A New Consensus For a Habitable World for All

Federico Mayor Zaragoza, Martí Olivella, Roberto Savio

14-12-2010

http://consensus.nova.cat

Federico Mayor Zaragoza and Roberto Savio have published this article, written in collaboration with the Director of the Barcelona Consensus Martí Olivella. Sign the "Manifest 2010: for an inhabitable world for everyone" if you support the Barcelona Consensus, and distribute this message among your contacts. 

Federico Mayor Zaragoza, President of Fundación Cultura de Paz
Martí Olivella, Director of Nova – Centre per a la Innovació SocialRoberto Savio, President Emeritus of IPS and publisher of Othernews

 History will judge us severely if we are incapable of responding to the challenges and opportunities presented by the global crisis. Instead of using 50 billion dollars to eradicate poverty, which was one of the agreed Millennium Objectives, the consensus among governments was to grant fifty times that amount to save the speculating banks that “are too large to let fall”, contradicting their own neo-liberal doctrine of allowing the market to regulate itself without government intervention. The impoverished “rescuers” are now being beset by financial institutions and, through hardly unbiased credit rating agencies, are taking speculation to new highs. It is clear that we require a new consensus to replace the failed Washington Consensus, the main originator of the multiple (financial, environmental, political, democratic, ethical) crises that we now face.

Instead of regulating the financial system, eliminating tax havens and initiating a new defense strategy based on self-disarmament, we continue to enable an economy of speculation and war (4 billion dollars invested daily in military spending, while 70,000 people die from hunger). This situation is ethically inadmissible.

After the dotcom bubble in 1993 and the real estate bubble in 2007, after using money belonging to all of us to rescue financial institutions, those institutions not only refuse to grant loans, but also continue to speculate and hound the same public entities that previously offered them a helping hand.

The crisis prompted by the present consensus –by action, omission or complicity- has even further increased the number of people who suffer from hunger. We are accomplices to an “involuntary homicide” of those who, due to hunger and the humanly inadmissible conditions in which they live, conform a “breeding ground” for waves of desperate emigrants who, risking their lives, attempt to reach the coasts of abundance or in, other instances, resort to armed violence against the structural violence that they must bear. Poverty not always originates violence. Hunger yes, very often, because it is violence.

Our oil-based civilization is firmly rooted and we run the risk of continuing to live beyond our means, wasting the solar energy accumulated millions of years ago in the form of fossil fuels (coal, gas, oil). The same countries that have replaced democratic principles with the laws of the marketplace, and the United Nations with groups of the world’s wealthiest and most powerful nations (G7, G8,…) continue to believe that the profits of multinational companies are more important than the lives of our present impoverished populations or our future generations. Ignoring repeated warnings, they fail to take any action to change their energy culture (reduced use, higher efficiency, renewable resources) or to limit the climate change that threatens the survival of all, both the rich and the poor.

The present consensus has given rise to a very serious situation in which 80% of the world’s wealth is in the hands of 20% of the population, while the other 80% hardly survives on only 20% of resources, often in desperate circumstances.

In the Washington Consensus, seven huge multimedia consortia control the world’s cultural, advertising and information output, influencing the perceptions, emotions, visions, desires and decisions of citizens, prompting them to adopt patterns of consumption and behavior that do not reflect their own choices, but rather the uniform “models” they have received. 

It is this unquestionable and dominant consensus that for the last few decades has given rise to or further aggravated the global crises –financial, economic, energy, environmental, democratic, ethical– which we now must bear. The governing consensus originated in ultra-conservative universities and think tanks, among high public and private power circles, and was promoted through media controlled by a few companies, ultimately reflected in the so-called “Washington Consensus”, which reflects a series of policies and strategies advocated by institutions of the U.S. capital (International Monetary Fund, World Bank, Treasury Department, Federal Reserve, etc.) managed and advised by (ex) directors of large banks and Wall Street speculators.

Thus it is evident that the Washington Consensus, which has guided the policies that provoked the global crisis with its disastrous consequences for citizens and the environment, cannot continue to dictate our destiny nor guide the world. A new consensus must be reached concerning democratic values and the political, economic, financial, media, etc. “game rules”, appropriate in a free and finite world. But this new consensus cannot come from those who created or who seek to maintain the present consensus at all cost. 

The new consensus must be reached with new players: with those who realize that we are not on the right road, with those who have proposed alternatives, with those who suffer the most destructive effects of neo-liberal globalization, guided principally by short-term interests. The Washington Consensus was created by a small group of people, the immense majority of whom were men from the North, government leaders, businessmen and financiers.

The new consensus must be reached among many different groups: men and women of all of the world’s regions, from different sectors of civil society, who will ensure there will be different perspectives, but who will seek the common good and provide elements to guide public policies toward a habitable planet for all people. This is difficult, but not impossible: “No challenge is beyond the reach of the creative capacity of the human species”, proclaimed President John Fitzgerald Kennedy in 1963, a few months before he was assassinated. 

This is not the time for further study and analysis: it’s the time for urgent concerted action. A group of organizations  with an International Advisory Council  that could be finally integrated by 20 women and 20 men from all continents has commenced a process to attempt to reach a consensus concerning specific alternatives to the market-based “globalizing” consensus. Using the possibilities for communication and deliberation that cyberspace affords, this group is inviting 300 people to participate , half of whom are women and half of whom are men. The persons participating in the “nucleus” of this new consensus will proportionally reflect the population of each of the world’s regions (180 from Asia, 46 from Africa, 42 from America, 32 from Europe and 2 from Oceania), representing different sectors of society such as social movements, associations, NGOs, trade unions, the economic and financial sectors, the cultural and scientific community, universities, social fora, former government leaders and international organizations, etc.

With their rigorous knowledge of reality –so that it can be profoundly changed- these initial participants are providing solutions for the world’s present major powers: military, energy, the economy and the media (the “dominating powers”). Concerning key aspects some of the solutions proposed include: 1) military: nuclear disarmament and the technological adaptation of defense to the nature of present conflicts, gradually decreasing the imposition of arms suitable to past conflicts; 2) energy: reduction of the consumption of fossil fuels that emit greenhouse gases, particularly CO2, replacing them –particularly for urban use- with renewable energy sources (solar, wind, geothermal, virtuous circle methane, etc.); 3) economy: transition from an economy based on speculation, outsourcing of production and war to an economy of sustainable global development, regulating markets and eliminating tax havens, while promoting improved food supplies through agriculture, aquiculture and biotechnology, as well as water harvesting, management and production; 4) media: ensure freedom of expression and access to truthful information, combating the concentration of the communications media in so few hands, with its serious risks of cultural uniformity, particularly with respect to the vast entertainment industry and the capacity to destabilize democracies prompting the social functions of political activities and not the political function of the market.

Together with these measures, there is a proposal to re-found, as established in this great global pact, a strong United Nations system endowed with the necessary personal, technical and financial resources, and to replace the present plutocratic system with a multilateral system based on President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s initial design. This structure would provide rapid and coordinated action in the case of natural disasters, providing the adequate technological means and personnel prepared to intervene during earthquakes, floods, fires, etc. Likewise, alternative financing should be sought, especially through electronic transactions, which feasibility studies have shown to be effective. And once it has been established that the cost of drugs has no effect on limiting consumption, there should be a “normalization” of drug prices with a view to gradually eliminating in the short term the violence and social problems generated by drug trafficking; the traffics of arms, capitals and, above all, of persons will not be stopped while total impunity exists at supranational scale.

In summary, the participants are presenting proposals to decide how to adequately approach five fundamental questions: commencing with the world we all desire (value system), in the finite world in which we live (ecological system), we must determine how we want to organize ourselves (political system), how we want to administer ourselves (economic system) and how we want to communicate (communications system). These proposals, sent by email to the secretariat, will be analyzed, classified and translated to English, Spanish, French, Arabic and Chinese, and will then be submitted for deliberation on an Internet platform, so that the level of agreement achieved may be assessed.

By January 31, 2011 a draft Declaration will be drawn up, to be presented at the World Social Forum to be held in Dakar, between 7th to 11th February 2011. And a new Barcelona Consensus will subsequently be approved on Internet.

The 1.0 version of the “Barcelona Consensus” will guide different sectors and countries as to how to replace the present Washington Consensus with a new consensus that will enable us in a few years to forge a habitable and peaceful world for all. It will be the first fruit of an emerging inter-cultural and inter-sectorial community that believes that it is time for a great worldwide civic mobilization. It will be broadened and strengthened to advance in consensus and values, to set the rules for politics, the economy, the media, the environment… to ensure sustainable coverage of the basic human needs for all the earth’s population in a finite world. The process is thus open to receive contributions from world civil society. We trust that the Barcelona Consensus will contribute to articulating the new points of reference that the world needs to reshape the global dynamics and well design our most precious common good: the future.