'The world as we knew it is gone.'

VENICE — Mikhail Gorbachev today is a dour and humorless man. His hopes were dashed in the 1980s, when he became the reformist Russian president only to suffer the seemingly eternal hatred of the Russian people. Resentment hangs over him like a dull cloak. At one time during his speech to a small group of us, he proclaimed as if trying to reassert his lost importance, "I was not an accidental leader."

Yet when I asked him what system Russia was going to adopt, it was clear he had not given up. "It's a road in the construction of a democratic society. We're on the road. I believe we're more or less in the middle. We have a long way. In the West, democracy took a long time."

Gorbachev's role in the world was clearly displayed at this meeting of international journalists, thinkers and politicians sponsored by his think tank, the World Political Forum. Gorbachev said: "Today we are in a crisis, and we don't know how it will all end. It is a crisis of all systems and of the very model of democracy. We need to search for a way out of this dead end."

Not surprisingly, he blames the United States for the financial collapse in the world and how it is related to environmental destruction. "When the Soviet Union ceased to exist," Gorbachev went on, "America talked about a 'New World Order.' They said the duty of America was to have a 'New World Empire.' That has led, to put it mildly, to the unpredictable scenario today. I was just watching TV and everything is going down. The U.S. was living on borrowed time, but it had one big advantage—the printing press for money for the world economy was in the U.S.

"We can say the world is in real danger. Look at Iraq—it has already cost $3 trillion. Look at Afghanistan. Just a week or so ago, people were unaware of the financial system. The idea behind the 'Washington consensus,' that the government has no place in the state, was predominant. They got rid of the state—now the state is needed again. It is not clear how it will bottom out or how it will end, but my instinct tells me that the models of hyperconsumption were wrong. The question of transition to a new model of development is the No. 1 problem."

Gorbachev still thinks that glasnost and perestroika can be applied internationally; it is not clear exactly how. But he is clear when he says, "The mechanisms that would result in direct action are missing." He feels vaguely that those mechanisms should be attached to the UN Security Council.

One could suddenly think: Implicit in his words was the idea that the West, because of all of its financial excesses, could be as fragile as was Gorbachev's Soviet Union, with all of its. What we are experiencing is not some crisis on the surface of Gorbachev's old Soviet Union, but a crisis of the workability of a terribly abused system and its architecture for the development of mankind. The possibility is simply staggering, but real.

The implicit, and sometimes explicit, question at the conference was whether the Western world could collapse as suddenly and unexpectedly as the Soviet Union did during Gorbachev's 1980s—first in a rush as Eastern Europeans fled to the West and finally with formal declaration of collapse in December 1991. Certainly there were no cheering remarks.

One delegate said: "The world as we knew it is gone. We are approaching the tipping point toward change—there is less time than we thought." Another thought the world resembled "collective madness."

Strangely enough, St. Servolo Island, where the conference was held, today is an exquisite pink conference center filled with beautiful sculptures and facing Venice across a small lagoon. But it was once a psychiatric hospital: an appropriate place for considering such dire and dour predictions? If Gorbachev was not an accidental leader, but one thrown up by history for a purpose, this may not be such an accidental place for these analysts to meet.



Georgie Anne Geyer is a syndicated columnist based in Washington.Gigi_geyer@ju

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