Ramphal
The following is the second and final of a speech by Sir Shridath Ramphal, Chancellor of the University of the West Indies, at the launch of the Chancellor's Forum in Kingstown, St. Vincent & the Grenadines, last month.
ONE of the distressing consequences of globalisation and of the industrialised countries' largely uncritical endorsement of its merits and promotion of it to the developing world - has been a tendency to leave it all to the market, to assume that left to itself the market, aided by the benign forces of globalisation, will promote growth and development and combat poverty and deprivation. This has allowed the rich countries to feel comfortable in diminishing their own contribution to multilateralism and to efforts to promote global development and end global poverty.
While, therefore, the changes that have contributed to globalisation have at one level strengthened the sense of one world by reducing distance and the relevance of national boundaries, globalisation has at the same time encouraged a retreat from global involvement, from global good neighbourliness the supreme contradiction and a devastating one.
The intimations that we are one human family have also been reinforced by the appearance of a growing number of issues on the global agenda, issues that affect all or many countries, issues no country - not even the richest and most powerful - can successfully tackle on its own but which require co-operative, global action. There have been many such issues: environmental issues such as global warming and damage to the ozone layer, nuclear proliferation, economic issues like instability in the world financial system, the persistence of extreme poverty and deepening economic inequalities, drug trafficking and other forms of organised crime, arms smuggling, and international terrorism, health-related problems such as AIDS/HIV, malaria and tuberculosis.
One of the consequences of increased global interaction through trade, travel and tourism has been greater exposure to infectious diseases, which have as a result themselves spread beyond the areas with which they were earlier, associated. Diseases like tuberculosis are no longer problems primarily for wretchedly poor developing countries. AIDS/HIV was once associated with swinging lifestyles in such affluent areas as California. It is now a massive challenge to the sub-Saharan Africa, to such populous countries as China and India and to our small Caribbean countries. Rich countries cannot effectively insulate themselves from the impact of these developments nor can we.
Perhaps the strongest intimations of our being part of one world have been provided by the environmental problems that human activity on earth has created over time. As I argued in the book I was privileged to write for the Earth summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, the degradation of our environment has served to drive home to us that, wherever we may live, we are citizens not only of our separate countries but also of the planet that is our common home. I called that book Our Country, The Planet.
In it I made the point; already 10 years ago, that global warming and climate change are not a distant prospect but a present reality. And it is poor countries, countries that have made little contribution to the accumulation of greenhouse gases, which are suffering the brunt of climatic disturbances caused by global warming. We know well in our region that the incidence of hurricanes has increased and the intensity of storms heightened - and many fear that worse is to come.
Guyanese have cause to be particularly concerned about the risk of rising sea levels as a consequence of global warming. In Our Country The Planet I wrote:
"Almost as large as Britain, Guyana has only 750,000 people. Most would be at risk if the sea were to rise even half a meter. The Dutch and later the British who colonised Guyana used thousands of African slaves
and Indian indentured labourers to protect low-lying land from the sea before planting the sugar that made Guyana an imperial asset. It would be a cruel twist of fate if the dilapidated seawall of Guyana's polders were now to overflow because Holland and Britain, and elsewhere in the industrialised world, the affluence to which sugar contributed introduced patterns of fossil fuel consumption that eventually caused the seas to rise in the distant Caribbean."
Global warming and other environmental problems that have assumed threatening proportions in the past century are a measure of the pressure that human beings have placed on the planet and its resources. We have come to recognise that the earth's capacity to sustain humanity as it continues to increase its consumption is not limitless but are slow to act on that recognition.
The American biologist Edward Wilson has concluded that "For every person in the world to reach present US level of consumption, we would need at least four more planet Earths." So which is it to be: One Earth or Four Planets?
Galactic fantasies apart, we have 'Only One Earth'.
FAR-REACHING STATEMENT
In 1995, an international Commission of which I was co-chairman alongside the then Prime Minister of Sweden (Ingvar Carlsson) the Commission on Global Governance produced a Report, which we called Our Global Neighbourhood. Some of you may have seen it. It was perhaps the most far-reaching statement to that time, and perhaps remains so now, of the degree to which the world's people had become members of a global community. In the Chancellor's Forum I hope I might share some of the insights of that Report - to which many of the prominent internationalists of our time contributed - and which retains its relevance in the years since it was published.
Our Global Neighbourhood spoke to many issues:
It spoke to the issue of values in the global neighbourhood; the basic respect for life, liberty, justice, equality, mutual respect; the values of caring and integrity, the need for a global civic ethic supporting the rights and responsibilities of all people, sustaining democracy and combating corruption; adapting old norms like self-determination and even sovereignty.
It spoke to the changed nature of global security, not only the security of states, but also the security of people and the security of the planet. It spoke to ending the threat to humanity by weapons of mass destruction and the urgency of demilitarising human society.
It spoke to the challenge of global economic governance, of the reality of economic interdependence between the few who are rich and the many who are poor; of the compulsion of ending poverty in the interest of all humanity; of the need for structures and institutions of a global nature that would respond to that need for economic security even as the world has tried in an earlier time to respond to the need for security in its conventional sense.
It spoke to the imperative of protecting the environment and the principles of global environmental governance.
It looked inevitably to the urgent need for reform of the United Nations system now representing 50 yeas of effort - much of it failed effort - to preserve peace in the world and enhance the social and economic condition of people worldwide.
It spoke to the strengthening of the rule of law in our global society through enforcing and promoting international law - a need as compelling globally as it is nationally.
And finally, it spoke to the need for leadership; leadership at all levels within countries, within regions and, very specially, within that wider world community.
Altogether, the Commission was endeavouring to develop a holistic vision of world society and to advance ideas for responding to the reality of that larger oneness through the evolution of a global culture, global institutions and systems; and doing so as a matter of practicality, not merely of idealism. Practically because of the degree to which global realities condition every facet of human existence within even the tiniest space of human habitation, like our Caribbean home. Hence: 'no island is an island' anymore. Have no doubt, our "Caribbean civilisation" is under threat.
INSIGHTS
The Chancellor's Forum is not designed as a platform for lectures - although it does not exclude them altogether. It is a Forum for sharing these and similar insights of our present reality: sharing visions in our need to understand the global environment that is so critical to our future and to understand the roles and responsibilities that devolve on us all to help to shape that environment in a manner comfortable to our needs and interests.
It is a Forum to sharpen our collective recognition that our future in the Caribbean will depend to a greatly enhanced degree, in virtually every aspect of our existence, on the global environment - economic, social and political - and on specific global developments in all these spheres. It is a Forum to help us develop together a broader view of our present and of the unfolding future as members of an international global community.
I have stressed to help us to develop these perceptions 'together', because the concept is that of 'a forum' - an opportunity for us to interact as members of our University community, and with others, so that there can be an opportunity for everyone to share their perceptions on all these matters.
A passing generation may hold the future in its hands; but the generation that follows, of which young people at UWI are a part, will increasingly shape the character of that future. Their views, your views, are of transcendent importance.
These are some of my ambitions for the Chancellor's Forum. I hope it will fulfil the Vice-Chancellor's expectations.
I am delighted that it is here in St. Vincent and the Grenadines that we have launched the Forum. I like to think of it as an acknowledgement of the Prime Minister's keen awareness, of our Caribbean "oneness" and of the threats to its foundations from a larger global oneness.
