Читать книгу Against All Odds - Jorma Ollila - Страница 22
ОглавлениеAPART FROM OUR DEFENSIVE BATTLES we looked after mundane but nevertheless important matters affecting students. Our responsibilities were greater than those of student leaders elsewhere, since student unions in Finland are property owners on a grand scale. Halls of residence were built. Student health services were developed. University governance was overhauled.
Though my main focus was domestic I spent a lot of my time on international issues. Twice a year there were meetings of Nordic student leaders, for example. Finnish student organizations also had good links to student organizations in the Soviet bloc. As president I travelled many times to Moscow and to Prague, where the headquarters of the Communist student organizations were located. I learned how to operate within the confines of Finnish foreign policy, and that international meetings have their own special usages and rituals.
Home-grown Communists often came along on these excursions. I remember one occasion when we were travelling by train behind the Iron Curtain. The conductor kept a visitors’ book, where travelers inscribed their names and a few fraternal words. A select group of Stalinists left this message: “My homeland is Finland, but my Fatherland is the Soviet Union.”
I had visited Moscow for the first time in 1970, when we concentrated chiefly on investigating the quality of Soviet beer, which seemed well up to standard. Otherwise I found nothing to celebrate in the Soviet Union because the gap between its super-power status and its level of technological development was clear. But the Russian student politicians we met radiated intelligence and talked readily about international affairs. It was easy to discuss the dollar exchange rate, the oil crisis, or U.S. economic policy. But despite these conversations the Russians remained products of the communist system. They were always aware of the party line, and no one could officially cross it; but in the small hours, after a few vodkas, they might say what they thought. Sadly, genuine friendships were not possible because everyone was stuck with a role. Several of the Russians later found a place in the Gorbachev, Yeltsin, and Putin governments.
The level of education in the Soviet Union was high: student politicians knew mathematics, economics, and international relations. But when, for example, I went on a guided tour of the collective farms in Moldova (then part of the Soviet Union) I saw how the country’s logistics let it down. A crop of peaches was left to rot when it should have been sold in Moscow. Their own efforts did not make people richer, and there were no incentives for work. Time after time I returned from the Soviet Union with a feeling of relief: this economic system could never beat a market economy.
The market economy however had problems of its own. Just like communism it contained the seeds of its own destruction. In practicing macroeconomics I had learned to see an economy as a system that moved from disequilibrium to equilibrium and back again. At the beginning of the 1970s it was shifting rapidly toward disequilibrium. At the end of 1973 the oil-producing countries decided to press the western world to change its policy toward Israel. The oil price went up by 70 percent; some oil shipments were sold for ten times or more than what they’d have fetched a year before. The world economy was suddenly hostage to the oil producers, and international recession was a fact.
The world recovered from the oil crisis, but it left an enduring mark on economic thinking. A debate started about energy conservation and alternative energy sources, which is still very much with us today. The Middle East and OPEC became a permanent part of the political agenda. Our whole world changed. In spring 1972, even before the energy crisis, a group of experts and futurists working at the Club of Rome had published a book called The Limits to Growth, which warned that the world’s resources could no longer sustain constant economic growth. Thus the world’s economies had to change: growth had reached its limits. Now the Club of Rome was proposing that zero growth should be the target so that the world with all its natural riches could survive. When the oil crisis burst upon us the warnings given by the Club of Rome were taken seriously. They became the theoretical base for the policies of those political groups, such as my own, that occupied the center ground between the hard Left and the dogmatic Right. While these political groups supported capitalism and the market economy, they also wanted economic development to respect the constraints imposed by nature and natural resources.
I read the Club of Rome report closely; I had, after all, been a member of a nature club at school. I was also a student of macroeconomics and I understood a little about politics. On top of that, technological development interested me even then. I tried to understand the logic of the Club of Rome, but I couldn’t believe that they were right. To my mind, zero growth was a superficial target – a figure plucked out of nowhere. I had learned in economics lectures that economic growth was necessary for human well-being in a growing population. I haven’t wavered in this belief since.
The Club of Rome didn’t take into account technological developments, which enable the same output to be produced using less energy and fewer national resources.
With hindsight the Club of Rome report was far too pessimistic about technology. The report warned that copper or silver might run out by 1990, but nothing will ever run out in a properly functioning market economy. For example, if there were a risk that paper might disappear, new alternatives would become available because paper would become unaffordable. The world’s known oil reserves are much greater now than at the beginning of the 1970s, and oil can be extracted in much more difficult conditions than it could then.
The Club of Rome thought in the 1970s that the market economy had an innate tendency to run out of control. But the global economy has shown itself much more flexible than anyone dared imagine.
No one believed in the seventies that the world could adapt to oil crises. The crises of 1973 and 1979 produced a global recession, but they also gave impetus to the technological development that has seen us through. Cars are now much more environmentally friendly, and more nuclear power has come online. Thus the world gained at least thirty years of extra time. None of this would have happened without the oil crises or the Club of Rome’s warnings. They asked the right questions, even if they couldn’t offer answers.
In the 1970s many young and even older politicians would meet Soviet representatives and visit the Soviet Embassy more often than they went to their corner shop. I went there chiefly for set-piece receptions: my contacts with officials were few and formal. As a counter-balance to the Russians it was important to look westward as well. In May 1973 I travelled to the United States for the first time. There was a U.S. Information Service office in Helsinki, which sent two to four student politicians across the Atlantic each year to get to know the American political system and way of life. Our program took in Washington, Denver, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, New Orleans, and lastly New York. We stayed in hotels, but we met local people in every town we went to, who played the part of host families showing us how Americans lived. Compared to seventies Finland, let alone the Soviet Union, I was struck by the sheer prosperity. There was as much Coca-Cola as you could drink, whereas in my teenage years in Finland it had been sold in parsimonious little bottles. T-bone steaks were the size of children’s flippers. Car seats were more comfortable than the sofas in our student rooms. It was a solid introduction to America.
In Washington we visited Congress, where we were given an explanation of the American political system, though there was really only one theme to the discussions: what would happen to the hapless Richard Nixon? During our visit the Watergate scandal was going through one of its most hectic phases and divided America down the middle. The Republicans claimed that the Washington Post didn’t have the right to humiliate Nixon as they had, while the Democrats were overjoyed that “Tricky Dick” was now on the run. Despite its disagreements over Nixon, the country was by no means as politically polarized as it has since become. We had lively discussions of what was healthy about the whole affair, and what wasn’t.
The trip to the United States and the Watergate scandal were an excellent opportunity to study Cold War positions and the Americans’ sincere belief that they ruled the world. Many people in Europe, where Social Democratic support was strong, thought it obvious that the United States had had its day.
American leadership had been discredited by Vietnam, the dollar was shaky, and the first oil shock was just around the corner.
There is documentary evidence from those years. One of the better-known treasures from the vaults is a clip from a television program of a grave, longish-haired, gangly, serious student leader on a trip to the World Youth Festival in Berlin. He boldly condemns the growing power of imperialism in the world. Yes, folks, that was me.
