World Public Forum "Dialogue of Civilizations"

«My friends, ladies and gentlemen,

It’s a great pleasure to be among you, when at least the economics and financial crisises are gaining speed all around the world.

This again reminds us, that we are in a deep crisis, what has been the old system of the world. But what did we learn from our Chinese friends, it’s that they have one word for crisis and for chance and therefore we are here together today to discuss not only about the failures of the past, but which chances does the new situation offer to us. First of all, I want to say, the crisis is a multiple one – it’s not only the financial crisis, it’s also a political crisis and it’s an ecological crisis. And for the first time, we are facing such a multiplicity of challenges, a head of us. This makes the situation dangerous, but on the other hand, it clearly indicates, that the present mainstream thinking in many areas is not part of the future, bit part of the past. And one of the main understandings, at least from a Eastern part of you, always has been, that a market economy has functioning perfectly well, when everybody is doing what he or she thinks is most beneficial for him or her alone and if everybody persues the own interest in an optimal way, then the market economy will function superbly. But this didn’t work out, if clearly indicated by the present crisis of the financial markets. But this thinking also has another implementation; that also political thinking was following more and more the market ideology, that the mainstream was suggesting, when everybody, each state, each power is following its own interest best, then the general interest, the global interest of the world will be best met. And when this didn’t function, we also can experience, because it led to a world of increased confrontations, increased conflicts and increased poverty. And therefore I think we could make a preliminary conclusions, from what happened so far. My first conclusion would be the great ideologies: and the greatest one of the last 25 years was neoliberalism, seems to be fading away as all others did before. Second conclusion is - we are entering the times, when the confrontational strategy with military means will not achieve the political targets that are connected with it. How many Iraq wars could a great nation in the world afford? I learned in the last days, when reading the book of our friend Joe Stiglitz that not even the United States of America can afford ONE Iraq war, not talking about many Iraq wars. But this clearly indicates that the way of confrontational solution of political, economical or power problems doesn’t work in the work anymore in future. The third conclusion is, if we are continuing like that, and I understand, that this issue is sometimes overshaded now by financial crisis but it is still there, if we are not able to solve the economical problem together on the world, then we are entering the situation, that is very close to the debate, we had in the beginning of the 80s, when we were talking about the nuclear war. When therefore the connecting issue for all reasonable people all around the world was to stop the nuclear armsrise because the thread of the nuclear war could exterminate all the civilizations that are all around the world. And nowadays we are entering the same danger on the ecological level, where there is a joint interest of all and everybody all around the world that we have to solve the ecological crisis, because it’s the question of the mere existence of our globe and the possibility to live and work here.

On bases of these conclusions, first quick conclusions, I want to add some personal experiences in that context. When I’m talking about the end of the confrontational age, what should the alternative to the confrontational age.

In my understanding we have to come to a cooperative, security structure in Europe and the world. Cooperative security structures not necessarily have to be traditional ones, could be also new ones. But of course we have some quiet good experiences with summels so if we are concerned in the last months the conflict in the Caucasus and Georgia and the question again of the NATO enlargement and the debate all around that, this of course was boiling up the conflict even stronger. In those days I very often was thinking of the model of my own country Austria – Austria is a social market economy and the democracy no doubt about that, member of the European Union, but since 1955 it is a neutral country, that does not belong to any military block and tries to offer good services in piece keeping in all around the world. Some people some years ago thought that neutrality is completely outdated, nobody needs this model any more, but if I look to a very complex contest nowadays I wonder if one could not learn from the model of military neutrality in order to calm down some of the conflicts and to enter more stability. The second experience and espiration in that context is that we always want to have balance, because balance seems to be according to the human nature and excellent statance of being.

The problem is the world is completely imbalanced and I think there is no blue-print for the new balance of the world. So the new balance in the world can only be the result of a process, the result of the experiments and the result of debates. And this is a very important element – a result of debates, which means that being inspired by the experience of all the civilizations that are living of all mother Earth we should have that debate. It is not the type of debate we had for many-many years, where the ideas developed in one part of the world are exercise with hetrimonical power all around the world. And the debate is that we all should be ready to except what has been presented and which of course created a lot of resistance not only politically in many areas of the world. And therefore I think, that the dialogue of civilizations might have been, you excuse me Mr. Yakunin, a futuristic idea some years ago, some people thought, it’s a nice exercise, that so many people are coming together, but nowadays it’s a quite essential element to embark for a new future, because the dialogue of civilizations is a pre-condition and maybe also a solution of the problems, that we are facing nowadays, because it’s in clear contradiction to a mono ideological thinking, it’s in clear contradiction to any exercise of ideological hegemony and it’s in contradiction to all the confrontational strategies, that we all were facing over the past years. And therefore we all can feel honored, because we are here and it seems that we are the beginning of a new time embarking on a new road in order to solve the problems of the world. I’m deeply convinced that we all have to contribute to that. I liked very much, what Mr. Vladimir Yakunin said: “Let’s not continue the debate about the old and the new Russia, the old Europe and the new Europe, this doesn’t lead to anywhere”. We have to see and to understand, that the fundamental challenges, that are the head of us only by cooperation and by dialogue. And this dialogue and cooperation cannot be limited just to the cooperation of states. We have the cooperation of states in the United Nations, we have other organizations, where states and other governments cooperate. But the problem is that sometimes states do not follow what they have agreed upon the international organizations, which doesn’t really increase the authority of international organizations. And second – this process that we are facing in many parts of the world, that there is a certain separation of the society of the government and that both sometimes are living completely apart. This requires, that the civil society is brought back on the stage, and therefore all new types of international organizations agreement or what so ever cannot be limited just to governments and to states, because this would be the first step in the direction of failure, they have from the very beginning to encooperate also the civil society. And let me give you one additional example, what we also have to focus on. We are now talking about the world financial crisis. This was a completely de-regulated market. It’s like organizing the Tour de France without doing any doping controls. This is the way, the international financial markets were organized. We have for instance the World Trade Organization, and world’s trade is much-much smaller, than international financial markets. But there you have an international organization that sets rules and has the possibility also to implement the rules. You have not such an institution for the international financial markets, which are much bigger, much more important. So if we are talking about new institutional frames for what we want to achieve in future, one of course has to think about world’s financial organization or something like that, if we want to establish something new, that is learning the lessons from the failure of the past. I think that all enlightened people, that are gathered here and people all around the world we are now sitting and trying to discuss what could be the answers to the situation right now, I think all of them have to understand that our work is a work in progress, that nobody will have the blue-print for the clearly defined future on his table and that we are acting on bases of plurality, mutual respect and cooperation of all the civilizations in this very important dialogue for the future of the world. We still can win this fight for our own future. But it’s our responsibility to conduct it.

All the best.