Amina Mohamed
Minister of Foreign Affairs and International Trade, Kenya
I know there’s no way we would have resolved in the Horn of Africa the issue of piracy if the international community did not come together. There’s no way we’d deal with the issues in Somalia of terrorism if the international community did not come together. Look at the bird flu.
If the World Health Organization did not rise to the occasion, I think we would have a pandemic of major proportions that would have engulfed all of the earth. Ebola, if the European Union and the United Nations did not come together as an international community and send in the many thousands of young health workers, I don’t think that would have been resolved. Yes, we need to do better, but I do not think that we should rule multilateralism and international cooperation out. It’s created the space that we need for dialogue, for discussions, for effective decision-making.
Kevin Rudd
Former Prime Minister of Australia and Presidentof the Asia Society Policy Institute
The global political leadership is so utterly consumed in holding together the simple fabric of their local democracies and local economies, that their capacity, their attention span, their ability to sustain the existing institutions of global governance, from the United Nations, from the Bretton Woods Institutions and the rest, is itself going down. The net effectiveness of global institutions is being challenged because they are not delivering the goods. Look at the U.N.
What’s the hallmark achievement of the U.N. in the last couple of years? You could say the Paris agreement on climate change. The other big achievement is the Sustainable Development Goals - Agenda 2030. I do not see any hope of the current U.N. machinery in the way it’s structured, or the way in which nation states are providing it with political and financial support, to deliver on Agenda 2030. It is a ticking time bomb for the legitimacy of the U.N. system if the Sustainable Development Goals are not delivered. States increasingly perceive the U.N. as ineffective. What I worry about is death by a thousand cuts to the U.N. Unless we radically turn this around, you will see it slowly drift to occupying the margins of global irrelevance.
Brian Smith
President of the Coca-Cola Company’s Europe, Middle East and Africa Group
The social contract, whatever that ends up becoming, whatever those important issues are for the communities the businesses work in, if it does not become a part of what corporations do and what we invest in, then consumers will eventually drop us. It’s almost part of survival into the next generation. If we don’t do it ourselves, then there should probably be ways in which we are forced to do that through entities and constituencies that would push us in that direction.
Kerry Kennedy
President of Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights
When I started working in human rights in the early 1980s, all of Latin America was under right-wing military dictatorships. Today, there’s not one that’s left standing. All of Eastern Europe was under Communism. And today, there’s not a Communist government left. South Africa was under the height of apartheid, and South Africa has had a series of freely elected governments elected by a majority of its people.
Women’s rights was not on the international agenda. Today, the women’s rights convention has been ratified by 183 countries. All those changes happened not because governments wanted them to, but because small groups of determined people harnessed the dream of freedom and made it come true. That’s what changes the world.
Irina Bokova
Director-General of UNESCO
There is a big social movement. The young generation is part of this and strongly pushing against inequalities and injustice. But we should hold governments accountable. I think governments should be there in the debate. I think education is the key to many issues. It’s about skills, jobs, values and human rights education.
It’s about democracy at the end of the day. You can’t have a democracy if you don’t have informed citizens - citizens who have critical thinking. It is critical to have this young generation as global citizens.
Roby Senderowitsch
Practice Manager, Governance Global Practice, World Bank
Countries have evolved in a way that they try to take the best from the different models that they can find. When it comes to competitiveness and industrialization, maybe they look at China. When they look at innovation and how new technologies can help foster growth in their countries, they look at India or Ireland today. It’s a combination of different models.
There are some people who say a dictatorship is much better than a democratic system to get there. This is a false premise, and there is not enough evidence to sustain it. It’s much better to live in an imperfect democracy than a perfect dictatorship. Even in a perfect dictatorship you need to be very lucky, to choose the right dictator, which is a paradox by itself because you don’t choose your dictators.
Sergei Guriev
Chief Economist, European Bank for Reconstruction and Development
I think [a robust democracy] includes the feeling of fairness. Part of the electoral setbacks in the West in 2016 were about people who felt they were being left behind. And it’s not just about inequality. Working in central and western Europe, we know that some equality can be unfair.
Ιt is unfair if I work harder, like in the Soviet system, and I don’t get compensated for that. But there is unfair inequality where we have inequality of opportunity, lack of shared prosperity, lack of inclusion. And this is where Nordic countries are delivering much better than some other Western countries. And that makes their political systems more sustainable and robust.
Keboitse Machangana
Director of Global Programs, International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance
More and more people are voting than before. We have more and more countries that are characterized as democracies. What is being challenged right now is not whether democracy is right or wrong. I think we have passed that debate. I think what we are seeing in the world is now people wanting better quality democracy.
They would like to see that democracy being practiced exactly the way they believe it should be. When leaders are coming up with policies for problems, do they take into account the views of the people into those issues? What we are seeing around the world, the social movements, the student protests, is people saying they want to be engaged whether there’s an election or not. Democracy needs to go back to basics: the rule of the people.
He Jiahong
Director of the Center for Anti-Corruption and Rule of Law, The School of Law, Renmin University of China
At the end of the 1970s [and the Cultural Revolution], China didn’t know the term “rule of law”. We just tried to restore the legal system. We thought we could learn something from Western countries about democracy, but democracy cannot be exported. We have to find our own way.
We should push forward rule of law first as a basis for development of democracy. And for development of democracy, we should have gradual changes. I don’t like the word “revolution” anymore. I like the word “evolution”, so people may have the right to know first, and then the right to speak, and then the right to vote.
Hyeonseo Lee
North Korean defector and human rights activist
The official title of my home country is “Democratic People’s Republic of Korea”. But in fact, there’s no democracy, no republic, no people, because North Koreans are slaves of the regime.
I saw my first public execution when I was 7, and the constant public executions were a reminder that I shouldn’t do anything to disobey my government, otherwise I would be killed, exactly [like] the person in front of me. But the biggest killer is the famine that has killed more than a million people.
Only America or a bigger country [in the] world can resolve these issues right now. So I think - I hope America can approach it in a different way, so to force the North Korean regime open, and the economy [could reform] in North Korea. That’s the most important thing that we have to do right now.
Kofi Annan
Former Secretary General of the United Nations and Chairman of the Kofi Annan Foundation
Democratic government is compared unfavorably with the concurrent success of authoritarian regimes, which seem to enjoy record rates of growth. Whilst the U.S. government’s plans to overhaul its infrastructure have been stuck in Congress for almost a decade, China has built the Three Gorges Dam and thousands of kilometers of new railways and roads. People – especially in developing countries that are struggling to overcome poverty and low growth – look at these achievements and wonder whether democratic governance, at least in its Western incarnation, really delivers.
The setbacks of the last decade have to be set against remarkable gains since the end of the Second World War, when there were only 12 fully-fledged democracies. Today there are 117, and elections, however flawed, have become almost universal, illustrating the power of legitimacy they offer. We should not forget that liberal democracy almost died in the 1930s, but the liberal democracies eventually defeated Nazism and Fascism. Democracy is therefore arguably the most successful political system the world has ever seen.
There is a growing perception that the priorities of the extremely wealthy take precedence over the well-being of the middle class thanks to campaign contributions and lobbying. At the other end of the spectrum, the poor and minorities are, or at least feel, excluded from the political system. Governments must respond by redistributing fairly the benefits of globalization by restricting tax avoidance and evasion schemes, and most importantly, discouraging tax havens. Fortunately, democracy is one of the only systems in which the concerns of the majority can overturn the interests of the wealthy if the majority harnesses the mechanisms at their disposal. But this demands more participation, not less.
David Van Reybrouck
Journalist, poet and playwright
Those who still ... vote are voting less and less in a predictable way. Forming a government is getting harder. Social media creates a culture of permanent feedback. There is a persistent electoral fever, and the campaign has become permanent. Perhaps for the very first time in history, we see that the weight of the next election is becoming more important than the weight of the previous election. Being in government is getting harder. You lose more voters if you have been in one.
Elections were never meant to be democratic. It’s not only an old procedure, it’s a profoundly aristocratic procedure. The word “elite” and “elections” have the same etymological root; this is important.
Today many people feel that ticking a box every four or five years is simply not enough. They still don’t feel heard. That’s why distrust is raising at an alarming rate. What if people were not only given the right to vote, but also a right to speak? What if we had sortition next to elections, going back to lottery? Sounds crazy, but we’re using it already every day. We call it “opinion polls.” The only problem is, polls ask us what we think when we don’t think. What if we had a chance to think and discuss with others first? And what if politicians listened then? We urgently need to democratize democracy. We ought to be against elections if democracy is reduced to them. For it’s not just about your vote, it’s about your voice, too.
Mark Thompson
President and C.E.O., The New York Times Company
There is a real debate about climate change, which has not been won. You’ve got to accept that many many millions of people, tens of millions of people in the Western world do not accept it, there is still a live political debate about it, and our policy on taking advocacy advertising is not to take only advocacy advertising from one side of a given debate.
And I think that instinct, which is, if you can stop people talking, you’ll solve the problem, if you can stop racist commentary, racism will disappear, if you can just stop people talking about vaccine safety, everyone will believe in vaccine safety, I would just say as a matter of fact, that’s a conjecture about human nature which has turned out to be false. And things like political correctness may have made the things they are trying to make better worse.
There’s a very interesting complication though, which is that social media has essentially to some extent and I think in some ways, in a good as well as sometimes troubling way, has opened things up and it’s possible for pressure groups who do not have the money to place ads in The New York Times or whatever, still to get their message across by effective leveraging of social media.
And we tend to have complicated views about that, we might be in principle in favor of the democratization of opinion, but troubled with the adverse results of that, which is there’s a lot of craziness and hate out there as well. But my - each case needs to be considered on its own merits, but my basic view is, public debate about almost any topic is better than attempts to suppress. And I get very worried about the instinct to kind of almost ask Facebook to kind of borrow software from Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping to start shutting down content which somebody thinks is bad.