UN Chronicle | NGOWatch: Soft Power Approach

NGOWatch: Soft Power Approach

Biography

Michel Rocard, Co-President of the recently established International Ethical, Political and Scientific Collegium and Chairman of the Administrative Board of the Association for the Collegium, is a former Prime Minister of France and currently Chairman of the Commission for Culture, Education and Media at the European Parliament.

He spoke on the telephone with Russell Taylor of the UN Chronicle.

Article

What are the aims of the Association for the International Ethical, Political and Scientific Collegium?

The initiative for the creation of the Collegium was launched in New York in February 2002 by a group of statesmen and academics inspired by the intellectual and moral leadership of President Milan Kucan of Slovenia and by the aspirations formulated in the Millennium message by United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan. We share this deep concern for the deterioration of the planet, the loss of ecological balance, deforestation and climatic changes, which profoundly affect our daily lives, as well as the lack of effective remedies to pandemics, such as AIDS and malaria. We felt the need to overcome the scandalous discrepancies in the access to basic public goods by separate members of the human family, resulting in new forms of violence, warfare and terrorism. A new effort is obviously called for to improve the quality of world governance, which can be initiated by a collective body of philosophers, economists, sociologists and biologists, as well as of present and former heads of Government who have shown a high degree of democratic efficiency and command respect.

Thus constituted, the Collegium intends to take up specific challenges and present recommendations or advice on actions to be taken to improve world governance. Our appeal has already been signed by some seventy personalities from all parts of the world who share the conviction that the Collegium can be an instrument of a new ambitious vision of the future. As you see, this is a "soft power", and not a "hard power", approach. The recommendations arrived at by the Collegium would not be binding for an body- they would just remain recommendations.

Globalization is a fact. Whether it touches economics, the world's financial regulations or the environment, it is nonsense to refuse globalization—it is here to stay. But the problem lies in making it respond to the basic needs and the human rights of the world's citizens. This will be one of the main objectives that the Collegium will pursue—turning global interdependence into an instrument for the well-being of humanity, not for the dominance of the rich and the powerful.

How do you see the Collegium working with the United Nations?

The Secretary-General will be the first and foremost, but not the only recipient of the Collegium's recommendations or pronouncements. In turn, the Collegium should be capable of answering questions formulated by the United Nations, such as appropriate measures to restrain and reduce the AIDS epidemic, measures to control climatic change, and point out emergencies in one or the other area. What, in fact, we do hope and expect is that the legitimacy and moral authority of the Collegium will prompt the Secretary-General to request from us ad hoc recommendations.

In June, Mr. Annan and I spoke about this initiative and how he would consider it. He was very encouraging and shared our conviction, first expressed by President Kucan, that the combination of statesmen and thinkers can be a trump card for the clarification needed to promote a higher quality of world governance.

Collegium Members—all distinguished—were selected at an October meeting in Slovenia. What else came out of that meeting?

The main result was the drafting of a Declaration of Interdependence, underlining the need to turn interdependence as a fact into interdependence as a goal to be achieved in the course of the century, namely an interdependence of the rights and needs of all the inhabitants of our planet. Once it is formally accepted by all members of the Collegium, we intend to give the widest possible publicity to this Declaration, and this will take place on 26 February 2003 at UN Headquarters in New York. Later, on 2 April, the Collegium will meet in Brussels at the European Union Headquarters, and again on 1 June in Geneva on the occasion of the next G-8 Summit session in France.

That seems to be a very ambitious programme

And a badly needed one. We are not too optimistic on the prognosis of formal reforms at the United Nations. We think that it will take time to attain more efficiency at the Security Council, less paralysis on account of vetoes, and a better authority for the Economic and Social Council. But no time must be lost. Research is needed urgently. Before its results can be turned into mandates and formal institutional decisions, a voice must be heard, drawing ethical authority from the unquestionable faith of all members of the Collegium on the needed safeguard of our planet and of humankind.

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