bout de papier, Vol. 6, No. 2 (1988) — Summer 1988 // Été 1988, pp. 18–19
In March 1988 the Canadian Institute of International Affairs sponsored a conference in Ottawa on “Canadian Foreign Policy: Preparing For The 21st Century”. One of the concluding speakers was Christoph Bertram whose thoughtful observations about future international challenges warrant some careful consideration. Dr. Bertram was born in Germany and studied law at the Universities of Berlin, Paris and Bonn. He began his career as a member of the planning staff of the German Ministry of Defence and in 1967 became a research associate and then director of the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London. Since 1982 he has worked with De Zeit as a political editor and, more recently, as a diplomatic correspondent.
Unlike most futurologists, Bertram believes that “the future has a good chance of not being fundamentally different from the present” because creeping rather than startling and abrupt change is a fact of history.
Bertram noted some interesting developments in the world which are unlikely to change things as much as most people think. In the last 3 or 4 years there has been much speculation on changes in the Soviet Union. “For the first time one actually feels, when one talks to people” ’, Bertram maintains, “that they are sharing some of their views with you and one feels that they, no less than Western academics, have developed a sense of academic vanity. Now, they want to show bout de papier Vol. what they think rather than what the Party thinks”.. While it was a very refreshing experience to go to the Soviet Union, one has also to realize at the same time the immense limitations of change in the Soviet Union. If Gorbachev is successful, then according to estimates by economists, he will only have succeeded by the year 2000 in actually stopping the decline.
Gorbachev’s striking proposals are all the more striking because they were originally Western proposals. And, as usual, when they came from Moscow we didn’t like them quite as much as when they came from ourselves. Bertram expects that Gorbachev’s priorities will remain firmly within his own empire because he simply does not have much energy left over to develop grandiose ideas on international politics. Therefore, fears that Gorbachev might devise a strategy of dividing the West are groundless because his overriding goal is to bring the Soviet economy up to date and this overriding task allows for no diversions.
There are, however, other implications flowing from changes in Moscow. One is the fact that the Russians no longer want to be very active in Third World conflicts, and nothing underlines this so much as their evident desire to get out of Afghanistan quickly. It’s too costly, money thrown away, Bertram argues, when there are other priorities. The second implication is that the Soviet Union wants to reduce, somehow, military competition. But beyond that, Bertram thinks that the implications will be much less than the expectations.
In Europe, the shadow of Soviet power will continue to hang over the continent. It is just a fact of vicinity. The difference in values between the democratic West and the nondemocratic East will be even more pronounced and more obvious when there is a reformer in Moscow; because, as one is seeing today in Eastern Europe, the man in the street is appealing to the man in Moscow over the heads of his own local warlords who are determined to keep the lid on tight. Whatever Gorbachev does, however, he cannot satisfy the demands on values that are inherent in the Western attitude. Moreover, he will have his hands full of problems inside his own country and in Eastern Europe. At this point, Bertram introduced a Euro-centric lesson for his Canadian audience: “Im always very struck” ’, he noted, “that people in North America are totally unaware of the latent and worrying instability in Eastern Europe, but it is probably the most serious European security problem. That you have a part of the Soviet empire which is incapable of reforming, which will need to be controlled, in which the Soviet Union hasn’t found a way of satisfying local demands together with a dire economic situation is a very unsettling situation” for Europeans. Consequently, the possibilities of change as a result of Gorbachev will be limited.
In the field of international security, two other things will also remain virtually unchanged. “Nuclear deterrence is here to stay”, asserted Bertram, “perhaps it will be even more acceptable now than it was in the past”. His reason for this assertion is because nuclear deterrence becomes unacceptable when we are afraid of war. When we are no longer afraid of war, which, in his view, is the state of the Western world today, nuclear weapons cease to be highly controversial. If you look at European history in the postwar period, Bertram argued, it is very striking that when Europeans wanted nuclear weapons from the Americans it was usually at times when they were less worried about the Soviet Union than the United States.
Bertram expects this pattern of history to repeat itself.
Bertram also predicted that issues of East- West security, which have occupied public opinion, experts and politicians for such a long time, are likely to recede into the background. Quarrels between East and West on the security level will be exposed as signs of a developed North living in a relative degree of luxury. We can afford these quarrels, he argued, only because they do not affect our survival.
Arms control will advance, not so much because people come up with a fantastic new proposal, but simply because there are overriding economic imperatives. We are now at the unusual juncture of East-West confrontation when these economic imperatives are being felt by both superpowers simultaneously.
Bertram saw no effective curtailment of conflict in the Third World. Since these conflicts are having less and less impact on the rest of us, we have now come to the point where we can live with them. Who, he asked, would have predicted 8 years ago when the Iraqis started to attack Iran that this would be an extraordinarily contained conflict which doesn’t even effect, in any unpleasant way, our oil supplies? On the contrary, since they need weapons they must sell their oil, so we are profiting from their conflict. Furthermore, developments in the Third World are less likely to effect our security in the future than they have in the past because the Soviet Union no longer wants to be very active in the Third World and the ability of the superpowers to impose solutions on the Third World is virtually non-existent.
What follows from this is Bertram’s prediction that the security threats of the future are going to be much more ambiguous. Geography will once again manifest itself. As security threats become more ambiguous, people will worry less about a Soviet invasion. As geography reasserts itself between Europe and North America, he thinks that we are likely to see an end to the coalition which has existed for many years, of Canadians and West Europeans pushing in a different direction from the United States. years ahead, he thinks we are going to see Europe much more aware of its geographic problems and Americans and Canadians much more interested, indeed preoccupied with matters in the Western hemisphere.
None of these changes will be abrupt and none by themselves will pose a major challenge to the Western world. For Bertram, the main challenge is: “who will think about the need for international order and cooperation in the future?” For the present, we are all muddling through and this has been a very successful strategy. Whenever you talk to a banker about the international debt crisis, his answer is “well let’s muddle through” Whenever you talk about problems on our periphery, our answer is “well let’s muddle through”. Bertram is convinced that this strategy will not work in the long run. Moreover, it’s dangerous.
First of all, it is dangerous because “muddling through”, however wise it may seem, is a strategy of damage limitation and not damage avoidance. You just try to make sure that the disadvantages that arise out of a situation are not getting out of hand. But you do not really deal with the problem at hand On the contrary, you encourage the tendency of politicians to put off doing the necessary. If you look at three crises areas today — South Africa, Afghanistan, Middle East — he thinks that all of us could point to times in which it would have still been possible to do something, but it was so much easier and so much more convenient to just “muddle through”.
Secondly, it is dangerous because if all we do is “muddle through” then we must not be surprised if the public ceases to be interested in the world beyond their shores. The growing provincialism of the developed world is something that is apparent when you open any newspaper in the world. There you find that people are much more concerned with domestic issues because they somehow feel that they can understand what effects them directly. International issues are far away, too complex, there is not much one can do about them. This is a fundamental denial of the reality of interdependence. “What we have today, in the Northern part of the world, is a population which lives in a state of interdependence but does not want to recognize it” ’, Bertram argues. In any discussion on how we should deal with the environment or the international economy, invariably the proposals that you hear are of a limited national nature. Continued “muddling through” will lose the support of our citizens for foreign policies. This public malaise, Bertram argues, will not solve problems but simply delay their solution to times when, in all probability, they are not going to be easier to solve and will make us complacent about the basic fact of interdependence.
How do we get out of this dilemma? The United States, for many years, was the initiator of our ideas on how to cope with the international conditions of Western life. It was very easy for the rest of us to respond to it, to accept it,or to quarrel about it, because we didn’t have to produce these thoughts ourselves. The architecture of international order was left to the United States and as a result our international house has been decaying because no new walls and no new foundations and no roof repairs have been conducted for a very long time. The United States today has become a consumer rather than a producer of international ideas. It will, Bertram believes, over the next 4 years be so “preoccupied with its own domestic issues, with its economy, with this catching theme of competition, that it will feel that others should start thinking about what is required for all of us”. Can we do that? Start thinking about a ! for the rest of the world n the temptation of : through”.
Bertram thinks that is “the most serious challenge that all of us face”. In concluding his address, Bertram left his audience with a clear message: “you in Canada, we in Europe need to get out of this rather nice and complacent habit of leaving the context for others to fill while we ride along on the back seat. That really is the task of burden-sharing. Not burden-sharing by paying for some soldiers here or there, that is not the real issue. Burden-sharing is to start thinking about a strategy for the West and for the rest of the world and to get away from the temptations of “muddling through”. If the superpowers will not do it, then who does it?” If, indeed, this is the real challenge, as Bertram believes, then we in External Affairs have some homework to do.
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Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 6, No. 2 (1988) — Summer 1988 // Été 1988, pp. 18–19. Read the rest of this issue →
