The 21st century world

The meeting had three components. The first component was a series of presentations given to us by experts in the five designated areas of focus: health, environment, global governance, poverty and development, and education. The first day we were also treated to a powerful lecture by Professor Hans Rosling from the Karolinska Institute (Sweden) on historical trends and what they can tell us about the future.

The second component was workshops, in which we tried to isolate the key problems in each of the designated fields and brainstorm possible solutions, and panel discussions and question and answer sessions, where we got to both pick the brains of the experts present as well as voice our own ideas.

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Finally, there were sessions in which we discussed the organisational and operational structure of the forum and how we should proceed in the coming years.

The first thing I noticed about the summit was similar to what I had noticed when I attended the World Economic Forum annual meeting at Davos in January.

In the US, where I have spent most of my adult life, there is still a big debate as to the responsibility individuals bear towards one another and the appropriate role of the state in solving society's problems. There are many conservatives who believe that the good society is one in which each person acts solely in his or her own self interest, and that this understanding should be the basis for public policy and private endeavour, and that we do not have any responsibility, either individually or collectively, to one another, or to help remedy the ills and injustices of society at large.

I remain astonished that a view which is so transparently and self-evidently incorrect should retain such currency, but that is an argument that can wait for another day.

The interesting thing was that at Zermatt this point of view was dismissed out of hand without discussion. The basic premise of our all being there and addressing the issues we were addressing was that there is such a thing as the global community, and as such, we all have a collective responsibility to bring about change for the better.

Thus, diseases such as Aids and malaria which kill over a million people a year are not just the problem of the stricken countries, but of all of us. The same understanding goes for issues of poverty and development in the third world.

Such an understanding is specially crucial to addressing the issue of the environment, as the environment is the pre-eminent issue requiring a transnational solution, due to the fact that climate change does affect all of us (though some more than others) in a way that, say, malaria might not.

The basic premise behind the forum is that the continued existence of extreme poverty and ill health are moral obscenities in a time of such widespread global prosperity, and that we have a duty as a global community to rectify this.

This understanding gets to the heart of what we at the summit determined was the real dilemma that the world is facing today.

One can argue that the 20th century was the century which saw the concept of the common good and the government's responsibility to its citizens first assert itself with muscularity at the national level, and that the principle struggle of the 20th century was the struggle between conceptions of national interest and narrow self-interest.

The pre-eminence of the idea of the national interest is what helped build the nation states and laid the foundation for concepts such as unemployment insurance and social security and nationalised health. Of course there is still much debate over these issues (specially in the US), but by and large, the 20th century saw the establishment of the social welfare model for the modern state, and the triumph of the idea that the individual good should be subordinated to the common good.

In the 21st century, the problem will be how to view things from a perspective of the transnational common good, and the struggle will be the struggle to convince people to substitute the global good for narrow national self-interest.

The principle road-block to this understanding in the world today is the Bush administration. President Bush is on record as saying that he didn't sign the Kyoto Protocol because it would have wrecked the American economy.

One, it would have done no such thing (certainly it would have done less harm than his economic policies). What Bush considers wreckage (perhaps one or two percentage points of GDP growth), would still leave the American economy the envy of the world.

But more importantly, Bush's words show that he is not yet willing to subordinate American self-interest to the greater good of the world at large. Kyoto would have required all industrialised countries to sacrifice, but with the exception of the US and Australia, all others were willing to do is in the interests of the common global good.

Bush recently reiterated this point in an interview ahead of the G-8 summit when asked about aid to Africa. He would act in what he perceives to be the interests of the US. Period.

Right now that is more or less how most countries feel to some extent. The US is not the only offender in this respect. European agricultural subsidies that contribute to the continued impoverishment of farmers in the developing world are a case in point.

Global governance was one of the key issues for discussion at Zermatt. Harvard Professor Joseph Nye gave us a presentation on the subject, after which I spoke as a designated challenger.

The difficulty, as I saw it, was how to develop rules for global governance and global institutions that are fair to all, and do not merely reflect the superior bargaining power of the industrialised world. The debacle at the WTO summit in Cancun in 2003 shows that we still have a long way to go.

The impasse over the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty is another problem, the roots of which are the nuclear powers' insistence on acting in their own self-interest at the expense of the global good. Not coincidentally, the US is once again the most recalcitrant.

This is the fundamental problem in the world today. The US -- or, more precisely, the Bush administration -- is driving world affairs. The Bush administration does not believe in a multilateral world order. It does not believe in the concept of the common global good. It believes in acting solely in its own self-interest. It should thus not be surprised when other countries such as Iran or North Korea do the same.

If the most powerful country in the world is concerned only with looking out for number one, then you can bet that the rest of the world will follow suit.

But as I said at the start of this piece, the good thing about the forum is that it is committed to this vision of a world of interdependence and shared responsibility.

And this to me is our central challenge.

In each country there are those who look at things through the prism of narrow national self-interest. Indeed, some would consider it treason to do otherwise.

But even as markets have been globalised, what is lagging behind is our sense of global community. The sense that we are all in this together. The sense that the life and livelihood and health of people in far-off lands are important things for us to be concerned about. The sense that we should look beyond our narrow national self-interest to the global good.

This is my hope for the forum. We aren't going to solve the problems of the world. But if we can somehow, in each of our countries, promote this agenda, and help push the world to a recognition of our collective responsibility for our shared destiny, I feel we will have performed a worthwhile service.

Zafar Sobhan is Assistant Editor of The Daily Star.