LECTURE BY PRESIDENT MARTTI AHTISAARI OF FINLAND AT THE MOSCOW STATE INSTITUTE OF INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS (MGIMO) ON 27.11.1997

GLOBAL CHANGE - FINLAND AND RUSSIA

It gives me great pleasure to meet Russian students and discuss matters with you. The world is changing. Russia and Finland are immersed in that change. As we say in Finland: "What students do today, the nation will be doing tomorrow."

We often forget that the enormous transformation taking place in Russia is only part of an upheaval in the throes of which the entire world community is now caught.

Economies are growing on all continents. I have seen this with my own eyes in China, southern Africa and the major industrial countries of Latin America.

Young people everywhere use the same consumer goods, have similar tastes in music and keep in touch with each other through the Internet. My son is putting the final touches to his doctoral thesis at Columbia University in New York. He keeps my wife and me informed of his progress by e-mail. Distance is losing its significance, not only as one cost factor in the economy, but also more and more as a factor that separates people.

Once isolated by geography and language, Finland has become the world's leading user of the Internet and mobile phones. Our country has found its place on the superhighway of global knowledge and interaction.

The radical change in Finland and the Nordic region that I have described is also the future for Russia and the whole of Europe. In this transformation, universities and research institutes have a decisive task to perform. Free research and scientific interaction transcending national borders are a great source of strength.

You will graduate into a world that is decisively different from the one in which you started school. This world is open, but demands much of you. It is important that reforms continue in Russia and that the international situation remains stable.

Next I want to examine Finland's position in Europe and as a neighbour of Russia:

The ending of the Cold War removed artificial ideological barriers and created the real preconditions for economic and cultural globalisation. The success story of post-war Europe has much to do with the integration of the continent. A development that began when the coal and steel industries of former enemies were combined has transformed an entire continent. Swords have been forged into ploughshares.

The European Union has lowered borders between its member states: people, goods, services and capital move freely throughout the EU. The Union has a common policy and speaks with a single voice on more and more matters in the world.

When the European Union expanded northwards in 1995, it became, through Finland, Russia's next-door neighbour. Finland's and Sweden's membership of the European Union has accentuated the Union's northern dimension in a natural manner.

Strengthening the European Union's northern dimension is creating new opportunities for cooperation between the Union and Russia as we approach the next century. Already now, more than half of Russia's foreign trade flows through the Baltic and nearly half of your country's road traffic abroad passes through Finland.

The European Union's enlargement to include Poland and the Baltic States will strongly increase interaction between the Union and Russia.

Enlargement and development of the European Union is projecting prosperity beyond its borders into the whole of Europe and North Africa and the Middle East. Only from this perspective can we deal with the enormous challenges that are associated with environmental problems and energy supply.

I do not need to tell today's students what the environmental problems that you have inherited mean to you. That bottled water is being drunk in the temperate zone is not a step of progress; it is a cry of distress.

Nuclear power stations in poor condition and polluting factories are not just a local problem. Pollution does not respect borders. This year's warm summer in the Baltic awakened all of us to an awareness of how delicate the sea's ecological balance is. The city of St. Petersburg's programme to reduce water pollution is just as important for Finland as it is for the people of St. Petersburg and the Estonians.

Broadly-based international cooperation is needed to solve the problems of the northern environment. Especially challenging tasks are those of cleaning up the military nuclear waste on the Murmansk coast and repairing ageing nuclear power stations. This work will have an enormous economic cost. It presupposes the participation of the European Union and the United States in addition to Russia

Nature is particularly vulnerable in the North. The Nordic countries and Russia are united by historical experience and interest in exploring northern and Arctic regions and exploiting their natural resources. We especially remember the great explorer Nordenskiöld, who commanded the Vega in the first successful attempt to navigate the North-East Passage over a hundred years ago. Nordenskiöld was a Finn, whom Czar Nicholas I banished from Finland as a student radical. For that reason his vessel sailed under the flag of Sweden-Norway.

Europe and Russia are combining their energy-management systems to a significant degree. The biggest energy reserves are in the Arctic zone, on the European, Asian and American continental shelves. Europe's energy supply is based increasingly on the use of gas. A constantly expanding gas network has created a situation in which consumers do not know what country their energy comes from. They do not know whether it comes from Britain, Norway, the Netherlands, Algeria, Central Asia or Russia.

Integration of energy markets has improved the availability of dependable supplies and lowered prices, in addition to increasing economic interdependence more broadly.

From now on, the security of the international community must be built more and more determinedly on the basis of the economic interdependence created by new realities.

The ending of the Cold War put a stop to a fruitless ideological confrontation. The present decade has shown what enormous resources were released when the Berlin Wall was breached. Now these freed human and economic resources must be channelled into serving the purpose of improving the conditions of citizens' lives.

For many of us, the ending of the Cold War also meant abandoning values and explanations to which we had become accustomed. This is the great challenge of globalisation: we do not always have ready answers, nor an ultimate truth.

The uncertainty that dramatic changes are creating can not be managed by means of orders from above. Of decisive importance is a well-functioning civil society. A society like that is founded on citizens' own initiative to take care of the matters that are important to them. A strong civil society that contains elements of genuine self-government leaves the state authorities free to take care of the matters that it properly should in a democracy.

The value foundations of the European Union countries and Russia are united in democracy. This is the most effective way to safeguard peaceful development in Europe and the whole world. I am convinced that the young people of the new Russia understand that economic prosperity, democracy and the rule of law are all prerequisites for each other. They are fruits of the same tree.

The same applies in international relations. Democracies do not wage war with each other. The argument for "Perpetual Peace" that Immanuel Kant presented on the shore of the Baltic, in Königsberg, two hundred years ago is of more topical relevance than it ever was. Kant reasoned that the growing destructiveness of warfare, democratisation of states and constant growth in the trade between them would guarantee a future in which war vanished to make way for peace. You, Dear Students, represent the generation that is closer to the new era that Kant predicted than any that has gone before you.

The interdependence of states is increasing. Cross-border interaction between states is growing at an accelerating pace. There is a greater awareness of this fact in universities and research communities than elsewhere. Now is a time of new paradigms and scientific breakthroughs. They are born of the intellectual freedom that has now dawned.