I am very happy that this seminar has taken place. It was conceived more than a year ago in a sunny day in Rome by President Toomas H. Ilves and myself during a meeting of the European Council on Foreign Relations. Both of us were impressed at the time by the similarities of the criticism in Russia towards our Western societies and the criticism of the jihadist movements of Islamic origin.

Those movements and the terrorism they nurture are a common enemy of Russia and of the West. How does it come that Russia shares with the common enemy basic positions on our societies?  Quite clearly, a dangerous cultural divide is growing between us.  Where does it come from?  Is there anything we can do to bridge it and/or to defend ourselves from its consequences? We put the idea in the hands (and in the mind) of Giancarlo, who has to be sincerely thanked. He has  built this seminar with the precious aid of Andrea Graziosi step by step and the success of the event has been his own success. Furthermore I understand that all of you are ready to consider the seminar as the first chapter of a continuing  work aimed at scrutinizing future developments.  An excellent result.

Should I summarize the main findings and conclusions of our seminar (as I have drawn them from the report Marlene Laruelle has offered to all of us), I would say that we are facing a harsh revenge of history, due to which bridging the gap  appears as a sort of mission impossible.  Only a few voices have argued that the authoritarian features of the current Russian regime are due to contemporary trends, such as the neo patrimonialism that has developed thanks to the strong relationship between the leader and the administrative apparatus of the State. The prevailing interpretations go back to the military tradition, to the notion of great power as a power that expands its borders to prevent unrest in the neighborhood and, substantially, to the views so clearly stated by Henry Kissinger in his recent book “World Order” , where he writes that the Westphalian concept of order as an overall equilibrium based on restraint, was rejected by Russia, for which restraint was a threat to security. The memory of the nomadic hordes –Kissinger writes- has never faded away.

Now,  let us assume that we are just coping with a new chapter of the old Russian history. Does this inescapably mean there is nothing we can do to change the course of it?  I agree with those of you who already have said that trying to do what is not realistically feasible would be a non-sense. But trying to change the course of history is not by itself unfeasible, for history returns with its old patterns when options and opportunities that could be caught  are not caught. The future not necessarily is a repetition of the past, despite the well-known role of path dependence. Therefore a question is legitimate: what has allowed history to return so firmly and so widely accepted in the Russian community?

I happened to be Prime Minister when Boris Eltsin went to power and, later on, when Vladimir Putin was elected. I still remember that Eltsin and his team were eager to understand and to adopt the frame of liberal democracies. Eltsin was surrounded by reformers, educated according to our values and also to our paradigms of institutional and economic building. But, as it has already been said here, liberal democracy was discredited in Russia after a while and not without reasons. You remember Western advisors in Moscow at the time. Their only advise was to privatize everything and to do it  immediately, ignoring that a market economy needs a legal frame of rules and institutions no less than private undertakings interacting within it.  The process of privatization became the process of enrichment of the officials of the previous regime (plus some others) better positioned to exploit the new opportunities.  In the meantime the Russian State simply declined and became a powerless machinery that eventually lost its most essential functions, such as collecting revenues throughout the country. It was a failing State when Putin arrived, which gave him a very clear (and very popular) mission: to restore the State and to restore its dignity.

Restoring dignity was a need the Russian pride felt as an absolute priority also in the international arena. Another scene that has remained in my memory is the arrival of the Russian ministers to the meetings of the financial G7. At the time Russia was not a member of it ( still G7 and not yet G8) and her Ministers were invited mostly to clarify the level of the Russian debt and their plans to repay it. Their uneven position in those meetings, where they almost played the role of the defendants before a court, really was humiliating. I can understand how the duet Putin- natural gas was blessed when, due to it, the greatness of Russia among the great powers  was re-installed.

No door could have been more  suitable for history to re-enter with all  the ingredients of  a  revamped national identity,  nurtured by military power, by the fear of the neighbors, by religion and  traditional values (much higher than the ones of the  corrupted western societies).  Eventually, even the scene President Ilves has described became plausible: the Russian Orthodox Patriarch blessing the memory of Stalin.

There is not much room for innovation, I well understand it. But allow me to make a few points. The first one – and again I have to quote Marlene Laruelle- is that no society is monolithic and therefore not even the Russian society is a monolith. Several Russians share our own ideas and values and, one way or another, dissent exists and resists. If we speak, somebody is ready to listen.

The second point is that we have to be convincing and convincing must be what we do, not only what we say. Perhaps we can’t aim at convincing Putin (in my experience, he rarely talks to others expecting to be convinced by them), but we can reasonably convince others in Russia. How?  To begin with, by being credible in what we promise. There is great uncertainty in Russia about Ukraine, but if we pledge to promote a real nation there, we have to be consistent, we have to do it. If we don’t, what’s the sense of opposing the separatist movement?

We have to defend our security and first of all the security of our eastern States. But do we really need, to such purpose, antimissiles missiles in Poland? Do we really need bringing Nato to the borders of Russia? In doing so, don’t we raise there the wrong feelings and emotions? Where do we want to go from here? Do we aim at friendship with Russia or at perennial confrontation?

I suppose you have read a beautiful book of some years ago, “How enemies become friends”  by a young American scholar in International affairs, Charles Kupchan. In the book  the author examines several cases of States opposing each other that eventually become friends and  his purpose is to find out what makes this transformation possible. He points at three factors: institutional moderation and restraint is the first one, compatible social orders is the second one and cultural commonality is the third one. Not always all the three factors are available, but if you promote the ones that depend on you, you may eventually succeed.

Upon this premise, the exercise of moderation and restraint is not at all unfeasible for us, nor would it endanger our security. For sure it would suggest negative answers to the questions raised above, in relation to the antimissiles missiles and to the borders of Nato. Despite the remaining differences, our social orders are not so incompatible any more, while our values are or perhaps appear distant  because we don’t make our own sufficiently attractive. We can’t preach the rule of law if we disregard it. We can’t be the advocates of equality if we violate it, mostly to the damage of those who come and live with us.

In conclusion: there is a long way to go, but something can be done if we have long term objectives and a realistic approach.  Let us be aware that for Russia, when it came out of communism, it was going to be a long way in any case. I still remember Russian friends telling me in the 90’s “ Don’t worry, we will build a democracy, but it will take longer than anywhere else in Europe, for we never experienced it in the past, with our sharp passage from the Tsars to the Communist regime”. You might argue that what has been built up to now is not a democracy nor can it be considered a first stage of it. But don’t think democracy  is a lost prospect for Russia simply because it is against its history. Sometimes we succeed in writing a new history and not always we are aware of its unknown paths.

* Giuliano Amato is a Judge of the Constitutional Court of Italy, since September 2013. He served as Secretary of the Treasury in Italy and was the Italian Prime Minister in 1992-‘93 and in 2000-‘01. From 2006 to 2008 he served as the Minister of the Interior. He was the vice-chairman of the Convention for the European Constitution. He has chaired the Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana Treccani and the Center for American Studies in Rome. A Professor of Law in several Italian universities and aboroad, he has written books and articles on the economy and public institutions, European antitrust, personal liberties, comparative government, European integration and humanities. He has served as the Chair of Reset-DoC’s scientific committee from 2003 to 2013.

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Between June 22nd and 25th 2015, Reset-Dalogues on Civilizations organized an international workshop and a roundtable on The Evolution of Russian Political Thought After 1991. The conference, held in Berlin at the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Auswärtige Politik, included a roundtable focused on The Political Culture of Today’s Russia.