After some initial success in Afghanistan, which proved ephemeral, US leaders again became persuaded that the United States could cope with any situation by relying on its own military might. They increasingly resorted to unilateral decisions and actions, and they announced that the United States was unilaterally withdrawing from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which ceased to be operative in June 2002. They refused to implement the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, withdrew from the United Nations’ Kyoto Protocol on climate change (George W. Bush revoking his predecessor’s signature), and refused to recognize the jurisdiction of the United Nations’ International Criminal Court.
The world began to be drawn into a new round of militarization, growth of military budgets, development and production of ever more sophisticated ‘smart’ weapons. Preparations began for a military operation against Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq.
The invasion of Iraq was the culmination of the US policy of unilateral action. I heard about it at Tokyo railway station, when I received a mobile phone call from the correspondent of Interfax. I immediately described it as a mistake that would have immense negative consequences for the United States and the rest of the world. These very soon became evident, and are making themselves felt to this day.
Poverty is a political problem
In the first decade of the twenty-first century, then, it became clear that the world’s politicians were failing to cope with the challenges of security, nuclear weapons or terrorism. Matters were no better in respect of two other crucial global problems: the challenge of poverty and underdevelopment, and the global environmental crisis.
In October 2004, we devoted the Assembly of the World Political Forum to the problem of poverty. Interest in the topic and the level of participation were wholly exceptional. Among the speakers at plenary meetings were the deputy UN secretary-general, Anwarul Chowdhury; the former prime minister of Malaysia, Mahathir Mohamad; former prime minister of Pakistan, Benazir Bhutto; the former German foreign minister, Hans-Dietrich Genscher; former UN secretary-general, Boutros Boutros-Ghali; vice-president of South Africa, Jacob Zuma; former Japanese prime minister, Toshiki Kaifu; former prime minister of India, Inder Kumar Gujral; former prime ministers of France, Lionel Jospin and Michel Rocard; former director-general of the World Trade Organization, Mike Moore; assistant UN secretary-general, Jeffrey Sachs; former Polish president, Wojciech Jaruzelski; former president of Portugal, Mário Soares; the personal representatives of the presidents of Nigeria and Kyrgyzstan; and other politicians, as well as representatives of social, governmental and religious organizations and the media.
Poverty is a political issue, I said in my speech at the opening of the assembly, and that became the leitmotif of the assembly. I believe the main thrust of my speech remains important today:
In the 1990s, the hope was prevalent that this problem would solve itself as the economies of all countries developed on the ‘only true basis’ of the Washington Consensus. We remember how enthusiastically this view was supported by business, especially the transnational corporations. That kind of one-sided approach, however, always produces dismal results.
Those who suffered most from this abstract theory were the developing countries, but the damage was not restricted to them. To a large extent it was responsible for missing the opportunities that arose from the ending of the Cold War. Today it is clear new approaches are needed.
At the Millennium Summit at the United Nations in 2000, the heads of the world’s states and governments took an important step forward by proclaiming their political will to solve the problem of world poverty and took on specific, quantified commitments to fight this evil. Now, only a few years after that event, for hundreds of millions of people in the third world, especially in Africa, those targets remain mere good intentions. Promises to develop fair trade conditions for developing countries, to give them access to markets, and for debt relief are not being kept.
Now, when the world has sufficient resources and there are specific ways to overcome poverty whose efficacy has been proven, the failure to resolve this problem relates primarily to a lack of political will. Instead of honouring their obligations, the leading states again seem busier seeking a new panacea.
As the latest magic formula we hear the praises of free trade and good management, including healthier government and the combating of corruption. There is no denying the importance of these things, as is following an intelligent economic policy and complying with the laws of a market economy. But too often, focusing on these undisputed truths looks like an excuse for wriggling out of such commitments as devoting 0.7 per cent of Gross Domestic Product to aiding developing countries. At the same time, there seems to be no difficulty finding tens of billions of dollars for large-scale military operations and developing new weapons systems.
Poverty is also a political issue because, if it is not resolved, the result will inevitably be a new division of the world, with consequences even more fraught than those of the division we overcame through our joint efforts to end the confrontation between East and West. The division of the world into islands of prosperity and zones of poverty and despair is more dangerous than the Cold War, because it is impossible to separate them from each other. Desperation provides conditions for extremism and terrorism to flourish, to say nothing of the floods of migration, the epidemics, and the emergence of new centres of instability.
Finally, poverty is a political issue because it is inseparable from the issues of democracy, human rights and fundamental freedoms. Democracy and development are in no way contradictory, but where the issue of poverty is not tackled for decades, people are prepared to sacrifice democracy and put their trust in politicians with authoritarian tendencies. The retreat of the wave of democracy that transformed the world at the end of the 1980s and early 1990s is largely due to this. I am certain that democracy cannot be imposed by tanks and preventive strikes. It must grow as each country and its people develop, but we can create more favourable conditions for it to grow, and chief of these is overcoming poverty.
What I sensed in the speeches of the politicians and experts attending the forum was great concern at the critical situation of poverty in the world. Analysing the experience of different countries in the fight against poverty, they made their different suggestions for ways to resolve the problem, but what they were all agreed on was that poverty underlies virtually all the problems confronting humanity at the present stage of its development: the degradation of the environment, the lack of security and stable economic growth, terrorism, social marginalization and many other negative aspects of globalization.
I stressed that we must listen to the signals being sent by the antiglobalization movement. Although among the protesters calling for ‘alternative globalization’ there certainly were hoodlums, aggressive troublemakers and outright rabble-rousers, the vast majority of the hundreds of thousands of people taking to the streets were honest, concerned people putting forward an entirely reasonable demand: that globalization should not be a one-way process making the rich even richer and neglecting the poor. Here is the real situation:
• nearly a billion people in the world are starving, while one person in four in the United States suffers from obesity;
• of 34 million people with AIDS, 23 million live in Africa;
• Tokyo alone has as many telephone lines as the whole of Africa;
• 57 million children are deprived of the opportunity to attend school;