ROW Episode 27

In this episode we discuss the imperative need for the global community of nations to identify and agree upon a set of global ethics that can then be used to underpin new institutions of global governance and be woven into their very infrastructure.

Transcript

Sovaida: 0:08

Hello and welcome to Reimagining Our World, a podcast dedicated to envisioning a better world and to infusing hope that we can make the principled choices to build that world. In this episode we discuss the imperative need for the global community of nations to identify and agree upon a set of global ethics that can then be used to underpin new institutions of global governance and be woven into their very infrastructure. Let's dive into today's episode. As we all know and are extremely well aware, the world is faced by a series of cascading global crises. These crises are increasing in their number, they're multiplying they're becoming more frequent, and they're increasing in their intensity. Chief among them, obviously, is the pandemic. We're all very aware of that. Climate change is another huge existential challenge that humanity faces. We've got the problems with the global economy. And then we've got the threat of war. We're starting to hear drumbeats of, the possibility of war, especially between the United States and China over Taiwan, between the United States and Russia, and possibly the European Union, over Ukraine, over Russia's massing of troops on the Ukrainian border, and the fear that Russia may attack Ukraine. We've got the perennial fears of North Korea's continual building up of her nuclear armaments and on. Now, if we're to have any prayer of actually resolving any or all of these challenges, in an effective manner we need to get past this scattershot approach that we tend to take and instead adopt a cohesive approach. What do I mean by that? At the moment, our solutions to global challenges, regardless of what they are tend to lack the glue that holds all the solutions together. Very often solutions in one area will undermine solutions proposed to another area. And we're not really thinking through the ramifications of our proposed solutions and their impact on all areas of human life. What we actually need to do is figure out what this glue is that can cause all our solutions and our ways of thinking about these problems to be coherent. I propose that this glue actually consists of a set of foundational principles. They've been called a shared set of global ethics. Some have referred to them as universal values. But we need to come up with something that we can use as a starting point to address our global challenges. Let's start by looking at this three step process that I think needs to be put in place as we start to imagine and build the kind of world that we really want and deserve. The first step is to identify a set of shared global ethics or set of foundational principles or set of universal values. These are all terms that allude to the same thing. Once we've identified them, we need to get consensus around them, get all the leaders of the nations of the world together and achieve consensus around them. And then, step three is to apply them methodically to solve any given global challenge. Apply them not only methodically, but without compromise. Now this method of doing business, if you like, in the field of international relations, in the way we deal with each other on global challenges, was first proposed, as best I can tell, by the governing body of the Baha'i Faith in a very interesting statement that they addressed to the peoples of the world in 1985 called The Promise of World Peace. It's a very dramatic title. And for those of you who are interested, look it up. It's a very thought provoking and forward thinking and stimulating document. In it this body says that leaders would do well to first identify the principles involved when they're trying to solve a problem, and then to be guided by it. After this statement was released, when one looks at the literature, it seems like it got out there in the environment and people started to think about this. The first major statement that struck me is by somebody called Gareth Evans, who was a former foreign minister of Australia. He also served on several high level international commissions and panels. He was also the director of one of the world's most prestigious NGOs in the field of conflict resolution called the International Crisis Group that some of you may have heard of. In a talk that he gave a number of years ago, he said,"There is no substitute for going back to first principles, getting consensus around them, and then applying them." And I thought, wow, this is exactly, what I've been advocating, inspired by that 1985 statement at The Promise of World Peace. The thinking is that these principles, it's like when we were, oh, this is at least my memory of being, doing mathematics in school, that you didn't memorize all the formulae to solve problems, you needed to be aware of all the first principles and all the primary assumptions, and then you could extrapolate solutions to any given problem. Since Gareth Evans's comments, there has been more of a proliferation of thinkers and academics who have started to talk about the necessity of identifying first principles. For example Professor Ian Golden, Oxford University's Professor of Globalization and Development, says in his writing that it's necessary to put ethics at the center of the debate on the future of global governance. And he talks a lot about the need to revamp our system of global governance and create something that is actually viable. Professor Jeffrey Sachs, that many of you may have heard of from Columbia, professor of economics and the director of the Center of Sustainable Development there, talks about universal values that need to be identified if we are to create global peace and address our challenges. And then we have Kishore Mahbubani, the Singaporean diplomat, academic and politician that I have spoken about in previous episodes who talked, if you remember, about humanity now being a ship consisting of 193 cabins as opposed to 193 independent boats bobbing on the sea of international life. It's a very gripping image. And other than the fact that, as we've discussed before, he says that unfortunately the ship has neither captain nor crew; so when faced with a global challenge, humanity, like the ship doesn't know how to steer course, as we have seen in spades during the pandemic and as we are seeing with climate change. He also says that another danger with having the each cabin run its own internal affairs separately from the other cabins, is that sometimes the rules that one cabin has can be dangerous to the welfare of the entire ship. So we need to achieve consensus around a set of rules that all the cabins will abide by in order to keep the ship from sinking. All right, so obviously this is a proposal for this three step process, and we all know, and you may be one of these folks, that there are many skeptics who say,"Oh, it can't be done." To you, if you're skeptic, or to the skeptics, I say,"Yes, it can be done." And how do I know? It has been done. And it has been done in the relatively recent past. 2005. We're talking 21st century. So at the beginning of this 21st century, after merely a handful of years of focused effort, when all the leaders of the world's nations gathered in New York at the turn of the century for the world summit, they endorsed a new international principle called the Responsibility to Protect that some of you may have heard of and others of you may be very well familiar with. Let's talk about how this principle came to be and why. The principle was first articulated and conceptualized in 2001 when the Canadian government appointed an international commission on intervention and state sovereignty. So the goal of this body, we'll just call it this body appointed by Canada, was to address this problem: What happens when people suffer human rights abuses at the hands of their own government? Either because the government is unable to protect them, or the government is unwilling to protect them. So able and unwilling or unable. And it was a fascinating process that they went through. The first really smart thing that this commission did is that they decided to avoid controversial language like the right to intervene. They started with the question, What is the role of a government and what is the role of state sovereignty? Usually this discussion had been framed as a discussion about rights, about the rights of a nation not to have another nation intervene in their affairs. They were very smart, they said, this is not a good way to go because it immediately raises people's hackles. Let's find a different way of defining or approaching the concept of state sovereignty. So instead of rights they started to use the language of responsibility. And they came up with this phrase, responsibility to protect. And here's the nub of the idea: In those situations where a government is either unable to or unwilling to protect its own people, especially against egregious human rights abuses, it is the responsibility, of somebody to step in and protect those people, because the people of that country still deserve protection. And they did something really interesting. They traveled around the world and spoke to the leaders of all countries, key people in positions of power in all countries. And they asked them. They said, don't you believe that the reason your government exists is in order to protect the people of your country? And apparently, I heard one of the folks who was involved in these travels and was part of the team say that they were very surprised that basically they didn't get leaders saying, no, we don't. They all said, yes, our people deserve our protection. And they said what happens if you're unable or find yourselves unwilling to protect them? Don't they still deserve protection? The answer was again, yes. They said that if you're unable to do it, who should step in? Presumably you don't want your neighbors to step in because you don't trust them not to try and take over your country. Don't you think it should be the international community? And apparently the answer was yes. So through this means of conversation, they were able to build consensus around this idea that all governments had a responsibility to protect their people, and in those instances when they were unwilling or unable to do so the international community should and needed to step into the vacuum. Now, what's interesting is that since that principle was articulated in the Commission's report, it was then endorsed by a United Nations high level planning on threats and challenges. Then the next step was that it was endorsed by the UN Secretary General at the time, Kofi Annan, in his own separate report. And all of these were like steps taken. And then five years later, so 2001 it was conceptualized, in 2005 at the World Summit all the nations of the world without exception, endorsed this new principle in international relations. So, lessons learned from this exercise, from this experience. First of all, it only took five years from conception to worldwide acceptance of this principle. So for those naysayers who say we will never be able to achieve consensus amongst all these nations around new principles of international relations that should underpin a new system of global governance that actually is fit for purpose to face and address today's challenges, we know now that it's doable. Second thing was that they actually provided us with a roadmap that we can emulate. What are the things we learned from them? That we need to find creative and non threatening ways of framing the discussion. In their case, away from rights to intervene to responsibility to protect. New ways of framing the discussion and arriving at a formulation of principles that everyone can accept without reservation or fear. The second thing we learn is that we can emulate the process that they actually went through, the commission and its assistants went through. They traveled around the world. They went to every country. They methodically engaged national leaders in direct conversation around the proposed principles and they shared their principles, their reasons for proposing their aims. And they shared their purposes what they hope to achieve by engaging this exercise. They also persuaded them with well reasoned arguments that embracing this responsibility to protect principle would serve their own nation's best interests, as well as the collective interests of the people. In other words, they presented a win win argument. This is an amazing example that we can emulate today. Imagine what we might achieve if we were to start the process now, instead of kicking the can down the road, of identifying a handful of principles, foundational principles or global ethics for a new, improved system of international relations, and a new system of global governance about which we've talked a lot in this series. What does this new system of global governance that we're proposing look like and what are the various institutions in it? We've talked about a global legislature and a world executive and an international standing force and a seriously revamped world court. Imagine if we started now and identified these principles and started emulating this process to achieve consensus around them, then hopefully a number of years from now we will have these principles in place, and then when we start building these institutions, these principles can underpin them and also be woven into the very fabric of these institutions to ensure that they are healthy and function the way we want them to. So the last thing I want to say is let me throw out an example of a principle that we could examine and have the world examine. And that is the following principle: that in today's interconnected and interdependent and globalized world, if a nation wants to guarantee its own advantage, the only way to do it effectively is to guarantee the advantage of the whole. Because we've become like a human body, if the liver wants to be healthy, it can't be healthy if the kidneys or the heart are not healthy. We have to guarantee that the entire body, the system, this organism as a whole is healthy. If we could really get our leaders to focus on this one principle and accept it and agree to it, imagine how it would assist us in creating the solutions and the methods for solving problems like climate change, like the pandemic. If we had truly grasped the fact that no one nation is going to be safe, no matter how many vaccines that it's people have, if the rest of the peoples of the world are not also vaccinated, because the virus will continue to mutate and will eventually come up in a form and a mutation that evades immunity and evades the vaccines. And we have to go back to the drawing board. So this very simple principle would actually clarify a lot of things and would make us a lot smarter in tackling our global challenges. And of course, climate change. Our last session, we talked about the challenges and the shortfalls of what occurred at COP26 and our inability to make collective decisions that really get us to where we need to be to mitigate the effects of climate change and to stop the world from warming beyond 1.5 degrees centigrade past pre industrial times before the end of the century. But if we understood this principle of the advantage of the part in the whole, then we would have a much easier time of it. All right. Take care, and I look forward to seeing you in January of 2022. Goodbye for now. That's all for this episode of Reimagining Our World. I'll see you back here next month. If you liked this episode, please help us to get the word out by rating us and subscribing to the program on your favorite podcast platform. This series is also available in video on the YouTube channel of the Center for Peace and Global Governance, CPGG.