Topic: Our World Today. Review of our main spiritual, intellectual, political and socio-economic.

Afternoon Session, Sept. 5

Jacques Rupnik
A possible way of introducing this afternoon's debate was to try to invite our speakers to define the post1989 condition of the world. We have clearly witnessed the end of an era marked by competing ideologies, yet important differences still remain when assessing the meaning and the implications of what was called the end of history, the idea that liberal democracy and the market economy are without rivals. As we have discovered since, the relationship between the two raises a number of important problems, called globalization. I know that Professor Wallerstein prefers the term "world system". First, what kind of market will prevail? Is the European concept still viable in the present context? What kind of capitalism? Andre Glüksmann talks about capitalism with a human face, a word appropriate for those who remember 1968 and socialism with a human face. This is one set of questions. The second issue is a question of nation-states and democracy in Europe's globalization. A free market creates a free society, and the logic of the economy is clearly supranational while political democracy still remains rooted in the nation state. If, as seems to be the case, politics is losing out to the economy, what are the implications for the notions of sovereignty for the future of democracies? What indeed is the meaning of politics in such a context? There is a third important dimension to the post-war, post-cold war situation, which concerns cultural and religious divides. Globalization and homogenisation are combined with fragmentation and the universal assertion of particular values and identities. There are, of course, different responses - religious and national - to the challenges of post modernity. There are also different ways of interpreting them. The clash of civilisation theory is probably the best known, though by no means the most accurate. It is one thing to say that we are seeing new geopolitical realignments influenced by historical and cultural divides. It is quite another to reduce civilisation to religion and postulate the inevitability of that conflict. It is with this last issue in mind that we shall start this afternoon's session. Chief Rabbi Sirat has chosen as a title for his presentation "Les religions du livre comme facteur d’harmonie". Chief Rabbi Sirat of the French consistory and president of the conference of European rabbis. It is a great pleasure to welcome you in Prague.

René-Samuel Sirat
Good afternoon, Ladies and Gentlemen, Mr. Chairman. First of all as an introduction to this presentation, I should like to say two words related to what was said here yesterday. The first was when Elie Wiesel talked about the Jerusalem bombings and I was, of course, concerned to hear the news from my country, from Israel, from my wife, from my daughters, from my children, who live just round the corner from where this atrocious act happened. Now the question is: Does it make sense to speak here about tolerance, about dialogues, about tolerance, about peace? Do we have a model right for this, and my answer to this is: Yes, of course we do have this right, more than ever before. We should never leave it up to our enemies to decide the answers to these questions for us. We should never do anything that would go against our hope.
The second question was posed here by Mr. Geremek yesterday. Towards the end of his presentation, he asked a straightforward question: And how about God? So, God is being introduced into our discussions here today. About 30 years ago everybody repeated after one another that God is dead. No, God is alive, and it needs man. No, man is not somewhere between an angel and an animal. Man is more than an angel because only man enjoys freedom. An angel obeys God. This is the way it should be. But man always talks to God face to face. Man can be a brutal criminal, and we saw this only yesterday, but man can also be a partner to God. Man can implement God's intentions but God is not the property of anybody. God does not belong to any representatives of any religion and God is not the property of any fanatics, who claim that they act and speak in the name of God. This cannot be so because God is merciful. God loves everybody, including these criminals, and I should like to express my sympathies to all the casualties in Israel, in Lebanon, but also in Algeria, where I come from. I really feel terribly sorry for that destiny. I do hope that one day we shall all have peace, peace that will wipe away all the tears on our cheeks.
Ladies and Gentlemen, it may sound paradoxical at the end of this century, on the threshold of the forth millennium, to speak about religions and the Bible as a fact of harmony. Everywhere in the world representatives of different religions promote what Gerard called the valence of the blessed. What is happening around us is a major challenge for all of us. It is also a challenge for those people who should be responsible, who should try to prevent all these atrocities. Decades after the Gulags, if we do not meet the challenges all this will have a very destructive impact on our certainties. During the days after Yitzhak Rabin was killed, there were people who demanded that those who had signed the peace accords in Oslo be held responsible for this - even that they be killed. Of course, we need to remember all the different instances of the expulsion of Jews from all corners of the world.
Some two or three weeks ago the orthodox Jews in Jerusalem wanted to pray in Jerusalem but the ultra orthodox Jews prevented this. Just look at the list of Nobel prize laureates and you immediately realise how many religious thinkers have contributed to peace in this world. The late prime minister Rabin said that he had been led in Oslo by the fact that it was virtually unbearable for any Jew to feel that he could rule any other nation. When the prime minister wanted to speak in favour of the Palestinian people, he was only a true follower of all Jewish sages. I should like to remind you of the fact that not only Rabin, but also representatives of other religions supported him. Others should have supported him and should not have insulted him. We shall never forget the very commendable struggle of the two co hosts of this forum, Elie Wiesel and President Václav Havel, who - and I'm quoting from one of the songs - from their very depths refused what seemed to be essential, and that is the destruction of man. They were drawing on religion and their loyalty to values, values that are anchors in the Bible. And yet, in the pangs of birth of this new millennium, we do have a source of hope. What we see on television almost every day and which is a truthful picture of what is happening here, is only part of the world that is dying. The Messiah, according to the Jewish tradition, is ready to respond to our calls, and is ready to let peace prevail. But when will the Messiah come back? If he is asked, if you wish so, he can come today, and this is a source of hope for all of us - hope, against the background of all the suffering symbolised by the Gulag or Auschwitz, which are not that far remote in the past.
Israel has returned to the stage of history after a number of centuries and it stipulated its own laws, one of these being the law of 1980 on the fundamentals of justice. Here in article one, whenever a court of justice faces a legal problem that is not formulated in any law or in any other case that would allow for any analogy, then the court should draw on Israeli traditions, that is freedom, equality and peace. And how many other countries would use this as one of the premises of nationhood? In roughly one month, for seven days
Jews will be living in bivouacs, where the roof will be made only of leaves, and this will symbolise how very fragile life can be. Of course, in these huts as it were, there will be no television. There will be just the spiritual world, full of hopes. Jews will go to their temples and they will bring four plants, the first that smells lovely, then there will be dates, myrtle and also one little twig of a willow tree. All these symbolise what is essential for men, for good men, but also for men who could be suppressed or driven away from the centre, and these four plants are always brought to the synagogue as the symbols of the diversity of mankind. This is a rite during which all the Jews can try to sing the very strength of their faith: Hosanna, Hosanna. These four plants are then moved in all directions from east to west, west to east, north to south, which again should be seen as a source of hope. Hope should never be chased away. Then one of these plants is picked up and lifted towards the heavens, and then down again, to the microcosm, and to the west, in the direction where one of the arch priests walks out.
Of course, there are also some very bad examples, but most of these people are still loyal to the calls coming from their inner self, from their deep inside. The most important commandment was love thy neighbor as you love yourself, and we know that is the only way. Only through applying this principle can we achieve progress. I am very happy to be here in Prague, in the centre of European Judaism, not only at the time of Rabbi Levi, but also Rabbi Loew, Maharal, and this, of course, means that I can draw on some wonderful text - and this is the text. Each night is divided into three wakes. During the first one it's the donkey, then we have dogs howling to the moon, and throughout the third wake a husband talks to his wife and she breast feeds their baby. This is how Maharal interprets this passage: this night is the exalt of the Jewish people. During the first wake Israel was burdened, just like a donkey is burdened by his master, in the second wake, when the wolf is howling to the moon, this was the period when Jews were persecuted in Europe, killed and murdered, and Maharal speaks about crusades, but also about the expulsion of Jews from Spain and Portugal, which occurred at the same time; and the third wake is characterised by a dialogue, a dialogue between Israel and other nations, and this is then compared with the dialogue between a husband and a wife. And reconciliation is seen as the most beautiful moment culminating their discussion. And just like the baby is being breast fed by his mother, Israel can provide nourishment to its people.
We have seen the birth of a profound debate between different religions and Israel, just like other nations, now feels the need to go back to the very source of life: fraternity. Peace will definitely be present at the time when we all enter Jerusalem. Hosanna, Hosanna, have mercy on us, God, and give us your mercy.

Jacques Rupnik
Thank you very much, Rabbi Sirat, for that inspiring and moving speech and for recalling the rich legacy of the Jewish presence in Prague. Our next speaker is professor Imanuel Wallerstein. He's currently president of the International Sociological Association and is known, among the many works he has published, for his book "The Modern World System". Professor Wallerstein.

Imanuel Wallerstein
The first half of the 21st century will, I believe, be far more difficult, more unsettling and yet more open than anything we have known in the 20th century. I say this on three premises, none of which I have time to argue here. The first is that historical systems, like all systems, have finite lives. They have beginnings, they have a long development and finally, as they move far from equilibrium and reach points of bifurcation, they atomise. The second premise is that two things are true at these points of bifurcation. Small inputs have large outputs, as opposed to in times of normal development of a system, when large inputs have small outputs. And secondly, the outcome of such bifurcations is inherently indeterminate. And the third premise is that the modern world system was a historical system, has entered into a terminal crisis and is unlikely to exist in 50 years' time. However, since its outcome is uncertain, we do not know whether the resulting system or systems will be better or worse than the one in which we are living. But we do know that the time of transition will be a terrible time of troubles, since the stakes of the transition are so high, the outcome so uncertain and the ability of small inputs to affect the outcome so great. It is widely thought that the collapse of communism in 1989 marked the great triumph of liberalism.
I see the definitive collapse of liberalism as the defining geo-culture of our world system. Liberalism essentially promised gradual reform towards ameliorating the inequalities of the world system and reducing the acute polarisation. The illusion that this was possible within the framework of the modern world system has in fact been a great stabilising element, in that it has legitimated states in the eyes of their populations and promised them a heaven on earth in the foreseeable future. The collapse of communism along with the collapse of the national liberation movements in the third world and the collapse of faith in the Keynesian model in the western world were all simultaneous reflections of popular disillusionment in the validity and reality of the reformist programmes each propagated. But this disillusionment, however merited, knocks the props from under popular legitimation of states, and effectively undoes any reason why their populations should tolerate the continuing and increasing polarisation of our world system. I therefore expect considerable turmoil of the kind we have already been seeing in the 1990s, spreading from the Bosnias and Rwandas of this world to the wealthier and more stable regions of the world, such as the United States. These, as I say, are premises, and you may not be convinced of them, since I have no time to argue them. I wish therefore simply to draw the moral and political conclusions from my premises.
The first conclusion is that progress, unlike worthy enlightenment in all its forms preached, is not at all inevitable. But I do not accept that it is therefore impossible. The world has not morally advanced in the last several thousand years, but it could. We can move in the direction of what Max Weber calls "substantive rationality", that is rational values and rational ends arrived at collectively and intelligently. The second conclusion is that the belief in certainties, a fundamental premise of modernity, is blinding and crippling. Modern science, that is Cartesian Newtonian science, has been based on the certainty of certainty. The basic assumption is that there exist objective universal laws governing all natural phenomena, and that these laws can be ascertained by scientific enquiry, and that once such laws are known, starting from any set of initial conditions we can predict perfectly the future and the past. It is often argued that this concept of science is merely a secularisation of prescient thought, representing merely a substitution of nature for God - and that the requisite assumption of certainty is derived from, and is parallel to, the truths of religious profession.
I do not wish to start a theological discussion here, but it has always struck me that the belief in an omnipotent God, a view common at least to the so-called western religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, is in fact both logically and morally incompatible with the belief in certainty or at least in any human certainty. For if God is omnipotent, humans cannot constrain him by declaring what they believe is eternally true, or God would not then be omnipotent. Now no doubt the scientists of early modern times, many of whom were quite pious, may have thought that they were arguing theses concerned with the reigning theology - and no doubt many theologians of the time gave them course to think that.
But it is simply not true that a belief in scientific certainty is a necessary complement to religious belief systems. Furthermore, the belief in certainty is now under severe, and I would say very telling attack, within natural science itself. I need only refer you to Ilya Prigogine's latest book, which has just been translated into English as The End of Certainty, in which he argues that even in the inner sanctum of natural science - dynamic systems and mechanics - the systems are governed by the arrow of time and inevitably move far from equilibrium. Now these new views are called the science of complexity, partly because they argue that Newtonian certitudes hold true only in very constrained, very simple systems, but also because they argue that the universe manifests the evolutionary development of complexity and that the overwhelming majority of situations cannot be explained by assumptions of linear equilibria and time reversibility.
The third conclusion I draw is that in human social systems - the most complex systems in the universe and therefore the hardest to analyse - the struggle for the good society is a continuing one. Furthermore, it is precisely in periods of transition from one historical system to another one, whose nature we cannot know in advance, that human struggle takes on the most meaning. Or, to put it another way, it is only in such times of transition that what we call free will outweigh the pressures of the existing system to return to equilibrium. Thus fundamental change is possible, albeit never certain, and this fact makes claims on our moral responsibility to act rationally in good faith and with strength to seek a better historical system. We cannot know what this would look like in structural terms, but we can set out the criteria on the basis of which we would call a historical system substantively rational. It is a system in my view that is largely egalitarian and largely democratic.
Far from seeing any conflict between these two objectives, I would argue that they are intrinsically linked to each other. Any historical system cannot be egalitarian if it is not democratic, because an undemocratic system is one that distributes power unequally and this means that it will also distribute all other things unequally. And it cannot be democratic if it is not egalitarian, since an inegalitarian system means that some have much more material means than others and therefore inevitably have more political power. The fourth conclusion I draw is that uncertainty is wondrous and that if certainty were to be real, it would be moral death. If we were certain of the future, there could be no moral compunction to do anything. We would be free to indulge every passion and pursue every egoism since all actions would fall within a certainty that would have been ordained. If everything is uncertain, then the future is open to creativity, not merely human creativity, but the creativity of all nature. It is open to possibility and therefore to a better world. But we can only get there if we are ready to invest our moral energies in its achievement and, as we are ready to struggle with those who, under whatever guise and for whatever excuse, prefer an inegalitarian, undemocratic world.

Jacques Rupnik
Thank you very much, Professor Wallerstein. Our next speaker is Timothy Garton Ash, the historian and writer. He's well known in this part of the world, and to those who are interested in it. Nobody who followed the events of 1989 could have avoided his writing on the subject. He brings Europe to the New York Review of Books and I understand he wants to talk about Europe to us this afternoon.

Timothy Garton Ash
Thank you, Chairman. I would indeed like to contribute to our thinking about the world by making a few remarks about Europe at the turn of the millennium. I' m told that when the leaders of the European Union reach one of their splendid agreements, a certain sect of born-again Christians reach for their Bibles to determine if this is indeed that coming together of the nations that is foreseen in the Book of Revelation and immediately precedes the end of the world. I think most of us would take a slightly less apocalyptic view of the recent counsels of the European Union but it is true that European politics in the 1990s have been characterised by a certain amount of what I call "secularised millennialism", if not millenarianism. A secularised millennialism, to some extent inspired by the seemingly miraculous revolutions of 1989, not least the Velvet Revolution in this city which I was lucky enough to experience at close hand with the then not yet President Václav Havel. The millennial goal in western Europe is, of course, that of monetary union to be achieved at the millennial date of 1999 and seen as part of a larger completion. The millennial goal for east central Europe is the so-called return to Europe, now symbolised by joining NATO - again at the magical date of 1999 and also understood as some sort of a finality, a completion, an end state.
I wish to suggest to you that these can nourish dangerous illusions - dangerous illusions for us in western Europe. Not just because the achievement of that monetary union is so desperately uncertain and because to have the whole European project stand or fall with this great gamble of monetary union is risky to say the least, but also because even if it does succeed as a further important step of integration, it would still leave huge questions outstanding about the relations between those states involved in it, between those states and other states of the European Union, and between them and the states elsewhere in Europe, let alone in the rest of the world. In saying that, I implicitly answer one of our chairman's questions. Whatever the developments in economics or science or technology, I' m firmly of the view that the major political actors in the first decades of the 21st century will continue to be states. For east central Europe, there remains a dangerous illusion because what every country that has joined NATO or the European Union has found is that when you get in, the negotiations have only just begun and many of the largest questions are still outstanding. But, above all, it is a dangerous illusion because while we in the west and central Europe have been pursuing these goals or dreams, elsewhere in Europe we have gone all the way back to war, to ethnic cleansing, to atrocities such as we have not seen in Europe for nearly half a century and, while we listened with respect to prime minister Silajdzic, I don't think that we have growled quite enough on the implications of that stark fact.
Does this mean that we should abandon the grand narrative of progress to millennial completion and instead see European history as cyclical. I think not. I think, Ladies and Gentlemen, it is still possible to tell a story of progress, but it is a much more modest and fragile progress. It is the story of a Europe, which in the 18th century gave us the idea that every serious language needs to constitute a nation. In the 19th century we added the idea that every serious nation requires a state. And then in the first half of the 20th century, the clash of nationalisms as conceived through the unrestrained competition of states for power in its extreme totalitarian form led to such destruction in two world wars and such barbarism - European barbarism. But in the second half of the 20th century, at least in the part of the continent fortunate enough to be placed in the west, after 1945 there did develop a new model of co-operation and migration between states. This essential achievement was nowhere better formulated than by one of President Havel' s predecessors, namely the Bohemian king Jiří of Poděbrady, who in 1458 was the author of the first proposal for a peacekeeping union in Europe. The essence of his proposal was, I quote, that we shall not take up arms for the sake of any disagreements, complaints or disputes, nor shall we allow any to take up arms in our name.
How better, Ladies and Gentlemen, to sum up the real central achievement of the European Union today and the achievement of permanent institutional co-operation and peaceful conflict resolution. Less in the union perhaps, but much more than a concert of Europe: Should we say an orchestra of Europe, in permanent session? Now 1989 was a chance to begin to extend this achievement to the whole of Europe. That chance was not properly and promptly seized, and hundreds of thousands of people have paid with their lives in the former Yugoslavia, in Sarajevo and Srebrenica for that failure. And yet I think the chance is still there. But let us define clearly what that chance is. The chance is, I believe, not the achievement of some millennial finality of unity for a few states in one corner of the continent, but the chance to build a peaceful, non hegemonic, liberal order for the whole of Europe. I think one of the central themes of discomforts has been a very important discussion of what could be a shared moral minimum for individual conduct, a shared minimum around the notion of human dignity common to all civilisations. What we need to complement this is the search for a shared moral minimum in the conduct of states - a shared minimum for the conduct of states in relation to each other, but also, if this is to be a liberal order, a shared minimum in the conduct of those states to their own citizens in respect of human and civil rights and, let me add, also of the rights of minorities.
Of course, this leaves open the vast questions about how these standards can be enforced, but Europe in the European Union, in the Helsinki process, in the Council of Europe, in several other institutions and processes, has begun to find novel and partially effective answers to those questions. I am not suggesting any artificial contradiction between the maximal goal of unity and the minimal, though still ambitious goal of liberal order. But I am suggesting that in the years since 1989 we have perhaps concentrated too much on the maximum for the few, when we had a unique chance to achieve the minimum for the many.
Now this model of permanent, institutionalised co-operation between states, as we have developed it in western Europe, is, I believe, genuinely new, different, and better than anything we have seen before in modern European history. It is, I believe, extendible to other parts of Europe, though how and how fast are important questions. It is also, I believe, qualitatively different from the arrangements between states in other continents in the world at the end of the 20th century. Having started with a critique of secular millennialism, I leave it to the distinguished representatives of other continents around this table to ask if this European model has any relevance to them. It would be absurd to end in Messianic vain, suggesting a European model for the rest of the world after the history of European imperialism, after what Europe has done to itself in the 20th century. I would never dream of saying, and here I must apologise for the interpreters but I can only say this in a different language, that: "Im europäischem Wesen soll die Welt genesen".
I leave the question of the relevance to others, but I do firmly believe that the chance that was opened up for Europe by 1989 is still there, that this precious and unique model is capable of developing and adapting to the larger Europe. But it is capable of that only if we see its achievements and its goal clearly, and without millennial illusions, and cleave to the old and very unshallow wisdom which teaches us that less can be more. Thank you.

DISCUSSION

Jacques Rupnik
Thank you very much, Timothy Garton Ash, particularly for your important conclusion about the shared common minimum for the conduct of states internally and externally. Whatever else is wrong with the European Union, I think it has achieved that. It is a union of democracy, and it has banished the possibility of war from its midst. But what about war at Europe's periphery, what about war at its doorstep, like we have seen in Bosnia. This is a crucial question, I think, but has further relevance beyond Europe, I think. Now the discussion is open: reactions, contributions, comments are welcome.

Khotso Makhulu
Professor Wallerstein had to elaborate a little somewhat about what he meant by the demise of the liberation movements. It was unclear because in our experience in different parts of the world it is those very liberation movements who are in power: whether they are good governments or not is another matter. The second question I would like to posit would be to the last speaker. He refers to a Europe that has done so much to build unity or union and yet, in life's experience we note at the same time that Europe has sealed its borders. I think there is a contradiction in terms there, when you talk of democracy and are very ruthless in the application of your immigration laws.

Imanuel Wallerstein
I can respond very briefly. Actually, just a little over a year ago I was in Durban, and I gave the key note address at the South African Sociology Association meeting. I don't remember the title I gave it, but it was essentially on the ANC as the last of the liberation movements and I'll be glad to send you a copy of that. You live in an area of the world in which the last of the liberation movements has at last come to power, but I am thinking of the long phenomenon of the demise of the movements after they came to power. Take the FLN in Algeria, the glorious long struggle for independence, and it no longer commands the support of the Algerian people in the national congress. And one could go on, in country after country, the liberation movements 20 years later have run into great difficulties, because they were unable to deliver the goods they had promised. It may not have been their fault - in fact I think it was not at all their fault - but that's irrelevant, I think. Historically that was an era, and these movements no longer command the affection and the support that brought them to power - except in south Africa, but it's the last one and it only recently came to power.

Michael Novak
Thank you. I would like to take advantage of the Rabbi' s words of introduction to make a point that joins several of our discussions. One of the great achievements of Judaism and one of the great achievements of Christianity, after all, was to carry Judaism to the gentiles. But one of the great achievements of Judaism, said John Adams, our second president, was to give to the world a view of God conceived of as truth, as light, and as providence, meaning light concerned also with probabilities and concrete details, not just with certainties, not just with abstract principles eternally true, but concrete details. And this has a very powerful result: it has a great result for the rise of science. Alfred North Whitehead said that the rise of modern science was inconceivable without 5,000 years of tutoring under this assumption. Let me say, true or false, it was a powerful assumption in history. Secondly, it has also led Judaism and the world that it has inspired, and Christianity also, to favour institutions that are designed to be discovery mechanisms. Universities are fruits, but so also were the election of leaders in the monasteries, in the papacy, so also was democracy, so also in my view is capitalism, which is primarily a discovery mechanism, both by way of market and by way of enterprise. This is the most important and most overlooked characteristic of a capitalist system. It is not constituted by markets and private property, but by enterprise, which is a lurking creativity and practicality, making things to be new. So I just want to once again make a move that I hope helps to unite different fields of science, of politics and of religion, not to make them the same, but to show the way all can contribute to a vision of the dignity of man. And finally, I would like to ask a question of Professor Wallerstein about the idea of egalitarianism. I think, unless understood correctly, it is a murderous and authoritarian idea. Talents are so different, the capacity to work is so different, ambition is so different that I think the chances of being poor in an open society, in a society in which there is opportunity - even if it is unequal - is much better than being poor in an egalitarian society. So there are many kinds of equality - I'm trying to say, before the law, in opportunity. Material equality, I think, is a great enemy of liberty and a great enemy of democracy.

Timothy Garton Ash
I just wanted to cheer up Archbishop Makhulu by saying that it's much worse, even than he suggested, because Europe is not only not open to people and goods from much of the rest of the world. Europe is not even open to Europe. One of the great sins of omission since 1989, to which I was eluding, is precisely the protectionism with which the European Union kept out a few lorry loads of tomatoes from Hungary or a few trainloads of vegetables from the Czech Republic, because of some special interest somewhere in the European Union - let alone the scandal, with a few notable exceptions, of closing doors on Bosnian refugees. Germany here, of course, was a very notable exception, but my own country took a pathetically small number of refugees from Bosnia. So it is shameful. I would say that in an attempt to address that, what I was suggesting was not the pursuit of unity. I was actually suggesting a large and important paradigm shift for European politics - from the paradigm of the pursuit of unity, which has been dominant in recent decades, to the paradigm of the pursuit of liberal order. That is the paradigm I'm proposing for the whole of Europe. And one characteristic of liberal order is precisely the attempt - the attempt I formulate cautiously - at openness to the world beyond.

Imanuel Wallerstein
Michael Novak and I simply don't agree. Let me say, first of all, that I don't think the fact that people have different capacities, abilities etc. from birth on, and at any point in their lives, leads to the conclusion that they should have considerably disparate incomes. I personally think that I am at least as capable as the president of any multinational corporation, I think the rabbi on my left is also as capable, but our incomes are considerably different - and our needs are probably the same. Furthermore, I don't think you'd be very convincing to the large billions of population who are at the bottom end of this wage distribution. Secondly, however - and much more fundamentally - I don't think a society that is inegalitarian is democratic or could possibly be democratic. I think the fact is that in all our so-called democratic societies, that is in the western world, there is a great inequality of real power and a great inequality of ability to affect social decision making. And that reality stems from the enormous inequalities the system breeds. So I don't think it s democratic as long as it's inegalitarian. Equally, I said, I don't think it can be egalitarian if it's not democratic. I don't think the fact that you pay everyone the same amount of money is effective, but to have some people with real power, and other people who don't have it, is an inegalitarian system, because the inequality in political power results in inequality. I think the two are inseparable and I think it has been a historic liberal myth that one should separate the two.

René-Samuel Sirat
Mr. Chairman, I would like to touch very briefly upon something that has been said here - and that is the ancient problem of the theologian: the omnipresence and omnipotence of God on the one hand, and the freedom of man on the other hand. And perhaps I would like to add one sentence, perhaps something that may sound rather original, something that is rather new in the Jewish philosophy. But it is not so new, and Polykaros, in his statement from the 14th century, explains that God in his great goodness did not want to give man an illusion of freedom, but genuine freedom, morally founded freedom. This is a theory that is rather limiting, because it does not allow us to predict the future, Polykaros explains, and we could say, using modern terms, that God knows all the parameters and, knowing these parameters, God, in his omnipresence and omnipotence, can act but we can also be taken by surprise depending on the behavior of men, be it in positive or in negative terms which can be a surprise to God. This is the price that God pays for giving man freedom.

Seizaburo Sato
Mr. Chairman, I have two comments - brief, very brief. The first is that one of the most remarkable development international society has achieved in seizing since the end of the World War Two - at least among advanced democracies - has been that military measures have become inconceivable to solve international conflicts. Some of the countries outside the so-called western world, that is Japan, Australia, the USA and so on, and until World War Two the major powers, have fought again and again and again, but even after World War Two the historical experiences remain there for several decades. But by now it is absolutely inconceivable to see another world war between the United States and Japan, or Australia and Japan. That is a very significant and hopeful or promising change for the world. But the point is that in this world there are nearly 200 states. And among these 200 states the number of states belonging to the wealthy, advanced democracies is relatively feeble. So one of the tasks we should aim for in the next century is how to develop the membership of these advanced democracies. That' s the first point of my draft thesis.
The second point is - I do agree with Dr. Garton Ash that it is the state that will very surely remain the major actor in the international community in the coming decades - not only one decade, maybe decades. Because, as I said in the morning session today, democracy has state borders. To be very honest, internationally honest, the borders are necessary. State borders are necessary to maintain the domestic society as relatively comfortable, safe, and relatively egalitarian. So in other poor countries, internationally inegalitarian policy is a precondition to maintain domestic society as egalitarian. And that' s one of the major indicators that the state borders will remain. Thank you.

John Silber
A degree of utopianism appeared in this afternoon's discussion from surprising sources: from two realists, Wallerstein and Garton Ash. I would like to hear them both respond to this question. When Bishop Makhulu accompanied him about closing the doors of Europe to the rest of the world, Mr. Garton Ash responded by talking about the hypocrisy that Europe has even closed itself to inter European states. Now, realistically, let us suppose, how many people do you want them to accept, shall it be one million, shall it be 10 million, shall it be 100 million, shall it be a billion, shall it be 1.6 billion? Obviously there is no possibility in any real world of having open borders for the immigration of a number of people without so dislocating society that you simply relocate poverty from one region to another. I'd like to hear some response to that. Now Mr. Wallerstein says no democracy without equality. I don't know of any place, any world, in which there's been equality, so is it his thesis that there is no democracy in this world? There are enormous achievements of democracy in the absence of equality and he has the second problem. He didn't answer Mr. Novak's question: How do you achieve equality if you maintain freedom and you maintain equality of opportunity?

Jacques Rupnik
If you abolish the borders internally, within the European Union, you must establish them externally. Every inclusion is by definition almost also an exclusion. What does that mean for Europe's relationship to the outside world? This is a very important question. But I'm supposed to give the floor and not to give the answers.

Cornelius Castoriadis
Very briefly. One point is a remark about what Timothy Garton Ash said about the maintenance of national states. I think I can understand in what respect he says that. He says this in the sense that national governments or states will not surrender their sovereignty to international institutions. But we see today that these governments are surrendering their sovereignty to other bodies. These, about which I will speak slightly more tomorrow, are multinational trusts, national corporations, financial oligarchies and institutions.
There are even in some cases, and I would like to be wrong on this, very important elements of a mafia organisation becoming almost sovereign on a world scale. We know that some countries are clearly ruled by mafias, in fact, and not negligible countries: I' m not talking about some Monaco, which is not ruled by the mafia, but very important countries. This contaminates also other countries. So the possibility for a demise of the national governments in the 21st century does not, to my mind, correspond to a perspective of an international government or an international world government. It rather corresponds to a generalisation, let's say - I use this with many misgivings - about the corrosion of the state today prevalent in the former Soviet Union, where in fact the constituted powers are not exercising any real power at all. Real power is exercised elsewhere, and most of it then, we know, is exercised by more or less decent mafias.
The second point is about this question of Mr Novak, about democracy, equality and so on. I wouldn't agree to use the term democracy for any of the existing governments in the world. The best among them are liberal oligarchies. Democracy means the kratos of the demos, the power of the people. And that's what the Greeks meant by it. To take a reference more near to President Silber, there is a famous phrase in American history concerning the government of the people, by the people, for the people; would he say that today the United States are governed by the people? To be governed by the people means that people participate in the political process. What we know about the States is, first of all, among others, the greatest degree of political abstention, in the so-called elections. Second, for instance, the fact, which is well acknowledged in American newspapers, that once you are elected senator, if you wish so you are forever a senator, because to be elected senator you need the money of the PACs - political action committees - and the election committees wouldn't give the money to Wallerstein, to me, or even to President Silber.
They will give them to people who will accommodate their interests once they are in power. And the third point might seem a settled one. But it is not. I have argued for 30 years that the classical or standard argument of the western so-called democracy defending the western regimes was that in the Soviet Union there was equality, but not liberty. In the west, of course, there was not equality, but there was liberty, and this was the price to pay for the other one. Now, of course, in the Soviet Union there never had been equality. I can see what can be the equality between the guardians of a Gulag camp and the inmates, or the guardian of the guardian. So there was not really equality, and neither was there liberty. Now in the US there is some liberty - that's why I call the regimes liberal oligarchies - but, of course, there is not equality and can't be equality in the first sense. The first sense is political equality. And it's really not serious to say that a billionaire in the United States today or in France has the same political power as a street sweeper. That's just not true. And that's all.

Imanuel Wallerstein
I can be brief. Let me answer John Silber's three points. As the realist that he says I am, I know that it is politically impossible to have open frontiers. As the liberal that I believe he is, John Silber should in principle be not merely in favour with, but unconditionally in favour of, free movement of people throughout the world. For 48 years, when there was a Soviet bloc, people in the western world deplored - and that is a mild word - the fact that there was not free immigration from Soviet countries. I deplored it too. I thought it was a terrible thing. I do think it's totally unacceptable in terms of liberal doctrine, which is one of my points about liberal doctrine. Liberal doctrine does not intend to be taken literally. It has never intended to be taken literally. Is there any democracy in the world? I give the same answer as Castoriadis: there has never been a democracy in the modern world, there have been liberal states. And I personally am pleased to have been living in one, it' s better than living in a non-liberal state, but it's not a democratic state by any means. And the third question is: How can we achieve both democracy and equality? That's a very good question and I don't know that we can achieve it. I merely said we should struggle for it, I didn't say we can achieve it. There are very strong forces in the world who stand in opposition to such a construction of a historical system, and they have won out in the past and they may win out in the future. And I do not have any formulas; I don' t know the structure of such a historical system in any sense of detail. I do know that there is my definition of a good society. And that if we don' t have it, I'll continue the struggle for it.

Jacques Rupnik
Thank you very much. Liberal doctrine is not applied literally, we are told. I would seize then God, I mean no political doctrine is applied liberally. The only people who tried to apply literally a doctrine was in this part of the world, and that was Marxism-Leninism, and it was a disaster. So thank God for not applying political doctrines too literally.

Timothy Garton Ash
Briefly, chairman. I think to be described as not being a realist in the study of international relations might in some quarters be considered a compliment. But I suspect Mr Silber didn't intend it as such. Of course, I wasn't absurdly suggesting that countries should be open to everybody. Of course, that's out of the question, but there is a huge distance between what western Europe could realistically have done in the way of being open to goods and people, and what it has actually done in the last eight years - and that, very simply, was my point. As to Professor Castoriadis: well, of course, nothing is ever what it was, and that's true of the nation-state too. It's quite clear that the nation-states of western Europe are not what they were 100 years ago, especially in terms of financial and economic power, which is one reason they pooled sovereignty. But it is a huge - and I think mistaken - leap, to deduce from this that the locus of political power at the beginning of the next century will no longer be the state, but will go either downward to the regions or tribes as Fritjof Capra suggested, or upward to some supranational entity. The question is not: Are we seeing the end of the nation state? Because we are not. The question is: What kind of nation states are we going to have? And there, I think, it's not Utopian to plead for liberal states.

Jacques Rupnik
Thank you very much. I think we will return to this question of nation states after our break, but before we do break, I have a question for Great Rabbi Sirat. Yesterday, when I asked him what would be the title of his presentation, he told me: "Les hommes de religion comme facteur d’harmonie". So I wrote it down, as prepared. Before we started our session today, he said he had a different title: "The religions of the Book, the people of the Book, as a factor of harmony". It is an interesting, important semantic modern difference, and I wonder whether the Great Rabbi would comment on his own change of title.

René-Samuel Sirat
Mr. Chairman, yes, there is a certain distance between what we wish for and what is ideal. What is important are reality and facts. Yes, representatives of religions by definition should be a factor of harmony. They have been chosen to act accordingly. Their mission should make it possible for these people to be those who will pave a way to harmony, freedom, peace, and so forth. This is their mission, this is the purpose of their lives, but what we are seeing more and more is a kind of an infection of what I would call political power. So we have seen a certain distancing of ourselves from these principles, principles on which their mission is based, and their acts. To be more brief and perhaps to express this in terms of a metaphor, the responsibility to be a factor of harmony is such that the representative of a religion feels more and more that he has no moral power and political power. These two things are interconnected, and any representative of any religion - whatever they defend, whenever they want to be truly sincere, loyal to their ideals, loyal to their missions, if they want to be at the same time a component of this harmony - needs to get rid of whatever is related to politics, because this is the reverse of their mission. This is not to say that a political mission is something that we should look down upon. I do feel that politicians are extremely responsible, and this responsibility at the end of this century is absolutely enormous, and we should try to help politicians to cope with all these new responsibilities. But our Jewish tradition has taught us that whenever there is a conversions of these two different powers, religious powers, political powers, economic powers, and so forth, the result is bad. I think that religious representatives should call upon all the rulers, all the kings - it's a kind of interpellation in fact. And I would say that some representatives of different religions are not courageous enough. They find their place only in their temples, in their churches, in their mosques, and so forth, like all the prophets who turned to King David. They should tell their contemporary rulers what is wrong and what is right, because by doing this they would help us develop more harmony. Thank you.

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 Globalization.

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 globalization 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 denuclearise 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 defense 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 globalization 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 globalization, 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 globalization progresses hand in hand with the rise of nationalism. I now give the floor to Professor Jiří Musil. He is a leading Czech sociologist and a professor at the Central European University. I think it is important in a meeting like this that the voice from Prague is also heard.

Jiří 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 automatism. 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, specialization, 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 Tübingen. 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.