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Notes for Montenegro: A World Order Under Threat. Is There Any Chance to Change It?

English Pages, 25. 11. 2024

It is great to see good old friends after such a long time and to get a chance to discuss with them the topics we all consider crucial and fundamental. We may have different views on some of them, but the friendly and free exchange of views is absolutely irreplaceable. There is no alternative to it.

The Covid hysteria brought about an involuntary and frustrating break in our contacts and in our discussions. We hope it will not return, at least without much stronger public resistance than was the case at the beginning of this decade. Even the politicians have, hopefully, learnt something.

I would like to express my gratitude to The Boris Mints Institute, Tel Aviv University and the University of Donja Gorica and especially, personally, to Boris Mints for organising this event and for bringing us together. An additional benefit, at least for some of us, me included, is the very rare opportunity to visit the beautiful country of Montenegro.

I was asked to open this morning’s session with my remarks on the topic “A World Order Under Threat”. It is a great but extremely difficult topic. To discuss it comprehensively is beyond my very limited capabilities. Nevertheless, I accepted this task. Let me make, therefore, as I stressed, at least a few remarks on it and let me try to elementarily structure it.

I share the feeling of the author of the invitation letter to this gathering that the world is finding itself under real threat or even stronger “the world plunged into one of the darkest moments in modern history”.

I see it very similarly but I have to admit that the mere fact that we are meeting again – after so many years – could be taken as a signal that the world is coming closer to some sort of rationality and order. The unexpected results of the American presidential elections also indicate that something – even for us, pessimists – is in the air.

The reelection of Donald Trump as U.S. President – an election outcome that is dividing America and the world – is for me a proof that even the unexpected can happen. I don’t hide that I see the Trump’s reelection as an extremely positive outcome. A hope for many of us. I don’t overestimate it, however. The party which lost the elections is not – I am afraid – willing to take it in a friendly way. We will be witnesses of a merciless clash between two blocks representing widely different world views. It is not only political. This result will define the content of the forthcoming era. Not only in the United States.

An elementary structuring of the topic: a geopolitical one
I am not a geopolitical theoretician, I have not been able to find any theoretical concept or background behind it. Without such a backing, we are on thin ice. All our reasoning is inevitably rather soft. With all these reservations, there is no doubt that one of the important aspects of the existing world threats is geopolitical.

We don’t live in a world of perfect competition of small sovereign states. We don’t live in a Metternich-like post-1815 European order. We don’t live in a bipolar world of the Cold War era either and there are many signs that we’re leaving the unipolar world of American hegemony, which started after the fall of communism. This is something the Americans are not ready to accept. This will be leading to a growing instability, I am afraid.

When I look at the current world, we are somewhere in-between all these hypothetical models of world order. This “in-between type” of situation is very dangerous. The current Russia-Ukraine war and the not less destructive tragic conflict in Gaza are, for me, an undeniable evidence of the coming of the end of one “world order” and of the difficult birth of a new one. The new order will reflect the new distribution of power in economic and military sense. The old one doesn’t reflect existing realities. This is, however, only one dimension of the whole problem.

Another world order: a more implicit one
The other, not less important, dimension of the current world problem can’t be measured by GDP or the size and strength of armies. It is the ongoing breakdown of another order, the breakdown of the dominant system of believes, of habits and traditions, of culture, of behavioural patterns. These create another, perhaps more implicit than explicit world “order”, but it is not less important. It keeps the world together. This “second” order is also under a fundamental threat now. Some of us often speak about the self-destruction of the West. This may lead to an even more tragic state of affairs.

I expect protests from the audience that I did not mention another dimension – international law, pacts and agreements, United Nations and similar organizations. I have not forgotten them. I am well aware of them. I am convinced, however, that the institutional or legal arrangements are the consequence of the existing reality both of the power relations in the world and of the implicit order of beliefs, habits, traditions and of cultures in a broader sense. Not the other way around.

Methodologically, I take the term “order” only as a habit or a custom. Talking about order is an overstatement. I prefer to talk about “arrangements”. Let’s use the word order only with a small “o”. There has never been in international relations an order with a capital “O”. Only on paper. An order of that kind can only be a normative ideal, not a descriptive notion. Even in the best of times, “the order” was a fragile, temporary construct. I don’t see anything like that now.

Do I have any suggestions what to do with it?
As someone coming from a small country which for most of its history was not a sovereign – we were a part of the Austro-Hungarian empire for centuries, a part of Nazi German “Reich” luckily for years only, a part of Soviet imperium for four decades, and now a part of the European Union – I don’t feel justified to propose strategic responses to the existing international threats or challenges, as you put it in your invitation letter. Who should be the receiver of these proposals?

There is, nevertheless, one fundamental “strategic” response to all these problems and this is to choose between peace and war, between fighting and negotiating, between absolutist stances and realistic compromises, between attempts to mastermind the world and to accept a dialog, between results 10 to 0 and 6 to 5 (or 5 to 6). The discussion about them is long overdue.

For someone like me, who lives in the Czech Republic, in a country which has on its territory the highest number of Ukrainian refugees (per capita) in the world, in a country which was liberated by the Soviet armies at the end of the Second World War and in a country which was – on the contrary – occupied by the Soviet Union (and some Central and East European countries) in 1968, something which is a living memory for some of us, the main issue of the current world is the Russian-Ukrainian war in all its consequences, especially the indirect ones.

I am frustrated not only by what Russia did on the 24th February 2022, but also by what the world, the world superpowers and international organisations, allowed to happen. No international organisation reacted. Some of them even added fuel to the fire. Not just after the 24th February, but – what was more important – before this date. Madam von der Leyen praised herself recently for being in Kyiv eight times since February 2022. My question would be: “How many times was she there before that, both before 2022 and especially before 2014?” All the evidence suggests that this was the moment when it all started. Everything else is a consequence.

I see a potential way out of this puzzle in accepting reality and searching for a compromise solution. The world missed this opportunity in 2014. It missed it in March 2022 when the Istanbul talks offered a solution. We don’t have the right to miss it again in a new situation after Trump’s election victory.

We shouldn’t be passive observers. That’s the main reason why we are here, I suppose. We all must help. In this case, as in other similar cases. As in Gaza.

Václav Klaus, Keynote Speech at a Conference organized by the Boris Mints Institute, Tel Aviv University and University of Donja Gorica, Podgorica, Montenegro, November 26, 2024.