Forum 2000: The Challenge of Multi-Stakeholder Dialogues on Globalization

	James Garrison, President, State of the World Forum

Ladies and gentlemen, as I've been coursing around the corridors and meeting all of you, I haven't been sure whether this is Forum 2000 or a family reunion, and I want to welcome all of you to the New York Hilton.

In 1995, in his first address to the State of the World Forum, Mr. Gorbachev said that the purpose of the Forum was to be a global brain trust to focus attention on the present and future of our civilization—which, if you think about it, is quite a tall order, but then Mr. Gorbachev, historically speaking, is a very tall man. I am happy to report, Mr. Gorbachev, that I think we have succeeded in establishing that brain trust, because over the last six years we have convened people from all over the world to examine those principals, and values, and actions that should guide humanity as it moves beyond the strictures of cold war into the next phase of human development.

At the core of this exploration has been a commitment to honor all the major issues—from the most explicitly secular to the most deeply spiritual—in the belief that an essential challenge before all of us is to see these in a relationship between all the different aspects that constitute our common humanity, and frame these aspects within a larger integral vision of human possibility. It is this commitment that has brought us to the present place, at the present hour and in just a few days' time, just a few block away, the Secretary General will be convening between 150 and 155 heads of state from around the world which, according to his office, will be the largest gathering of heads of state in modern history.

Here at the New York Hilton, the Forum and over a hundred partners from around the world, all of you, will be convening upwards of 2,000 people over the next seven days, so that with the heads of state that will be joining us beginning tomorrow morning, we can take up what is perhaps the singularly most important challenge currently confronting the human community at the turn of the millennium, in the turn of the century.

How do we govern globalization? What do we think actually constitutes globalization? How do we make it more equitable? How do we ensure that it's democratic? These are all crucial questions. They were highlighted by the collapse of the World Trade Organization conference in Seattle last December, and by all the protests that surrounded the IMF and the World Bank meetings this past April in Washington. They reveal a very deep paradox at the heart of globalization. On the one hand, globalization is changing everything, everywhere and affecting everybody, everywhere. And yet on the other hand, the prevailing institutions that we have set up to govern globalization—the WTO, the IMF, the World Bank, even to some extent, the United Nations—were all created in a bygone era and are limited exclusively to representatives of sovereign states. This gap, between the reality on the ground and the limitations of our prevailing institutions, is the cause of much of the inequity that we see, our inability to cope with global challenges and a rising tide of public dissatisfaction and protest.

In the face of this situation, a challenge of singular importance to the world community is simply to bring the major stakeholders around the same table. And it is for this that we have dedicated Forum 2000—the convening for the first time anywhere of all the major players involved in globalization: sovereign states, international financial institutions, global corporations, trade unions, UN agencies, NGOs, major religions, the science and technology sector, academia and youth. That a small organization such as the Forum should be exerting leadership in this area may seem surprising, but in the larger scheme of things, it is actually totally predictable, even desirable.

Let me just pause for a moment and let us all say good night to Mr. Gorbachev. He leaned over to us, just before I came up and said, "You know, it's six a.m. in Moscow." And we've been friends for a long time, so I take no offense at his leaving. He'll be back with us at nine o'clock tomorrow morning.

If you think back a hundred years to the beginning of the twentieth century, there was only one player on the world stage, and that was the nation state; but at the beginning of the twenty-first century, there are three major players, certainly the nation state, but also the global corporation and, increasingly, civil society. As globalization takes root, power is being democratized and new actors are emerging which are demanding seats at the table of government. We actually need all three. We need the regulation and the security that government provides. We need the dynamism and the prosperity that the free market and the corporate sector make possible, and we need the values that civil society insists upon. This triangulation, in my judgment, is central to an effective global governing system: security, prosperity and ethics. We need all three.

Our task over the next seven days is to sit with each other and to reason together about the complexities and the dimensionalities of globalization. Tomorrow morning, Mr. Gorbachev will convene the opening session, so that representatives of the different constituencies can speak to their aspirations and their concerns. On Wednesday we'll be looking at the issue of the social implications of globalization. On Thursday, we look at the growing impact of science and technology, specifically digital technology and biotechnology. On Friday, we look at the issue of global finance and capital flows. On Saturday, we look at issues related to core economic productivity and trade, natural capitalism in the environment. And then on Sunday, we meet back together again to summarize and speak to issues of governing globalization and to discuss a possible next step moving beyond this conference.

Now, at the same time that these multi-stakeholder dialogues are taking place here in the Grand Ballroom, down the corridor in the Mercury Ballroom there'll be a parallel track taking place on another aspect of globalization. The International Space Sciences Organization and the Templeton Foundation will be convening leading scientists and spiritual leaders to discuss how these two very different disciplines can come together to re-imagine the human future. We encourage all of you to look at the master schedules of these two parallel tracks and go to any session that you find of interest, because the interaction between our multi-stakeholder dialogues on globalization and the future visioning between the science and spiritual sector form the basic conversation of this conference.

Now, in advance of our discussions, I'd like to make one statement of personal conviction about the phenomenon we will be discussing. Perhaps the most prevailing assumption about globalization is that it is inevitable, and that there's really no alternative to current world system. The basic message is to either join or be left behind. I wish to directly challenge this assumption. I believe it is not only wrong, I believe it's dangerous, and here's why.

Again, let us go back a hundred years. The European powers have circumnavigated the globe and have consolidated power quite literally over all the other people of the earth. Between 1878 and 1890, there have been seven crucial inventions that made our modernity possible: electricity, the telephone, the car, the subway, the elevator, the steel frame skyscrapers and mass transit. Together these inventions brought the industrial revolution to a feverish pitch of productivity and innovation, generating unprecedented prosperity and, for the first time ever, global finance, global trade and global communications. It was the world's first experience of globalization. At the Paris Exhibition in 1900, when Europe came together to celebrate the new century, there was exuberant rhetoric about the fact that free trade would soon dominate the world and make the world safe for Western-style democracy. People believed that war would soon be obsolete, that scientific materialism, democratic capitalism and Western civilization continued to take root in Europe and were carried by European armies to all conquered lands.

Those were very heady days for the West. So confident were people that few noticed that when a minor duke was assassinated in August of 1914 in Sarajevo and even after the carnage of the First World War, President Wilson declared that it had been a war to end all wars. Such was the deep belief of America and Europe in the inevitability of progress. But there was no march of progress, in less than a decade of the armistice, Adolph Hitler had been democratically elected chancellor in Germany. And then came the Second World War, and then came the Holocaust, and then came nuclear weapons, and then came the Cold War from which we are only now beginning to emerge, thanks to the extraordinary statesmanship of Mr. Gorbachev and several other leaders with him, just 10 years ago.

As this second phase of globalization takes hold, my deep conviction is that we need to enter any discussion of its promise chastened by our recent past. History is too complex for any mythology of triumphalism, because it is our stage of moral development, far more than the sophistication of our economics or our technology, which in the end is what determines our fate. And in moral terms, far closer to the truth than any notion of globalization's inevitability is the universal recognition that we reap what we sow. When we sow greed, we cannot reap happiness. When we sow inequities, we cannot reap harmony and when we sow conflict, we cannot reap community. What we will reap is the whirlwind. And for those who have trouble with this thought, I urge you again to look back over your shoulder to the century we are just finishing and remember that even as we began the twentieth century with war in the Balkans, we ended the century with genocide in the Balkans, and on both occasions globalization was the context. Let us all be humbled by this fact and, in the face of it, look beyond economics, beyond technology, beyond even politics into the depths of the human soul. It is my belief that it is in this depth that human history is determined.

I offer these reflections in advance of our general conversation about globalization because it is my deep belief that close to the core of what it means to be human, lies the wellspring of ethics and with it the capacity to learn. Yes, we must look back over our shoulders to seek what can come again, and then let us simply look around us and recognize that at our disposal is virtually unlimited knowledge about the world and ourselves, an essentially unparalleled power to mold our world through technology. And having looked around us, let us look forward through the eyes of our children and resolve for their sake, if not our own, that we can, indeed we must, create a new and better world. Let us do this knowing that our generation has a greater capacity to change the world than any generation in the history of the world, and this is the quintessential fact of who we are at this moment in our collective journey.

My friends, let us know that how we manage globalization over this next decade, will in all probability shape the scale by which this next century will be judged. It is up to us, placed as we are at its beginning, to make sure that the balances are correct. Let us be conscious, therefore, that all of our choices have consequences, and that beyond globalization, the ultimate task, the real task, is to learn to govern ourselves. Let us be humble in the face of our shadow, and let us be bold in the face of human possibility. Let us deepen our sense of democracy and take seriously not only that we need effective global governance as the cornerstone of this next stage of human development, but that the global governing system must, at some level, at a real level, bring nation states, the corporate sectors and civil society together for sustained interaction and dialogue.

Let us also expand our appreciation for human diversity, understanding that whomever we think is the other is actually the other half of who we are. Let us know that as we give chase to globalization, the more democracy we can embed in our institutions and the more diversity we can embrace in our culture, the more deeply human we will become and the more enduring the edifice of globalization we will build.

Rome stood for a thousand years. Can we even begin to match that level of vision? Will the people who usher in the fourth millennium, a thousand years from now, remember us? If so, how will they remember us? What do we want to be remembered for? Let our goal certainly be prosperity, and let this prosperity be framed and directed by an equally powerful intention that globalization be sustainable, that it be inclusive and in the end, that it serves as the gateway to a truly compassionate global civilization. It is possible to change the world. It is possible to imaging a world that works for everyone. It is possible to leave this place humbled by the creativity that's unleashed when democracy is respected, when diversity is celebrated, and when our moral development, our moral depth is sought for as we would pure gold. Nothing less than this is worth the potential toward which the third millennium and the twenty-first century point.

It is in this spirit that I stand before you tonight, and in this spirit along with Mr. Gorbachev, Queen Noor, Jane Goodall, Wally N'Dow and our other co-chairs hereby convene Forum 2000. Thank you all.