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The Challenge of History
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17243 |
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Section : |
CURRENT ISSUES
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| Issue
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2 / 1990 |
2,080 Words |
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Morton A. Kaplan
Editor and Publisher |
A new phase of history is gestating in the bowels of the old. The chief question facing the world is not whether the Cold War is over but whether we are doing what is needed to establish a framework of international cooperation that will prepare us for the consuming tasks that will challenge the family of nations in the next several generations.
Unfortunately, these are questions that are honored primarily by not being asked. And events are progressing at a rate that may overtake our ability to deal with them productively if we do not recognize both the opportunities and the dangers presented by a new configuration of world affairs. If we do not respond to this historical challenge, we may replace the old Cold War, with its simple oppositions, with a far more complex set of dangers and conflicts.
The old Soviet system and the challenge it represented is finished and cannot be resurrected. Although President Mikhail Gorbachev has expressed grave dissatisfaction with his treatment by the Soviet press and has threatened some of its tenure of editors, events in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe have progressed faster than I predicted when I began in 1983 to set up one conference on an end to the division of Europe and a second and larger conference on the fall of the Soviet empire. What critics characterized as unrealistic dreaming both before and after the conferences in 1985 has been overtaken by events.
The Baltic states and Azerbaijan have instituted constitutional changes that embrace the genuine possibility of independence if their demands cannot be met within the framework of the existing Soviet system. The far more critical
... (1995 of 12789 Characters)
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