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A World Transformed shows the former world leaders as candid, and, at times, combative during their October 9, 1995, meeting in Colorado Springs. Perhaps the most striking is the participation of Mitterrand (president of France, 1981-1995), who succumbed to cancer on January 8. Thoughout the summit, he displays wit, scholarship and political acumen sufficient to belie his failing condition. Along with Bush (president of the U.S., 1989-1993), Gorbachev (president of the USSR, 1985-1991), Thatcher (prime minister of the U. K., 1979-1990), and Mulroney (prime minister of Canada, 1984-1993), Mitterrand puts a human face on the behind-the-scenes story of how a conflict that defined and drove global politics since World War II was defused through a series of rapid changes from 1985 to 1992. In A World Transformed, the former leaders discuss their interpretations and, in some cases, misgivings, about the key events of that period, including the downfall of the communist regime of the “Evil Empire,” the fall of the Berlin Wall, the lifting of the Iron Curtain and the unification of Germany. The summit was moderated by Jim Lehrer of PBS’s The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, hosted by Bush, and sponsored by the George Bush Presidential Library Foundation and the Forum for International Policy. If the rapidity of communism’s fall in Eastern Europe created for some the impression that the major world powers easily reached consensus on all issues, A World Transformed will shatter those illusions. Speaking with a candor born of the passage of time, the freedoms of a more private life, and the personal familiarity among those who have weathered a crisis together, the former leaders divulge some of the conflicts that arose behind closed doors during the dawning of the new era.
The leaders also encountered opposition within their own countries. Bush recalls the outcry among Americans in 1991 when his administration took a hands-off approach to the use of Soviet troops in the Baltics, rather than jeopardize the tenuous détente it had developed with the Soviet Union. “I was accused of coddling Mr. Gorbachev, staying too close to him, not being willing to stand up for freedom,” Bush recalls. Disagreement continues among the former leaders about why the Berlin Wall fell and whether a unified Germany will help or hinder Europe. “What brought everything down is East Germany,” says Mitterrand. “They could not control the fantastic migration outflow from East Germany into Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and West Germany.” Thatcher takes a less fatalistic attitude. “You could not say it was inevitable. It wasn’t. It was facilitated,” she says, expressing pessimism about the long-range outcome of German unification in light of that nation’s political past. “I, to this day, cannot understand why so many Germans, who are so highly intellectual . . . let Hitler do the things he did . . . There is something in the character of the German people which led to things which should never have happened,” Thatcher states, adding, “Some people say, ‘You have got to anchor Germany into Europe, to stop these features ever coming out again.’ You have not anchored Germany to Europe. You have anchored Europe to a newly dominant, large Germany . . . In the end, my friends, it will not work.”
Gorbachev disagrees, asserting, “We could find a response to SDI as well. So SDI was not decisive in our movement toward a new relationship.” If there was agreement among the leaders, it lies in the mutual recognition that much work remains to be done to reduce the threat of war and increase the rights of individuals. “We have left a bipolar world to a unipolar world,” Mulroney says. “There is one superpower left — the United States of America. But there is another one emerging, and it is called China.” By 2020, he says, China will have the largest economy and the largest standing army in the world. Mitterrand sees further upheavals ahead in Russia. “We are witnessing the beginning of a new revolution today. Mr. Gorbachev began and he is measuring how you can initiate a revolution, but it is very hard to finish it,” he warns. “A revolution devours its own creators.”
Bush calls for a continued dialogue with China, Russia, Europe and the rest of the world. He warns against the isolationism being preached by some in Congress. “If we ever turned inward,” he says, “we (would) do it at our own peril.” Bush eulogizes Mitterrand in a segment appended to the program during the final edit. “When President Mitterrand traveled to Colorado Springs last fall to be with us, he was in the twilight of his struggle against cancer,” Bush says. “But as the events and dialogue unfolded, it was clear that, while his body may have been frail, his will was strong and his spirit stronger still.” A World Transformed: Our Reflections on Ending the Cold War is a HoustonPBS production, underwritten by Carnegie Corporation of New York and Victorinox Swiss Army Knife Foundation. Executive-in-charge is Leon Collins. Producer: Sue Davis. Director: David Deutsch. Editor: Robert Crowe. Protocol producer: Peter Roussel. |
eorge Bush, Mikhail Gorbachev, Margaret Thatcher, Brian Mulroney and François Mitterrand gathered at a private summit to debate the factors that helped them end the Cold War and to offer predictions — some surprisingly ominous — for the new era.
“I would not want to paint a perfect picture,” Gorbachev says of his early talks on perestroika with the Reagan Administration. “We sometimes had quite heated arguments, and I was sometimes struck by the fact that our ideas were not properly appreciated among (those in) the United States, including among people close to the president. Some of them were saying that it was another communist trick.”
The leaders praise Gorbachev for promoting perestroika, but Thatcher says other initiatives also helped the peace process. “I think we are all missing one vital factor about the end of the Cold War. That was Ronald Reagan’s decision to go ahead with SDI,” she says. “It required enormous computer capability, which he knew at the time the Soviet Union could not match, and that was the end of the arms race as we had been pursuing it.”
The world remains in the throes of a profound transition, according to Gorbachev, who says that, while events are heading in the right direction, further change is needed to maintain peace. “We should allow people to choose democratically, to create social partnership, to create a mixed economy,” he says. “Then we will be able to have a very diverse world, where different cultures and nations interact. And then we are not going to have a clash of civilizations.”
