Govts must tackle rapid global changes together: Tony Blair
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POLICYMAKERS must live and cope with two key issues today: the large scale and fast pace of change; and global inter-dependence, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair said yesterday.
There is no escape from them, he said at a public lecture in Singapore hosted by The Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore (NUS).
‘The point is you may be reluctant to globalise, but you live in a globalised world, like it or not,’ Mr Blair said in his lecture entitled ‘The Crisis in Global Governance: Challenges and Solutions’.
For Mr Blair, who was Britain’s prime minister from 1997 to 2007, global inter-dependence was brought home starkly by the 1997 Asian crisis and the Kosovo war in 1999.
He said it became clear to him that if nothing was done to deal with these seemingly distant problems, they would have spread to Britain and the rest of the world.
Mr Blair listed economic growth, terrorism, climate change, energy policy, immigration and Africa as the key challenges today that will have a global impact.
Terrorism, according to him, is a reaction against globalisation staged by religious extremists.
Mr Blair indicated that he has a personal interest in Africa on moral grounds. But he said that the tragedy of this resource-rich continent - its poverty, deaths and conflicts - will come to haunt the rest of the world if the situation there is left to persist.
Global challenges require global solutions - which means no one government, including the US, can go it alone in tackling them, Mr Blair said.
Yet multilateral bodies like the G8 and the United Nations are not strong or adequate enough to act on global problems, he said. China, India and many other emerging economies, for instant, are not represented in the G8.
Mr Blair said that the multilateral organisations need reforming. Strong alliances must also be built up. The US and Europe must engage China and other emerging powers.
At the same time, civic societies need to be empowered and involved in many of the global issues, especially in dealing with terrorism, Mr Blair said.
Multi-lateralism is not an idealism we strive for, he said. It is ‘hard-headed realism’ that must be embraced.
And to ensure multi-lateralism works, Mr Blair said that it must have a set of unifying values. He has in mind not just values like democracy. There must also be justice and fairness, according to him.
Filed by Amadeus Domaradzki under Other, Development, Climate Change, Terrorism, United Nations Reform