• Home
• Blog
• Podcasts/RSS
• Store
• Help
• About
• Advertise
• Contact
• Pressroom
• Membership
• Speaker Directory
• Partner Directory

Joan Dempsey: Only our nation but the world is facing and we have heard about many of these problems and we have discussed over and over how difficult they are to deal with. This after noon I am hoping that we can start to talk about solutions to some of these problems and specifically we are going to talk about network governance and the need for modernizing our ways of thinking about international institutions leadership in a global globally dynamic environment where our our command and control sort of hierarchical structures may not be the best approach to dealing with some of these intractable problems. I have a truly extra ordinary panel of leaders on the stage this afternoon to start us on our discussion, of course in the center, we have former secretary of state Madeline Albright who is here to talk about the need for reemergence of American leadership on many of these issues. I also have to her right Harriet Babbitt former permanent representative of the US to the organization of American states and also she served as deputy administrator of the US agency for international development and can talk at length about how our NGOs are now playing a role in leadership and then defining issues. We also have Ambassador John Bruton, former Irish prime minister and currently the European union ambassador to the united states, Ian Forbes on my far right who is a retired admiral of the royal navy and also was representative in many international organizations and will be able to talk to us this afternoon about NATO and security issues of the future and finally last but not least on my right, Ashraf Ghani who is currently chancellor of Kabul university and chairman of the institute of state effectiveness and formerly was finance minister in Afghanistan between July 2002 and December 2004. I am going to ask the panelists to make brief opening remarks and then we will turn the discussion over to you all for questions on the topics that they address, so with that introduction, Madeline would you start us off please.

Secretary Medeleine Albright: Well thank you very much and I am delighted to be here and to be on this panel, there are so many things to talk about because I think that the international system is out of kilter and while I was known as multi lateral Madeline, I think in fact that many of the multi lateral institutions that exist are not working as they should, I was ambassador of the united nations for four years and feel very strongly about the importance of that institution but it needs very serious reform, the security council being the first issue, it just I generally talk about it as a Rubik's cube problem. When we were in office, we believed that Germany and Japan should be made permanent members of the security council by virtue of their size and economic contributions and so what happened, the first country that came to me to object to that was Italy and the Italian ambassador said, this is totally unfair, we need to be permanent members of the security council because we lost the war two which is a rather peculiar campaign slot. The other part of the Rubik's cube aspect is represented by ambassador Bruton which is that at any given time, I would go to a European ambassador and at any given time five out of the 15 members are Europeans and most of them at that stage some were in the EU, some wanted to be in the EU, so I go to an EU ambassador and I would ask for his thought and they would say I am so sorry I can't help you because the EU does not yet have a common position and then two days later I go back to the same person, I say can you help me now, he said I am so sorry, I can't help you, the EU does have a common position which means the EU should have one permanent seat but I can't visualize either great Britain or France giving up its VITO so that is a part of the Rubik's cube aspect and its only one small part of what needs to be reformed at UN. I also think that we have the wrong stack holders with in the international system and I hope that we talk about this more because the truth is that a multi national corporation of major size has more influence over the international system than and to pick a country where I hope nobody is from at the moment than Uruguay. And so the question is how an international system would have representatives from business as well as non governmental organizations as well as non as states and non-state actives but part of what I did want to talk about was the US role, I believe in the goodness of American power and I also was the person that was most identified with a phrase which actually president Clinton used first which is the indispensable nation and I continue to believe that with in the future international system that the US has to continue to be the indispensable nation but how ever indispensable always the way I define it does not mean along, indispensable actually means actively engaged in solving international issues and so I would hope that what can happen as part of the solution is that the united states sees itself one as a contributor to the re-organization of the international system, we after all were the progenitors of the UN and then a lot of the Britain was organizations and a lot of what [0:06:14] ____ talked about when he wrote presented the creation and we I think need to be a part of the recreation because no matter what I think we will continue to be the indispensable power what makes it difficult however is the numbers that just came out of the spew survey. I am the coacher of the senator Dan ford. I was I have to tell you first the chair, but the first time that the results came out from 38,000 questioners and it just came out that the US numbers were bad in fact that people didn't like us, the Wall street journal wrote we are not bad on a ad that said, of course this was bad, Madeline Albright was the chair of the pew survey, so we decided that it had to be bipartisan and this time we questioned 45,000 people in 47 countries and out of that the US unfavorable ratings are worst than they have ever been. And I just returned from Turkey and this is a sign, Turkey a NATO ally and one of the most important to me strategic friends that we can have, our unfavorably ratings now are 83 percent, nine percent like us there. That is very serious in the Ivory coast or Ivory our unfavorably ratings are only 11 but its not quite the same position as Turkey. I do think that the issue here is how as my colleagues here talk about what an international system looks like, what role will the united states take and I personally believe that even after the Iraq war, because it will end, believe me at some point, the united states is going to have to be an active part which means that our leaders are going to have to make the case very strongly that in American national interest, we are better off as partners and the indispensable nation with in some kind of a newly functioning international system. I just want to make one other point which is that the rest of the world is also going through a number of different organizational changes and a lot of questions about how the Europeans work with each other and I was just showing this chart to to ambassador Bruton, when I first came to the became secretary I hated to admit that I did not know every European organization so I asked our intelligence and research part of the department to create for me a chart that would show the European organizations. I think you can see this a little bit, it is such a combination of things that we started calling at the euro mess because of the duplication and the difficulties of creating a lot of ad hoc systems in order to deal with whatever the immediate problem was, so as we deal with these issues, I think we have to think more a long term than well certain ad hoc correlations are important that we can't just go ad hoc.

Joan Dempsey: Thank you Madeline. Harriet, one of the lessons learnt that we are already coming out of this aspen ideas festival is that we have not spend much time on Latin America or Latin American issues and certainly you may be able to speak to that in your formal role of the organization of the American states, but I also know you have great knowledge of the involvement with NGOs and so I would be very interested your perspective on how multilateral institutions can incorporate NGOs into their decision in governance processes.

Ambassador Harriet Babbit: What you all ask as to think about the multilateral organizations or multi lateral approaches to the 21st century and the the best way for me to think about that is to sort of think what's the stage and who were the actors and the diplomats were used to sit around the department of state and lament that the urgent always took the place of the important, that we are always putting out fires and never getting the important issues, the good news this is we were looking for good news, is that there is really a growing global consensus that these large multi lateral issues, these large global issues, are both urgent and important, and we have got climate change, we have terrorism, we have always these issues. I thought, I would talk a little bit about climate change, because it's been a big issue at aspen it's certainly one of the issues that multilateral organizations have, and the world is going to have to face and you know here is were we think big, start small and act now, you may think big eventually we need to have a 192 nations members of the United Nations as part of one global organization dealing with climate change. It's hard to imagine that you can sit down with a 192 nations and negotiate a complex set of issues like that and although you certainly construct a situation where would have that - say there are 15 most capable and most effective nations sit down and work at then pitched into the United Nations, they are starting small, I am going to disagree a little bit with Madeline in a sense that I am a little bit of a proponent of the starting small venue, at least to identify regional organizations or Sectoral issues, were you can get consensus or convergence more quickly, so for example the United States where this the administration has had a worse and a total failure of leadership on climate changes has been denying the science and inhibiting the progress of others on the issue. The New England states got and put together a process for a Cap and trade system and Cap on the missions, Governor Schwarzenegger in California has done the same, many number of the western states have are eager to to become part of that, on the business and NGO side and I think this is really a very interesting way of example Jeff Immelt at GE and Allen Belda at Alcoa and the folks at Duke energy have joined with, you know the world resources institute and the NRDC, the national resource of defense council to put together some thing called the United States climate action partnership, saying global climate changes real it's caused by people, it's an urgent problem, the solution is a Cap and Trade system, those kinds of things feed into building consensus, and FT had a wonderful piece yesterday on the advancing number and importance of correlations between business and NGO's, where the businesses say we can't wait for multilateral organizations to catch up, we can't even wait for our government to catch up, we have to do some thing now and push the process, so I think that's an important element, I wish the United States were in a leadership position, but we can't wait, we have got to move ahead on these issues, and these sectoral solutions are pretty good much. The another thought I would I wouldn't even and I have a lots of thoughts but I leave them for the question and answer period and that is that the institutional answers of these questions, it seems to me have worked the best when they were the most focused and worked incrementally. We are all talking now about how the post called world war two institutions aren't really serving a very well the Breton organizations to UN and others, but if you look at the EU and I am not going to talk much about the EU because we have the worlds main expert on the panel, but the EU started off as a coal and steel community, and have moved into a series of trade agreements, you know moved into a customs union and moved into a currency area, and it grew as people became more comfortable with the laws of sovereignty as the issues changed and needed to be addressed and now we and the world to look at the EU with NR as invested in the success of the EU in dealing with some of these issues, because it's a successful model with for how to put together even if not in the UN context in multilateral organizations, or you look at the WTO, the WTO started off dealing with trade and tariff issues in 1945, yet in 1995 it turned in the general agreement on trade and tariffs, it turned into the WTO, it had a, enforcement mechanism and had a much broader range of issues to deal with, so as we look at multilateral institutions for the 21st century, I think we really have to pay attention to these sort of successful model of incremental growth and focusing really on the on who the actors are bringing how to bring in the NGOs and what the state is, and the state is eventually global, but may be it's not initially global.

Joan Dempsey: Thank you Harriet, John as representative from the European Union, and certainly an organization that has reinvented itself repeatedly over the decades as Harriet noted. What's your perspective on how multilateral institutions can govern in some of these intractable problems?

Ambassador John Bruton: Well I think the strength of the European Union is that its multifunction, it has you know an energy dimension it has a dimension to do with internal mark as it is a dimension of foreign policy, it is a dimension of transferring money from richer to poorer parts of the European Union, and the factor has those multitude functions, means that it is actually able to have trade offs, somebody who may have to give some ground for the sake of an overall agreement in one area, may implicitly be compensated on another or there may be understanding that, you know a consideration will be given when we come to consider, all the topic, all the fact that you have addressed through on this. I think the problem with multilateral organizations for other countries that are not part of a group like that is that there are each treaties individual, the United States I think is partially to 600 multilateral agreements, but each one of those are free standing, so the US count if it makes a concession in one multinational organization which goes beyond what is in the US interest to do, what is good for the world as a whole, it can't be compensated within that because there isn't a sort of a networking or a sort of a mechanism, an agreed mechanism for trade offs, which the European Union is effectively. And I think that that's one of the - may be one of the contributions to thinking that EU could make at least that held in our security strategy which you adopted in 2003, which I am sure, and happening in particularly familiar with we said our goal was effective multi nationalism and this was heard as some thing very brilliant and I am not so sure whether it was or not, it was only a phrase, but I think what it probably meant is some thing like what I am saying, creating a building a series of building blocks in the world of which the EU would be one, which internally can do trade offs, who can then do trade offs in a manageable negotiation with five or six other blocks in the world, and there by create some thing that works. I think the difficulty would continue - is with continuing with a system of free standing individual multilateral agreements, where such trade offs are impossible, and were each country is negotiating individually, I think it was some thing of American that the last Eurogear congress concluded, at all I know Peter Zoller then plays well, then basically he banks with the gavel and said this is agreed, now in fact there were several people in the room who didn't agree, but they were intimidated by his personality and by the sound of the gavel and they shut up and they then ratify the thing. The same happened at the convention draft at European Union constitution that I said, history of it's own afterwards but if it wasn't for got the stamp being some times a benevolent despotism, some times just a test pass, we never have got the thing through, and I mean I all credit to I mean he drove it through and when it went through, all the governments signed up towards and did the best of the very best to get through but you know this is the trouble with a very large numbers for you require every one to agree that you know it's just going to be very very difficult to be sort again and see us in Europe all the time dealing with things has to be unanimous decision. So we need I think to move to a system of blocks based on the capacity for internal trade offs.

Joan Dempsey: Thank you John, Ian you have come from multilateral institutions from a security perspective, joy to comment on some of the challenges going forward from that angle?

Ian Forbes: Well, I am delighted to be here in Aspen, and thank you for your generous introduction, I am a retired royal navy four star admiral and I freely admit I am a long way from the sea but I am feeling pretty comfortable and also I think one of the few bricks who has been wondering around so if I can just sort of open with the personal bridge statement before I would like a few remarks, I did 39 years in the military, I worked very closely with the American military from the rank of lieutenant right the way up to four star, I think that experience apart from being very enjoyable made me a committed atlanticist, just let me give you a two vivid personal experiences, the first was the falklands any of us who would down there on the front line and I was, were absolutely convinced that we wouldn't to be prevailed on that with out US support in a shape of weapon rate and a shade of intelligence. Example one, secondly Yugoslavia when I was involved for one reason or another in the policy end on the ground in Seriove and then running the battle group of Kosovo when Miss Albright was Secretary of State. And I experienced I think first hand through out that process, the strength and the influence of what I would call the American power, and so I am just start off with a great believer in affective, and I think I am going to play their as Madeline's goodness of American leadership, and the necessity always in tackling global problems, I left Hethrow three days ago, and it's been raining in UK for about two and a half weeks, and we had unprecedented flooding for a summer in the North of England, and we have also had a bomb in well it didn't go off so we had a bomb in Glasgow and we also had a bomb in London, and when I go to terminal four, every thing stopped because we have another bomb scare and every ones was off the plane and so we came a grinding halt day light in arriving, one of these events had had a chaotic effect on travel, and the economy, tourism, public confidence etcetera. So when I was reflecting all these in the plan, this you know a little bit of climate change in fact, a little bit of domestic terrorism, conferencing a government machinery at some stretch, a new government incidentally in tend and it really struck me the network governance an interesting term and our ability to coordinate collective efforts domestically and internationally was a very much one of the significant challenges at the moment. My field is clearly security in defense, my particular experience is as John said NATO, and its this organization, I just want to make a few brief comments about and they just had a very lively, 15 years and it's I sort of capture it in the term which has been chasing a rationale in a very fast moving security setting, until we slightly lagging it, when he has done rather well, from article five and operations that standard defense to peace keeping in Bosnia, we had a peace enforcement in course of it. To peace enforcement and support and stabilization operations in Afghanistan, and it's moved very rapidly and changing it self to adopt to cop with all these new external geo political drivers who have taken it really beyond its original comfort zone which was nice static operations with static forces and a robust static culture. But in reality it probably hasn't been able to move as far as it wanted to, internally not withstanding new missions, new capabilities, and new members it is I think it is probably fair to say being tested to the limit, because the decision to go out of area, a significant decision, make it in made in Iceland when I was in the room, when it was made, as I believe general Powel was as well. To move beyond NATO's previous borders was absolutely an amend decision, and the consequences were significant, you know if you were in a commercial business, it was like taking a domestic business suddenly offshore and international, and we did it in a stroke, we didn't do it with any pre prior preparation, so what is playing on the back of that? The Afghan mission is a real test, and NATO feruled a good reasons Afghanistan really cannot afford afford to full shot on this test, because failure there, I believe would have very profound consequences obviously not only for Afghanistan but for NATO as well, probably more profound than un profound and for the United Nations. So this has been a learning process for NATO and we are trying hard to catch up, and I wouldn't I am trying to give you any false impressions just not quite a struggle. And there was some big lessons, there has been a gap I think between what I will call the rhetoric of nations, signing up to missions and the reality as being prepared to resource them, there has been a failure on occasion of fourth generation providing the right numbers to get on the right mission and we have in areas full ensured, I have seen the secretary general going from nation to nation and his various delegations looking for one and two helicopters from nations, now this is this is strictly not you know effective fourth generation, and there has been a tendency once forces are in theatre, in terms of rules of engagement to place cheviots on respective national contingence and what this means is that the the nation will sign up to providing a contingence to go on the deployment but then it limits it to the missions that it might be able to undertake, now clearly this is extra ordinarily difficult for force cohesion, it's extra ordinarily difficult for force commanders to have configure his force and it really isn't particularly intelligent for missions success. There are lots of others, but I went to one of them, there is a internal problems that I think and the alliance is having to deal with and progress is being made, and there is a bigger issue, and I think we have sewed to touch on it for the other panelists so that's an external one, but in today's complexity in the failing state scenario or in security issues generally and the problems are not solved by the use of military force alone a general Powel I think might have mentioned this yesterday, it is a tool, but it is a relatively blunt one. In Afghanistan for instance the collective leavers of international power I think probably and I am sure we talked to Powel this morning and I went I went to a state of thunder but the military track under NATO is going one speed and the other tracks political, diplomatic, economic reconstruction, are going at another and clearly from a strategic overview point of view, this is not intelligent and the words, strategic failure, you know it's sort of walked around the out field, and that that's sense relatively well. So that's really one element associated with this this is the fact that the coordination between global institutions in the security context, the UN, NATO the EU, the world bank etcetera, and what I would term strategic level it's patchy, I were go any further and that's pretty patchy. In some cases I mean as [0:25:40] ____ non existent and the upshot is that we then got a less sensible division of labor, when we go into these particular scenarios, and a less sensible common approach, and looking at the threats in the security field that we touched on, here are the last two to three days, and it's it's we have to really make progress here and it's a big issue, and we don't appear to have a global security form of market rendering our intervention models some two decades after we first went in terms of Bosnia rending them as any thing less than inefficient, perhaps we need some thing, representatives seems that with all of that lessons of intervention over last 15 years, which many of these in this room have learnt, we remain less in capable of forging institutional relationships between our primary security providers with the speed that we should, we have to find ways for improving this, and I think may be this is an area where the private sector, looking at this very critically may well be able to help. I am very conscious about my five minutes this picture has been some more gloomy, it wasn't meant to be but we are here to look at the problems after all. How ever let me finish on a hind note, when despairing a little bit about the road ahead, a glance in the rear view mirror to see how NATO, how far its come as it was rather heartening just let me give you three, we will know them but there it was rehearsing in a forum like this, stability in Bosnia, the most successful post complete mission of the modern era, and NATO was in the heart of that, the politics state in NATO unthinkable a decade ago, and NATO was at the heart of that and last I name it these German military force on the ground in Afghanistan [0:27:16] ____ did, so that is much that we have to do, we are doing a lot and but that does remain an often lot more to do thank you very much.

Joan Dempsey: Ian thank you, Ashraf you come with this from slightly different perspective and you have been involved obviously over the last five or six years in rebuilding a country and in dealing with multilateral institutions from a different perspective. Could you please share with us some of the challenges you see and what you think the way ahead could be?

Ashraf Ghani: Thank you, it's a pleasure to be here, the first thing is about governance, in 1965 was the first use of the term, to mark the shift from administration as a hierarchical phenomenon and for management, as a hierarchical phenomenon within the corporation because it was top down to lateral, so the key issue really here is about shift to share decision making processes, not hierarchical domination, and not surprisingly the word came from the university, the word governance was first used in relationship with universities, now if we look into globalization, what is it done to us? It's a simultaneous it's a spontaneous process, that is of human making but not of human design, so it's out stripping our institutions, it's posing challenges for which the institutions that we know were not prepared. That the problem is that we approach the problems from the mental models of the past, not in relationship to the challenges that our present and are going to confront this in the future, because our mental perspectives are defined from the perspective of interests with which we have been raised, not the realities or that are going to forces us to confront the nature of our interests in different ways, one of the most difficult things for dominant powers has been the question of succession, will they think in orderly ways about succession? What were that - their dominant position is different than the world that they began with, Great Britain at enormous difficulty making that transition during the first wave of globalization and hence we got the crisis, the second point to be made about we don't have global institutions today, we only have international institutions, nations as nation states are the operating members of these and again as secretarial so eloquently said, the corporation is not present in these decisions and the reason is very simple. The economy, the world of 1945 was national in economic terms, was national in political terms, national in cultural terms, hence a lot of restrictions on flow of money, money was tightly controlled, this world that we live in is a world of flows, and those organizations have great deal of difficulty. Now to frame the point both about in two way, one, these organizations UN, the world bank IMF the whole is listen at some of the points, because they operate in silos, those silos may have been justified particularly prior to 2001, up to yes, 9/11, but after the world of 9/11, you cannot have compartmentalization into security development and monetary policy, then the organizational culture of each has become distinct, the UN is never been needed more, that is least capability to govern it self, and least resource to do the task that the international community requires of it. It's chapter is a major asset, today I don't think we would be able to secure in agreement on a chapter of that breath of vision but the organizational management day to day is really a problem, Dean Atchison again secretary Albright mentioned make sure that the world bank had a mandate that its management could do, and has what - what ever they pleased. But the problem is that the flow of financial resources has made money to the least of the problems, that is not this world is not facing shortage of money, it is facing the institutional agenda for management of that money, and the bank has a problem doing this. The IMF lost its credibility in 1998, again an organization that is very much like a priesthood incredibly competent that they may have much been trained by just words and their approach rational cardigan but when that medicine did not fit the world of 1998, now they face a crisis, because of this, I think we need for reform becomes fundamental, under one hand to built on the capabilities that exist, but on the other hand to bring them to under poor governments, and this network governance today in cases like Afghanistan cannot be done with out the corporation in the civil societies, we need to understand that international organizations on the one link in that chain, until the reform, this reform is not going to be radical under the current context. Each organization presents different possibilities, but - and the discussion is not taking place, except and for us like the Aspen festival. Why because most of those other discussions are about hierarchies, people, governments take positions that are about their interests rather than about a project of collective imagination and what we need to be I think is a project of collective imagination of the same magnitude, as the 1945 project, and 1945 as Dean [0:32:38] ____ again said, he felt present in creation because half how to make the half the word, free and democratic with out blowing the horn, today our task surely is to how to think, about the entire process of the world, the reason is very simple two fold, one threats of global as as how Disso Brightly said second the criminalized networks are the most efficient in today's world, network governance is best demonstrated among criminalized networks, and in places like Afghanistan, security is most threatened by those criminalized networks, because they have flexibility, they have resources, and they have precision, and to move NATO or the world bank or the UN to cope with the challenge of that time, really requires imagination and leadership, and that what we need.

Joan Dempsey: That's a great conclusion, I think what we would like to do now is open the panel up to questions from the audience, if you have questions please go to the mikes on either side and as you do that I would like to ask a general question of the panel, how do we began that necessary reform?, how do we bring into network governance all of the players who have a stake in the issues? How do we reassert a certain leadership at all levels as part of this process and after you finish answering that that may be we can go on to atomic fusion or fission or whatever secretary Albright, would you like to start?