ROW Episode 35

In this episode we examine the need to take a principled approach to solving global challenges by identifying, agreeing upon, and methodically applying a set of shared global ethics or first principles. These principles should also be used as an indispensable underpinning for the institutions and processes we adopt as we build a peaceful and just world.

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 examine the need to take a principled approach to solving global challenges by identifying, agreeing upon, and methodically applying a set of shared global ethics or first principles. These principles should also be used as an indispensable underpinning for the institutions and processes we adopt as we build a peaceful and just world. It is evident that our world is faced with a series of cascading crises. You see this term cascading crises everywhere now. It's a phrase that I've been using since the early 2000s as I looked ahead at all of these crises that in my mind were developing like clouds in the distance, nuclear proliferation, terrorism,, migration, climate change border conflicts, lack of economic resources and so on. But here we are now and we're facing it. The storms are definitely here and we're in the midst of them. Humanity is essentially being squeezed in a vise. There are definitely lessons to be learned. I firmly believe that this is why all this is happening. It's all happening for a purpose and until we learn our lessons, these crises are not going to let up. In fact, they're just going to get worse and worse. The primary lesson that we have to learn is that it is time to adopt a set of first principles to form the foundation of a new system of interrelationships between nation states. A new system, if you like, of international relations. Humanity has matured and grown, we're interconnected as never before, and the needs of yesterday and our capacities of yesterday no longer meet our needs today. So it's really time to revisit this whole idea of Identifying and achieving consensus around a set of first principles from which we can extrapolate solutions to global challenges. And indeed, one of the themes that I want to hammer home in today's episode, because I find it fascinating and I have a feeling you will too, is that whenever humanity has identified and been able to agree on a set of principles, especially in the last century, those principles provided a springboard for a quantum leap in humanity's growth, especially in terms of its societal organization. Now, our current approach is clearly not working. It is an outworn one. I'm not going to belabor it. It's basically a scattershot approach based on reactivity, reacting to the crisis of the day, whatever that happens to be. We have many fires we need to put out. There seems to be little sense of farsighted leadership, where leaders take a proactive approach to problems that they see appearing over the horizon and tackling them before they become emergencies. Our reactions tend to be based on short termism, crafting solutions based on short term and narrow self interest, the interests of one nation or one group of nations. Consequently, we never actually solve any single problem, and we leave the embers to continue to burn and wait for the next wind to fan the flame and bring that crisis to the fore with ever greater strength. I'm reminded, for instance, of this idea of holding nations hostage to energy. This is nothing new. We've seen this happen. Russia did this in 2006 with Ukraine and Belarus. We've seen this. It was done over and over again, and at the time, I remember writing about this in my book, Collective Security Within Reach, warning that if we didn't actually open our eyes and tackle this issue up front, chances were that countries, writ large, countries who sat on these energy resources would feel very comfortable holding the whole world eventually hostage. And this is with Ukraine, we've now seen that. We've seen this Ukraine conflict has really resulted in a global energy crisis. We're all suffering because we didn't take care of business when we could have and should have. The second problem with the way we're doing things now, the way we tackle global problems is that solutions we craft in one area usually undermine and are incongruent with solutions in another area. Because we want energy from a particular country, we are willing to turn a blind eye to their bad behavior in other areas, including human rights and so on. We see this over and over again in many parts of the world. It's not, none of these problems is limited to any one nation or group of nations. This is just humanity's poor habits that we've adopted over a long period of time. I'm not in the business of pointing fingers,"This country did this and it's wrong, or that country did that and it's wrong." It's the patterns that we see. What are the bad habits that we have and how can we change them? That's really the interesting question. What can we replace the old habit with? The third problem with our approach is that every solution we craft seems to sow the seeds of an even bigger disaster different from the one that comes back. Because the wind fans the flames and we see this, for instance, with Brexit. Britain thought she was solving one problem and taking control over her destiny, but it turns out that Brexit actually took away a lot of control, and she now finds herself flailing in many respects and suffering as a result of this decision that was taken without really looking at the consequences, without all the politicization of the people who were for and against both sides, exaggerated things, so people were left without adequate information to make an informed decision. And ultimately, our approach means that there is no glue that gives coherence to all our solutions in different areas. As we tackle climate change, as we tackle the economic crisis, as we tackle nuclear proliferation, as we tackle arms production, what is the glue that is going to hold the solutions together? The only answer is to adopt a set of first principles from which we can extrapolate solutions to all global challenges no matter what they are and then the solutions that we craft hang together in a coherent fashion and don't undermine each other. In order for us to do this, we need to really understand that our global challenges and really all societal challenges, name them, whether local, national, international, are really symptoms of a disease that has a root cause. And the role that principles play, if we're able to identify certain common principles, some people call them global ethics or common organizing principles, the benefit of doing that is those principles actually address the root causes and create conditions in which we can then address all the problems in a manner that is coherent. I find it very interesting that when we look at the human body, apparently autoimmune diseases tend to come in clusters also. So if you develop one autoimmune disease, chances are very high that you will then develop at least one or two others. The reason is that the root cause of all of these autoimmune diseases, they're discovering, is really an imbalance in the microbiome, in the gut. So if you want to actually treat your autoimmune diseases and not develop new ones on top of the one you have, what you actually want to do is to make sure that the balance of the good and bad bacteria in your gut is a good balance; so that the bad bacteria are not dominating the good. To me, when I think about it, I think principles play that same role. It's like injecting good bacteria into the microbiome of humanity's organized existence in order for us to live a healthy societal life. Now what are the kinds of principles we're talking about? I think we do well to start at a very meta level and talk about principles starting with the three that I have laid out here: oneness, justice and truthfulness, making them the ruling principles of international life. What do we do with these principles? I think these principles need to be, once we agree on them, and I think these three are ones that everybody can agree on. And in a second, I'll come to what some naysayers say and address some of their objections. But, first of all, how do we use these principles? I think in two key ways. One is, as I alluded to before as first principles that we use to extrapolate solutions to any given problem. If you want to have a demonstration of how this works, I would commend to you the first book I wrote actually in 2008 called Collective Security Within Reach. It goes in and takes a series of global challenges and it demonstrates how identifying and applying methodically a set of these global principles, including the ones I've just laid out here, actually yields very simple politically palatable and practical solutions to these challenges, and with the benefit, added benefit, that all the solutions then hang together and don't undermine each other. The second way in which these principles need to be used is to serve as a foundation for new set of supranational institutions that we need to build in order to address the needs and challenges of an interconnected world that has become a single organism. So there are two roles for these principles to play and that's really critical. Let's look at what some of the naysayers say. There are those individuals and nations or governments who claim that the such a project is impossible. First, they say there is no such thing as universal values and they go on to say that any attempt to identify such values really amounts to an imposition by one set of countries, for instance the West, to impose its colonialist aspirations or racist values on the rest of the world. That's not true. Let's just tackle this head on and see where we get with this, because it's important to engage in dialogue and really unpack these things and not let people just frame conversations and say,"Oh, okay. They said so. Therefore it is." Let's examine the assumptions underlying this. The first thing I'd invite all of us to do is to look at the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Let's remind ourselves this came about in 1948. It was created as a document to complement the United Nations Charter. It was a roadmap to give rights to individuals everywhere. In fact, it was the first time that the world had agreed to a document that asserted that all human beings were free and equal, regardless of sex, color, creed, or religion. Now, the first interesting thing is that contrary to what some governments and people would have you believe, there was diverse representation on the drafting committee of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Among them was a gentleman, Mr. Chang, who was Chinese. We had somebody from the Soviet Union, Mr. Kresky. We had Mr. Santa Cruz of Chile, Mr. Malik of Lebanon, Dr. Cassin who was French. And we had only one woman, Eleanor Roosevelt. And so on. So I'm just trying to demonstrate that it was actually a very diverse group. So contrary to common belief that this was something imposed by the West on the rest of the world, in fact, the whole world had a say except African countries. And the reason for that was that there were only four independent countries who had won their independence on the whole of the African continent. The rest was still under colonial yoke, and so that's why it was that way then. But it is time, as you will see, I believe it's time to revisit and reconsider some of these principles, confirm some of them, and maybe add some new ones with new input from an even broader representation and spectrum of society. Now, a couple of really interesting things. This document is really a set of moral principles. It's a charter of moral principles for the world. In a June 1947 meeting in the minutes, you will see that Dr. Cassin, the French representative, was telling the committee, we have to ensure that three principles are included. And I find this fascinating, so I want to share it with you. One is, quote, the unity of humanity. Second, quote, solidarity and fraternity. The third, the right to be treated one like another. Also, the Chinese representative on the drafting committee was responsible for inserting a word in Article 1 of the Charter of the Human Rights Declaration, the word conscience. And this was a really the insertion of a critical concept from Chinese culture that really denotes something akin to compassion, conscience, compassion. And it reflects Chinese concepts of morality and responsibility in terms of how one human being should treat another and duties that we have towards each other. It's beautiful, because we've inclusion of this beautiful principle in this universal document. Another point that I want to make that is really fascinating is that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights itself was built on another set of principles that were articulated by President Roosevelt in a State of Union speech he gave to Congress in January of 1941, in which he articulated four universal freedoms, including freedom of speech, freedom to worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. And these four universal principles that he was trying to use to get Congress to continue America's aid to Britain during the Second World War. These are really foundational principles that make their way into and become the launching pad for both the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and later for another document which we will come to later. Another point that's really interesting. The Declaration of Human Rights, it is true, is not a binding document in the sense that it's not a treaty. However, it is a universal document. And therein lies its strength. It has been incorporated into a lot of national constitutions and into a lot of national domestic legal frameworks. It's also become the springboard for the development of legal binding human rights treaties, including the treaty against genocide and the treaty against the elimination of all forms of racial discrimination, and the convention on the elimination of all forms of discrimination against women, and the convention on the rights of the child, and the convention against torture. You see my drift here. Because of this inculcation of these principles into all of these treaties and all of these laws, it has come to be viewed now as part of customary international law. Because it has been used so often by so many people over a long period of time, it has come to be regarded as customary international law. But over and above all of that, it is viewed as a charter of moral principles applicable to all. And this is really critical. So yes, we can do it. We've done it before. And principles are the launching pad for so many good things. All of these human rights treaties that I mentioned and others have made our world, believe it or not, a better place than it would have been without them. To those who say that,"Oh, it's impossible because it'll take forever.", I just want to remind them that the text of the Declaration of Human Rights, the entire text was prepared in two years. So there we have it. Once we set our minds to doing something, we can do it. Now, the third thing I want to address is, look, folks human progress is uneven, but the unevenness of this progress does not give us an excuse to give up. To say"Oh look, we have this Universal Declaration of Human Rights, but countries have not been implementing it perfectly." Yes, that is true, but we're better off with it than we are without it, and we are a work in progress. And if we don't aim high, we're never going to achieve anything. I want to offer another couple of observations. First of all, we know that even in our individual lives, we have to periodically update our identity and decide who do I want to be? Do I like how I'm showing up? And reassess the direction in which we're going and figure out where's this trajectory taking me? Do I like the destination at which I'll arrive? And if not, then adjust our destination and our trajectory, our behavior. And humanity, having as a collective whole evolved through various stages of childhood and currently in the throes, it seems, of a turbulent adolescence, now stands also in need of new capacities and capabilities. So it's time. It's okay to recognize that,"Hey, we haven't done things perfectly so far", and we can do a lot more, and we can do a lot better, and come together and decide what that looks like. There's no need to beat ourselves up or to use this as an excuse to say, let's just throw the baby out with the bathwater. We need to have a compelling vision of the destination that appeals to us, i.e. a peaceful and just world is what I would submit is what we all want and want to aim for and to aim high. Now, the fourth thing that I want to mention and this is the nub of today's presentation, we know from our past experience that when we have done this--being identifying a set of first principles, agreeing on them and applying them methodically,-- humanity has taken a leap forward. Let's look at a couple of examples to demonstrate this point. The first example is Woodrow Wilson's 14 points that he presented to a joint session of Congress on January 8, 1918. In the midst of the First World War, it was his proposed framework for a lasting peace. In his message to Congress, he said that the U.S. objective was to vindicate the principles of peace and justice in the life of the world. Beautiful. And of the 14 points, 8 of the points were focused on specific territorial issues that were going on in the world, but then five were general principles for a peaceful world. And the last point, the 14th point, was his proposal for a League of Nations, an association of nations that would focus on maintaining peace in the world. Despite all his best intentions, a number of Woodrow Wilson's 14 points were not implemented because the world was not ready yet. But since 1918, we've had a century and four years. We've had a lot of experience and I believe that this experience has taught us the value of these 14 points. For example, let's look at a couple of the points that he proposed that have not been taken on board that we would do well to revisit now and actually implement. One of them was to reduce the armaments of all nations to the amount necessary for each of them to maintain domestic order within their borders. Imagine if we were to do this today. I was just reading in the news this week. Japan has decided to double her expenditure on on arms production, her defense budget, because she feels unsafe. She feels threatened, because of the neighbors around her, China and North Korea. The United States Congress is about to approve in bipartisan fashion 858 billion of expenditure for arms production for one year, and it's just staggering, mind boggling. When you think of all the needs we have in the world, when you think about climate change, you think about the catastrophes, the food crisis, the energy crisis, the economic crisis, poverty, on and on, we need this money. We're misallocating our resources. Another point of Woodrow Wilson's that was not implemented was that according to his proposals nations were to agree not to resort to war, but rather to give the right to initiate a war to the League, give it exclusive power, and it would do so basically just to maintain peace in the world. Again nations were not ready for it, but when we look again at the Ukraine conflict today, imagine if we had this principle in place, imagine what a different experience the people of Ukraine and the world would be having now, and we wouldn't be spending all these hundreds of billions of dollars in armaments that are just getting used up. Not to mention the maiming, the killing, the death and destruction, the psychological trauma, and so on that is occurring. Unfortunately, Woodrow Wilson's points did not get implemented because most of them were scuttled by Britain and France, who were at the time colonial powers and were clinging to outworn nationalistic ideals. They wanted to get back territories they'd lost during the First World War and try to get some more, but they also wanted to punish Germany and make her pay for having gotten them into a First World War with all the casualties. There were other problems. The U. S. Senate didn't adopt the treaty and failed to allow the U.S. to participate in the League of Nations, because they believed that the treaty undercut American autonomy in international matters. Again, the nationalistic approach. In short, we paid a very high price, we being humanity, for not implementing Woodrow Wilson's points. And these unaddressed points led to the Second World War. Indeed, Wilson predicted that the U.S. not becoming a member of the League would lead to war within a generation, and he was absolutely right. So it's time to learn from our mistake. Every, every, mistake is an opportunity to learn. Even though the failures of not implementing Woodrow Wilson's points were very costly for humanity, if we learn the lessons from it, then it won't all have been for naught. Let's look at a few lessons that this failure yielded and take them on board. We learn from this what happens when there's no general consensus or meeting of the minds or unity of vision, however you want to frame it. We need to have nations and leaders who are able to come together, lead their people to a unity of vision and be able to consult with each other as leaders in order to attain a unity of vision for how to attain peace in the world. There were some nations focused more on self determination. Woodrow Wilson himself was very eager to allow people to have the right to self determination, but then other countries were more interested in holding on to their colonial territories. So you've got this conflict right up front between these two aspirations. Another thing we learn is the cost of the absence of universal participation in an important organization like the League of Nations. The United States didn't join, the Soviets weren't part of it, and Germany, Japan, and so on. By 1920, only 48 countries had joined the League, and at its peak, 58. Another lesson we learned is that the time has come and gone for having international institutions, i.e. institutions where nations come and they try to maintain an equilibrium of the balance of power between them. This was something Woodrow Wilson realized wasn't going to work, the trying to maintain balance between amongst military alliances. And incidentally, it's something we've talked about in these in these podcasts. Jean Monnet, the father of the European Union, was very big on this. He recognized that if Europe were to survive it would need to create a union, which he hoped would be a European federation, in which we would focus on the fusion of the interests of the nation of Europe, rather than maintaining an equilibrium between them. And in fact, I think his experiment with the European Union is a really amazing one to look at and to emulate in some respects and do this at the international level in terms of learning to fuse national interests around the world. Another thing we learned is what happens when you require unanimity in decision making. It doesn't work. You come up with the lowest common denominator decision making. The League failed, because it was not able to maintain peace in the world. Another thing we learned is what happens when you humiliate a nation, as the victors of the First World War ended up humiliating Germany in what's called the War Guilt Clause in the Versailles Treaty, in which they demanded a ridiculous amount of reparations that bred resentment. And we know the story how it gave rise to the right wing and the fascists in Germany and led to the Nazi movement and to the Second World War ultimately. We also learn what happens when we give a mandate to an international organization or a supranational organization without giving it proper tools to actually carry out and implement the mandate, like no standing force to go in and bring nations to heal when they disturb the peace of the world. The final thing we learned is the importance of transparency and inclusion of all parties. One of the mistakes Woodrow Wilson himself made was that when he drafted the 14 points, he actually got a team of 126 academics together. He called the inquiry to come up with ideas, and he didn't include Republicans. And he didn't include Republicans in the delegation to the peace conference in Paris. That was a huge mistake and it was the Republicans who then regained the majority in Congress and the Senate who scuttled the treaty and refused to ratify it and refused to have the U.S. join the League of Nations. So it's time to try again now to take these points that we talked about that Woodrow Wilson had proposed that were never implemented, and we really need them today. Now, a second example of principles acting as a launching pad or springboard for the creation of yet a better or a higher order of organization in the world are the principles of the Atlantic Charter that were really the foundation for the creation of the United Nations. So what is the Atlantic Charter? Prime Minister Churchill and President Roosevelt, FDR, met aboard the USS Augusta in Placentia Bay, Newfoundland on the 9th and 10th of August 1941. Why did they meet? To discuss their respective war aims, of Britain and the United States, and to outline a post war international system. They came up with, as a result of this meeting, with a charter that included eight principles. You remember we talked about the four freedoms that Roosevelt had articulated in January of 1941? Now fast forward, this is eight months later. Those principles again fed into and were the springboard for these eight principles. So really interesting again seeing the role of principles in making the world a better place, essentially. And this Atlantic Charter was a document. Although it wasn't a binding treaty, it laid out the vision of two very important nations for the post war, which was, interestingly, very similar to Wilson's vision. It demonstrates that humanity had yet another opportunity for growth. Now I want to call your attention to two important principles that were articulated that I think we need to revisit, just like we talked about revisiting some of the points that Woodrow Wilson made. Article six of the Atlantic Charter called for peace which will allow all to dwell safely and an assurance that they will live in freedom from fears and wants. Remember these are two of the freedoms of the four freedoms that Roosevelt had articulated to Congress in January of that same year. Then Article 8 calls for disarmament and a system of collective security under which all countries would abandon use of force, again like what Woodrow Wilson had called for. So the world keeps learning again that we really need this and without this we're going to get ourselves into a world war. Now there's very interesting phrasing that I find fascinating that I want to share with you that is included in the Atlantic Charter. This is stunning. It says, for spiritual and realistic reasons, all nations must abandon the use of force. Wow. So it's both morally right and spiritually right. And it's practicable and realistic. We're not talking about people sitting on some hilltop smoking something. This is Churchill, who was a very practical human being and FDR. These are people who were leaders, visionaries, but also very practical people who tackled immense challenges, both within their countries and at the international level. And this is the wording that they come up with. So let that be a great lesson to the rest of us. In short, it's clearly time for humanity to revisit these principles, to say, okay, we've now attained a new stage of growth as a collective humanity. What elements of Woodrow Wilson's 14 points can we now implement? Because we're ready. We're grown up enough. We've seen the value of them. We've seen what happens when we don't do it. What principles of the Atlantic Charter can we implement because we've learned our lesson? Let us take the resources that we're misallocating. Let's take these hundreds of billions of dollars and the two trillion dollars that the world spends on armaments and the arms industry every year and let us reallocate it to coming up with solutions to climate change and to alleviating poverty and so on. Interestingly, another element in the Atlantic Charter, which I found really interesting, I wanted to share with you, talks about including access for all nations to raw materials needed for economic prosperity as well as an easing of trade restrictions. Given again with the Ukraine conflict, we've come to recognize how interconnected we are and that when there is a conflict, of the kind in Ukraine. It constricts the amount of energy resources that the whole world needs. We have people everywhere suffer because there's a shortage of gas and energy resources, and the prices go up, and it has a domino effect on people's lives. The cost of living goes up and people are straining everywhere. It has an effect on food and access to food and the quantities of food available. This is again another topic that we have covered extensively in these podcasts: the need to pool to create a supranational organization into whose hands we pool certain critical resources starting with energy resources in order to solve a triad of issues. If you want to look at those former podcasts, you can look at number 34 which was last month's the pooling of resources to solve three problems, climate change, the equitable distribution of energy. Episode 29: what happens when we don't have a system of collective security and how we could have avoided the Ukraine war if we had, along with the contours of how we create such a system and what it looks like. And episode 23 also talks about that, the need for an effective system of collective security. And lastly, there is a video on the YouTube channel. It's a talk called, It's Time to Bring Order to our Global Home. It's a presentation I delivered in November last month at the NewKind conference talking about what we need to do. By the way, with the Atlantic Charter, just to wrap that up, a group of 26 allied nations eventually pledged their support for the principles that these two gentlemen, these two world leaders, had proposed, and in January 1942, these 26 allied nations signed a declaration by United Nations. And then this document thereafter became foundational towards the establishment of the body that we know as the United Nations organization in 1945. So again, look at the power of principles to be a springboard to get humanity to a better place, and one set of principles spawns a bunch of things and leads to a larger set of principles. Four freedoms lead to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and lead to the Atlantic Charter and lead to the United Nations Organization and they also lead to the League of Nations, which is fascinating. There's no need for us to beat ourselves up that we haven't gotten there yet, but it's time to acknowledge that we now need to actually revisit these. The seeds have been sown. We've had time to get used to the idea, and now it's time to implement them, because we also have gained a lot of experience in what life on planet Earth looks like without the implementation of these principles, and it doesn't look so pretty. How can we do this? We start with a few high minded and trustworthy leaders who get together and come up with a plan and then they get the leaders of other nations to ratify it, because we do need a unity of vision and we do need to have unity of action. This has been done before. If you look at episode 27, we laid out a roadmap for doing this based on our experience with doing it with the Responsibility to Protect principle. Essentially what's required is for us to aim high, a large dollop of perseverance and patience, understanding we won't get there overnight, but if we don't start today, we're going to be having this conversation 10, 20, 30 years from now when the situation in the world will have just deteriorated considerably, and so many more millions of people have suffered, and ceaseless endeavor is required. Now, if you want to learn more about all these concepts of the importance of the adoption of first principles, again, please look for the book Collective Security Within Reach that's available on Amazon, and feel free to reach out to me through CPGG dot org, the website of the Center for Peace and Global Governance. I'd love to engage with you. Okay I hope that you found this interesting and I look forward to seeing you next month on the 21st of January at 3 p. m. Eastern time. Take care. Bye bye 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.