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The Challenge of History
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17243 |
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CURRENT ISSUES
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2 / 1990 |
2,080 Words |
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Morton A. Kaplan
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A new phase of history is gestating in the bowels of the old. The chief question facing the world is not whether the Cold War is over but whether we are doing what is needed to establish a framework of international cooperation that will prepare us for the consuming tasks that will challenge the family of nations in the next several generations.
Unfortunately, these are questions that are honored primarily by not being asked. And events are progressing at a rate that may overtake our ability to deal with them productively if we do not recognize both the opportunities and the dangers presented by a new configuration of world affairs. If we do not respond to this historical challenge, we may replace the old Cold War, with its simple oppositions, with a far more complex set of dangers and conflicts.
The old Soviet system and the challenge it represented is finished and cannot be resurrected. Although President Mikhail Gorbachev has expressed grave dissatisfaction with his treatment by the Soviet press and has threatened some of its tenure of editors, events in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe have progressed faster than I predicted when I began in 1983 to set up one conference on an end to the division of Europe and a second and larger conference on the fall of the Soviet empire. What critics characterized as unrealistic dreaming both before and after the conferences in 1985 has been overtaken by events.
The Baltic states and Azerbaijan have instituted constitutional changes that embrace the genuine possibility of independence if their demands cannot be met within the framework of the existing Soviet system. The far more critical Ukraine, even if more slowly, seems on the road to a similar and potentially far more explosive stance. Hungary, in addition to dismantling the Socialist Workers (Communist) Party, remains in the Warsaw Treaty Organization only in a nominal sense and because of its defensive value against Romania rather than as part of an anti-Western coalition. Its new constitution provides for political democracy in a multiparty system. Although the Communist Party still controls the interior police and the military in Poland, both are in the process of being professionalized, and the economy is about to be reorganized into a form that could be called capitalism - although it would also fit several of Werner Sombart's 400 definitions of socialism.
When East Germany and Czechoslovakia were still opposing perestroika and openings to democracy, Romania is believed to have proposed a joint invasion of Poland that the Soviet Union quickly suppressed. I stated publicly in 1989 that I did not believe that the Soviet Union could have afforded to invade Poland. An invasion in the 1990s is extremely unlikely, and it would shake the Soviet Union to its foundations if it occurred. Even if successful, it would require a dictatorship, the form of which would condemn the Soviet Union to Third World status indefinitely.
Revolutionary process
Although events still could go wrong, even dangerously wrong, a massive revolutionary process is occurring in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. It rests on general recognition of the intellectual and practical bankruptcy of the collectivized and undemocratic systems that had been the foundation of communist rule. Thus, whatever happens in the future there cannot be simple
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