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THE 1990s: Challenge! Response?
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17410 |
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Section : |
EDITORIAL
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| Issue
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1 / 1990 |
870 Words |
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Morton A. Kaplan
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Nineteen ninety will usher in a decade that will be different in several important ways. Although China seems, temporarily at least, to be regressing, the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe appear to be on the road to radical change. Environment issues are attracting more attention than ever before. The charisma and moral appeal of Ronald Reagan have been replaced by the administrative efficiency of George Bush. Thus, the new decade will differ from the old in terms of both circumstances and atmosphere.
There will be immense challenges in building a new world order fit for democratic and cooperative peoples. Instead of two blocs that maintain peace between themselves--often at the price of stimulating violence elsewhere--the Soviet Union and the United States may cooperate to terminate and contain conflicts among smaller nations, and perhaps crucially so in Europe. The economic institutions that coordinate policies among OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) nations may have to be expanded to include the former centralized economies. The United States and Japan may have to adjust to an integrated European commonwealth. The suggestions made in my article "World Order in the 1990s" with respect to these issues are among the topics that presidents Bush and Gorbachev should take into serious consideration in their forthcoming summit meetings.
Despite the superiority of the liberal democratic state over the collectivist state, the former has numerous problems that need to be addressed, in particular those arising from new forms of international and regional order. But even socialist ideals continue to challenge, for substantive goals remain more important than procedural requirements among most peoples. Moreover, reformers may seek to restrict what they regard as the parochial or even corrupt decisions of legislatures and administrative bodies. The American savings-and-loan scandal is a case in point.
The shrinking of the world seems to be melding cultures. There has been great resistance to this in some sectors: fundamentalist Iran, for example. Differences between the cultures of Japan and West are playing a major role in disagreements over trade policy. Suggestions that we adopt the institutional or behavioral customs of Japan fail to reckon with the stickiness of cultural differences. Yet the need to coordinate, although not to homogenize, different cultures will remain an urgent task for the next ten years.
Although we are not yet ready to enter the automation age, in which factory work and accounting will be done by robots, its consequences are likely to become weighty before the decade ends. This raises the question of what human beings will do with increased leisure--for it will transform the home as well as the factory--and how work or the concept of work will change.
There are far more questions than answers even with respect to a period of time as near as the next ten years. This is inevitable, for history is not a science, and change introduces novelty. Nonetheless, even though we cannot predict the future, it is possible to point to some factors that will produce change and thus lessen the probability of disastrous outcomes by taking into account or preparing for what may be possible to anticipate.
The articles on the 1990s in this issue are intended to provide the reader with analyses of
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