Speech
before the Los Angeles World Affairs Council on November 27, 2001:
Members of the
Russian Academy of Science
Andrei Kokoshin,
Director, Institute for International Security
Sergei Rogov, Director, Institute of the U.S. and Canada
Nikolay Shmeliov, Diector of the Institute of Europe
Vitaly Zhurkin, Director Emeritus, Institute of Europe
Jeremy Azrael, Moderator, Director, Center for Russia and Eurasia, RAND
(NOTE: Due to technical difficulties, only excerpts from this program are available)
…. I’d
like to recognize Dr. Michael Nosov from the Institute of the United States and
Canada, who made a very important contribution to this study and, of course, Dr.
Milstein, a unique combination of a scholar who turned businessman but who
recognized that the intellectual capability of Russia may be more important than
oil and gas. But maybe that’s a
topic for another presentation.
This book is our message to our public in this country and
in Russia, and the message is very simple.
Where [does] Russia belongs? Does
Russia belong to the community of political democracies and market economies or
not? Do we want to join the Western
community, and is the Western community really willing to admit us?
All of this is a continued debate in Russia, which way to go.
And I presume there is a debate in the West.
Some people used to say in the last decade, “oh, don’t worry.
The door for Russia is open.” But
it turned out that the door was painted on a brick wall.
It’s remarkable how much the two presidents, George W. Bush and
Vladimir Putin, were able to achieve in the last several months, and that may be
the second reason why this meeting tonight is so important and so timely,
because we really have an enormous window of opportunity in Russia-American,
Russian-Western, relations.
From the first time since 1945, common interests define
Russian-American relations. For the
first time since the Second World War our two countries face a common enemy.
And the enemy is as ugly and terrible and deadly as the enemy which we
faced during the Second World War. What
I see happening is what happened in Russian-American relations many times
before. Since the War of
Independence when Catherine the Great, who was not the greatest admirer of
Jefferson and Hamilton, supported the American Revolution because we had a
common enemy -- I’m not going to mention who that enemy was.
During the Civil War, the Russian navy came to the north because we still
had the same enemy. The same story
happened in the First and Second World Wars, and I hope that today, recognizing
that we face a common challenge, we are going to work together.
In fact, today Russia and the United States and Russia and NATO are de
facto allies.
We are fighting together against the common enemy, and this
is a remarkable development. But
that’s not enough, really, for us to be long-term partners. When I’m thinking about the future of Russian-American
relations I sometimes -- and I hope you understand me correctly -- I sometimes
wonder, “what if, by mistake, bin Laden is killed tomorrow? Will the new Russian-American alliance collapse
immediately?” Simply having the
common enemy is not enough to maintain the long-enduring partnership and
alliance. This relationship should
be based on other common interests. Let
me mention two other pillars of what I consider to be the strategic alliance of
Russia and the United States and Russian and the West for the 21st
century.
One is the threat presented by proliferation of nuclear,
chemical and biological weapons. In fact, your country is already a victim of an
attack -- it’s still not clear what happening, who’s doing it, but clearly
biological weapons are used against the American people.
We have to be mature enough to bring and build the mechanism for
cooperation to stop the process of proliferation of weapons of mass destruction
and hopefully start rolling it back. Maybe
it’s a too-ambitious goal, but only if Russia and the United States, together
with other key members of the international community, do it we can hope that
this goal can be achieved in the 21st century.
Let me mention also another pillar.
Why is the Western community today so strong?
It used to be the Soviet Union, a clear and present danger, which
produced the creation of the Western community, the North Atlantic Alliance,
etc. The Soviet Union is gone.
As my predecessor, Dr. Arbatov , said in 1985, “we’re going to do
something terrible to you. We’re
going to deprive you of the enemy.” And
we did.
Today, if we compare -- of course, it’s difficult to
claim that Russia is a mature democracy and Russia is a mature market economy.
No, we’re not, but if we look at the two hundred-plus years of
Russian-American history never before was the gap between our ideology, our
economy, our political systems, so small. Still,
there are very important differences, but unlike the Stalinist Soviet Union or
Czarist Russia there is no more what used to be called, when I was young,
“antagonistic contradictions in a dialectical way.”
What makes the Western alliance so strong is not simply commonly
strategic interests, it’s the common economic interests.
Really, it’s the economic interdependence of the advanced political
democracies and advanced market economies which make the Western alliance so
strong and successful. Yes, there
are differences and when I see all these banana wars I feel sorry that you’re
not fighting banana wars with Russia, because Russia is not really a strong
competitor to the United States and to the Western community.
It’s absolutely important for us to build this economic
interdependence, taking into account that Russia is the richest country in the
world in our natural resources. Russian
potential is not limited simply by oil and gas. Our strongest power is the brains of the Russian people.
We have a scientific community which is still second to none.
I cannot say this about the budget which we spend on research and
development, here there is a very, very major difference.
But it’s the Russian people which is our strongest power I must tell
you that this affinity, which Russians and Americans feel quite often -- you
love Dostoevsky, we love Stallone, you love Tolstoy, we love Schwarzenegger --
this affinity is important. But
it’s only the economic interdependence which really can make the new
Russian-American alliance not only a de facto relationship, but something which
is legally binding and profitable. That’s
why, again, I want to say what I started with.
It’s thanks to people like Jeremy Azrael and Vadim Milstein that we
intellectuals were able to produce this study which describes how to make this
world better and how to make Russia and America real close strategic allies in
the 21st century.
Thank you so much.
Thank you, Sergei. I
think in order to get some further flavor of the totality of the book that these
gentlemen have produced that, rather than address questions to Dr. Rogov at this
point, we ought to give the floor to Dr. Shmeliov and then question the panel,
as it were, even if not all members of the panel will have spoken.
They can allocate the questions among themselves.
Dr. Nikolay Shmeliov, Director of the Institute of Europe of the Russian
Academy of Sciences:
Ladies and gentlemen, because of the lack of time
unfortunately I must speak mostly, so to say, by headlines.
The first headline is that it seems that in modern economic crisis Russia
at last, I think, achieved the bottom and now is climbing step by step,
centimeter by centimeter, from that pit where we found ourselves.
The second point: now, in our relations with the outer world foreign
countries, we are facing three groups of major problems.
Problem number one, from my point of view, I’m afraid will appear for
you a little strange. I’m not
sure that many of you thought a lot about what is going on now, really, in the
world, financial flows when it concerns Russian interests.
People usually think now that the world is financing a very
weak, very chaotic Russia with all kinds of assistance, aid, capital, inflow,
but the truth now, not only now but all of the last decade, is quite the
opposite. Russia is financing, on a
rather considerable scale, the world but the world is not financing Russia.
The ratio, proportion, between inflow of capital in Russia and outflow of
capital from Russia now is somewhere close to 1 to 3 or even 4, and this
distortion of normal world financial flows is really a tragedy for us in these
economic bleak ten years or even a little more, it is almost unbearable.
I don’t blame anybody. I
think it’s a result of our own stupidity, but the fact is that, whereas I
think it’s quite necessary just now to somehow stop this economic day-to-day
bleeding, it’s impossible to achieve without international aid, without
international understanding. I
think that just now we are interested more in somehow changing this design of
world financial flows that we observe now.
It’s problem number one.
Problem number two is how to ease that burden, our official
burden, that not only really sometimes seems unbearable for us, but unjust,
especially if we compare the modern Russia, the modern Poland, I think that the
problem of Soviet debts, not Russian debts, can be somehow resolved in a new
situation.
Problem number three. Of course, we really want to join the
World Trade Organization. It’s
really a goal for us. But I’m
afraid, and a lot of my friends in Russia also are afraid, that they’re too
much in a hurry in the movement to join the WTO just now.
You see, it’s not a problem of trade regimes for Russian goods and
services and so on in other countries. It’s mostly purely our domestic problem. Unfortunately, goods and commodities produced in my country
are not competitive, all of them, even in our domestic market.
What is competitive in the Russian economy just now?
….Maybe some kinds of beer, nothing more.
For us to open all doors into our economy – we already made serious
historical mistakes, we were so naïve that we opened all doors in the beginning
of the ’90s and almost ruined some of the most important … of our industries
and, by the way, undermined the whole process of conversion of our military
industries by that quite unexpected and very tough competition from foreign
consumer groups. So nobody just now
rejects the necessity to join the World Trade Organization, but we need time for
a reconstruction of our industries for making them more competitive.
I understand our President, Mr. Putin.
He’s a great partisan of opening our economy and joining the WTO, but I
think maybe it would be more reasonable to slow a little our movement, to study
more attentively the experience of modern China. They spent not less than twenty
years in the process of preparation for joining this organization, and they
created huge export capacities and they opened for themselves American markets,
and now they can afford more sharp competition on their domestic consumer
markets.
Maybe you can add to these groups of problems one more: the
question of foreign private capita. But
this is a rather delicate thing. I
understand Russian businessmen when they say that before we will come seriously
on your markets, try to somehow convince your own businessmen, who now prefer to
keep their money in offshore zones and not so willing turn back to power our
economy.
Thank you very much.
Jeremy Azrael
Just to underscore what I think was pretty clear in support
of Dr. Rogov’s proposition that Russia has undergone a very significant civic
and political evolution. Dr.
Shmeliov, if I understood him correctly, just delivered a rather fundamental
critique of the policies of the Russian government -- which would have been
something pretty inconceivable at a forum like this ten years ago.
In any event,
I think both of our speakers have raised some very fundamental issues.
I don’t want to abuse the privileges of the Chair, but if I understood
correctly Dr. Rogov has raised the tantalizing possibility that the United
States and Russia are embarking on what could become a new strategic
partnership, analogous to, but in many was much more enduring and based on more
fundamental and long-lived foundations, the strategic partnerships that have
existed in the past. The questions that he didn’t pose but is certainly well
aware of are what’s required of the United States and what do we require of
Russia in order to consummate this partnership or, indeed, even to keep it alive
if Mr. bin Laden dies tomorrow. So
that gets you quickly to issues like Iraq and Uzbekestan and the economic
relationships that he and Dr. Shmeliov talked about.
I hope that we’ll pursue some of those questions.
You all are a pretty representative group of very influential,
internationally-engaged Americans. What I think would be interesting for our Russian guests to
hear and comment on is the question of what more can Russia do and, to hear your
thoughts, about we might do for it.
Dr. Shmeliov, if I understood him correctly, was talking very much about the need for renegotiating debt. He was talking perhaps about the need to consider some very special requests by Russia for conditions as it proceeds toward membership in the World Trade Organization. He was talking about capital flight in very large amounts without addressing a question that I’m sure is on the minds of some of you and that I know is on his mind: why is the capital fleeing? Why are Russian investors, to put it in its crudest possible form, not investing in Russia and, under those circumstances, what probability really is there that Western investors will significantly invest? And if Western investors don’t invest, what then? Anyway, as I said, I don’t want to abuse the privileges of the Chair, I just want to frame a couple of what I think are the broad issues, and to remind you that in this book -- and in the presence of our guests that there is a capability to talk, and indeed maybe even a requirement to talk, about Russia and the Transatlantic relationship. That is to say, Europe is very much part of both the political and the economic and the strategic equation certainly from a Russian and American point of view.