Ken Jowitt: I am Ken Jowitt and and the same person that will be speaking. There may be there may be a few there may be a few terms that I use today that are not familiar so for Stanford graduates, I have a glossary. And for Berkley graduates I will speak slowly. I want to I want to talk about what's happening to the world today and contrast it with the way we view the world after the demise and collapse and extinction of the Soviet Union and I hope you will see the lesson involved. We responded to the end of the cold war in a predictable manner - that is to say with absolute notions of how the world would evolve absolute notions singular, fixed, dogmatic notion of how the world would evolve. The most dramatic was the idea of the end of history. That notion was with the defeat of communism, never again would universal ideology appear able to compete with liberal capitalist democracy. That was Frank Fukuyama. That's an extraordinary statement and actually philosophically a very sophisticated statement that would the defeat of Fascism, Nazism, and communism there would be wars in the future, but there would never again appear a universal ideology with the political centre with the power to threaten or destroy the United States, there were derivatives of this idea. And one of the things I want to get across is that there are points in history where ideas count. Americans are very funny, they don't like Marxism but the fact to the matter is that most Americans believe economics count more than ideas and the fact is, sometimes economics count more, sometimes power counts more and sometimes ideas count more or we wouldn't be in Iraq today. We didn't go for oil, we didn't go for geo strategic influence, we went because we thought we were going to create a democracy that would be the catalyst for a global democratic revolution. Ideas count and the ideas are mentioning to informed and shape they directed American foreign policy for the last fifteen years with negative consequences. As I said the first idea and the grandest was that history was over you know the Albanians might fight in Kosovo but the fact of the matter is you would never see another Lenin, you would never see another Hitler, you would never see an ideology that was universal in scope that generated power and that challenged the united states of America. A derivative of this and for those of you who like symmetry, that's why I am doing this, the argument is very weak but it's very symmetrical. But those of you who believe in Jacob's Ladder or the chain of being depending on whether you are a biblical scholar or did Beowulf and Chaucer when you were in college. This is basically the second notion of a single fixed idea about what was happening throughout and that was Tom Friedman who was always right, Tom Friedman he has a great advantage over most people. He is always correct. Tom Friedman - we get a flat earth wrong - we have got globalization - wrong but he doesn't know it. Tom said Tom said the following that "The fixed imperative of the post cold war period was globalization" and globalization and he gave the title to a book, the book was called the "Lexus and the Olive Tree" and the Lexus and the Olive Tree basically meant that everybody from Bedford-Stuyvesant to Bulgaria to Burundi would drive a Lexus a hi-tech Lexus and keep their own cuisine so that basically what you would have is a homogenized world based on a shared technology that interestingly enough came basically from the United States of America, that was then the idea. Mainly a political science idea and many people think political science isn't powerful but it is more powerful than Christian Science. If you if I don't mean to offend anybody I think every religion is marvelous. Anyway if you look a transitioned democracy, the basic idea was that if you looked from 1974 as Sam Huntington said April 17th 1974 midnight in Portugal. There was a whole series, there were a whole number of transitions to democracy from Spain to Portugal, to Greece, to Latin America then to Eastern Europe and this Huntington called the third wave in fact it was seen as being in tsunami, it was seen as being an irresistible force that with the end of communism, defeat of Nazism and Fascism, the end of history that occurred, there was a mechanism that was going to make this work in favor of liberal capitalist democracy that was globalization, the agency for this was going to be a transition to democracy and then there were two other notions equally fixed all of the same order, the first one was it was going to be an American empire, there were people- some people wrote books about this, for the last five years I had to keep up reading their stuff and the problem was they are big books, they weren't small books, only people would realize an article is better than a book in any case they all were talking about both the possibilities, need or the value of an American empire that would act as the agent to preclude any opposition ideology, any opposition power with an ideology opposed to the west from coming to power and then finally there was a fixed theory that was more important than all the others, the end of history, globalization, transition and democracy and American empire and that was the idea of regime change to bring about democracies where they didn't exist particularly in the Middle East and that wasn't a theory, that was a political policy carried out by George Bush and his neocon advisers and that was influential because unlike all the others which were academic, this provided the most powerful agency in the world - the United States an audacious idea, a somewhat arrogant idea and fairly ignorant idea because it fully failed to understand the culture, the anthropological, the social, the social organizational, the social psychological and the political realities of countries outside of the west. I don't think there is a single member of the Bush administration that took anthropology 101. I once asked an audience how many people in the audience were married to their first cousins, how many here are married to the first cousins? One person from West Virginia - okay. The point I want to make is in the Muslim world sixty percent of people in the Sunni world marry their first cousins, what's the significance of that? The significance is their loyalty, not only familiar but social, religious, clan, regional is to the family, not to their state. You can't have a democracy without having a nation state. There are no effective nation states throughout that part of the world. So what we had for sixteen years were a set of ideas all related to one another. End of history in favor of liberal capitalist democracy, globalization led by the United States, transition to democracy creating regimes like the United States, American led empire and finally a global democratic revolution that would make Iraq look like Indiana - could be Arkansas. Point is - point simply is that if you look at this notion, it defies historical reality history for the most part is protestant, not roman catholic it's polytheist, not monotheist, it has multiple dimensions to it, not one. There are rare occasions in history when there is one dimension to life and that happened during the cold war when the Soviet Union was the reality and with the right to fixate on it. If anything happened in the world we could say, the soviets did it and nine out of ten times they did and the same thing could be said about us but through most of history there is no single authoritative fixed dogmatic principle of conflict that enables you to understand the whole world, there are multiple ones, there are partially connected, partially disconnected, overlapping and create odd mixes in the world and that's what's happening today and we have to grasp just what the nature of these odd mixes are. I wrote an article in 1992 - was called "The Leninist Extinction". Actually I don't have notes of periods or shopping lists but it gives me a certain sense of security. In this in this piece, "The Leninist Extinction" that I wrote 15 years ago I argued - so it's on the record that sooner not later we would see the emergence of new leaders, ideologies movements and regions that would contest the predominance of a liberal capitalist democratic way of life, and there were a number of reasons, but I will give you two that are worth keeping in mind because we will always find opposition in the world, because we are the cultural mutant in history, we are not the norm and the reason why the culture are mutant, I happen to think the best in human history, but we are only the exception, not the norm for two reason we are the only culture in human history based on the individual not the group. An individual and not the group. I grow up in a Roman Catholic Irish working class family. I dated an Italian, every body went to mass. They were they couldn't understand why wouldn't date an Irish girl. Then I dated a Jew. They called up my cousin, a nun to wonder what was going wrong with me. Then instead of going to Holy Cross, I went to Columbia and they said "why you are going to Columbia? There is nothing there than communists and Jews" I ended up studying communist and marrying a Jew. That's called America - that's called America. America is not a multi cultural society, it's a multi cultural individual. My son just married a Chinese American. That is what makes us different and we think the rest of the world is like us. We go to Morocco and we bargain over some almonds or some dammed carpet or some thing, aren't they lovely people? No no because if you are not part of their family, - they don't care. But it feel so good, oh you know we just walked in and everybody was going "lama lama" and every thing like that different, fundamentally different. Second thing that makes us different from the rest of the world, impersonal law, impersonal law. I love it when when Americans at this point in history get tired of this. I walk in to buy a car; I don't spend 15 hours bargaining over the cars. So what's the price of the car? Then I say "what's the real price of the car?", then I pay it and I drive it out. Twenty minutes, try to buy a pencil in Egypt. I don't know - fifty dollars let's have a tea - I mean the world could go to hell by the time you get a pencil. What is the point? This supposedly alienated western culture of ours is predicated on two things that have given us more innovation, inventiveness in 200 years than the rest of world in 5000 years. It gave us the individual, it gave us impersonal law. Now if you look what's happening in the world today, I would suggest you very simply that the rest of the world still does not understand individualism, or impersonal law. That doesn't mean they are dumb, it doesn't mean they are any worse than we are, it simply means that they have a culture, a mind set, a ethos, set of orientations that simply doesn't get who we are. So any notion that the world is going to be globalized, that is going to transit to democracy, that is going to undergo regime change because Americans send them copy of the federalist papers is misguided and that's what we thought for 15 to 16 years. It will be funny except, it's true. So what do we see happening today? I said that in 15 years, some day when I should stop because I have talked for the whole time, there will be no questions and I won't get a raise. What you are seeing in the world today is what I said would happen in in 1992. New ideas, new movements, new ideologies, new regions, new types of opposition and further more what is absolutely amazing about what's happening in the world today is that the problems that are emerging are not simply 21st century problems, they are an amalgam, they are an odd mix of 19th, 20th, and 21st century problems. Think about that, they are a mix of three centuries of problems and we still think it's all about Iraq, it's all about Iran. Iraq is important, not as important as we made it. Iran is very important, not the only important thing. Let me give you an example of what I mean by odd mixes by looking at China. China today is a 21st century power and as much as it has a space program, it has an economy that is growing by an average of about eight percent for the last 20 years exactly. It is in short a globalized 21st century power that owns most of the American debt. At the same time China has evidence of growing nationalism. That's typical of Europe in the 1850's. But has growing social divisions between poor and rich, typical of western societies in the 19th century and regions and finally it has examples of millenarian eschatological movements. I use these words because many of you have a sense of what that means, but aren't sure. And because you are college educated, you will admit it. So that's why I used these terms. I see I taught for 35 years at Berkley and all I can tell you is people - you know parents would call me and congratulate me, they have never been in my class and the reason was before thanksgiving, right before thanksgiving I would talk about the ontological problems that face us all today as well as the eschatological movements that are present today and I would sit down, I would spell out what they were and the kid would go home, parents paying 40 thousand dollars to go to Berkley you know to drink and take drugs and engage in promiscuous sex and and - that they are upset, they are naturally upset. So their little leery kids comes on, sits down in the dinner table, friends come over for dinner and the kid just looks and says, "I am sorry" - that that's really an ontological problem. Oh Jesus that that money goes back up to the kid every week - just just look at him, look look can we buy you a car? It's easy it's absolutely easy, by millenarian and eschatological I mean a very simple thing, groups that believe the end of the world is imminent and that they have to prepare for it. They sell their goods, they sell their houses, they get divorced, they go up in a mountain and they wait for Jesus but the wait for somebody, it doesn't have to be Jesus and what I am suggesting to you is millenarian movements are characteristic of Chinese history, the greatest one in the 19th century was the Taiping rebellion, they killed 20 million people. It was in power for twenty years in Nanjing and there is one that's almost like it today, Falun Gong. Now look at China, 21st century, globalization up in space, 19th century increasing nationalism, social division between rich and poor, between rich and poor regions. The existence of a millenarian movement that scares the bejesus out of the regime and at the same time it's a 20th century power because it has nuclear weapons and they are increasing. Here is a china that now owns part of the American debt but is building a capital in East Timor so that it can have the strategic position in the Indian ocean building a railroad as well as a port in Burma so it can challenge India, it's supporting every despotic regime in Africa in order to get resources, will be the largest net importer of resources from Latin America in the next 10 years and supports Cuba. Now how would you define China? What would a terrorist state? Well that doesn't a nationalist state? - The fact that matter is we are dealing with realities now that our mixes odd mixes, I will get to how we can deal with them, Russia is the same way. Everybody is looking at Russia and Putin announcing they are imperial, they are not imperial. They believe in a strong state and no affective citizenry, yet they have one of the most popular presidents in the world. That is not supposed to work. I mean the czar didn't go out and say "vote for me and get a vote", he just said I am the czar. Putin goes out and get 72 percent of the vote. They don't believe in electoral democracy, they believe in electoral monarchy and it works. They are mercantilist at home, the state controls the economy but there are entrepreneurial in Europe. How would you classify them? They have an aggressive policy in central Asia but they are against terrorists, how do they fit? How do they fit? You can't simply any longer say it's the war on terrorism, it's Iran, we have got to get used to the fact that we are seeing a world evolve in terms of odd mixes of combinations of threats from the 19th, 20th and 21st century, that complicate our universe. So the question is, how do we respond? Three ways- first thing we do is we learn from Iraq and never try to convert another country to democracy. Never try it again. The only problem is I have learned it but George Bush hasn't. Last week he said he are going to convert Cuba. Yeah! He told Raul Castro we would not allow you to succeed Fidel, that we want the Cuban people to be democratic and that if you don't allow that, we will do I don't know yell. The problem with Cuba is they have no terrorist, no atomic weapons; they are no threat to us at all, 7 to 10 million people who have the only functioning 1957 Chevrolets left in the world. This is not a bad place, it's an authoritarian dictatorship with a highly educated population and so what are we doing? We are repeating the idea that there is a one fixed idea not as a global democratic revolution. It's absolutely absurd. Raul is going to succeed if we find an indigenous movement that's stronger, that's against communism and it's for democracy, we support it and if we don't find it, we don't support it. We put up for an authoritarian regime in Cuba. Just the way we put up with the nuclear authoritarian regime in China. Second thing is, we engage a balance of power. I'm sick and tired of the United States is getting involved in every single issue. It's absurd it's just if you were taking care of everyone of your children's problems as well as your business, as well as your neighbors and some of you are doing that. It's tiring, it annoys the people you are trying to help and it achieves nothing. We should do what Britain did in the 19th century, to stand off, it look and it say Germany is getting too strong, I will help France, France is getting too strong, I will help Germany. We should play that role in various context and regions of the world, India and Pakistan, China and Japan, Russia and China. We should play a balance of power role, we should not convert anybody. And the third thing we should do and this is a little harder to articulate clearly. We should recognize that all of the situations we deal with in the the world have multiple multiple dimensions, not one and we have to decide and we need astute foreign policy people which we haven't had to date. We need astute foreign policy people who will be able to say this is the dimension that we have to worry about now, they are getting too economically strong, or they are getting too militarily aggressive or they are coming up with ideologies that are potentially threatening instead of collapsing it all into one thing and saying bomb Iran. There are two statements that I live by, I tend to exaggerate. In any case one is a statement by William of Baskerville who is a character in Umberto Eco's brilliant book "The Name of The Rose" and and obviously William of Baskerville is a metaphor for Sherlock Homes and basically what he what he says and let me let me quote him "At a time when I was a philosopher, I doubt the world has an order, I am consoled to discover if not an order, at least a series of connections in world affairs. That's not heroic, that's not majesty and destiny that is a sophisticated and that's simply pragmatic understanding of the nature of the problems we have to deal with", there is another statement that's comparable by a very wise man, my colleague Robert Conquest who is having a ____ next week in in Washington. He on 1962 wrote these words which were prescient, I quote him "to reduce everything to two or three let alone one clear cut reality in the world is to leave out of account cross currents of a dozen sorts," that's exactly the type of world we live in and it's going to take a sophisticated citizenry to be able to come to grips with it. Thank you all for showing up today. I thought there was so many of you here because you heard I was giving out free cocktails. Any questions?
