Vintage Clinton. When he speaks, the world listens with interest.
President Clinton Calls for “Systematization” for Peace and Humane Globalization
21 January 2004 - Davos, Switzerland
To ensure globalization with widespread peace and prosperity, world leaders must work to create mechanisms that can be applied on a large scale to address inequality and other challenges, said former US President William J. Clinton, Founder of the William Jefferson Clinton Foundation, at the opening lunch of the World Economic Forum’s Annual Meeting 2004.
“There are lots of wonderful people who are dealing with the rough edges of globalization,” Clinton said. “But we do not have the systems the world needs to respond in a comprehensive way.”
Hundreds of business, political, religious, academic and civil society leaders are gathered in this Swiss mountain resort for five days of meetings around the theme, “Partnering for Security and Prosperity.” They listened as Clinton said that many of globalization’s opponents “have got their criticisms right”. He added: “There is a broad conflict between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have-nots’ to define meaning, identity and rootedlessness.”
Yet Clinton defended moving forward instead of trying to return, in the ungrammatical words of the late US humorist Will Rogers, to “the good old days that never was”.
Clinton cited the battle against HIV/AIDS as an example of how “systematization” might work. The former US president described how he and former South African President Nelson Mandela launched a roadshow to ask for more money to combat the disease. “Nelson Mandela and I were out there rattling the cup for more money, and the head of the programme in the Caribbean told me that they wouldn’t have the infrastructure to spend the money and that they wouldn’t have enough money to buy medicine anyway.”
As a result, Clinton said, he changed his focus to helping to build local clinics and bringing down the price of HIV/AIDS medicine. Capacity building at the local level is key to the process, he commented.
Initiatives that deserve to be “systematized”, said Clinton, include the Grameen Bank, a community loan programme in India, and a campaign led by Hernando de Soto, President of the Instituto Libertad y Democracia in Peru, to guarantee property rights to the poor. “Soto is probably the most important living economist,” said Clinton, “though some people think that the term ‘living economist’ is an oxymoron.
Clinton also advocated greater global support for politicians who are willing to take big risks to promote democracy, such as Ernesto Zedillo, the former Mexican president who ended one-party rule in his country, and Mikheil Saakashvili, President-elect of Georgia. “Are you just going to pat [Saakashvili] on the back?” Clinton asked participants. “Or can we give him help in some systematic way so that all those other countries of the former Soviet Union want to get in line?”
“Half the people here today deserve medals for their work,” said Clinton. “But we ‘haves’ need to systematize our responses. When you hear about a good thing during these next few days, think about how we can systematize this to scale.”
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