Challenges of globalization
Meanwhile, the world was changing rapidly. Processes begun earlier gained momentum from the ending of the Cold War. Global confrontation, if unable to halt them, had certainly inhibited them. Now they accelerated and spread virtually across the planet. Academics and politicians called them globalization, and it became the dominant trend of world development.
From the outset, I and my colleagues at the Gorbachev Foundation made this phenomenon a top priority in our researches. I believed that globalization offered an opportunity for transition to a securer, more stable world order and, ultimately, to a new civilization synthesizing the main ideals and values of different cultures and ideologies. We chose as the Foundation’s motto, ‘Towards a New Civilization!’. Even so, I was far from idealizing the way globalization was proceeding, and presented my thoughts on this at a conference we held in summer 1992.
The objectively conditioned movement of the human community to interaction and interdependence is occurring so rapidly that it is forcibly uprooting the familiar way of life of hundreds of millions of people, forcing them to break with longstanding behavioural stereotypes and ways of thinking. The instinctive reaction of an ordinary person who feels helpless as he is buffeted by the winds of change is to retreat into his own little world, traditionalist, religious or national. This is the explanation of the swell of fundamentalism, religious fanaticism and crude nationalism flooding many regions of the world.
Our world is in a major transition to a new symbiosis of peoples. This gives rise to pressing problems in need of careful analysis and coordinated solutions. One of these, perhaps the most perplexing, is how to correlate available resources with the desire of a multi-billion and rapidly increasing world population to live a decent, dignified life. …Right now it is important that we, the international community, take stock of the situation as we emerge from the Cold War era. We have to recognize that all the undoubted changes in the global landscape and the system of international relations remain, for the present, only provisional.
After the collapse of the bipolar world, a multipolar, pluralistic world is just beginning to emerge, in which an increasing role will be played by a united Western Europe, China, Japan and a number of other countries. …Despite all the obstacles and opposition, a system for international regulation of important social issues is emerging and will continue to do so. This process, for all its ambivalence, will take place, I believe and hope, through voluntary delegation by individual states of powers essential for resolving problems that can only be addressed at an international level. It is to be expected that the range of these powers will increase, which will surely be possible only on a voluntary basis. …Mutual trust will be essential if international institutions are to be effective. In turn, trust will be generated if those involved in the process formulate their policies on the basis of transparent, democratic procedures.
I feel I managed in that speech to outline both the promise of the process of globalization and the knotty problems arising as it proceeded. Initially, it was presented as an unambiguously positive process opening up limitless possibilities for all. To some extent, that was an honest mistake, but in part it was promoted in order to exploit the new situation and establish a monopoly of leadership by the West, and primarily the United States.
Globalization became the object of one of the Gorbachev Foundation’s main research projects. We were among the first to draw attention to negative aspects that became increasingly prominent as globalization accelerated, and to point out the considerable risks. Polarization of global wealth and poverty increased at a dangerous rate.
The problems of globalization and its consequences came to be an invariable item on the agenda at international forums, including those at the highest level. In September 2000 they were discussed at the Millennium Summit, held in New York at the headquarters of the United Nations and attended by 160 heads of state and governments. They were mentioned in the Millennium Declaration adopted there and approved by the UN General Assembly.
In parallel, also in New York that September, the State of the World Forum 2000 was held with participation of prominent members of the world’s political elite. I was one of its initiators, chaired it and gave the opening speech, in which I urged that there was a need to find some way of regulating the blind, uncontrolled process of globalization.
The outcome of our project was a collective work, Facets of Globalization: Difficult Issues of Contemporary Development.[2] That volume tries not only to analyse the phenomenon of globalization, its complexities, pluses and minuses, but to outline the concept of ‘globalization with a human face’, socially and environmentally responsible globalization. This first attempt to suggest an alternative could not hope to provide answers to all the issues and problems, but was responding to a real public demand: the movement for an alternative globalization was gaining momentum and identifying serious problems. It increased in strength after the global economic crisis of 2008 exposed the inadequacies of assumptions currently underlying world development.
One of the most important political conclusions, staring us in the face as we examined what was happening in the world, was that no country, or even group of countries, would be able to cope with the major challenges of the new millennium on its own. These were the challenges of security, poverty, economic backwardness and the environmental crisis. They are interconnected and ultimately require an integrated response. Their sheer scale and the risks they are fraught with are, in my belief, unprecedented. I have discussed them on numerous occasions with politicians, scientists and social activists, have taken part in dozens of conferences and forums, given interviews, published articles, and had my conviction confirmed again and again that, without New Thinking, the world will fail to respond adequately to them.
The challenge of security
Challenges to security come in various guises, of which the most dangerous are weapons of mass destruction and terrorism. The worry is compounded by the possibility that ultimately the most terrible weapons may fall into the hands of extremists.
For me, the issue of nuclear disarmament runs through all the years and decades of my career. One of the great achievements of New Thinking was ending the nuclear arms race. After decades of relentless build-up, stockpiles began to be reduced. The turning point came at the 1986 Reykjavik Summit. Although it proved impossible to finalize agreement there because of Ronald Reagan’s desire to get us to agree to continued testing and deployment of anti-ballistic missile systems, not only on earth but even in space, it was at Reykjavik that the scope of a 50 per cent reduction of strategic offensive weapons and the elimination of intermediate range missiles were agreed. These were subsequently formalized in the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaties of 1987 and the 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START). In autumn 1991, President George Bush and I exchanged letters of intent to eliminate the greater proportion of tactical nuclear weapons. All these agreements were subsequently implemented. It was an unparalleled reduction of such deadly weapons in such a short time frame.
2
M. S. Gorbachev, ed.,