Crisis is opportunity to restore coherence in global economic governance - WTO DG, Lamy
DELIVERING a lecture at the UN office in Geneva, yesterday, Pascal Lamy, Director-General, WTO, said, “ In modern history, crises have been both the result of failures of governance and the cause of progress in governance. This applies both at the national level and, if we take armed conflicts as the ultimate form of crisis, at the international level. It also applies to the crisis - first the financial crisis and then the world economic crisis - that erupted in 2007 08. I would argue that this crisis stems from the growing disruptions to the order established in the aftermath of the Second World War. But I also think that it provides us with an opportunity to restore some kind of coherence in global economic governance. ”
Trust : Trust in the international context is a rare commodity, both precious and fragile. Because it can only be built up through a slow accumulation of signals, first exchanged and then verified to remove the professional distrust that inhabits all negotiators, whose ideology dictates that their country has “neither eternal friends nor eternal foes”. Because it presupposes the involvement of reliable and trusted third parties, free of all suspicion of manipulation or bias and ready to take the risk of intermediation or to act as scapegoat if the intermediation fails. But this trust goes beyond the building of compromises. It can only take root in shared values capable of filling the legitimate gaps in interests, cultures, beliefs and visions of the world .
Public Opinion : It is to the public that governments are accountable. It is with the public that we must share the sense of urgency that so many of us feel. The political legitimacy still belongs first and foremost to nations, as the European experience will attest, despite formidable progress in the field of governance. The global governance that the world needs cannot be severed from local governance roots. There is no shortcut to global coherence via our international institutions, all too often perceived by citizens as remote or obscure, even if it is their governments that are running them. In my view, good international governance is not about globalizing local problems, but localizing global problems. This is the price to pay for the legitimacy on which all power must be based. Hence the importance of discussions of the kind that brings us together today.