傅军接受《纽约时报》采访谈利比亚重建

    2011年8月26日，《纽约时报》在全球采访了三位学者和三位政府官员，就利比亚重建问题进行了一次多视角的讨论。他们是英国(正版)365官方网站傅军教授、美国MIT的Daron Acemoglu教授、英国牛津大学Paul Collier教授以及阿富汗过渡委员会主席Ashraf Ghani先生、巴西国防部长Celso Amorim先生和英国议员Rory Stewart先生。采访内容的纸面版刊登在8月27日《纽约时报》国际版面《国际先驱报》。

   《纽约时报》相关讨论的电子链接：For Libya, a Light Hand May be Best

   傅军教授的采访内容原文如下。

【The New York Times】: In Libya, we have upon us the world’s newest country in need of rebuilding: devoid of institutions and civil society, scarred by violence, traumatized by its own past. What is your advice, for Libyans, in terms of what they should focus on as they begin rebuilding?
 
【Fu Jun】: First of all, let me say diminuendos to passions; crescendos to rationality. One should be keenly aware that it is easier to destroy than to build. Institutions being historically and socially conditioned, new ones usually do not come about automatically; they evolve over time. The peril of a violent revolution to overthrow a dictatorship is easily to slide back into another form of dictatorship, and often in the name of the people. The risks are particularly large when passions are running high. Economic recovery aside, the Libyans will soon face the daunting task of both nation-building and state-building. In terms of the former, they must lose no time in learning and practicing the merits of reconciliations, and resist the temptations of revenge. In terms of the latter, they must exercise principled pragmatism to build a government powerful enough to govern, but not powerful enough to suppress. In other words, they must put together a program of building a sophisticated political system of checks and balances, sensitive to their own social and historical conditions. 

【The New York Times】: What is your advice to the West about the appropriate way to help and be involved in Libya and across the new democracies of the Arab world, without taking on the impossible?
 
【Fu Jun】: The West should continue to engage, but not to impose. Human learning is an evolutionary process. This is especially true of collective learning as it involves complex co-ordinations of large numbers of people in terms of values, norms, and actions. I would also suggest that human rationality is a function of prevailing social and economic conditions. Such being the case, new institutions stand a better chance to survive and thrive when imported than rather exported. The West should stand ready to help rather than to impose.

【The New York Times】: What have we learned, say, in the last ten years about the ability of some countries to change others? Should the West be more humble about its ability to bend the trajectories of faraway lands, or should it remain confident?
 
【Fu Jun】: The record is mixed. A salient and positive example is the continued engagement with China through mechanisms such as the WTO, bilateral strategic dialogues, trade and investment, cultural and educational exchanges. As a result, millions and millions of Chinese have been lifted out of absolute poverty. This is no small achievement in human history, and provides a basis for human dignity and social progress. We, in the East and in the West, should be both proud of what we have achieved thus far by working together. On the other hand, often times when the West did not do well is when it became overly confident about turning what should be a facilitating hand into a bending hand, and especially when that hand is armed with hard power rather than soft power. There are lessons to be learnt. The West should be more patient and more sensitive to local conditions in faraway lands. To facilitate changes effectively, one must simultaneously have global vision and local knowledge.

【The New York Times】: It seems as though many of the countries that have most succeeded in changing of late ― India, China, Brazil, the nations of the Arab Spring ― have done so by changing from within rather than through Western intervention. And yet they have all done so by taking advantage of the systems that the West has built. Talk a bit about that duality of countries that benefit from the Western-built world order but ultimately do the changing required on their own.
 
【Fu Jun】: As I said, although institutions are historically and socially conditioned, they also evolve over time. However, when not just a few but millions and millions of people are involved in a complex and condensed process of transition, the reality has to be that some would inevitably adapt to new institutions more quickly than others --- here the new institutions being a modern market economy based on universal rule of law as against an autarkic village or tribal system based on particularistic social relations. Such being the case, one size DOES NOT fit all, so to speak. You need to manage what has to be a dynamic process of nuanced duality for all people involved. How to manage that successfully? Phase-in and phase-out is the key here. By the way, it has taken centuries for the West to build its own system. Historically the West did not put up its own system overnight. It built markets and rule of law first, and then it gradually expanded political participation.
  
【The New York Times】: President Obama has said to the Libyan people that “your revolution is your own.” Does this signal the end of a certain kind of Western faith in the power to remake other societies? If so, is it in your view a healthy or dangerous modesty?
 
【Fu Jun】: In a globalized age of information, it does make sense to play up soft power and play down hard power. A proper mix of both is called smart power, is it not? Given the mixed record of its experience in the past decade, the United Sates does need to recalibrate the power spectrum. This is a healthy modesty.