Transcript
JOHANNES LINN: Over the last two to three years, we've heard quite a lot in this town debated around particular areas of global governance reform including United Nations reform; closer to home in a sense here, IMF reform has been popping up repeatedly and actually will be discussed and probably decided on by the governors of the IMF at the upcoming annual meetings. World Bank reform is picking up speed in terms of its governance structure. We have had ongoing debates around the question of whether the G8 is in fact still serving its function in today's world and that has recently gathered some speed around the concept of democracies or a league of democracies or whatever which are being promoted by a number of people including some in this building. So there are a number of individual ideas that are popping around based around individual reforms and it's a question -- why is this? Why are we all worried about this? There are a number of factors which the book picks up on which I'm sure we'll hear more about.
First of all, the shifting power balances in the world with of course China, the BRICs more generally, taking on much more of an importance in terms of global economics, political security areas, and this in itself of course brings about questions of whether the global governance system is responsive to these changes. In addition of course, the whole globalization and integration process that we've been watching is an important factor and again will be picked up here.
Very importantly, I think the sense that the international institutions have a number of weaknesses that seem to be resistant to change, so that is a factor that keeps pushing in the direction of reform. Finally demonstrated most recently and painfully in the Georgia crisis. At least what I've been observing in the last two to three years, is a sort of a resurgence of what I would call the East-West divide. I used to work a lot on the former Soviet Union when I was the Vice President of the World Bank, but after 1990-1991, people didn't talk about East-West anymore. It had gone out of fashion. Now in the last few years all of a sudden this divide is creeping back into the way we talk, the way also some of us at least think, and I think it's reflective of new divisions, perhaps old-new divisions, new-old divisions, that are creeping back in. So the question is how do these institutions that we have or that we should have intermediate these divisions and the tensions that we face.
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