CAN'T HAVE A CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS WHEN THERE IS ONLY ONE:

In a sense, the fundamental difference between East and West was never ideological. During the Cold War, the capitalist Nordic countries were more socialist than the Soviet Union ever was. Rather, the difference was always one of principles. Unlike in the Nordic states, equality and equity were never part of the Soviet Union's governance system. Despite its declarations, the Soviet system did not uphold human dignity in its actual policies.

When I recently asked my students in the international relations department at Kyrgyz State University what makes a country great, their responses centered on military power, economic development, and geopolitical influence. These answers are rooted in the old paradigm that greatness depends on a state's ability to dictate policy and bend others to its will.

This idea of national greatness reflects the view that a country's leader, like an emperor or a king, must have absolute power over people. In such a place, human beings are a disposable resource that can easily be sacrificed and replaced for the sake of the state's greater glory.

The horrors of World War II - the death camps, slave labor, and inhumane experiments on people - produced a global commitment never to permit such crimes to be repeated. This began a transformation of international politics whereby appreciation of the value of every person's life and dignity ensured that even most authoritarian governments at least paid lip service to human rights.

But the Soviet Union and many of its successor states, particularly Russia, never internalized this change. More than three decades after the USSR collapsed, most post-Soviet countries are still governed according to the old "imperial" paradigm. So, it should come as no surprise that we are now witnessing a clash between fundamentally different sets of values and ultimate goals for statehood.

The alternate view of statehood measures greatness not by military might, but by standards of living and confidence in the future. It emphasizes how safely children can ride a bike to school, how comfortably the elderly can live on an honestly earned pension, and how much freedom of thought, expression, assembly, and mobility residents have.

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