The 2011 WS-20 Declaration
Here is the complete text of the 2011 WS-20 Declaration. Document is also available in .pdf format.
THE WORLDSHIFT 20 DECLARATION
Issued by the Worldshift 20 Council on the 5th of November, 2011
PREAMBLE
Recent Declarations issuing from the annual Summits of the G20 read like emergency reports of Ministers of Trade and Finance rather than the deliberations on the wellbeing of the people of the world by the heads of government of the world’s twenty politically and financially powerful nations.
The final communiqué of the 2011 meeting of the G20 in Cannes repeats this pattern. The G20 headlines its Declaration with the statement that its concern is with our common future, and its aim is to undertake renewed collective action for the benefit of all. The Declaration notes that global recovery has weakened leaving unemployment at unacceptable levels, and it identifies as the reason for this weakening tensions in financial markets, vulnerabilities in emerging markets, increased commodity prices, and exchange rate volatility. It responds by reaffirming its commitment to reinvigorate economic growth, create jobs, ensure financial stability, promote social inclusion and make globalization serve the needs of the people. Environmental protection, green energy, sustainable development and climate change are given brief mention toward the end.
The G20’s assessment of the world’s problems is one-sided, and its proposed remedies are short-term and ultimately ineffective. The twenty heads of richest states perceive the world as an economic system and assess its imbalances in economic terms. They do not recognize that the world today is deeply fragmented, full of mistrust and antagonisms, with growing gaps between rich and poor, and Western-style monetized societies and traditional cultures living by alternative values. They have no awareness of the deepening disconnect between human life, especially in big cities, and the rhythms and balances of the Earth’s life-sustaining ecosystems.
The human system is more than an economic and financial system, and reestablishing its balance calls for more than economic and financial measures: it calls for the fundamental transformation of the world’s economic political, and social systems. Measures that fall short of this objective are not more than fixes that introduce some measure of stability in the short term but lead to recurring and progressively worsening instability in the long. The requirement is for an embracing view of the problems of the world, and a global and humanistic set of recommendations for coping with them.
The WorldShift 20 Council offers its alternative to the G20 Declaration in order to call attention to shortcomings in the philosophy of the G20 and introduce a more appropriate holistic and humanistic perspective.
THE 2011 WORLDSHIFT 20 DECLARATION
1. Elements of the global crisis
There are a number of major elements of the global crisis requiring urgent action including:
1.1 Financial instability
The current global monetary and financial system is innately dysfunctional on an unprecedented scale; it is approaching a breakdown. Although the on-going crisis is the biggest since the 1930s, it certainly is not the first and without fundamental reform and re-setting it will not be the last. The IMF has identified 145 banking crises, 208 monetary crashes and 72 sovereign debt crises between 1970 and 2010, crises that have repeatedly affected three-quarters of the 187 IMF member countries. These crises feedback to exacerbate each other. A banking crisis can lead to sovereign debt problem (e.g. Ireland), a sovereign debt problem to a monetary crisis (e.g. Greece); and a monetary crisis to a banking problem. Increasing globalization of markets have also become progressively destabilized and dangerously volatile by the lack of effective regulation, over leveraged financing, exponential increases in speculation and hyper-speed transactions.
Until now, governments have kept borrowing from the financial system to bail out banks. They have been tinkering at the margins with regulations, but without any meaningful reform or touching the monetary structure itself. How many crises do we need to experience, or indeed are able to withstand, before systemic problems are addressed with systemic solutions?
1.2 Climate change
Unless decisive measures are taken, the climate changes produced by global warming will come together with such profound synergies that no human power will be sufficient to retain them. They will inexorably synergize in spontaneous interactions and disastrous effect. By the end of the 21st Century, a considerable percentage of the human species may perish due to climate-induced catastrophes, epidemics of diseases sweeping into new terrains, and human conflict and war resulting from the most massive migration of peoples in human history, with hundreds of millions, even billions of climatic refugees moving across the continents. These scientific predictions merit the most sober consideration and urgent large-scale actions.
The year 2011 has seen the most significant melting of the Polar region ice caps since the “perfect storm” of atmospheric and ocean conditions in the year 2007. Ice extent for September 2011 was the second lowest in the satellite record for the month. The last five years (2007 to 2011) have had the five lowest September extents in the satellite record. The linear rate of decline is now -84,700 square kilometers (-32,700 square miles) per year, or -12% per decade relative to the 1979 to 2000 average.
1.3 Nuclear weapons
The abolition of nuclear weapons, in turn, is no longer merely a lofty goal and noble aspiration: it is essential for human survival. Peace is impossible as long as the threat of nuclear war hangs over our heads. A Nuclear Weapons Convention prohibiting the production as well as the use of all nuclear weapons in all circumstances is urgently needed. In a democratic world, such a Convention must be constructed by awakening the public to the threat of maintaining vast arsenals of weapons that could destroy all life on Earth. Such an awakening is already in progress.
In 21 countries, including the five major nuclear powers, polls show that 76 percent of people support negotiation of a treaty banning all nuclear weapons. But powerful military-industrial complexes are trading on the fear that has been purposively foisted on the public. An impartial debate on the subject is almost impossible, and in consequence it is difficult to bring about the consensus needed to initiate democratic measures that could eliminate the nuclear ‘Sword of Damocles’ hanging over our heads.
1.4 Population growth
In the year 1911, the world population was approximately 1.8 billion. In 2011 it has reached 7 billion an increase of almost 400% in just 100 years. The United Nations predicted that World Population could reach 10 billion by 2100, even if the birthrate in all countries slows over time to a replacement level. More than 95 per cent of the future population increase will come from less developed countries (defined as all countries except the U.S.A., Canada, Europe, Japan, Australia and New Zealand) where the populations are overwhelmingly young.
2. Urgent steps
2.1 Re-Orientation in the Public Sector
Governments must work together and on behalf of all their people, rather than represent the elite financial and corporate interests that brought global society to the edge of breakdown. A thorough transformation of current structures and practices is required, country by country and community by community, based on the positive change movements now arising worldwide. The dysfunctional institutions of the United Nations, IMF and World Bank need fundamental and urgent reform to enable them to fulfill the globally representative roles they were originally set up to achieve.
There is an urgent need for a new social function based on partnership between Governments, NGO’s and civil society to connect and communicate ‘breakthroughs’ wherever they occur. It is to scan for and connect positive developments the world over and enhance social synergy and cooperation among cultures and peoples in the world,
2.2 Reform of the global financial system
We are not in a period of ‘delayed recovery’ as U.S. and European leaders maintain. Instead we are in imminent threat of a tipping point into a catastrophic breakdown of the entire system. The G-20 agenda at this critical moment must be urgently and radically reframed to acknowledge and deal with this larger and unavoidable reality.
Just before an irrevocable tipping point, complex systems move through a short period of rapid fluctuations and a critical slow down. This is currently happening in the world financial system. The current responses to this process are utterly inadequate to deal with the process. We are at a point where attempts to mollify or moderate the ravaging of the global economy is like trying to placate a virus whose infection is destroying its host.
In 2007 and 2008 in the United States and currently in Europe, bailouts benefit banks and financiers at the cost of the vast majority of the people. Efforts to rebalance and reform the current system have failed and will continue to fail. Only a fundamental transformation of the dominant structures and institutions of the financial system can avert a continuing series of deepening crises.
2.3 Institutional reform
It is time to properly fund and empower the United Nations System. The General Assembly should have in accordance with its Charter a representation of civil society in its composition (50% of States and 50% of institutions and regional representations of the various communities). Global governance needs to be guided by democratic principles in a fundamentally reformed IFM and World Bank, as well as in the WTO. Membership of the Security Council should be overhauled and two more high-level globally representative Councils should be added: an Environmental Security Council, and a Social-Economic Security Council.
2.4 Economic reform
Capital is a means to that end, not an end in itself. Capital must be protected as other property rights, but not in derogation of adverse impacts on the rights of individual people and biological systems that have existential value beyond the market.
New economic measures must be established which incorporate the health of the environment as well as of people as part of the social bargain of society conceived as a limited liability entity. There must be a proper valuation of the natural world independent of human interests at all levels of wealth measurement. National sovereignty must be balanced with universal norms and values based on principles of harmony with nature, identification of shared interests amongst states, justice, and the rule of law.
The pressing issues of our time include moving toward a post-carbon economy to reduce the risk of climate change; dealing with the financial consequences of an aging society; and reducing joblessness and poverty. Each of these challenges could be addressed with monetary innovations that would provide the diversity that is needed to stabilize the global monetary system. It is within the power of governments to choose what media they demand in payment of taxes, and thereby what kind of effort they require from their citizens. By demanding exclusively bank-debt money, governments give away most of their power to resolve the current problems.
Rethinking the design assumptions of the regulatory framework of capital markets and rebuilding trust is a further priority. Principles to be urgently implemented include:
- democratizing finance and widening the debate on reform by including all stakeholders and all qualified groups advocating effective re-structuring;
- re-framing finance as a global commons;
- a commons approach where markets, as tools, are designed to allocate indivisible “non-rival” public goods and infrastructures for equitable access to resources and to opportunities for development;
- energy solutions that draw on abundant, non-polluting, renewable energy.
In order that financial markets become just, equitable, stable and sustainable, there is an urgent need to shift to a mature “invisible” form of capitalism. This means shifting:
- from a global economy of speculation, delocalization of production and war ($4 billion dollars per day on armaments while more than 30,000 human beings die of hunger), to an economy for global sustainable development;
- from an operational economy based on the concept of mechanical systems to a complexity economy based on living systems;
- from a knowledge economy based on visible capital to an empathy economy based on invisible capital generated by trust among people with an awareness of invisible “trade-offs” between present and future generations;
- from a monetary economy to a voluntary economy;
- from a beneficiary economy to a participatory economy serving the real needs of people;
- from the illusion of an unlimited growth economy to a shared global environmental economy.
3. The need for globally conscious leadership
In international meetings leaders remain the prisoner of ‘silo thinking’. Negotiators from leading economies build upon narrowly specialized agendas inherited from the past. In the name of creating more economic growth as formulated and measured by GDP, they exacerbate inequality and resource depletion the world over.
This mode of thinking is dominant in the G20 Summits. The G20 leaders represent some two-thirds of the people of Earth and yet they remain in thrall to elite interests, lagging behind the search for justice and sustainable well-being that is already sweeping through civil society. To safeguard the Earth and our common future we do not need politicians who offer solutions from the same mindset that created the problems.
There is no progress as yet towards fundamental systemic change. System-wide collapse cannot either be wished away or ignored. Current global systems of economics, governance, societal organization and ecological relations between humanity and nature must be urgently re-designed based on values and principles that provide peace and long-term sustainability. The ‘window of opportunity’ to begin a large-scale transformation may only remain open for a few years.
There is no longer any time to waste if humanity is to endure and prosper on this planet. Globally conscious leadership is called for by those in positions of decision-taking at every level of every society. The G20 leaders need to ask a paramount question: “What good is it to be rich in a sick world?” Having done the most to increase their wealth at the expense of a depleted planet, the leaders of the industrialized countries need to focus on bringing about a balanced and sustainable system for all the people of the world.
THE BOTTOM LINE
Argentina yesterday, Greece today—Italy and Spain tomorrow, Serbia, Poland and Hungary the day after? Sub-prime crisis yesterday, banking crisis today, major-power default tomorrow? The economic, financial and political systems that dominate the world are fundamentally flawed. Global economic and financial instability is an indication of a structural malady. Band-aid solutions applied to the symptoms of this malady are not enough. The malady itself needs to be addressed.
THE WS20 RECOMMENDATION
The G20 leaders need to appoint an independent body to examine the structural causes of instability in the world and recommend effective approaches to cope with it. This body is not to represent the governments of the G20 and is not to report uniquely to the governments. It is to be composed of ethical individuals who serve in their own capacity and represent the basic human interest: the interest of every woman, man and child on the planet. They are to report directly to the people, enlisting the cooperation of the world’s foresighted and ethical media.
In a democracy it is the people who lead, and in a global democracy it is all the world’s people who must lead. The world’s people have woken up: they are ready. They are divesting themselves of dictatorships and hierarchies, they are raising their voice and forming networks and alliances through throughout the globe. They know that the world is reaching a watershed, and that the year 2012 will be decisive to deconstruct the old and launch the new.
The malady is real, but the cure exists, individuals who have the integrity and the wisdom to identify the cure exist, and the people are ready to respond and take the lead. The leaders of the G20 could be the catalyst of an urgently needed worldshift. This would be in the leaders’ own interest. A tidal wave of change is coming, and leaders either enable the people to ride its crest or will be swept aside.
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THE G20 AND THE WS20: TWO DECLARATIONS BUT ONE WORLD
Which World is the Real World?
AN AFTERWORD BY THE WS20 CONVENER
A review of the G20 Cannes Declaration and the parallel WS20 Declaration gives the impression that there are two different worlds. The world of the G20 is one where the problem is economic instability and financial insecurity, and the remedy is to re-stabilize the economy and overcome the financial crisis. The world of the WS20 Declaration is a world where seven billion people share a small and highly exploited planet and face the urgent need to share it cooperatively, peacefully, and sustainably.
In the WS20 world economic and financial issues are not the real problem: they are manifestations and consequences of the real problem. The real problem is the way the social, political, economic, financial, and cultural system of this planet evolved in the last several decades. This is a multidimensional system that has come to be unilaterally dominated by the economy. In the dominant feature of the system the function of money is to make money, and without money fulfilling this function the system collapses: its persistence depends essentially on accumulating wealth for a powerful minority. However, the continued concentration of wealth entails the progressive marginalization of the majority, and the progressive overexploitation of natural resources and degeneration of the environment.
The growth required for the viability of the system has an endemic problem: it generates social and cultural crises, catalyzes political upheavals—and produces economic instability and financial crises. Concentrating on the latter is like trying to cure the symptom while leaving the malady out of account. Yet this is precisely what the leaders of the twenty richest and most powerful countries of the world propose to do.
The G20’s approach is at best a band-aid covering a festering wound. It will not work even in the medium-term; at the most it will postpone the onset of one or another crisis. But if the processes the trigger the crises continue unchecked, the next crisis will be greater and less amenable to temporary fixes.
For this reason the WS20 recommends that the G20 appoint an independent body composed of ethical and insightful individuals to examine the root causes of the problem and recommend effective measure for coping with it. The Independent Advisory Council (IAC) would make its findings available to the G20 at its 2012 Mexico Summit, and the G20 would place the review of the findings on the Summit’s agenda. The Independent Advisory Council’s findings would be made available to the general public, since in the final count in a democracy it is the people who are to lead. Through the IAC the WS20 intends to provide the information the people need to lead wisely and effectively.
In the WS20’s view if real progress is to be made toward building a peaceful, equitable, and sustainable world, there is no alternative to this approach.
(Ervin Laszlo, November 8, 2011)
The WorldShift 20 Council
The Worldshift 20 Council seeks to articulate and amplify the collective voice of humanity, representing the shared human interest. The Council is composed of twenty prominent global citizens from diverse cultures and economies worldwide. Its mission is to give urgent attention to the emerging condition of the world and provide essential orientation so that informed, non-violent movements toward a diverse, peaceful and sustainable global society can be strengthened and sustained.
The Council aims to shift the attention of the global public and media from the increasingly intractable problems and deepening crises of our deteriorating world to the opportunities and vistas of a world where seven billion human beings can live in peace, prosperity and justice, in harmony with each other and with nature.
Members
Deepak Chopra (USA/India)
Jude Currivan (UK)
James Garrison (USA)
Jonathan Granoff (USA)
Hazel Henderson (USA)
Jean Houston (USA)
Barbara Marx Hubbard (USA)
Min Jiayin (China)
Ervin Laszlo (Hungary/Italy)
Bernard Lietaer (Belgium)
Federico Mayor (Spain)
Edgar Mitchell (USA)
Tomoyo Nonaka (Japan)
Marianne Obermüller (Germany)
Paul Ray (USA)
Marco Roveda (Italy)
Masami Saionji (Japan)
Marilyn Schlitz (USA)
Karan Singh (India)
Hiroshi Tasaka (Japan)
Worldshift 20 Council Administration
Ervin Laszlo, Convener (Hungary/Italy)
David Woolfson, Coordinator (Canada)
Carl Carpenter & Dennis Aspell, Web Administrators (USA)
