Address at the WEF discussion entitled "The Future of Government"

Vienna, 8.6.2011  |  speech

Key-note Address by Dr Danilo Türk, President of the Republic of Slovenia, at the discussion entitled "The Future of Government" at the World Economic Forum on Europe and Central Asia
Vienna, 8 June 2011


I wish to thank Professor Klaus Schwab for having introduced us to the topic and for his explanations about the choice of the subject of the future of government and the inherent relationship between the concept of government today and complexity of today's world. Armenian Prime Minister Tigran Sargsyan has explained to us how the world is changing in the 21st century. We live at the time when we are fascinated by the pace and the extent of technological and scientific change and we have great expectations and also some fears.

Sometimes historians ask themselves whether ours is a unique phase in the whole human history or whether there were similar situations in the past. Some people would say, well, steam engine has changed the world and has brought industrial revolution, electricity and electric bulb have changed the world and have produced enormous changes in life, computers have changed the world and the question is which of these inventions has changed the world more. I think we can safely say that the current technological change has affected more people in a shorter period of time than any preceding historic change. I think that that is what makes the big difference between the current and expected change and what happened in the previous phases of history.

Obviously, the question of the future of government is extremely important in this context because the governments are challenged again. The concept of government is challenged and I think we have to look at these challenges with great care. I'm saying this after having quickly gone through the report and I congratulate the authors for excellent work done. I will come to some of the key recommendations shortly but before that I would like to refer to another report produced by the World Economic Forum, the Global Risks Report, which was produced a few months earlier. That report has a very interesting basic definition of the main global risks today. It says that one of the most important risks is in the fact that we now have a situation of economic disparity combined with a global governance failure.

These are rather strong words. Economic disparity, that I think we can all agree to. I'm not sure whether everybody would agree that the global governance faces a situation of failure, but clearly the situation is not satisfactory. We can also say that the debates on the changing of global institutions are not producing significant results. We are not at the "San Francisco moment", we are nowhere near the "San Francisco moment", which produced a whole new organisation of the world. We see the difficulty with which the International Monetary Fund is changing. It is important to realise that the future of the global world speaking from the point of view of governance depends vitally on the way in which we shall combine the imperfect international institutions with the quality of national government and national governance. I believe that that's the key to the future.

Obviously, we also have to understand that there are differences from different parts of the world. Europe and European Union countries in particular are very close to the idea of global governance. But we have to understand that Asia is in a very different mindset, that it is much more "Westphfalian" than we are in Europe. We have to understand that. We have to understand that, measuring by the criteria of effectiveness, Europe is currently not doing very well in comparison with Asia. If we take for example just one indicator, the percentage of green growth element in the stimulus packages of 2009, when governments had to intervene massively in the national economic structures, we could see that in South Korea, for example, the percentage of green technologies and innovation that were supported through government was about 80 percent. In China it was 37 percent. In European countries it was much more modest. So we are not doing all that much progress as perhaps the international situation requires.

I think that the lesson from here is that, obviously, the world will have to find a proper combination of improvement of global governance and heavy reliance on national governance in the future because much will have to be invested nationally. This brings me directly to the recommendations of the report on the future of the government. Here we see a number of paradoxes and I would like to mention just briefly by way of introduction a couple of them.

First, one of the main conclusions of the report, among many recommendations is to address the inherent complexity of societies through better networking, better combination of work of government institutions and civil society and other non-governmental institutions. I think this is a valid strategy. Certainly, it is a valid strategy, but it brings certain questions with it. I think we have to ask the question of how does corruption work in this context when one can face not only the classical forms of corruption, which are known from before, but much more structural corruption, structural "incestual marriage" between civil society and private sector organisations on the one hand and government structures on the other. Do we have to address that or is it too early to do so, whether we should simply think about how to make government more inclusive and more sensitive to the needs and more cooperative with the civil society sector.

The other thing is democracy. Is democracy natural and, above all, necessary ingredient of quality government? One would say, yes, in principle, but we can see that in many parts of the world this is not seen as the key ingredient. In many cases when democracy has been accepted as critical for the quality of government and governance we have clearly seen that there have also been disappointments. We have to understand that democracy is not an end in itself but it has to deliver, it has to deliver results, it has to be something that is related to results. So, here again I think we need a further discussion on how to develop democracy so as to deliver results. In Latin America we have seen disappointments in the past decades. They have been largely overcome. I don't know how things will turn out in the Arab world, with this huge change and huge expectations. And huge expectations may very well lead to disappointments. So we have to look at that as well.

And finally, to the issue of complexity in a much more fundamental sense. Prime Minister Sargsyan has spoken about the technological and scientific development. The paradox – again, one described in the Global Risks Report by the World Economic Forum – is that the technological change is mastered by non-governmental actors more than by governments themselves. The governments do not control and sometimes cannot even guide the necessary social and technological changes because they are lagging behind. This is something inherent in the way the governments and the governance are organised today. Here is the critical question – how does one improve the technological capacity of government in order to be better able to guide the necessary transformations? I will not say control, because control is dangerous and this may lead to totalitarian and other excesses. But guidance is necessary. Guidance will be necessary, especially in the places like Arab world where the changes will have to be guided, managed if they are to be peaceful and leading to prosperity. Therefore this is something we have to pay special attention to.

These are the kind of remarks that come to mind after having very quickly browsed through this very interesting, excellent report and after having linked it to some other literature produced by the World Economic Forum today.

I wish everybody a nice evening, bon appétit and a good discussion. Thank you very much.