Power and powerlessness
Virtually every international operative of any stature was there, in one vast room.
The ‘there’, was here, in Geneva, the UN’s other home. Ban Ki-Moon came in at 9am, spoke for 10 minutes and disappeared.
A well-honed, well-delivered speech, but no sense of occasion or presence. Behind him, however, a phalanx of heavyweight talent.
Pascal Lamy, the Director General of the World Trade Organisation – dynamic, brusque, no nonsense and the man whose mere invitation had ensured that the others all turned up, including Ban Ki-Moon.
Angel Gurria, the charismatic orator who heads up the OECD came next. Behind him Robert Zoellic the American former trade secretary now head of the World Bank, who is again extremely impressive in the flesh. Dominique Strauss-Kahn of the IMF. Helen Clark, the former New Zealand Premier who heads the UNDP. The cast went on and on.
What struck me was that these global institutions are currently in exceptional hands. But what also struck me was that the representative bodies that tag around in their wake are amazingly cumbersome. The room at the WTO sported a delegate and some sort of support from virtually every member state of the United Nations.
Hundreds and hundreds of thousands of air miles had been burnt to get them to the event. Their capacity to interact with these speakers was limited by the size of the room and the length of the day. The whole thing might have been infinitely more effective had it been done via a video-conference online.
The event? I have got this far without even mentioning it; it was a review of the Aid for Trade project – about countries in the north assisting in developing the trading capacity of countries in the south by investing infrastructure and systems that will level the trading playing field. This while the latest trade round, the ‘Doha round’, is stalled (incidentally everyone I spoke to felt the deal at Doha was there for the taking if only the Americans (and a few others) will get behind it).
The session I ‘facilitated’ followed Ban Ki Moon’s. It started with a highly structured debate.
Then the EU Development Commissioner Louis Michel, who was on my panel, turned to me and whispered: “This is boring – get them to stop reading.”
So I did, I banned all pre-prepared scripts as delegates and panellists had simply been reading from prepared statements.
Suddenly the whole thing lit up and people said what they meant.
Sounds boring I know, and in some ways it was, but it was a fascinating insight into power, powerlessness and the state of global institutions in a globalised world where globalization itself has run into such thunderstorms.
I will do another session today – likely to be far more interesting, to which I will return in my next Snowblog.
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Yes, there seems to be a disconnect going on. All the people who know that they are powerless haven’t the faintest idea what to do about it. It’s a problem of ‘perception’… take a look at http://moralorder.mediumisthemess.com/blog
It strikes me that on these occasions too many people say the right thing but then nothing gets done. Until the UN gets teeth (unlikely) or developed countries start to mean what they say, little will change.
Sorry, one of my cynical days.
Maybe you will get invited to the next Bilderberg gathering – now that would be interesting….
Well done for getting them to get rid of the prepared script. Proper debate and discussion can only happen when politicians and others are straight about what they think and do not simply follow the “party” line.
Where was my invite?
http://kennedycartoons.com
It amazes me how reference to ‘poor’, are associated with ‘poor’ third world countries, while the western countries are depicted as rich, as if all its citizens are well off! This is so far from the truth. It’s a minority that are rich and generally corrupt & greedy, while the majority live on or, well below, the poverty line or with nothing, in the so called rich countries. It’s the media spin that’s controlled by the corrupt rich pumping out lies that fool people.
These meetings are just people trying to justify their well renumerated positions, while getting no real concensus on anything!
Can you tell me why you always say Samira (or whoever) has the REST of the day’s news when you always come in later with more – surely you should say she has MORE of the day’s news. Or is the operative word Day or News – thus implying that what you say next is neither the day’s or news?
Too often events such as this are mere junkets where bureaucrats and politicians can posture, postulate and eventually come up with a communique which will be read to the media and the forgotten.
They then head back to their poverty stricken often oppressive nations so they can posture and postulate on what they accomplished, all th while planning their next junket.
Observation and reportage requires context, shape, values and comparison.
Art and politics are shared reflections.
I’m no hack, artist or politician…
But yes I care and I vote.
All of us , all players in society recognise that communication is king..
Confronted by loud and strident voices …..the more a singular voice can be lost .
The loss of Lennon is less important than his musical legacy..
The ‘Imagine’ lyric survives and endures…it shelters and glows.
Warmth and commitment that a young Snow firstly experienced is now an elemental process that he cannot escape, nor wishes to..
Humanity and the human story litter all our lives..some..see and feel the shape and art of life..
Global contact has inevitably become bureaucratic…
I guess that Jon Snow, the peoples’ hack, would decode the moment and strike out for straight forward comment and debate…
What do you think…account and explain…to your audience….
There is another angle on powerlessness. Jon Snow got within a whisker yesterday in his interview with Alistair Darling of
asking the one key question that has to be asked: is the British system of corporate
governance past its sell buy date? The answer to that is certainly yes.
Mixing execution with supervision as in the British and American models explains why
we are constantly light on supervision. Boards have to be reconstituted. Supervisory
boards must be charged with supervising what executives get up to. The neat arrangement
that exists has to end. Then we may avoid scandals like those now brewing at M & S
over pay arrangements as well as the failure of the M & S board to uphold the Cadbury
arrangemnts for separating the posts of chairman and chief executive.
Jon Snow is always trenchant and hard hitting. We rely on him to
keep debates like this movng forward.There can be no drifting back to business as usual.
Richard Tudway
richard-tudway@blogspot.com
Great stuff on confiscating the prepared scripts John. I do a lot of facilitating of groups and small seminars in the UK urban regeneration field. Getting ‘beneath the skin’ of subjects at these events is often hard – I find that you can unintentionally and unhelpfully silence delegates with the killer question “yes, but in hard practical terms what will you/we now do about this?”.
The practice of going to real-time events to merely pose and regurgitate what is often already-known, all to no evident effect, is now deeply embedded in most of our national, and most of the international, networks.