President, World Future Council Initiative

Building the EU's Global Vision:
The World Future Council Initiative

We are supposed to discuss how civil society can participate in EU strategies for sustainability. Yet the implications of the accelerating global crises go far beyond the scope of current EU strategies. For example, climate chaos is now understood to be an existential threat. The peak oil scenarios commonly accepted today were ridiculed even a year ago. The belief that privatization of water resources is the best way to deal with growing water shortages was conventional wisdom until the global water conference in Mexico last month concluded that it does not work.

Dialogues need a common basis and our situation is unprecedented. We are waging war against future generations by destroying their birthright to a healthy planet. Our situation reminds me of the USSR I visited as an MEP in 1989: the old structures were still intact but certainties were crumbling everywhere. Or, as Winston Churchill wrote in 1938, 'The era of procrastination, of half-measures, of soothing and baffling expedients is coming to a close. We are entering an era of consequences.'

Our children will not be interested in how we dialogued but in results. Seeing the growing implementation gap between innumerable dialogues and the failures in tackling existential challenges, I increasingly sympathize with George Soros' remark that, to him, networking means not working.

Our key problem today is the failure of (and consequent collapse of trust in) the ruling ideology of economic fundamentalism and its messengers. We lack trusted leaders. In a German poll last year, only 13% trusted their government while 49% trusted ALDI, a cut-price supermarket chain. Without trust, almost nothing can be done. Timid politicians dare less and less, causing further distrust and cynicism - a vicious circle.

All power vacuums are filled and today power has been usurped by short-term private interests. But by what authority do they impose their perverted cost-benefit calculations on us ? By what authority do they pollute our minds, bodies, air, soil and water ? By what authority have they been given power over everything from the airwaves to the genetic blueprints of life ? These are serious questions for, as President F.D. Roosevelt warned in 1938 : 'The liberty of democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in essence, is fascism.'

When I hear EU governments declaring that the new safety rules for chemicals must not make these more expensive, I wonder if our children, already facing growing epidemics of chemically-induced diseases, will look on us as criminal or mad? As the conservative German writer Franz Alt says, 'In the Middle Ages, those who poisoned wells were sentenced to death. Today they rule over us as CEOs of chemical companies and their political allies.' The current global economic order is neither 'natural' nor the result of democratic choices. It is the result of a well-organized attack on our cultures , values and commons, co-ordinated by a greedy minority and their corrupt allies . Their globalization is a last attempt to escape natural limits by growing into the economic and ecological space of other countries. But what is the point of growing numbers of fishing-boats when there is no more fish? 'What is the point of all my business and philanthropic activities', an Indian entrepreneur said to me, 'if the Monsoon rains stop coming?'

We need to change the global rules so that we can match our huge and urgent needs with our huge and under-utilized resources. It is estimated that we have about one billion un- or under-employed people in the world. Also, the clean energy provided by the sun and wind today cannot be tapped tomorrow and we can no longer afford to waste it !

The Financial Times recently published an article headlined 'The Hippies Were Right All Along About Happiness' which called for happiness to replace economic growth as our societies' criteria for progress! How can we create this new mainstream? The EU has a key role to play! The post-war European order was built on co-operation and 'co-operation for the best' needs to become Europe's global vision - in contrast with the US-led global model of 'competition for the cheapest'.

We do not need to invent a 'new ethics' as is sometimes claimed. Where would it suddenly come from ? But we need to give a stronger voice to our values as world citizens as opposed to our values as global consumers. Of course we have always traded and consumed. But never before was 'competition for the cheapest' the over-riding global ideology. It was subordinated to the desire of every previous generation to build a better world for their children - or at least hand over one which had not deteriorated. If they had lived like us, we would not be here, but long extinct! Have we lost this basic human breeding instinct? No, but it is difficult to practise values like generosity, love and solidarity in a society where the rules, institutions and information streams are all geared to supporting lesser human qualities. So we need to change these rules, institutions and information streams!

The World Future Council Initiative is a key part of this global power shift. It will aim to provide

• a trusted voice speaking up for the interests of children and future generations
• an ongoing forum developing policy responses to the key challenges facing us
• the moral authority to overcome current reform implementation gaps

The World Future Council (WFC) will encourage the creation of national, regional and local Future Councils. Whenever possible, these should - as is now envisaged in several Swiss cantons - have a constitutional mandate, making their recommendations difficult to dismiss.

The WFC will be advised by small expert commissions, hosted by existing organizations. Its own structure will be lean, with three or four office locations, including the Global South.

In conclusion, we need a World Future Council because today, when the very conditions sustaining life on Earth are under threat, we need to build trusted leadership to help guide us on the most difficult journey humanity has ever travelled. 

Further Information is available on the World Future Council Website http://www.worldfuturecouncil.org