BLED NET
Speech by President of the Republic of Slovenia Milan Kucan

Bled, 1 October 2001


Gentlemen, partners in discussion,

I am delighted that what we planned has been fulfilled. Welcome to Slovenia, to Bled, here at our common deliberation over the humane and democratic management of the future, a future with a human face. I appreciate the fact that in the rush of modern life you found time for our meeting. I hope that you will have a very pleasant stay here and that the meeting will be a success. With your kind indulgence, I would like to use the privilege of host to offer a few thoughts. And I would do this partly because I shall not be able to be present at this meeting as much as I would like, and as much as the weight of challenges facing us would demand.

Black Tuesday, 11 September, with its terrible crimes in New York and Washington, changed the face of the human world. This has been said more than anything else.

Yet is this really true? What if the world had already been different for some time previously, but we had simply not possessed the capacity, will or ability to recognise it? In reality this evil did need to explode in an extremely brutal way for us to realise the deep contradictions of the modern world and to admit that, at least since the collapse of the bipolar division of the world we have been faced relentlessly with new and very demanding issues. And these issues will not settle for any simplified or merely pragmatic responses. They have many ethical, anthropological, philosophical, sociological, political and other dimensions. In many respects the answers will determine the future of human civilisation and also the very existence of life on the planet. For this reason our answers should also spell out what we want to change in this world, and what we have achieved through the democratic development of civilisation that we do not want to lose – such as the rule of human rights.

1. Globalisation demands new, urgent responses
The challenges that demand common consideration can be seen primarily in divisions that have global dimensions. These are divisions on the one hand into the owners of capital, knowledge, ideas and information technology and on the other hand into billions who are condemned to ignorance, a life of poverty and endless subsistence on the margins of society.

I see these challenges in the ever increasing financial weakness of many countries, even entire continents, without development potential or a future. I see them in the unbridled growth in the power and dominance of global capital, whose autonomous logic has long since extended across the borders of nation states, while bearing no responsibility for the social status and development prospects of their people, or for freedom and democracy, solidarity, development, their security, or for the future, although it has exercised a powerful, even decisive, influence on it. This responsibility has been left to national administrations. Capital moves in other circles.

I see them in the perverted understanding of competitiveness, which leads to production and services with an increasingly reduced work force, without a feeling for nature, life on the planet and its future, for humans, their dignity and rights. I see them in monopoly economies, whose only goal and motive is profit.

And I see them in fundamentalisms of all kinds, which ignore the diversity of the world and exclude everything different through the unscrupulous use of power, aggression and discrimination.

A deliberation on the challenges of the radically changing world demands a consideration of the dimension of time, owing to the lengthy development of societal processes and the long-term nature of environmental phenomena, biological and biomedical encroachments, since the effects are only visible after decades, and some perhaps even in following generations. They also demand a comprehensive understanding of the phenomena and processes, and what links them. Modern-day political, economic, social and environmental dramas and conflicts are an expression of the mutual effects of a range of social and natural lines of force and phenomena in the world of economics, politics, the environment, genetics, finance, the information society, international crime and even terrorism and so on. They are like an epidemic. They cannot be confined within the borders of one or several countries. They cannot be eliminated through the pragmatic logic of modern politics, for the most part without ideas and vision. There are a great many indications and reasoned warnings of this in the material prepared for today’s meeting.

2. Terrorism and protest are not the answer, but they demand one
Our meeting is taking place at a very special time, which we could in no way foresee when we decided back in the spring, here in Bled, to hold it. The terrorist attacks have served merely to further underline the purpose and urgency of such meetings. Indeed they demand, as do the anti-globalisation movements, that we provide a very clearly articulated response to them. For neither terrorism nor these movements offer any answers. They are simply a warning of the acute nature of wider issues and of the urgent need for answers.

In responding to terrorism it seems important to grasp the following:
We cannot give in to terrorism. It is not enough just to condemn it. It must also be resisted, deliberately and decisively. Otherwise society will be ruled by a heightened and uncontrolled aggression, and the deciding factor will simply be the balance of power between aggression and counter-aggression.

A rise in aggression would threaten the fundamental values and principles that humankind has developed and established through its history as the yardstick of a common existence, in order that a tolerant life in human society and the development of that society are made possible.

At this time of tragedy there is an urgent need for sincere human, political and functional solidarity with the USA and its citizens. The USA is a global superpower and a symbol of advanced Western civilisation. Yet it, too, is subject to the globalisation processes, and is not sufficiently resistant to the influence of their negative phenomena. Solidarity demands concrete resources and actions in agreed common projects. These must be directed against those groups, individuals and regimes across the world which brutally violate these principles and bring into our human world chaos, murder and increased aggression.

In essence, terrorism is above all an act against democracy. The fight against terrorism is a fight for democracy, for the freedom of the individual, for human dignity, rights and security.

The means required to effectively combat this evil must strengthen democracy, they must protect the freedom of the individual and the rule of law for all people. They must be used against the perpetrators and organisers of terrorist acts, against regimes, political groups or movements which support terrorism or which initiate it. Human, social and political pathology has changed it into a profitable business, and has given international terrorism its own internal dynamic. And this must be resisted. The sponsors and perpetrators of these acts belong in a court of law.

The fight against international terrorism demands united and coordinated actions and measures from the democratic countries. Terrorism must be made to realise that it is standing before an impenetrable wall of opposition from all countries. It must realise that there is no country that would permit, facilitate, conceal, encourage, use or abuse it. This is a struggle for a world of greater peace, freedom, solidarity, and security for every human and for all nations, for greater social justice and increasingly less aggression.

The fight against terrorism is not and cannot be a battle against civilisations or cultures, or a battle between them. This is a fight for the culture of the world, a fight for the values that should prevail in it. In this modern and otherwise diverse world, all civilisations, all cultures and the major religions respect the dignity of the human person and his or her life. Killing, especially the killing of innocent people, is wrong across the entire world.

Yet the fight against terrorism is not enough. Despite its current urgency, we should not overlook the fact that it is a reflection of a range of problems faced by the modern world and it is a phenomenon that weighs upon all societies. It must also be faced over the longer term. There is a pressing need to eradicate the social, political and other roots of this evil, providing its breeding ground, in other words injustice, repression, inequality and discrimination. The recognising and eliminating of these roots must incorporate all the intellectual, philosophical, conceptual and religious potential that is able to deliberate on the future of humankind.

3. The globalised world – global responsibility – global management
International terrorism is a phenomenon of the globalised world. And the clash with it, like many other modern phenomena (environmental and political) convinces us that the globalised world requires global responsibility. This begins with the responsibility of each country. No longer in the name of sovereignty, not even within their own borders, can countries arbitrarily do things that run counter to the values of the democratic world and which therefore threaten the security of other countries and the international community. Nor can they ignore activities of this kind in other countries, shutting themselves in behind the virtual security of their own borders.

It is also becoming increasingly obvious that the globalised world requires global management. This issue is being given increasingly recognised attention by the civil society, which is seeking ways and means of transnational global linking. Our difficulty lies in us overlooking the fact that the world has become one big society full of contradictions, with almost no common or binding rules of behaviour, or with rules that are not appropriate or adequate. Every society, even the global one, must be subject to a given set of rules and standards, otherwise in its potential chaos it will be subordinated to the rule of sheer might.

More than ever before we also need to think, in tandem with the UN, about a hierarchy of authority or system of instance common to all countries, to which countries would grant full authority founded on their global responsibility, and which would function to the benefit of a dynamic developmental balance of forces and effects of the global economy, the environment and the globalised world as a whole.

In the period that lies ahead, despite the apparent utopian nature of this by no means new idea, we need the legitimacy of a system of institutions and bodies which we will endow with power and jurisdiction, by setting out within them common binding rules, standards to which we will submit and which can also exercise control over these institutions. This may also serve to allow the global community to determine the rules of globalised capital, and not the other way around.

Within the democratic discourse of the global community these rules will undoubtedly help in formulating a variety of civil movements that emerge beyond and across the borders of nation states, and raise their voice against the perversions of global capital, and which are committed to the rule of human rights, to their universality, resisting the “plundering” of nature, the monopolistic control of information, abuse of children and so forth.

It is highly possible that in the future these movements will seek, in bringing their arguments into play, alliances with nation states, which at least for the moment with their traditional ties to the phenomenon of sovereignty are not favourably disposed to such movements, but which through their functioning within the UN, the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organisation and so forth have at least a formal possibility of limiting the monopolistic power of the global economy. And this is without doubt a common interest. In this way the movements and countries involved would grow into an embryonic system of global management institutions.

Here there is a need primarily to consider whether these goals can be achieved within the UN, and what reforms of this universal organisation would be needed to achieve them.

4. The role and scope of Bled Net
Debates are currently under way on all of this in many centres of thinking around the world. Our own, here in Bled, is one of them. It has complete intellectual freedom and is therefore a useful support to political decision-making. In my own work I have always felt the need to verify my thoughts and decisions, and open them to discussion founded on ethical and value judgements that are capable of envisioning and critically reflecting on what really exists.

The Bled initiative came to Slovenia from Paris. Its creators are with us today. I myself, my associates, and the people at the Scientific Research Centre of the Slovene Academy of Sciences and Arts found this initiative to be more than acceptable and welcome. At this time in Bled there will supposedly be a kind of autoreflection on this idea. It is expected to lead on to the formulating of a project of an international ethical, intellectual and scientific collegium, to the adopting of views by intellectuals and politicians who are aware of the critical nature of our time and its dilemmas, and also their responsibility to seek ways out and answers to them. And this includes responsibility for bringing political decisions closer to these answers.

In the world that is becoming established with its new global issues for humankind, there is an urgent need for dialogue between people who sense these issues as a challenge and an obligation to think, and to provide initiatives and actions for the ethical and democratic development of humanity. I myself feel bound to such a dialogue, as a citizen of the world and as one of the administrators of a small part of this common world of ours. But also as a person from Slovene society, which as a nation and state has established itself to a large extent precisely through the civil society movement and in a fruitful dialogue of the state with the civil society.

The modern world is a world of information technology. Alongside dangers it also offers new prospects for the rapid transfer of thoughts and ideas that are building new global coalitions. Coalitions of reason or irrationality. Coalitions that are bridges for a society of the future or coalitions that are bridges for a society of the past. I regarded Bled Net as an opportunity for one of the coalitions of reason, a coalition for democracy, a coalition for ethical dialogue between civilisations of the globalised world, and as a coalition for its future. A coalition which is not set up through great stage-managed meetings and grand spectacles, but through open communication, with open lines of contact among everyone participating in the net. This should enable rapid, perhaps even immediate, reflection on the important, common, global issues. Reflection by thinkers from different parts of the world, from different cultures and civilisations, on the same issue. And without lengthy procedures for harmonising dates, subjects and protocol, and without promotional publicity. An initiative, questioning, deliberation, recognition and message which may be of great common benefit in managing the world. This should be the goal.

We politicians remain caught up in everyday matters, and in pragmatic considerations. We are left with very little time for serious and profound consideration of a common vision, common values, common ethics which should be the connective tissue of the community and a handhold for each individual. On the other hand, humankind disposes of outstanding studies which do not enjoy sufficient attention among those who could use them. Bled Net is an attempt to find a way.

This initiative has aroused interest among other heads of state, including some leading personalities of the world. I believe they will join us. This initiative is a contribution to the deliberation over how to administer in the new circumstances. It is one of the attempts to find new paths. And it is an opportunity to state clearly what we want from our lives. I therefore wish Bled Net a long life.