1997 Conference

Afternoon session, Part II (Friday, September 5, 1997)

JACQUES RUPNIK

Let us resume our afternoon session: we have three speakers. The first of them is Professor Michael Mann from the University of California in Los Angeles. He has looked extensively at the long-term developments of European society and the problems of nation states. He is the author of a well known book, "The Sources of Social Power", and he will speak today on democracy and social conflict.

MICHAEL MANN

Thank you. Since I am a sociologist, not a natural scientist, I look not for shapes as John Polanyi was looking for, but for patterns or connections, trying to find some overall pattern, however imperfect and provisional in the enormous mess that is human society. I am not as confident of finding social systems as Imanuel Wallerstein, though some of the things that I say will parallel some of the things he said. I will try to connect capitalism and nation-states and the major social conflicts that they have contained - on the one hand political and ethnic cleansing, and on the other hand class conflict. I am afraid that I'm breaking from the rubric of today. I am not talking only about today, I'm talking about yesterday, and whether we can avoid repeating the patterns of yesterday tomorrow. To help make the connections, I am going to distinguish two types of democracy: liberal democracy and organic democracy.
Modern liberal democracy originated in north-west Europe and its wide colonies. Yesterday Ralf Dahrendorf defined its essence pretty exactly. It is the political attempt to live with difference. Those who hammered out our political constitutions recognised the diversity of what at the time they called interests. They recognised they were contending with interests and they were seeking to compromise and regulate them. These were economic interest groups: the aristocracy, the gentry, manufacturers, farmers, artisans, labourers. They were more or less what we can roughly call classes, though it should be understood that I am not in any sense using a tight Marxian form of analysis. I am talking roughly about economic groups in conflict, though this system of liberal democracy was rather good at dealing with domestic interest group conflicts, and so it was quite capable of coping with subsequent interest group conflicts, like conflicts between men and women.
So liberal democracy is essentially concerned with the institutionalisation of conflict, and for many years it centred on class conflict. So it was a response, it should be remembered, to pressure from below, from subordinate groups. And the consequence was that liberal democracy always promoted social rights, as well as political and civil rights. For example, factory workers were only interested in getting the vote in order to lower taxes, have factory safety regulations, stop the employment of their children in factories etc. Now when we talk about liberalism as enshrining only the rule of political or civic citizenship, I think that's fundamentally wrong about the history of the development of liberal democracy. It's always contained extensive social legislation - that was the point of getting political citizenship. Now, in relation to class, it never saw the abolition of class, or the creation of social harmony. But it saw regulation through compromise. Now, of course, "we the people", in the immortal phrase that opens the preamble to the American constitution, was always plural and diverse.
Liberal democracy had its blind spots. In western Europe's only colony, Ireland, religion was never satisfactorily coped with, and religious diversity was never satisfactorily coped with by the British state. But its major blind spot was, of course, in the white colonies where we, the people, comprise only the contending interest among whites, of course: white male property. And in the colonies those of other races were not recognised as being part of we, the people, and they were submitted to massive ethnic cleansing, sometimes nearing genocide, and alternatively to cruel slavery. Eventually their survivors were admitted to "we the people", and so in the 20th century liberal democracy looks extremely benign and, indeed, it is relatively benign.
Aspirations to democracy spread rapidly elsewhere, but since they spread later, they spread in a changed world. There were two major differences when it first spread as an aspiration to central and eastern Europe and southern Europe. The first was that it was among colonial or semi-colonial peoples, ruled from abroad. Secondly, it was at a time when the state was expected to do more for social development than the original liberal state was expected to do. And so democratic movements in the later 19th century in the other half of Europe were infused with nationalist and statist ideals. And in those living under Habsburg, Romanov and Ottoman rule, this led to organic conceptions of democracy. The people were united in their struggle against oppressors. The people was not plural and divided but integral and organic.
This is the second conception of democracy. This people had a singular will, which could be expressed by a relatively strong state, sponsoring social, economic and moral development. In the crisis of World War One, reinforced by the great depression, this idea narrowly won out over liberal democracy over the whole of central and eastern Europe, east and west of a line one could draw through Europe with one exception, that is Czechoslovakia - a state, more or less, with liberal democracy. Now the ideal of organic democracy, the single indivisible people, is actually delusory since the people is actually really diverse, so that within the people conflict is not something legitimate, but is treason to be repressed.
As Ralf Dahrendorf, again, said yesterday, a claim to internal homogeneity leads to internal repression and external aggression. An organic democracy proved an unstable form of regime, because it turned almost everywhere very easily into dictatorship, authoritarianism and often to fascism. Now, this organic conception of democracy was also relatively appropriate after 1945 in colonial situations in other continents. And once again, after a period of contrast between liberal and organic conceptions of democracy, the organic - that is the notion of the singular people struggling against foreign oppression - tended to win out in most countries, and we had to face our supposed organic democracy, which again proved unstable and tended to lead towards authoritarian regimes.
Now, in Europe a particular form of social conflict emerged from the triumph of this unstable organic democracy, which is the European tradition of ethnic and political cleansing of the enemies of the people or nation. And this was not a singular event, not a singular holocaust, but a persistent 20th century process, beginning perhaps with the Balkan wars and the massive refugee flows that followed from it, encouraged by the statements of President Woodrow Wilson during the war, and enshrined in the Versailles treaties, establishing single dominant ethnicity nation states almost everywhere in the old terrain of the Habsburg and Ottoman empires and part of the Romanov empire. Then, enhanced by the massive refugee flows of the 1920s and turning extremely nasty in the pogroms against Jews, it resulted in formal political ends in the mass killings of the Russian civil war, and of Hungary as well at the end of World War One. And then, of course, it culminated in the genocide committed by the Nazis, but also by Baltic, Ukrainian, Romanian, Croatian and other nationalists, all adhering to organic forms of nationalism. And by Italian fascists against Africa. This was not the end. Than we have the mass forced migration of the Germans westwards, in which were various large numbers of them killed - and the penultimate chapters of this tradition. The collapse of multiethnic Yugoslavia amid considerable violence and the peaceful break-up of Czechoslovakia. The last chapter will concern the Russians, the only significant group left in other people's states. We don't know whether they will stay peacefully or whether there will be forcible movement and even more murder. But Europe is now more or less cleansed. The major multiethnic states of Western Europe are actually the oldest ones, like Switzerland and the United Kingdom. I know there are Romanians left in Hungary and Hungarians left in Romania, but Europe is virtually ethnically cleansed. And whatever the feelings, the European community is a gathering of nations, within each one of which there has been a persistent history of ethnic cleansing. Now the question is: Will this terrible European history now be repeated in other continents?
And the answer probably is yes, if colonial and imperial oppressors can be plausibly linked to the local alien enemies of the people, which was the recipe in the first half of the 20th century in most of these European cases. And this might well happen if we assist dominant ethnic majorities to claim that the people is an integral, organic body. One way that we are encouraging that is by forgetting our own history of democracy, capitalism and class conflict. Capitalism can be made relatively benign but only after subordinate groups, including classes, have struggled successfully for rights within it. Yet modern neoliberalism tends to suppress this history. It asserts that the spread of capitalist markets automatically brings development and prosperity to all. This is not liberalism. It forgets that the real history of liberalism is rooted in conflict, including class conflict.
If what Hazel Henderson called the Washington neoliberal consensus - the IMF, the World Bank and the US government - is all that we provide to the South, then this will also involve and does of course involve child labour, inadequate labour laws, the expropriation of common peasant rights to land, etc: in other words, class exploitation linked to a foreign enemy and probably to a local class. The result will not of course be liberal democracy. In the short run it will result, and has resulted already, in authoritarian regimes damping down local protest. In the long run it will often lead to organised movements of both the left and the right. The world's fascism and communism are probably dead, but movements of the left and the right resembling them will probably resurge, claiming to unite the organic people against its local and foreign enemies, in which we in the advance countries will be a principal one. And the sorry history of Europe will be repeated. Now, other people here are much better equipped and have given better accounts than I have on what might be done. I will only insist on two things.
Firstly, that we insist on democratic and minority rights, provisions and constitutions. Secondly, that we insist on codes of conduct for our own multinational enterprises including finance capital. This we can actually do more easily since they have a home base. We can do other things too, of course; regulate the arm strength, for example. All this is well known but it is worth observing that it civilises us as well as it civilises them.

JACQUES RUPNIK

Thank you very much, professor, for reminding us that the term ethnic cleansing is perhaps a recent invention but it has a long and tragic history in Europe and other parts of the world. I now give the floor to Professor Hans-Heinrich Nolte. He is a professor of East European history at the University of Hannover. He is the author of a number of works which deal with the question of peripheries, that is a formation of what he calls one world. The title of his presentation is Some Deficiencies in the Discourse on Globalisation.

HANS-HEINRICH NOLTE

Thank you very much, thank you very much for having been invited to Prague as a German historian. I would like to stress here that I'm aware of the fact that Germans have occupied this country twice and I should also like to express my sadness and my sorrow of the fact that the Jewish population of this country as well as the Jewish population of this part of the continent had been almost wiped out. Of course we feel a great void, a great feeling of emptiness due to these developments. Originally I was asked to prepare my paper in English and therefore I shall be delivering my speech in English. I planned quite a general lecture on expansionism as a part of European history, but what my predecessor said had very well made the point about which I was thinking. So, listening without knowing what he would say, I decided to concentrate on two concrete points. First, learning from the deficiencies of the debates on globalisation in the seventies and eighties and secondly, learning from the persistence of ethnic cleansing: that one of the possibilities available to modern man is to break the thin shell of civilising and look for legitimations for the use of force.
But what made the difference to the discussion following 1990 between the politics of the Soviet Union on one side and Yugoslavia on the other side? I think that one of the big differences was that the West had a discussion which really made it easy for the Soviet Union, and especially for Gorbachev to receive an answer. I don't want to go into the history of the peace movement of the West. But the message of the peace movement was that they wanted to try to avoid intervention and that they wanted to understand the Soviet problem. This message was received by those people who tried to build perestroika. Already in 1985 Gorbachev connected messages to Western peace movements with hopes for ending nuclear armament. In January 1986, Gorbachev proposed his plan to de-nuclearise the world by three steps: his clear aim being that in 1999 there would be no more nuclear weapons in the world. Certainly he was referring also to the Star Wars program of President Reagan, hoping to stop it. Quite openly Gorbachev was attacking the United States, hoping to enlarge the differences within NATO and trying to put himself at the head of the peace movement.
At this time, at least judging from his speeches and writings, his aim was not to reallocate resources from defence to consumption, rather he was hoping to attain the acceleration of the Soviet economy by internal means - fighting alcoholism, bringing back the intelligentsia to the party. Of course, it was also part of a political plan to regain the cultural leadership within the Soviet Union, within Eastern Europe and in part of Western Europe. Only late in 1988 the communist party started to openly discuss the defence burden. And only in 1989, when perestroika was already in deep crisis, did the Soviet government openly admit the exorbitant degree of armament exorbitant with regard to the economic resources of the country. And only then in the theoretical journal of the communist party was there published the simple argument that to keep military parity with the West which had about two and a half times as much Gross National Product would necessarily mean overburdening their own economy. Against the fears of Václav Havel, the word perestroika was not, at least not generally and not in the long run, used as a rubber truncheon to club down the opposition. There were of course many and complex reasons for this and the effect of the peace movement on the thinking of Gorbachev may have been more limited than assumed here. But it was important that the West had decided not to intervene.
It also was important that the Soviet Union was not allowed to achieve military superiority. And it was important that the West offered a politically important place to the Soviet Union and took up Gorbachev's thinking and the offer of a European home which at that time was supposed to include Russia and not to exclude it. But I think it also was important that Gorbachev accepted part of the thinking of the peace movement which turned to him, which provided an audience to him and established his self-image. And in the end it was decisive in preventing perestroika being used as a rubber truncheon, and in the Soviet army not intervening in the process of democratisation.
What has been said about the success of 1989 shows where the deficiencies of Western politics were in the case of Yugoslavia. In the case of the Soviet Union, the West accepted the Soviet timetable. It waited, often to the disappointment of the nations of Middle Europe. In the case of Yugoslavia the West did not wait. Germany especially forced the peace very soon. And it was important that there had been an intensive debate on socialism in the seventies and eighties in the West. Western intellectuals had read about and discussed intensively what had happened in Prague in 1968. There was an intense debate on globalisation and Imanuel Wallerstein started his book on the world system in 1974. But there was no comparable debate on nationalism. The opposition movements argued on ethnic and on national terms against the Soviet Union. For instance, the Lithuanian samizdat found their audience in the old emigration, mostly in the 1944 emigration. The liberal or the left discourse on the West was global and it was surprised by the renaissance of the nation-state in Eastern Europe. Now there is globalisation, but it does not mean that up to now the world is getting more homogeneous. Differences are arising within countries, but also between countries.
One of these differences is answered by the construction of the nations or the reconstruction of old ones. So we have to be careful to look at these differences early. My point also in self-criticism is that the discussion of the seventies and eighties lacked complexity. The importance of regionalism and of ethnic and religious conflicts was underestimated. The case of Northern Ireland - or the Basque countries - might have given some hints on that. But the message the West gave on ethnic cleansing was not at all as clean as we would like to have it today. So the West had not intervened against Turkey when Turkey attacked Cyprus and practised the politics of ethnic cleansing. The West had not intervened in Kurdistan, the West did not and does not intervene in Tibet, in Nagorno Karabakh or in Chechnya. The reasons are clear. Turkey was our ally, and China and the Soviet Union are too powerful. So the message for the Serbs and the Croats was that ethnic cleansing was a question of power. Of course I do not want to defend Serbian or Croatian ethnic cleansing but I do think that our double standards put into question what we claim. But how could we come about these double standards and fancy them at all in such a fundamental crime as genocide.
Allow me to start my argument on that from history. One of the main changes in the history of justice in European history was the change from private to state prosecution. In medieval times murder was only prosecuted in the event that a private person, a family or a clan asked for judgment. Where nobody accused, nobody would judge. With the coming of the modern state, the state took upon the responsibility to accuse in all cases of murder, not taking into account whether the murdered person belonged to a big family or was only an outcast. I think that one of the changes necessary for the 21st century should be the withdrawal of national sovereignty in this regard. That would mean that we should introduce obligatory prosecution of genocide and ethnic cleansing. That would mean that, in addition to the court in the Hague, we should have prosecution in these very defined and closed competencies on a global level. Of course, the prosecution would have to do the job without taking into regard whether the country against which the prosecution was directed was powerful or not. The prosecution should not be dependent on votes in the Security Council or in the general assembly of the United Nations. I think we have talked a lot about possible big changes for the 21st century. I think this would be a very small change, but a very necessary one. Thank you.

JACQUES RUPNIK

Thank you very much, Professor Nolte, for showing how globalisation progresses hand in hand with the rise of nationalism. I now give the floor to Professor Jiri Musil. He is a leading Czech sociologist and a professor a the Central European University. I think it is important in a meeting like this that the voice from Prague is also heard.

JI¤i MUSIL

Thank you, chairman. I should like to react in a few words to the things which were said today and which were said yesterday as well, and I would like to concentrate on the mechanisms of co-operation and integration, and mainly in the context of the lessons of the Czechoslovak dissolution. We have in fact had the experience of having been dissolved twice, i.e. in the year 1939 and 1992. We divorced twice, so we have an unusual experience and it allows us to compare the different processes which led to these two splits, and this experience allows us to derive from them ideas of a more general meaning. It is a very specific phenomenon that we have in the Czech Republic which has not yet been discussed in a serious way: these two divorces, especially the second one in 1992. What is important, what is interesting about the whole matter, is the fact that two models of a completely different state organisation collapsed. The disintegration of the first one, i.e. the inter-war Czechoslovak state, was an example of the disintegration of a liberal model, based on an attempt to establish a democratic state comprising two main ethnic groups, i.e. Czechs and Slovaks, which formed the Czechoslovak political nation.
In Masaryk's concept Czechoslovakia was considered a unitary state, using two languages. The liberal democratic model failed, but the same forces of disintegration, i.e. nationalism, worked in the subsequent Marxist model of the Czechoslovak state. The forces of nationalism were simply stronger than the idea of a political nation.
Ernest Gellner once described the Marxist model as a theory starting from the assumption that nationalist movements are only masks of deeper problems in the background, i.e. of social inequalities and conflicts. The Marxists, following their theory, believed that after "removing" the economic and social differences between the Czech lands and Slovakia, the two parts of the state would start to integrate into a harmonic unity of two co-operating parts of one federal state. Both these doctrines assumed some kind of automaticism. I do not have enough time to go into details, but it is important, it seems, that the common denominator in both cases was the fact that it had not been possible to create a Czechoslovak identity that could be accepted by both groups to the extent of allowing them to be stronger than the individual identities of the two groups. So what was lacking was the Czechoslovak identity. Of course, there were a number of other factors as well.
It should also not be forgotten that after 1989 we had a certain vacuum in the political concept of the common state. The vacuum was caused more, I think, by the Czech side. But at the same time we had a mobilisation of the Slovak political elites, those elites which had partly developed in the first, i.e. inter-war republic, in that liberal republic which emphasised education and democratic political processes, and opened the door to the development of the Slovak intelligentsia. Of course, historians one day will discuss, and sociologists are already discussing, whether - given the structural similarities just before the split in 1992 - there did not exist hidden and deeper differences between the two societies than those shown by an elementary socio-economic analysis. From the point of view of basic structural data describing the two societies, there was, however, no big difference between the Czech and Slovak part of the federation. We can actually say that in 1918 the differences were much larger, and yet the state was established.
So to the paradoxes of Czechoslovak history belongs the fact that Czechoslovakia split at the moment when its individual parts were socially and economically most compatible, when they were in these terms closest. Maybe this structural similarity actually hid something more complex. Some analysts, and I am one of them, think that a hidden economic difference still existed, so that although on the surface we had a kind of structural similarity, the fact loomed behind that the Slovak economy was the weaker of the two. Why am I speaking about the dissolution of Czechoslovakia in the context of a discussion on the integration processes of European Union?
I think that when we observe the European integration processes from Prague, from the outside, we are aware that there was a strong moral impulse at the beginning which then, however, transformed into a more pragmatic model, which is sometimes called a transactional model. It is a kind of neo-classical model - in the economic sense, a theory according to which the main element of integration, the motor of the integration, is the division of labour, specialisation, market. But these undoubtedly very important and strong integrative mechanisms should be accompanied by social and cultural elements of integration. To use Václav Havel's vocabulary, there exist cultural and moral prerequisites for integration. In a German newspaper I read some time ago a commentary on the European situation. It spoke of "Europe, a Continent without an Idea".
So what I want to say is more about the content, about the core values, about what is hidden but nevertheless is the unifying force. I think that our experience could be of some value to Europe: it is a kind of warning, saying that without a strong effort to define and cultivate spiritual commonalities, there will be not an integrated Europe. You can call it the common minimum, and if Europe will not be able to find such a minimum, such a shared minimum, then, I am afraid, Europe could observe a repetition of what happened to us in our recent history.
Thank you.

JACQUES RUPNIK

Thank you very much, Professor Musil, for that Czech perspective, I think on a common problem that we have seen discussed this afternoon, that is the question of the nation-state and the question of ethnic homogenisation. This is a European problem, but we know very well that this is a problem we see in different forms in other parts of the world.

NORBERT GREINACHER

Mr Chairman, we have been hearing here about conflicts. I was surprised to hear nothing about one conflict, that is the conflict between the sexes. If you look around this table, you will see what the role of women has been. I mean we have young women working for us - we have interpreters working for us all day - but round the table I can see only two women. In terms of proportionality, it's basically the same thing that we see at my university in Tubingen. We have about 500 professors at our university and among them we have only ten women. And it is a shame that I should now comment on what is now happening in the Catholic church. Until today women are excluded, cannot be ordained. If I remember this correctly, we have seen one exception to this rule, something that happened here in Czechoslovakia. I believe that some women were indeed ordained here and became Roman Catholic priests. I believe I'm not mistaken when I say that one of them was a bishop. Of course, this conflict between the sexes is not the only conflict we are seeing today, but it is a conflict that has been with us for a long time and I believe that it is a conflict that we should definitely pay attention to in the 21st century.

IMANUEL WALLERSTEIN

I'm very glad that Michael Mann made the point about our continuous process of ethnic cleansing in Europe. There is a very interesting table in your book on Europe which took every capital of the ex-Soviet bloc and showed what their ethnic population was in 1870 and what their ethnic population is today. And not a single one of them in 1870 had a majority of people coming from the ethnic group that is now dominant and of course the figures for 1980, which I think were the last that he had, are widely different. So that's a very important point to make. However there is another point to make which is that there is a second process going on ethnic homogenisation, and that's called the international migration.
Now, in the United States, Canada and all the Western European countries virtually without exception - France, Germany, Britain, Belgium, Netherlands, but even Italy, Spain, Portugal, Sweden etc - we have today something between, depending on the country, 10 and 25 percent of the population who are from the third world within. And, realistically, I will use that word again, it is very likely that within the next 25 years, whatever the legislation - and it will probably be negative in most of these countries - there will be a continuing inflow of new migrants plus demographically a different rate of reproduction of this third world within. So that we are likely to have, 25 years from now, up to a third, maybe even more, of the population of Western European countries and of American countries, even to a smaller extent Japan, composed of populations from the third world who will be socially, economically and often politically excluded. So, looking forward in terms of social conflict, that seems to me is one of the looming major social conflicts of today.

NIKOLAUS LOBKOWICZ

I want to add something to what Professor Musil said. I think that the most dangerous heritage of the century in which we are still living is the idea that states should be nationally homogenous units. All the conflicts which we have witnessed, which are not ideological conflicts, are due to this. And the reason why Czechoslovakia fell apart was also due to this idiotic claim that the Slovak nation is a younger branch of the Czech nation, which was historically nonsense. Nevertheless everything was built upon this. So I think the message of the day has to be that we have to think of states and of nations as something completely different. Having a different function, states can combine many different cultures, that is living with diversity. But we are still constantly thinking of states in national terms. Everywhere. And this is something we have to fight. Because most of the conflicts we have today are due to unsolved national conflicts from World War One.

JACQUES RUPNIK

Thank you very much. This is, I think, a very important theme.

RAIMON PANIKKAR

I felt in the discussion that this extraordinary important group has lost the optimism of reason. Not finding real, original rational solutions to the quality of democracy etc. I'm reminded of Whitehead's remark that the entirety of Western philosophy is a footnote to Plato. We have not overcome the dualism between l'ideal and la realité. And we are still living under this schizophrenia, a dualism which is coming from the fragmentation of knowledge: ethics here, religion there, men here, women there, the divine upstairs, the human downstairs and the others more or less. We have not overcome the fragmentation of knowledge and the fact that the West is losing its best tool, that reason could solve the problems, could lead us to the unpopular metaphysical, philosophical, intercultural and religious problems. The word with which I would summarise it, is a word that has a long tradition in the Christian tradition: metanoia which means not only a change of mentality, and the Greek is on my side, but overcoming the mental. The third eye would not only say what the veterans and the victorious in 12th-century Paris said and that, I think, is our challenge. Ideas matter, we have said, we have heard. Now I think it is time for us to reflect on these fundamental, basic, anthropological and metaphysical challenges of the West. Thank you.

TAKEAKI HORI

Thank you very much, Mr Chairman. Actually, my comment has nothing to do with the speeches of the last session, rather it's my self-murmuring, maybe deriving from the main stream we have been discussing here. But I've been sitting here for almost two days and just remember one of those good university days when you met all kinds of prominent professors and everybody comes up with impressive ideas, brilliant ideas. Then, yes, for the first week and the second week we have been running all kind of lectures in the theatre. And then after two weeks we have become bored because constant brainstorming cannot be sustained forever; even the brain can be exhausted. And therefore, I think what can we do off the campus: you know some sort of physical sport. And this is a thing that I think is really possible for maybe the future moderators, to put a bit of stress on the reality.
I know you have been talking about all kinds of global villages, or kinds of human cleansing, ethnic cleansing or whatever. But we are dealing with a realistic matter like global villages and you nobody has ever mentioned small island countries scattered in the South Pacific where there is a completely different paradigm. Nobody ever mentioned that. It's OK, it is a meeting here in Prague. So I'm not complaining about that, but someone should give it a bit of consideration to think about another new world, that's one theme and I would really appreciate. Also, after exchanging all the kinds of good philosophical ideas, at some state you have to descend to our actual plan, or actual plans. Otherwise, because of meeting such fine celebrities here and all the more once the people leave the castle already occupied with another of those ideas - how can we commit, everybody is saying, to human responsibility, international organisation, have sympathy for minorities. But you will walk out of this castle, and everybody will eventually forget this. Therefore I think that from tomorrow everybody has been assigned to give a speech. Thank you very much.

JACQUES RUPNIK

Thank you very much. May I say that from what I heard this afternoon - the discussion about the nation-state, ethnic homogeneity, and ethnic cleansing - these are not theoretical, philosophical issues. This is the reality of today's Europe, but not only Europe. This is the reality in Rwanda, this is the reality in other parts of the world. You cannot be closer to the ground of the situation in today's world than with the issues we are grappling with today.

TAKEAKI HORI

Excuse me. If you are going to criticise my comment, I have a right to argue back again. Because as I told you I was saying nothing in connection with the speeches that were delivered at today's sessions, I was just simply expressing my sort of ideas, general ideas. I'm not talking about today's session, but maybe sometimes we need to handle the reality, because this conference is just organised by two figures, probably well known figures, Mr Wiesel and President Havel. And President Havel has a commission to hear, to conduct this conference. And what he wanted is something I really appreciate and I remember the speech which was delivered by President Havel, when he pointed out that human spirituality has been eroded over time. Therefore I think we need to come up with some kind of recommendation or some clear idea. This conference is completely unlike other conferences. In other words, this conference has got to be unique and got to be naive, and it could be nice to be naive all the time. This is my opinion. Thank you. So I'm not arguing, I'm not complaining.

JACQUES RUPNIK

Well, obviously the plea for naivety is greatly shared around the table including by myself and I give the last word to Mr Evans.

GARETH EVANS

Let me just contribute a little naivety of my own on the question rather fascinatingly asked by Michael Mann. With Europe's awful 20th century history of ethnic cleansing, I think a way of answering the question is to look elsewhere, to East Asia. East Asia's hemisphere, where we have three states that are pretty monolithic in our terms: China, Japan and the Koreas. But pretty well everywhere else there is a very significant ethnic diversity. In some states this is less visible because this is a process of absorption, in particular of the Chinese minorities, and Thailand and Vietnam and perhaps the Philippines. But in Malaysia, Burma and so on that is a potentially explosive mix if we look at the demographic structure. But it is the case at the moment anyway in East Asia. There is no real argument that I can discern anyway. I think that the states can be characterised by national homogeneity in the way that has been the case in Europe. It's just not part of the repertoire of disputation of the moment. We have, of course, our conflicts within Burma, and the China-Tibet issue, and East Timor. But these are not really occurring in the context of some larger argument about national homogeneity. An interesting question, I guess, is why that is so. I mean, one reason may simply be that East Asia has been faster to appreciate the implications of the global village and interdependence: people are just so preoccupied with making a fast buck at the moment that other sorts of things are drifting off to one side. There is plenty of practical, pragmatic evidence around in support of that sort of preoccupation. It is massively and marvellously taking people's minds off chopping each other to pieces, which they have been doing in East Asia on a more graphic scale than just about anywhere else in the world most of the century. So that is perhaps one explanation. A second explanation is Francis Fukuyama's thesis about the triumph of liberal democracy as an ideology.
This sort of thesis can win 15 minutes of fame and was sort of pushed off to one side as being hopelessly offensive. But the notion of there being no really serious competing ideology around the place and the end of history being describable in those terms is one that I think deserves to be looked at more clearly and carefully in the context of East Asia because I can see plenty of resonance for that idea still. And there is a sense in which even now East Asia is the place where we see the last of the formal authoritarian communist regimes as in China and North Korea and Vietnam. Nonetheless there is a sense in which they are very obviously fighting in reaction and the ideological battle has been long lost. Associated with that is the phenomenon of economical liberalisation inexorably working towards political liberalisation. We've seen it occur in South Korea, we've seen it occur in Taiwan, we're beginning to see it occur I think in Vietnam and in China, and there is something very interesting going on there. It certainly seems to be taking people's minds of ethnic cleansing.
The last point I want to make is the virtual utility of regional organisations and international superstructures and so on and reinforcing good developments of this kind, reinforcing the possibility of peace being preserved and international pressures being put to work to ensure that. Asian institutional structures have been fantastically important in south-east Asia in terms of curbing a long history of violence and mutual conflict and calming a lot of internal pressures within each of those societies has recently been reinforced by larger regional architecture with economic co-operation in the form of Asian regional security structures, which are recent inventions, but all of which have been important in creating the larger sense of community we were talking about earlier on. So I don't want to sound like a hopelessly naive optimist about these matters but, instead of being totally consumed by the European experience, and being totally appalled and consumed by the African experience, I think it might just give us a little ground to finish on a note of optimism and say: Hey, look at what's going on in the most economically dynamic and vital and fastest growing part of the world at the moment. And it really isn't a bad story from the perspective we've just been talking about.