The Club of Rome and the genesis of ‘new political thinking’

The 40th anniversary of the beginning of Perestroika and ‘new political thinking’ has revived debates on the specifics and mechanisms of the late Soviet Union’s foreign policy. In this context, researchers typically focus either on the views of M.S. Gorbachev and his associates or on the ideology of the ‘liberal wing’ of the party elite. However, they overlook the fact that, as early as the early 1970s, the USSR had engaged in a dialogue with the so-called Club of Rome, which developed and actively promoted the concept of ‘common challenges to humanity’ or global threats. The author hypothesizes that it was these ideas of the Club of Rome, which resonated strongly with the sentiments of the then Soviet leadership pursuing a course of detente and gradual rapprochement between the USSR and Western countries, that largely paved the way for the emergence of the ‘new political thinking’ concept in the mid-1980s. To test this hypothesis, the author examines the process of rapprochement between the USSR and the Club of Rome, which involved the internalization of the latter’s ideas by the Soviet scientific community and a part of the political elite. The article demonstrates how an entire network of institutes and laboratories engaged in research aligned with the ideas of the Club of Rome gradually developed in the USSR. From the outset, these studies, marked by a liberal-globalist orientation, constituted an intellectual counter-current to the official Marxist-Leninist ideology. Under their direct influence, the concept of ‘nuclear winter’ and the idea of prioritizing universal human interests over national ones became firmly embedded in the Soviet official rhetoric. Thus, this research not only highlights the ideological affinity of detente and ‘perestroika’ but shows that the latter was a logical consequence of the entrenchment within the Soviet leadership of the ideas about the necessity of ensuring humanity’s survival in an era of global threats for the sake of which it was deemed justifiable to sacrifice national interests.