21st Century Challenges
Date: 22 Mar 2007
Speaker: Secretary-General Don McKinnon
Location: Indian Council of World Affairs, New Delhi, India
21st Century Challenges - Speech by Don McKinnon
Mr Chairman, Excellencies, Distinguished Guests, Ladies and Gentlemen,
I am delighted to be with you this evening. It is a real privilege to be invited to address the Indian Council for World Affairs, and to know the quality of those who have stood before me on this platform, and of those who sit in front of me now as I speak.
The Council and other Indian institutions of its type represent both the deep-rooted intellectual tradition of this country, as well as the openness of India’s world view. How appropriate that is, in this age of the global village.
It was Mahatma Gandhi who said “I will let the winds of all cultures blow about my house; but I will refuse to be blown off my feet by any”. Gandhi spoke of the incredible diversity of the Indian nation. He could just as well have spoken in those terms about the Commonwealth.
This is my seventh visit to Delhi as Commonwealth Secretary-General in as many years. That is no coincidence and speaks volumes about the place India occupies in the Commonwealth. Two visits ago, I visited the excellent Commonwealth Youth Centre in Chandigarh. On this visit, I am meeting your President and Prime Minister, and opening an International e-Partnership Summit. India is hosting that Summit as a leading light in a Commonwealth-wide commitment to bridge the ‘digital divide’.
It is difficult to think of the modern Commonwealth without thinking of India.
That is not simply because India is the Commonwealth’s largest member – even if it is home to over half of the population of the Commonwealth.
It is more so because without India and without Pandit Nehru there may not have been a Commonwealth as we know it today.
History will always acknowledge that it was independent India’s request in 1948 to stay in the Commonwealth, in spite of choosing a republican form of government, that made possible the formula enshrined in the 1949 London Declaration.
That initiative by India – and the equally farsighted response by the other members of the Commonwealth at the time – paved the way in later decades for many other countries from Asia, Africa, the Caribbean and the Pacific to join this family of nations.
So your 60th anniversary of independence this year, and the 60th anniversary of the modern Commonwealth two years from now, have a symbiotic relationship.
Today, from the eight members of 1949, the Commonwealth has grown to embrace 53 countries. We are a third of the world’s population, a quarter of its countries, and a fifth of its trade. We are home to countries large and small, rich and poor, and to people of every colour and creed. And still more want to join. What testimony could be more powerful in underscoring the relevance and vitality of our organisation?
India was also instrumental, as part of a group of half a dozen nations, in the creation of the Commonwealth Secretariat in 1965, arguing strongly for a neutral and impartial instrument to replace the mechanism hitherto provided by the British Government.
Over the years, India has continued to play a key role in Commonwealth affairs. I can personally attest your deepening involvement especially in the last five years. I welcome it: you, and all Commonwealth members, have to make the Commonwealth work for yourselves – whether it’s helping you at home or strengthening your relationships abroad.
Modern India epitomises the core Commonwealth values and reflects a Commonwealth success story. You are a vibrant democracy, and the rest of the world views it as nothing short of breathtaking that some 600 million people successfully voted in your last elections in 2005. You are an open and tolerant society. You have a firm commitment to improve the lives of your people.
It is as wrong to talk of a ‘British Commonwealth’ as an ‘Indian Commonwealth’ – unless we talk of 51 other countries’ Commonwealths, too. All 53 are freely and equally associated. But, at the same time, we would never seek to deny the roles and the significance of Britain in the Commonwealth - and nor would we deny that of India.
India is today one of the fastest growing economies in the Commonwealth. It is the fifth largest financial contributor to the Commonwealth. It provides the largest pool of expertise among developing Commonwealth countries extending technical assistance to other member states. Your share of the world economy is expected to rise to 11% by 2025. By 2050, the pundits expect India to be the world’s second largest economy.
In 2010, New Delhi will host the largest single celebration of the Commonwealth spirit, the Commonwealth Games – or ‘the Friendly Games’ as they are also known.
I have chosen to speak to you this evening on ‘21st century challenges’. That is a huge subject, which could keep us here all night. Challenges are different within and between nations – just as they are for communities, and indeed individuals.
If I was speaking in 1907 on the challenges of the 20th century, I’m sure I would not have predicted two world wars, or something called HIV/AIDS. I may not have foreseen the erection of the Berlin Wall, let alone its destruction. So a healthy dose of caution is called for in talking about the challenges of a century that has barely commenced.
So where do I begin? One way to achieve any sort of focus on the issue is to try and do so through the lens of the Commonwealth, and the twin pillars of its strategic plan – ‘Democracy’ and ‘Development’.
We say those two words ‘Democracy’ and ‘Development’ in the same breath. It was a certain former Indian Finance Minister, one Dr Manmohan Singh ….. who in 2003 led an impressive team of wise men and women, which produced a seminal Commonwealth report entitled Poverty, Democracy and Development. The report stressed the extent to which the two are mutually inter-linked and mutually reinforcing. As for Dr Singh, well, life got even busier for him…
Everything we do in the Commonwealth is built around those two pillars.
On the one hand, our challenges include upholding constitutional government, or fundamental human rights, or the rule of law, or combating the scourge of terrorism and other international crimes, or creating more harmonious societies.
On the other hand they involve alleviating poverty, eradicating illiteracy and disease, helping to create an equitable multilateral trade regime, bridging the digital divide, or protecting our precious environment.
Let me just touch on some of these, however lightly. I shall perhaps raise more questions than I answer. So let us talk later. I view the Question & Answer session as every bit as important as this lecture.
For now, let me start by raising the challenge of early 21st Century democracy – and how we in the Commonwealth are trying to address it.
There are those who contend that democracy is something of a dirty word. Certainly, it’s seen as the stuff of rhetoric, not reality. Nightly television scenes of the way that the much vaunted democracy is playing out in Iraq and Afghanistan do nothing for its share price. Nor do bad headlines anywhere raise its stock – be it ‘cash for honours’ in the UK, or even legislators hurling microphones and furniture at each other in one of your own state assemblies in India! Each morning, I receive press clippings from around the 53-nation Commonwealth and, every now and then, read headlines like these in each and every Commonwealth country.
It’s very easy to be selective, or qualitative, or dangerously anecdotal in making assertions like this. But some people try and give us the empirical data from which to reach these conclusions. Let me quote one.
I began my year by reading The Economist’s ‘World in 2007’ publication, which published the findings of a US organization called Freedom House. They ranked 170 countries under the headings of electoral processes and pluralism, the functioning of government, political participation, political culture, and civil liberties.
Sweden came top and North Korea bottom, with 27 ‘full democracies’, 55 so-called ‘flawed democracies’, 30 ‘hybrid regimes’ and 55 ‘authoritarian regimes’ in between. For your interest, India came 35th, and lost points in the areas of political participation and culture. But let’s not deconstruct this too far, or look at individual countries. Rather, let’s note that 2,500 years after the 5th Century BC Athens of Pericles, democracy doesn’t seem to have come all that far. 50 chronically fragile states account for 1/7th of the world’s population, and 1/3rd of its poverty.
There is a converse argument, that says how far democracy has come, and how healthy it is. Here, I shall point to Commonwealth Africa, and further to Ghana, which celebrated the 50th anniversary of its independence last week. Now there is a country that suffered coup after coup, that built its leaders up only to topple them. And yet it was one of the first to move peacefully from one-party authoritarianism to multi-party democracy in 1992, then to see an Opposition Party come to power in 2000, and today to be considered a model of African democracy.
Likewise, there have been six Presidential elections in Commonwealth Africa in the last 18 months: all were peaceful; all were judged free, fair and credible – if never quite perfect. It is the essence of democracy that ‘life goes on’ whether a government is returned or replaced. And in Ghana and throughout Commonwealth Africa it has done so. 14 of the 28 countries in the African Peer Review Mechanism are Commonwealth. And Ghana is now at the stage of exporting democratic good practice, with its electoral commissioner, human rights commissioner and chief legal draughtsman advising Commonwealth governments all over Africa and beyond, while its teachers and peacekeepers also make their presence felt the world over.
I was in Lesotho recently, meeting political parties before the February elections. I found it inspiring to see political opponents sitting around a table and committing one-and-all to nurturing their country’s democracy. This is the secret of Commonwealth Africa’s democracy, for all its flaws: Africa owns it; cares for it; and wants it to mature.
So where does all this good news meet the bad, and what is the challenge of 21st Century democracy?
I have two answers. First, let’s keep the faith. Democracy isn’t easy but it’s the best way we know to give individuals freedom, control over their lives, and opportunities to do better. It is ‘work-in-progress’ wherever it is – always evolving, often making mistakes, always adapting to circumstances.
Second, let’s try and nurture democracy at three levels, which to some extent tie in with the five categories in The Economist survey.
We have to support the forms of democracy, like free and fair elections. We have to support the institutions of democracy, like a parliament, a judiciary and an executive which are apart but work together; responsible armed forces and police; an independent and responsible media; a lively civil society. And finally we have to support a real culture of democracy … of citizens having a say in how they are governed.
Of all these things, perhaps the culture is the greatest. Democracy is often fragile, because it is precious. If we are committed to it, we are always chiseling away to make it better and stronger.
The Commonwealth helps countries do that. In high profile cases, it will suspend members who flout its shared principles: such was the case for Fiji after a democratically elected government was overthrown by a military coup in December. But in general we keep a lower profile – working alongside governments as trusted partners on those three areas: the forms, the institutions, the culture.
These, then are some of the challenges of democracy itself. And their links to the challenges of development were most forcibly brought home to me by an African leader who said to me: ‘yes Don, but you can’t eat democracy’.
Because it is food on the table – and all the other fruits of development, like jobs, investment, education, health – which must be the dividends of democracy.
Again, I ask where to begin on the 21st Century challenges of development? Even if I limit the development challenges to the Commonwealth and not the entire globe, the litany of depressing statistics is still overwhelming.
30 million Commonwealth children never see the inside of a primary school – and another 40 million miss out altogether on a secondary education.
27 million Commonwealth people carry the HIV/AIDS virus.
Over a billion Commonwealth people are without safe drinking water, and two billion without basic sanitation.
In all this, women suffer disproportionately: two-thirds of those below the poverty line are women, and two-thirds of those who can’t read or write.
Statistics – even apocalyptic ones such as these – can start to lose their meaning.
Which is why the newer challenges are perhaps best not quantified. The two most pressing are best mentioned very quickly.
The first is that last year, the world crossed a rubicon: more of its people now live in cities than in rural areas. And the reality of ‘cities’ is so often another word: ‘slums’. Slums compound and compress every human challenge in health, education and the very coherence of the way people do, or don’t, live together.
The second is the threat of climate change. We see a surfeit of water in places like Bangladesh, and a lack of it in others. We see changing crop patterns, desertification, rising sea levels. We are just 1.2 degrees centigrade away, or a generation away, from profound change. For a start, the Commonwealth would see three countries – Maldives, Kiribati and Tuvalu – quite simply disappear under water.
What are the Commonwealth’s solutions to these challenges of development?
With limited resources but huge reach, we certainly don’t pretend to have them all.
In education, we stress the primacy of the quality and quantity of teachers: you can have schools, desks, blackboards, but there can be no schooling without teachers, and the world needs at least 2 million new teachers if it’s going to put all its children through primary school by 2015. Moreover, it needs to keep those teachers where they are most needed – rather than seeing them migrate towards better prospects in the developed world.
Similarly in health, we stress the primacy of the quality and quantity of health workers: we need 4 million new nurses by 2015, and again we need to manage their migration. Yes, we need cures and we need education – above all in fighting HIV/AIDS – but first and foremost we need the human resources.
It is the cruellest irony that while I say we need more teachers and health-workers, I say in the same breath that it’s they who have suffered as much as any groups from this terrible disease.
In all this, we stress that women are equal to men. It’s too easy an escape to say that half a million women a year worldwide dying in childbirth die from poor health service. No: these women die from discrimination and political neglect. Gender equality is an imperative – in health, education, business, and political life. Some countries, for instance, have pledged by law to achieve 30% of female representation in central and local government. But on average, the world only manages about 15%.
I have spoken of the challenges of human development. Inextricably linked are those of economic development.
Here, we are at a watershed. 2005 was an extraordinary year. Much of its focus was on Africa, as the only continent to have got poorer in the last decade – but its premise was the same the world over, and just as much here in parts of Asia. The rich world offered the developing world three things: more (and better managed and coordinated) aid; more debt relief; and more trade. The developing world, in turn, pledged to plan its own routes out of poverty and towards development; furthermore, it pledged itself to the good governance which has to underpin that growth.
The challenges are to turn those promises into reality.
Developed countries have delivered debt relief: we warmly salute them – indeed, the Commonwealth takes major credit, as the father of the idea of debt relief in the late 1980s.
They have delivered on some of their aid promises – we half-salute them.
They have not delivered on their promises to establish trade that is both free and fair, and for that we criticise them.
For too long, the EU, the US and Japan have ridden roughshod over developing economies and grown fat from the pickings – charging unfair tariffs, subsidising inefficient farming. It’s unacceptable. If the Commonwealth fought racial apartheid in South Africa in the 1980s, it is fighting trade apartheid now. Two years ago all 53 of our leaders – from richer and poorer nations alike – called unequivocally for the rich to give more than they take. We have lobbied tirelessly for that to be the case – supporting ACP countries in negotiating their trade agreements with Europe, and helping in their negotiations with the WTO.
Yet still there is logjam over tariffs and subsidies. And the cancer of selfishness spreads: were we not so conscious of the actions of the EU and the US protecting their agriculture, more criticism would be directed at this country for its reluctance to free up the market in industrial goods coming to and from this country.
I have long said that a trade deal which puts the interests of developing countries firmly at its centre, and then sees richer countries offering transitional arrangements and transitional assistance, is the greatest challenge of economic development that we face today.
I met WTO head Pascal Lamy in Geneva last week. He said two things: one, that he feels a world trade deal is ‘doable’. Second, that he viewed the Commonwealth as an influential champion of the case for properly managed trade as the key to unlocking economic growth – and beating poverty.
There is one other 21st century challenge I must mention – it is the challenge of managing diversity, the challenge of co-existence. India is an excellent example of a multi-religious, multi-lingual, multi-ethnic society, held together by the glue of democracy and secularism. Not that you are immune from social fissures – you do suffer from them – but by and large your leadership and your political system manage them in a mature way.
But in many parts of the world diversity has become divisive and the fault lines are becoming serious. That is why, in Malta in 2005, Commonwealth leaders asked me to explore how the Commonwealth could help to bridge divides, to promote respect and understanding across faiths and communities.
The Commonwealth Commission on Respect & Understanding is led by another distinguished son of India, Professor Amartya Sen, and will report to me later this year. Leaders will receive its recommendations in Kampala in November. It is my hope that they will get recipes for creating harmonious societies, drawing on the strengths of many Commonwealth countries.
These, ladies and gentlemen, are just some of the challenges facing ‘Democracy’ and ‘Development’ in the 21st Century.
I could talk of so many more….
…. about the need for countries to work together rather than apart, by building multilateralism
…. about the role of international organisation like the UN, the EU and ourselves as the practitioners of multilateralism
…. about the related needs (in a world of ‘big’ countries like the US, India and China) to give voice to the smaller states, so many of whom find their best platform in the Commonwealth
…. about the challenges facing our young people, so often seen to be adrift and apart
….. but time precludes, and the question and answer period awaits. I encourage you to pick me up on any of these topics: I have barely scratched the surface, and actively welcome our debate.
I leave you where I began – here in India – and I also venture slightly further afield, into this continent of Asia.
I have stated that this country is the embodiment of the modern Commonwealth – and not just because it constitutes over half of it. You represent all of its most pressing challenges, and all of its potential solutions. This country’s huge successes and its equally large challenges are encapsulated in one remarkable statistic: that while over 300 million Indian people have been lifted out of poverty in the last 20 years, a further 300 million still remain below the international ‘dollar-a-day’ poverty line. And many but not all of the 5 million people living with the HIV virus in this country are very poor.
When I look further at Commonwealth South Asia – which constitutes two-thirds of the population of the entire Commonwealth – I see the same contrasts.
Pakistan – with all its progress in social reform and political representation in recent years, but with a President who wears two hats – those of President and Chief of Army Staff – and has been requested to choose between the two.
Sri Lanka – with its firmly rooted democratic tradition, but riven by debilitating internal strife.
The Maldives – edging slowly and haltingly towards real representative democracy.
Bangladesh, from where I came here yesterday – with its impressive social indicators and trying to root out corruption, but needing to map a clear and timetabled path towards a General Election.
In each of these countries there are contradictions and challenges. Each of them must find its own solutions to them. But collectively we must shape the solutions to the common, trans-national challenges of democracy, development and diversity.
Unlike the world as seen from a 1907 perspective, we are now more globalised, more inter-dependent, more likely to be affected by developments outside our own national boundaries.
Democrats are less likely to wage war against each other. And we will not readily get into conflict with those whose economies are linked to our own.
Democracy and development must therefore remain the flagships of a 21st century Commonwealth
Thank you.
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21st Century Challenges
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