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Speech by John Ruggie
Speech by John Ruggie, Kirkpatrick Professor of International Affairs at Harvard University and former senior adviser to United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan
JOHN G. RUGGIE
KIRKPATRICK PROFESSOR OF INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS
HARVARD UNIVERSITY
DISTINGUISHED VISITOR’S LECTURE
IN INTERNATIONAL STUDIES
UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN, MADISON
23 APRIL 2001
My joining you here today closes a circle that began exactly thirty years ago. The very first public lecture I ever gave was here at Madison, in 1971. Today is the first opportunity I have had to speak as an academic again – entirely free of concern that anything I say may get me – or my boss – into trouble. So thank you, UW, for your keen sense of creating these memorable moments in my career.
Just ten days ago I bid farewell to United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan, and the many colleagues and friends I had the pleasure of working with the past four years. Serving as the Secretary-General’s chief policy adviser was a truly exhilarating experience - and in some ways an unexpected one in light of the fact that my academic work had always been a bit theoretical, if not obscure.
But it turns out that, under the right circumstances, theory and practice are not like oil and water, and they can mix well. The last few years have been such a time and the United Nations has been such a place.
Why? Because both theorists and practitioners are struggling to understand and grasp the forces of globalization that comprise the new matrix for international relations, a new context for social life on our small planet. What I would like to do today is to step back a bit and begin to reflect on the UN’s efforts to come to grips with globalization.
Last September, the United Nations convened the Millennium Summit, bringing together kings, presidents and prime ministers from 149 countries to chart a course for the international community in the decades ahead. The overarching theme of the summit was the challenge of making globalization a positive force for all the world’s people.
The leaders adopted the Millennium Declaration, setting out some clear priorities. None was deemed higher than halving world poverty by the year 2015. It was followed closely by a commitment to strengthen the UN’s capacity to prevent conflict and to make and keep peace. Promoting good governance, human rights and the rule of law was also stressed.
The difficult task of translating these commitments into concrete results I left to my successor.
But no job will be harder than transforming the world of intergovernmental organizations itself to the new global reality. Simply put, post-war institutions, including the United Nations, were built for an inter-national world. But we live in a global world. International institutions were designed to reduce external frictions between states. Our challenge today is to devise more inclusive forms of global governance.
How far we have moved from a strictly international world is evidenced by the changed nature of threats to peace and security faced by the world’s people. The UN Charter presupposed that external aggression, an attack by one state against another, would constitute the most serious threat. However, in recent decades far more people – 80% of the total – have been killed in internal wars, ethnic cleansing and acts of genocide, driven by greed or grievance and fuelled by weapons widely available in the global arms bazaar.
Much the same is true in the economic realm. Those post-war institutional arrangements were premised on a world made up of separate national economies, engaged in external transactions. International trade negotiations, for example, were confined to border barriers. The emergence of integrated global markets and firms contradicts these expectations, and has thoroughly domesticated the global trade policy agenda.
Other forms of globalization are posing equally novel challenges. Criminal networks take advantage of the most advanced technologies to operate global conglomerates of illicit activities, trafficking in drugs, pornography, weapons, diamonds - and human beings.
Diseases have shaped history for millennia, spread by traders, invaders and natural carriers. But the most recent upsurge in the global transmission of pathogens, above all HIV/AIDS, has hit with a velocity and scope that are made possible only by open borders and unprecedented mobility.
Transborder pollution has been on the international agenda for decades. But once the cumulative effects of industrialization came to affect global climate change, the world became enveloped - literally - by a wholly new ecological context.
Information technology is altering the world’s economic landscape and transforming organizational structures. IT is changing the way people work and live. IT enables people to be connected directly who are otherwise divided by distance, culture or economic stratification. And that, in turn, enhances the possibilities for mobilizing social action across national boundaries, while in the longer run potentially blurring cognitive boundaries between "self" and "other" in world politics.
Those are some of the many faces of globalization. The challenge they pose is clear: the opportunities and the problems we face today are increasingly connected, if not integrated, whereas the means by which we organize our political lives remain partial and fragmented. The anti-globalization backlash, on the streets and in the corridors of government, reflects the frustrations generated by these growing global governance gaps. What can be done to close them?
In the minds of some people, the very term, global governance, conjures up images of world government, of centralized bureaucratic behemoths trampling on the rights of people and states. Nothing could be less desirable. Weak states are one of the main impediments to effective governance today at national and international levels alike. For the good of their own people and for the sake of our common aims, we must help to strengthen the capacity of those states to govern, not undermine them further.
Moreover, the very notion of creating centralizing hierarchies is itself an anachronism in our fluid, highly dynamic and extensively networked world – an outmoded remnant of nineteenth century mindsets.
By the same token, all states need to develop a deeper awareness of the fact that they play a dual role in our global world. Each state, of course, has primary responsibilities towards its own society. At the same time, however, states are, collectively, the custodians of our common life on this planet - a life the citizens of all countries share. That’s true even -or should I say especially - of the most powerful state.
This implies, in turn, that decision-making structures through which global governance is exercised must reflect the broad realities of our times. The United Nations Security Council is a case in point. Based on the distribution of state power in 1945, the composition of the Council today does not fully represent either the character or the needs of today’s world.
The General Assembly - sometimes called the parliament of humankind - also needs revamping. Its group system serves poorly to aggregate the interests of member states, let alone the world’s people. The norm of consensus, for all practical purposes, has been translated to mean unanimity. And its deliberations typically stress process over results. Accordingly, the Assembly’s work tends to move at the level of the lowest, and slowest, common denominator.
For their part, the major international economic forums – the IMF, World Bank and WTO – suffer from growing legitimacy deficits. They need to become more pluralistic in their political structure and policy orientations. All countries are consumers of globalization’s effects; therefore, all must have a say in the process itself.
The new context also demands a better balance in global rule making. In recent decades, rules that favor global market expansion have become more robust and enforceable. Rules intended to promote equally valid social objectives, whether poverty reduction, labor standards, human rights or environmental quality, lag behind and in some instances actually have become weaker. And so we find ourselves in the situation where intellectual property rights, for example, are protected far more vigorously than fundamental human rights. This imbalance is unsustainable, as shown by the vehement social reaction against the major pharmaceutical companies for seemingly privileging patents and profits over the needs of AIDS victims in developing countries.
None of these steps will be easy to achieve. Yet they are the easy part of the equation, because they involve mere modifications in existing machinery.
More effective global governance also requires still more fundamental innovations. The integration of markets has created a single, global economic space – alongside the more familiar spaces of places in which you and I reside. If that single economic space is to survive and thrive, it must be embedded in a more inclusive social texture – made up of shared values and institutional practices that reflect broader social needs. Market rationality, by itself, has never been a sufficient basis for social cohesion and stability. We take that fact for granted domestically; it is no less true globally.
One illustration of weaving such a texture is Secretary-General Annan’s so-called Global Compact. It is an initiative that seeks to promote social and environmental principles in the new global economy by engaging the private sector directly, in cooperation with international labor and NGOs.
The Global Compact encompasses nine principles, drawn from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Labour Organization’s Fundamental Principles on Rights at Work and the Rio Principles on Environment and Development.
The UN asks companies to act on these principles in their own corporate domains, moving towards "good practices" as understood by the broader international community, rather than relying on their often superior bargaining position vis-à-vis national authorities, especially in small and poor states, to get away with less.
Specifically, companies are asked to undertake three commitments:
To advocate the Compact and its principles in mission statements, annual reports and similar public venues, on the premise that their doing so will raise the level of attention paid to, and the responsibility for, these concerns within firms.
To post on the GC website at least once a year concrete steps they have taken to act on these principles, discussing both positive and negative lessons learned. This triggers a structured dialogue among participants, leading to a broader, shared understanding of what constitute good practices. And the accumulation of good practices, over time, should help drive out bad ones.
To join with the United Nations in partnership projects of benefit to developing countries. For example, Ericsson is establishing a worldwide system to provide emergency telecommunications equipment to countries hit by natural disasters, while Cisco is constructing Network Training Academies in all of the 49 least developed countries.
You can readily imagine why the UN, international labor and NGOs want to pursue such a Compact. But what about business? Companies participate in the Compact because they realize that, as markets have gone global, so, too, must the concept of corporate citizenship and the practice of corporate social responsibility. Doing that reflects positively on a company’s brand, which goes directly to their bottom line - and it helps to build the underpinnings without which the global market remains vulnerable to backlash and protectionism.
The Global Compact is one prototype of how to close the proliferating governance gaps that are generated by globalization.
It is network-based, rather than being a centralized bureaucratic structure. It embodies a learning model that promotes principled practices in a highly dynamic field of play – rather than imposing a priori rules and standards that would be hard to define and keep up-to-date. And it brings together all the relevant social actors: governments, which established the principles on which the initiative is based; companies, whose actions the Compact seeks to shape; labor, in whose hands the concrete process of global production takes place; NGOs, representing the wider community of stakeholders; and the United Nations, the world’s only truly global political entity.
Initiatives inspired by similar approaches may be seen in numerous other areas. They include the multi-stakeholder World Commission on Dams, which recently issued guidelines for dam construction and financing. An analogous process produced the Ottawa land-mine ban, though it had the more focused objective of yielding a treaty.
Along parallel lines, trans-national social movements and advocacy networks have helped transform environmental politics, and their work has been indispensable to the promotion and protection of human rights. Similarly, they can claim credit for a good deal of the progress that has been achieved towards the creation of the International Criminal Court.
In many instances, the United Nations has served as the focal point for such efforts - as in the conferences of the 1980s in the areas of environment, women’s issues, human rights, population and children - or, in the case of the ICC, a forum for actual negotiations.
What do all these endeavors have in common?
First, all tap into broader and deeper social roots than are reflected in the global private sector, on the one hand, and the world of intergovernmental organizations, on the other. All, thereby, help to shape and strengthen the historic project of constructing globally something that resembles a civil society. Civil society domestically occupies the space between market and state, providing checks and balances to both. It is beginning to perform similar functions globally, albeit in a still weak, awkward and far from uniform manner.
Second, these efforts result neither in the subordination of the state, nor in its being superseded by a higher political form. They draw on elements of state authority, and mingle them with whatever thin layers of international authority that can be mustered to produce little pockets of global governance. They range in form along the entire spectrum from creating shared understandings among relevant social actors to new treaty obligations. In some of my academic work I have described this process as the "unbundling" of sovereignty, and its rearticulation within, among and across national jurisdiction.
Modern sovereignty was a totalizing concept. It pulled together fragments of incomplete and overlapping authority into one single structure, embodied by territorially distinct and mutually exclusive state formations.
What we are beginning to experience at the global level is the emergence of post-modern forms of governance, resulting in a de-totalization of authority - if there is such a word - a mixing and mingling that is, at one and the same time, functionally less inclusive than the state, but spatially and socially more so.
This is a messy world we are moving into. It is fully of contradictions and moral dilemmas. It requires a high level of tolerance for ambiguity and a willingness to experiment. My generation has trouble wrapping its brain around these challenges. So it’s good to know that you will be there to help us meet them.
Thank you. |
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