Gefira 95: The best predictor of the future is the past

What does Warren Buffet do to multiply his fortune? He studies the past. Yes, he studies the past. No, not wars that Alexander the Great or Caesar or Napoleon waged: he regularly takes a close look at the past of big companies in order to assess their potential, their development and whether their value is likely to rise or drop. Only then does Warren Buffet take decisions about either purchasing or selling the assets of particular businesses.

The past is a guide, a teacher, a prophet, one might say. Especially in the case of social and political sciences where experiments are not possible. The past is a huge laboratory of experiments, the past is the place where we should dig and look for events that might match today’s processes. The past is the laboratory with a long inventory of causes and results. That is why the past had better be carefully studied, analyzed and dissected. This postmortem of the by-gone events ought to lead to drawing correct inferences, and those inferences in turn ought to be skilfully applied to the present and the nearest future.

Gefira 96 invites the reader to take a look at two multinational, multi-religious, multiracial and multicultural political entities: Yugoslavia and Russia/the Soviet Union. The historical laboratory offers us an insight into the mechanisms of holding such structures together and of the inevitability of their eventual breakup. Though the proverb says, Good fences make good neighbours, we tend to believe that cultural, religious, racial and national diversity along with a no-borders policy are a recipe for the bright future of humankind. Sadly, the past proves that the opposite is always the case. Though we limit our analysis to Yugoslavia and Russia, the laboratory of the broader past shows that the rules and principles at play in these two regions of the world are timeless and apply around the globe.