Ginebra, Suiza, 21 de septiembre del 2012.- En un discurso pronunciado el 21 de septiembre de
2012 en la Escuela Rajaratnam de Estudios Internacionales, en el marco del Singapore
Global Dialogue, el Director General Pascal Lamy dijo: “valores comunes,
multilateralismo, subsidiariedad, coherencia, exigibilidad, legitimidad:
nuestra tarea en los años venideros es reinventar un sistema de gobernanza
mundial basado en estos elementos.” El Director General dijo lo siguiente:
“Gobernanza de un orden
mundial multipolar”
I would
like to begin by thanking the Rajaratnam School of International Studies and in
particular its Dean, Barry Desker, for the invitation extended to me to address
the Singapore Global Dialogue.
In my
intervention, I will discuss what I think is the key issue of our time: the
proper governance of the common house of humanity. My view is that the question
of governance cannot be dissociated from the deep changes in the global system
of the recent past and the challenges of the near, and not so near, future. So,
let me start from there.
Radical
changes
In the last
20 years, we have witnessed two radical changes, with which we have not quite
learnt to deal. The first is the rise of emerging economies and the second is
the growth in interdependencies.
2011 marked
the 20th consecutive year that exports of developing economies have grown
faster than those of developed ones. The share of world trade of advanced
economies fell from 75% in 1990 to just above 50% today. Inflows of foreign
direct investments in developing countries have increased from 20 to 50% in the
last decade only.
The shift
in comparative advantage and economic weight that the world economy is facing
today mirrors past experiences in the 19th and 20th centuries. But what is
unique about the current transformation is the fast pace at which change is
taking place and the immense number of people involved. China's economy, for
instance, was less than 2% of the world economy 20 years ago. Today, it
accounts for 10% (in current dollar terms) and, according to some projections,
it is likely to more than double that in 20 years.
The rise of
emerging economies was set in motion by the changes in technology,
transportation costs and regulatory environment. This swing in economic power
has profound geopolitical consequences that will hardly be reversed in the
foreseeable future.
The second
big change of the past few decades has been the dramatic increase in
interdependencies. I use the plural because the growth of interdependency is
not only an economic phenomenon, but it encompasses also relations in the
social, environmental and technological sphere.
In the
economic domain, increased interdependency has certainly been the by-product of
the rise of trade and financial linkages. Globalization first de-nationalized
consumption, allowing consumers to buy goods and services from places where
they are produced more efficiently. More recently, we have also witnessed a new
phenomenon: the de-nationalization of production. The advent of new
technologies and reduced trade costs makes it feasible to separate stages of
production geographically, leading to the formation of value chains that span
across borders. World trade in parts and components of manufactured goods, a
rough measure of the importance of cross-border value chains, has doubled
between 2000 and 2010, rising from 1.4 to 2.7 trillion dollars. But economics is hardly the only domain where
interdependence across countries has increased.
Migration
is a powerful vector of social interaction across diverse cultures. In the past
ten years, the total number of international migrants has increased by over
40%, reaching 214 million people worldwide. This means that migrants today
would constitute the 5th most populous country in the world.
With the
advent of the ICT revolution, technical and managerial know-how have become
more firm-specific and less nation-specific. This has led to an unprecedented
surge in the international mobility of technical knowledge, the positive impact
of which we still may not fully appreciate. But societies have also become more
interdependent through “risk sharing” in areas such as health and the
environment. Pollution and communicable diseases clearly know no national
boundary as we saw with SARS or with the H1N1. The shift in economic power from
the West to the Rest is also reshaping the geography of environmental
degradation and gas emission.
Challenges
and institutions
In light of
these deep social, economic and technological changes, the policy and
governance challenges that we face today are certainly more complex than they
used to be.
We are all
familiar with the issues that our societies will have to confront in the
decades to come. There are five broad areas where action is needed:
First, in
the social domain, key challenges include population growth in the South and
ageing population in the North, management of growing migratory flows, rapid
rates of urbanization in developing economies and the rising incidence of
non-communicable and infectious diseases.
The second
area concerns the tasks that we face in the economic sphere: achieving
sustainable and balanced economic growth, addressing the rising inequality and
unemployment that endanger social inclusion in both developing and advanced
countries, and managing an increasingly interdependent global economy.
Third, and
as history has taught us, environmental problems can lead to the collapse of
civilizations. Climate change and biodiversity loss, food and water scarcity,
energy security and the unequal distribution of resources will seriously test
the peaceful co-existence, if not the very existence, of our societies.
Fourth,
welcome developments in democracy, education and human rights but also more
individualism, acquired rights and vested interests have complicated the task
of coalescing constituencies and made more difficult the task of managing
change. The sense of belonging is more diverse, free riding easier and
solidarity more elusive.
Finally,
science and technology can offer solutions to address many of the global
challenges of our time. But they also bring new risks, such as the threat
caused by nuclear proliferation, bioterrorism or cybercrime, as well as a
complex array of ethical and legal questions such as those associated to
genetic research. Many of these issues are not new. Climate change, for
example, has been on the global agenda since the 1972 United Nations Conference
on the Human Environment in Stockholm. Disarmament negotiations have been
dragging on for decades. The key question then is: why has so little political
energy been spent to solve the critical and impending challenges of our future?
A first
answer comes from a question that Dante asked in his Divine Comedy:
Now who art
thou, that on the bench wouldst sit In judgment at a thousand miles away, With
the short vision of a single span?[1]
Short-termism,
as we would call today Dante's concept, is first of all an anthropological
problem. Short-termism acts as a huge break to the exercise of leadership. But,
I believe, it is the role of government to guide, to regulate and to educate.
In a word, to correct the collective myopia that affects our societies. The
failure to act is, at least in part, a failure of our institutions.
Short-termism,
however, is not the only cause of inaction. Three other problems limit our
collective ability to respond to the global challenges of our time.
First, the
political structure that we have inherited, the Westphalian order, is based on
the notion of full sovereignty of nation states. The inconsistency between the
extent of interdependencies, on the one hand, and the fragmentation of the
political structure, on the other, is often a cause of inefficient policy. The
tragedy of this discord is that national governments find it (individually)
rational to choose policies that, in the attempt to increase the welfare of
their constituency, may actually reduce it. The temptation of protectionism is
just one of the many examples of this self-destructive behaviour.
The second
problem is what I call a "coherence gap". One often overlooked dimension
of interdependency is the interdependency across issues. The increase in
biofuel production to address energy security concerns was an important driver
of the spike in food prices in 2008, because both biofuels and food competed
for scarce land and water. Similarly, climate change will have a huge impact on
migratory flows; while the inability to address inequalities in developing
countries will continue to affect global imbalances. We need a holistic view,
but this often collides with the purely sectoral nature of our international
institutions.
The third
problem is that, while new economic and political trends have emerged, the
rules and institutions governing multilateral cooperation have not kept pace
with these changes. In fact, we are to a large extent living on the global
rules created in the 1990s, the last period of improvements in global
governance. From climate change to trade negotiations, the difficulty in
finding a new balance between advanced and emerging economies in a muted
context has certainly played an important role in holding back meaningful
progress.
Conclusion:
a new model of governance
In
concluding my talk, let me turn to the following question. If one looks at the
reform of global governance from a practical perspective, what are the
essential principles? I would point to six elements:
First,
global actions require political will, clear projects and common institutions.
But these three pillars can only be held together by a system of shared values:
a sense of common purpose.
The second
principle is multilateralism. A system based on the centrality of a single
economic and political hegemon, or some form of directorate of two or three
countries, is in contradiction with the emerging structure of economic power
and the nature of interdependencies.
Third,
public institutions can only be effective if they are articulated according to
the basic principle of subsidiarity, which is the ideological basement of
federalism. Policy should be allocated at the lowest level of government (national,
regional or global) encompassing all benefits and costs.
The fourth
element is policy coherence. This means to ensure that international
institutions do not function as vertical silos in strict isolation from one
another.
Fifth,
commitments need to be enforceable. Global governance must be anchored in laws
and regulations accompanied by mechanisms for their enforcement, including
binding dispute settlements.
The final
element is legitimacy. This means finding ways to give citizens greater
ownership of common institutions and greater say in their direction. This also
means we need to foster greater solidarity by nurturing a sense of global
belonging built on a set of common values. This can only be constructed bottom
up, starting from the local level and hence the importance of an active civil
society.
Shared
values, multilateralism, subsidiarity, coherence, enforceability, legitimacy:
our task in the years to come is to re-invent a system of global governance
founded on these elements.
Thank you
for your attention.
Fuente: OMC