World Public Forum

Published on 11 October 2008

Written by WPF Dialogue of Civilizations

Multipolar World, Multilateral Challenges

by Craig Calhoun,
Social Science Research Council

Greetings Excellencies, Colleagues, and Friends.

I join all other speakers in expressing gratitude to the organizers of this important event. And I want to express my appreciation to Ambassador Babakar for his comments stressing a range of important issues before the international community, from racism and injustice to terrorism and insecurity.

We live in perilous times, but we face them with hope. I am among those Americans whose hope is strengthened by the election of our new President. And there are other reasons for hope around the world, including other new political leaders, and also new efforts – like that of the World Public Forum - to strengthen solidarity and encourage dialog across the boundaries of nations, civilizations, religions, and political alignments.

Let me not imply that because we have hope the dangers we face are any less. We live in a world wracked by armed conflicts, divided by astonishing inequality, rendered more dangerous by mutual suspicions and civilizational divides. It is a world of humanitarian disasters, human rights abuses, grinding poverty. It is a world threatened by global climate change and unsustainable patterns of economic development and natural resource exploitation. But it is also a world in which people mobilize to help others in their suffering, bringing humanitarian relief and supporting the United Nations in its peacekeeping efforts. It is also a world in which people struggle to create better governments, ending human rights abuses by strengthening constitutions and political participation within their own countries, because external interventions have only limited efficacy. And it is also a world in which religious commitments encourage both charity and active efforts to alleviate poverty.

It is up to us to choose the cooperation that makes hope realistic or allow the conflict that undermines it. Cooperation starts with mutual respect. It cannot thrive where the rich regard the poor as unworthy of their attention or where the leaders of one country think they know what another needs so well that they are entitled to mount a unilateral invasion. Cooperation is sustained by dialog. Dialog nurtures mutual understanding. It also nurtures enlarged understanding because none of us sees the whole truth by ourselves. Cooperation also requires social institutions; it cannot be achieved overnight or by means of good intentions alone.

In the last thirty years we have seen a sustained attack on crucial social institutions. This has happened at the global scale and within individual countries. Nationalists, not least in my own country, have refused to support the United Nations and its efforts to achieve global security and development. Market fundamentalists around the world have demanded that the institutions of the welfare state be turned into commodities traded in capitalist markets.

Of course there were problems with the old institutions. The United Nations was too often bureaucratic and not always well organized. Regimes of social benefits were too often inflexible and discouraged innovation. But reform and improvement were called for, not destruction.

During the last thirty years the illusion was widespread that globalization made old institutions irrelevant. The growth of global wealth, we were told, would be just a matter of private business activity. There was no need for effective new regulatory institutions. If wealth was terribly unequally distributed, that was a matter for private charity not government action.

The current financial and more broadly economic crisis reveals the risks and contradictions in the ways this capitalist globalization has been accomplished. This upheaval has not only cost billions of dollars in stock market losses, it is causing hardship for families faced with the loss of jobs or homes or clarity about where they will find their next meals. It is undermining the development of countries plagued by poverty.

The dangers of further economic damage are real, and need urgent attention. Governments have stepped in and invested hundreds of billions of Euros and of dollars to stabilize the financial system. This process has created massive new public investment after thirty years of neoliberal efforts to privatize investments, services, institutions, and risk. But the challenge remains to ensure that this public money will be used not just to shore up a system of private gain but also to promote the public interest.

When public investment simply rescues those who have made speculative private investments it creates moral hazards. It encourages future speculators to think governments will bail them out too if only their losses are spectacular enough. Yet in this crisis there is not only moral hazard but also moral opportunity. This starts with recognizing that the economic crisis didn’t just happen, it was caused - not only by systemic problems but also by greed, by willingness to flout laws and regulations without care for the consequences, by massive speculation, and by the failure of governments to exercise appropriate regulation and oversight. Some private investors made billions while many ordinary workers lost their pensions, and now public money is saving the shirts of some of these private investors. We must work to make sure it serves everyone equally.

Responding to moral opportunity goes beyond rightly condemning and in some cases punishing those who caused the crisis. It includes affirming that the people of the world are joined together by moral obligations and political solidarities as well as markets. Action to meet this moral opportunity includes creating new regulatory regimes to minimize abuses and maximize transparency and public understanding. It includes working to create institutions that channel investments to areas of public need like health care and education. It includes nurturing an understanding of economic activity not simply as an occasion for private gain at the expense of others but as the basis for shared prosperity and social solidarity. These goals demand effective government action, and they demand the action of civil society. The moral opportunity is partly to recognize that we ensure our collective future by creating strong public institutions and not by privatizing these.

This economic upheaval comes at a moment when the world faces a range of other pressing challenges. Though we have tried to hide from it, most of the world now recognizes that climate change is massive and threatening. Add problems of pollution and the disposal of waste. Add hyperurbanization and the problems of slum development. Add international migration and the need for better ways to incorporate new citizens. And of course add armed conflicts.

The invasion of Iraq brought not only a lingering war in that country but damage to the structure of international cooperation which is needed to encourage peace everywhere. The war in Afghanistan threatens not only the lives of Afghanis but also the stability of Pakistan and the region. Conflicts in Darfur and Congo are not only humanitarian crises but also part of a destabilization of the whole Horn of Africa and the whole Great Lakes Region – a destabilization wrought by global trade in diamonds, guns, and oil as much as by local ethnic conflicts.

Just like the world financial crisis, these conflicts and challenges are occasions to reflect on how much the fates of different countries and different peoples are connected. There is no path of complete national independence from global affairs. This doesn’t make nation-states irrelevant. On the contrary, strong national governments are crucial to effective participation in global affairs and effective support for internal social solidarity. But national governments must cooperate.

We have lived through the Cold War and we have lived through an era when the United States tried to assert unilateral hegemony. We need to seek an era of multilateral cooperation. In any realistic assessment of the immediate future of the world we must expect that there will be several major powers including China, Russia, India, Brazil, and Iran as well as Europe and the United States. These will lead, both in their regions and around the world. But it would be dangerous to let this inevitably multipolar world replicate something like a 19th century competition among powers.

It is more crucial than ever that there be strong multilateral institutions. But as we build the institutions of cooperation it is also more crucial than ever that there be dialog across lines of cultural and civilizational difference. This brings mutual understanding. It brings creative new ideas to the fore. And it gives us all the chance to hold governments and other institutions up to public scrutiny to make sure they serve the public good.

Neither the cooperation nor the dialog we need can be achieved by intergovernmental organizations alone. They are tasks for intellectuals and academics; tasks for artists and for the media; tasks for religions; tasks for social movements; indeed tasks for businesses, since these are more than just market actors.

We need organized cooperation and we need also open public dialog. Thank you all for working to make each a reality.