Global Thinker Award 2010
Full Speech of Dr. Shashi Tharoor
I feel deeply honoured to receive the “Distinguished Global Thinker Award” and join the ranks of Prof Lord Bhikhu Parekh; Dr M S Swaminathan; Prof C K Pralhad; and Lord Meghnad Desai. The notion of being called a Distinguished Global Thinker is quite disconcerting. It reminds me of Napoleon’s famous crack about the Holy Roman Empire, that it was neither Holy, nor Roman, nor an Empire. I fear you are giving this award to someone who is neither distinguished, no longer very global, and rarely enjoys much time to think. But as Groucho Marx said when presented an Oscar, I am delighted to accept this award before you realize your mistake.
I take this opportunity to congratulate the IILM Institute for Higher Education, which has developed over a short period of time to be one major institutions of higher learning in India with a network of schools, colleges and institutions of higher learning in India, for their contribution to the cause of quality education and training in India.
I’m happy to address the topic of global governance, something that I have worked in at the United Nations for three decades but also a theme of compelling interest to me in my present incarnation.
Global governance is not exactly the most precise concept dreamed up by political scientists today. It is used to describe the processes and institutions by which the world is governed, and it was always intended to be an amorphous idea, since there is no such thing as a global government to provide such governance. “Global governance” is a term that tries to impose a sense of order, real or imagined, on a world without an organized system of government. To describe it I would focus on four essential aspects.
The first is history. The institutions of global governance today are those that emerged after the disasters of the first half of the 20th century, and I think we must never forget the past if we are to understand the present and focus on the future. In the first half of the twentieth century, the world saw two World Wars, countless civil wars, mass expulsions of populations, and the horrors of the Holocaust and Hiroshima. It was a period in which I think the world really must have wondered whether we as a collective humanity were likely to survive. Tolstoy had already written that memorable line that if you were not interested in war, it didn't matter; war was interested in you. And that's what essentially happened in the first half of the 20th century.
Then things changed. In and after 1945, a group of far-sighted leaders were determined to make the second half of the twentieth century different from the first. So they drew up rules to govern international behaviour, and they founded institutions in which different nations could cooperate for the common good. That was the idea of “global governance” – to foster international cooperation, to elaborate consensual global norms and to establish predictable, universally applicable rules, to the benefit of all.
The keystone of the arch, so to speak, was the United Nations itself. The UN was seen by world leaders as the only possible alternative to the disastrous experiences of the first half of the century. It stood for a world in which people of different nations and cultures looked on each other, not as subjects of fear and suspicion but as potential partners, able to exchange goods and ideas to their mutual benefit. The UN was seen by visionaries like former US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt as the only possible alternative to the disastrous experiences of the first half of the century. As Roosevelt stated in his historic speech to the two US Houses of Congress after the Yalta Conference, the UN would be the alternative to the military alliances, balance-of-power politics and all the arrangements that had led to war so often in the past.
His successor, the US President who presided at the birth of the UN, Harry Truman, put it clearly: "You have created a great instrument for peace and security and human progress in the world," he declared to the assembled signatories of the United Nations Charter in San Francisco on June 26, 1945. "... If we fail to use it, we shall betray all those who have died in order that we might meet here in freedom and safety to create it. If we seek to use it selfishly – for the advantage of any one nation or any small group of nations – we shall be equally guilty of that betrayal".
"We all have to recognize," Truman declared, "no matter how great our strength, that we must deny ourselves the license to do always as we please. No one nation ... can or should expect any special privilege which harms any other nation ... Unless we are all willing to pay that price, no organization for world peace can accomplish its purpose. And what a reasonable price that is!"
Truman’s conviction was that the sacrifices that soldiers had made in the Second World War to create that moment in San Francisco, would only be justified if you had an arrangement in which all countries felt they had an equal stake. That was a very clear and strong vision, and there's no question that the setting up of the global institutions in 1945 is something that we can all look back on with a sense of admiration, and dare I say it, gratitude.
Not that Paradise descended on earth in 1945. We all know that tyranny and warfare continued, and that billions of people still live in extreme and degrading poverty. But the overall record of the second half of the twentieth century is one of amazing advances. A third world war didn't occur. The world economy expanded as never before. There was astonishing technological progress. Many in the industrialized world now enjoy a level of prosperity, and have access to a range of experiences, that their grandparents could scarcely have dreamed of; and even in the developing world, there has been spectacular economic growth. Child mortality has been reduced. Literacy has spread. The peoples of the developing world threw off the yoke of colonialism, and those of the Soviet bloc won political freedom. Democracy and human rights are not yet universal, but they are now much more the norm than the exception.
The second important feature is the global nature of the determining forces of today’s world. There are broadly two contending and even contradictory forces in the world in which we live today; on the one hand are the forces of convergence, the increasing knitting-together of the world through globalisation, modern communications and trade, and on the other are the opposite forces of disruption, of religious polarisation, of the talk of the clash of civilisations, and of terrorism. The two forces, one pulling us together, the other pulling us apart, are both concurrent phenomena of our times, and these are taking place in a world in which – though I may be accused of being excessively India-centred– 26/11 was in many ways emblematic of this paradoxical phenomenon. Why do I say this? Because the terrorists of 26/11 used the instruments of globalisation and convergence – the ease of communications, GPS systems and mobile telephone technology, five-star hotels frequented by the transnational business elite, and so on – as instruments for their fanatical agenda. Similarly, on 9/11 in New York, rather than as forces to bring the world closer together, the terrorists also used similar tools – the jet aircraft being crashed into those towers emblematic of global capitalism, while the doomed victims of the planes made frantic mobile phone telephone calls to their loved ones.
Both 9/11 and 26/11 were grotesque moments in that way. At the same time 9/11 had already reminded us of the cliché of the global village, because it proved that we are living in a village in which a fire that started in a dusty cave somewhere in Afghanistan, in one corner of the global village, could be strong enough to melt the steel girders holding up the tall skyscrapers at the opposite end of the global village. We have to recognise both the positive and negative forces of the world today, and from it, a consciousness of the increasing mutual interdependence that characterises our age.
Global governance therefore rests on the realization that security is not indeed just about threats from enemy states or hostile powers, but that there are common phenomena that really cut across borders and affect us all. In fact, in my days at the UN we used to use the phrase “problems without passports”-- the notion that the world is full of problems that cannot be solved by any one country or any one group of countries, however rich or powerful, and which are unavoidably the shared responsibility of humankind.
This idea has gained strong ground through the '90s and through the first part of this century. There is an obvious list of such problems: terrorism itself, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, of the degradation of our common environment, of climate change (quite obviously because we cannot put up a fence in the sky to sequester our own climate, it affects everyone), of persistent poverty and haunting hunger, of human rights and human wrongs, of mass illiteracy and massive displacement. There are financial and economic crises (because the financial contagion becomes a virus that spreads from one country to others), the risk of trade protectionism, refugee movements, drug trafficking. And we must not overlook epidemic disease. Take the SARS epidemic in China; initially there was an attempt to keep it quiet, but it was very easy for the virus to hop on a plane and show up in Toronto, and suddenly it became a global phenomenon, no longer something that could be contained in any one country. The same is true of AIDS, the same is true of swine flu (H1N1) today, and so on.
Today, whether one is from India or from Indiana, whether you live in Narita or Noida, it is simply not realistic to think only in terms of one's own country. Global forces press in from every conceivable direction; people, goods and ideas cross borders and cover vast distances with ever greater frequency, speed and ease. The Internet is emblematic of an era in which what happens in New York or New Caledonia – from democratic advances to deforestation to the fight against AIDS – can affect lives here in New Delhi. As has been observed about water pollution, we all live downstream.
Indians therefore have a growing stake in international developments. To put it another way, the food we grow and we eat, the air we breathe, and our health, security, prosperity and quality of life are increasingly affected by what happens beyond our borders. And that means we can simply no longer afford to be indifferent about the rest of the world, however distant other countries may appear.
The fourth aspect is the emergence of institutions and processes that reflect this reality of increasing global convergence. Global institutions benefit from the legitimacy that comes from their universality. Since all countries belong to it, the UN enjoys a standing in the eyes of the world that gives its collective actions and decisions a legitimacy that no individual government enjoys beyond its own borders. But the institutions of global governance have been expanding beyond the UN itself. There are selective inter-governmental mechanisms like the G-8, military alliances like NATO, sub-regional groupings like the Economic Community of West African States, one-issue alliances like the Nuclear Suppliers Group. Writers connect under International PEN, soccer players in FIFA, athletes under the International Olympic Committee, mayors in the World Organization of United Cities and Local Governments. Bankers listen to the Bank of International Settlements and businessmen to the International Accounting Standards Board. The process of regulating human activity above and beyond national boundaries has never been more widespread.
This is occurring at a time when we have this huge list of problems without passports that call also for solutions that cross frontiers. Individual countries may prefer not to deal with such problems directly or alone, but they are impossible to ignore. So handling them together internationally is the obvious way of ensuring they are tackled; it is also the only way. Perhaps we can call for "blueprints without borders": some scholars of international affairs have begun to speak of an idea they call “responsible sovereignty”, the notion that nations must cooperate across borders to safeguard common resources and to tackle common threats. I think that's a very sensible and succinct way of looking at the world which we have now come to, 65 years after the institutions of global governance were created, in a very different world, and in itself in a reaction to a very different world that preceded it.
In parallel is emerging the idea that there are universally applicable norms that underpin our notion of world order. Sovereignty is one, and linked to that idea is the principle of non-interference in other countries’ internal affairs, equality and mutual benefit, non-aggression and co-existence across different political systems, the very principles first articulated by Pandit Nehru in his famous Panch Sheel doctrine with the People’s Republic of China in 1954. (Today’s China foreign policy is not explicit about Panch Sheel, but its principles are embedded in the Chinese concept of a “harmonious world”.) At the same time, there has evolved a new set of global norms of governance that complement these principles, including respect for human rights, transparency and accountability, rule of law, equitable development based on economic freedom, and at least to most nations, political democracy. These are seen as broadly desirable for all countries to aspire to, and while no one suggests that they can or should be imposed on any nation, fulfilling them is seen as admirable by most of the world and broadly accepted as evidence of successful governance.
Now these four broad aspects are descriptive of global governance, rather than prescriptive. But I would suggest that we should examine them in the context of a significant change in the way the world has evolved since the end of the Second World War. While we have all benefited from the global governance structures that evolved since 1945, we still have to recognise that these reflect the realities of 1945 and not of 2010, and that's why the time has come to think seriously about the challenges and the opportunities in global governance in the future.
As we look around the world of 2010, we cannot but fail to note the increase in the number of major powers across the world since the structures of the international system were put in place in 1945. It is an undeniable fact that the emerging powers have moved very much from the periphery to the centre of global discourse and global responsibility, and they have now a legitimate and an increasingly voluble desire to share power and responsibility in the global system. The dominance of a handful of small industrialized Western countries, especially in the international financial institutions (the so-called Bretton Woods organizations), looks increasingly anomalous in a world where economic dynamism has shifted irresistibly from the West to the East. (In arguing the case for more democratization of the international system, I would like to add here, parenthetically, the increasing role of what are called social forces – NGOs, civil society movements – which we don't perhaps give enough account of in our discussion on global governance, but which we cannot be indifferent to, or unconscious of.) With all of this, and the emergence of new powers and forces which, unlike China, were omitted from the high table in 1945, we have clearly reached a point where there is need for a system redesign of global governance to ensure that all countries benefit. Clearly, what we in India are looking for is a more inclusive multilateralism, and not, as some American and Chinese observers have suggested, a G2 condominium.
As an Indian, I have no doubt that we must be globally active if we are to create and maintain the society we want at home. And our success at home is the best guarantee that we will be respected and effective abroad.
Because the distinction between domestic and international is less and less meaningful in today’s world, when we think of foreign policy we must also think of its domestic implications. The ultimate purpose of any country’s foreign policy is to promote the security and well-being of its own citizens. We want a world that gives us the conditions of peace and security that will permit us to grow and flourish, safe from foreign depredations but open to external opportunities.
At the same time there is a consensus in our country that India should seek to continue to contribute to international security and prosperity, to a well-ordered and equitable world, and to democratic, sustainable development for all.
This we will continue to do, and we will do so in an environment in which change is the only constant. If I may be permitted the indulgence of a personal reminiscence, let me tell you how much my old organization, the UN, has been transformed in the career span of this one former UN official speaking to you. If I had even suggested to my seniors when I joined the Organization in 1978 that the UN would one day observe and even run elections in sovereign states, conduct intrusive inspections for weapons of mass destruction, impose comprehensive sanctions on the entire import-export trade of a Member State, create a counter-terrorism committee to monitor national actions against terrorists, or set up international criminal tribunals and coerce governments into handing over their citizens to be tried by foreigners under international law, I am sure they would have told me that I simply did not understand what the United Nations was all about. (And indeed, since that was in the late 1970s, they might well have asked me – “Young man, what have you been smoking?”)
And yet the UN has done every one of those things during the last two decades, and more. It is a reflection of how much the world around has evolved since the era when the Cold War seemed frozen in place, borders seemed immutable, and the Soviet Union looked as if it would last for ever. If all of those things could change so dramatically within one generation, shouldn’t we be better prepared, as a country and a society, for similar changes to happen in the course of the next generation? And if so, how do we want the world that will emerge to be organized?
This leads me, almost inevitably, to UN reform, because that is perhaps the first consequence that follows from the analysis that I have given you. UN reform is sort of like a malady where all the doctors gather around the patient, and they all agree on the diagnosis, but they can't agree on the prescription. That is the problem we've been facing for the last 18 years of debate on UN reform, since the General Assembly took it on the agenda in 1992 but which we are seeking to supplant with a more serious discussion in the General Assembly plenary.
29. The diagnosis, I would stress, is clear. There are many elements to mention, but I shall just give you three examples. The first is that when the UN was founded, the Security Council was 11 members out of a total UN membership of 51; in other words, 22% of the UN's members were in the Security Council. Today it is 15 out of a total membership of 192; so, fewer than 8%, which means that larger numbers as well as a larger percentage of countries feel unrepresented, under-represented, unheard in the premier institution for the maintenance of peace and security. With all respect to Europe, a continent which I have a lot of affection for, the fact that Europe with 5% of the world's population has 33% of the seats in the Security Council is, frankly, bizarre. That is something that the rest of the world inevitably questions. There is also the fact that the five permanent members of the Security Council, with their permanent positions there and their right to veto, are all there because they happen to have won a war 65 years ago. Now, when can you think of any institutional arrangement which is justified by an event of history that took place six-and-a-half decades ago?
For all of these reasons, the diagnosis that reform is necessary is very clear; I wouldn't spend too much time today on the prescription, because we all know that there are so many differing views on whether to reform, where to reform, how to reform, which countries to get in, for every country that has put itself forward there have been some other countries that have objected. I remember when the initial talk was all about Germany and Japan, the then Italian Foreign Minister Susanna Agnelli saying "What's all this talk about Germany and Japan? After all, we lost the war, too". So Europe has its objections, we know that the Spanish-speaking Latin American countries are less excited about Brazil than perhaps others are, in India we know that we have a neighbour who has strongly resisted any proposal that could see us become a permanent member, and we know that Japan has similar problems with its East Asian neighbours. There are objections, but the fact is that we live in a world where you're not going to get an objection-free solution. What you need, nonetheless, is to finally move beyond the indefinite debate, acknowledging the validity of that diagnosis, is to find a prescription that the rest of the world will eventually learn to finally live with.
So that is something that India clearly feels very strongly; there is a need for an expansion of the Security Council in both categories –permanent and non-permanent. But it's not just the Security Council; we'd like to see the General Assembly strengthened as the primary intergovernmental legislative body, which it is not yet; it has become too often a rhetorical forum, or a declaratory forum rather than one which acts as a legislative body which drive the action of the UN organisation. We'd like to see the Economic and Social Council becoming a more meaningful development-oriented body, and a serious instrument of development governance. And we would like to see a greater sharpening in focus on the working of the UN funds, agencies and programmes, whose effectiveness is so important for so many of the world's vulnerable and developing people.
I say all this not just as an academic exercise, because as somebody – not just as an Indian Minister, but as somebody who has devoted three decades of his life to multilateral cooperation at the United Nations – I will say very strongly that my big fear remains that if reform does not come, that countries will despair and lose interest in the working of the world body. Already one hears exasperation when serious people say “Why should we waste time and energy and support and political focus on a place where they will not have us at the high table when there are others who are willing to acknowledge us and admit us?" The G8, now G20, or whatever it's going to be in the final numbers, is a body that is yet to have charter, that does not requires two-thirds vote for amendment, that does not need to be hamstrung by 18 years of debate, in deciding on its composition. For observers of world politics it would be interesting to watch whether alternative structures of world governance could really undermine the one really effective universal organisation we have built up on the underpinnings of national and international organisation. So not reforming, and being petty in throwing obstacles to reform is terribly short-sighted, not only because it does not address the fundamental problem that I described as the diagnosis, but it is also short-sighted because it could potentially undermine the very institution that many of these countries – particularly the medium-sized countries that are in the forefront of opposition to reform – have seen as a bulwark for their own security and safety.
I do want to turn to the international financial institutions, the Bretton Woods institutions as well, because of course we tend to focus excessively perhaps on political institutions; geopolitics is always more interesting to laymen than financial institutions. But the fact is that it is rather bizarre, once again, that they reflect the realities of 66 years ago (we have to add one more year to the equation because those institutions were designed in 1944), rather than of today. Frankly it does seem slightly absurd that a small European country should dispose of the same weighted vote as China in these institutions. And we really will need to see reform; the G20 Summit in Pittsburgh last September set in motion a process for global redesign of the international financial and economic architecture, and in some ways that was what legitimised it in the eyes of many of us as the premier forum for international economic cooperation. It is a meaningful platform for north-south dialogue, because the south is not completely outweighed by the north in the composition of the G20.
The summit in Pittsburgh took a concrete decision to reform the Bretton Woods institutions; there are going to be mechanisms for G20 experts to address regulatory reform, but there's also talk of shifting decision-making power within these organizations -- a decision, in fact, to shift 5% of the IMF quota share and 3% of the World Bank's voting power from the developed world to the developing and transition economies. Now, this actually falls short of what India, along with Brazil, Russia and China, have called for; the BRIC countries called for 7% of the IMF quota share, and 6% of the World Bank's voting powers that should be transferred, but at least it's a beginning. And our objective, frankly, in the longer-term is broad parity between the developed countries and the developing/transition economies, and we would see this therefore only as a first step.
If that seems contestable to some in the West, I think we can only point to the recent global financial crisis, which showed how important it is that the surveillance of risk by international institutions, early warning mechanisms and so on are needed for all. In other words, they are needed so that the developing countries can also have some oversight over the mistakes the developed countries are making, as well. It's important that in this context, the developing countries should have a voice in overseeing the global financial performance of all countries rather than it simply being a case of the rich supervising the economic delinquency of the poor, which has been the pattern of much of the last 65 years of international global governance. So the inclusion of developing countries in the oversight mechanisms, and the inclusion of developed countries in the mechanisms that need to be overseen is going to be essential, as well. And to that I might add, en passant, the need for multilateral and regional development banks to have additional and adequate resources to fulfil their mandates.
The need for increased, more democratic and more equitable global governance cannot be denied. Jobs anywhere in the world today depend not only on local firms and factories, but on faraway markets for the goods they buy and produce, on licenses and access from foreign governments, on international financial trade rules that ensure the free movement of goods and persons, and on international financial institutions that ensure stability – in short, on the international system constructed in 1945. We just have to bring them into the world of 2010.
Our globalizing world clearly needs institutions and standards. Not “global government”, for which there is little political support anywhere. But “global governance”, built on laws and norms that countries negotiate together, and agree to uphold as the common “rules of the road.” India is committed to a world in which sovereign states can come together to share burdens, address common problems and seize common opportunities. If we are determined to live in a world governed by common rules and shared values, and to strengthen and reform the multilateral institutions that the enlightened leaders of the last century have bequeathed to us, then only can we fulfil the continuing adventure of making this century better than the last.
At the same time, much of what we are in the process of accomplishing at home – to pull our people out of poverty and to develop our nation -- enables us to contribute to a better world. This is of value in itself, and it is also in our fundamental national interest. A world that is peaceful and prosperous, where trade is free and universally-agreed principles are observed, and in which democracy and respect for human rights flourish, is a world of opportunity for India and for Indians to thrive.
As you all know, we in India come from a very long tradition of internationalism or universalism. The old Sanskrit saying "Vasudevaya Kutumbakam" – the whole world is one family – has animated India's approach, since time immemorial, on the global stage; we have never been an insular, internally-focused country, we have always been externally focused. Even at the moment of independence in 1947, when the flames of partition with Pakistan were burning, our great first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, at that tragic moment, was still able to speak not only of his dreams for India, but for the world. In his historic speech about India’s “tryst with destiny”, Nehruji, speaking of our country’s hopes, said: “Those dreams are for India, but they are also for the world, for all the nations and peoples are too closely knit together today for any one of them to imagine that it can live apart. Peace has been said to be indivisible; so is freedom, so is prosperity now, and so also is disaster in this One World that can no longer be split into isolated fragments.”
So we see ourselves very consciously as a responsible international citizen seeking to help fulfil those dreams for the world. And on that basis we wish to see a world that is more equitable, that allows more voices to be heard, that allows more players to have a part in that classic spirit of "Vasudevaya Kutumbakam ", that we are all one family, and we have to sort out that family's business together.
Thank you very much.
