The century is approaching its conclusion in a climate of growing tension. Conflict springs up between individual rights and collective duties, between local roots and cosmopolitism. It is present in the tension between economic development and the safeguard of the environment, the aggression of global markets and the desire to protect fragile economies, the pressures of emigration from poor countries and unemployment in the more advanced nations. There is renewed bloodshed between ethnic, religious, cultural and economic groups, and between nations.
However, as the International Commission on Peace and Food reminds us, "the perspective the world seeks must be based on a greater understanding of the inextricable linkages between peace, democratization, development, equity and the environment. None of these great goals can be achieved, without corresponding progress towards the others. [...] What are the foundations of this new intellectual perspective and what sort of strategies, actions and results will it lead to? It requires a change in the way we look at and think of familiar things like war, developing countries, democracy, agriculture, industrialization. First, we have to awaken from the millennia-old nightmare that war is a natural and inevitable part of human existence, which can perhaps be mitigated or kept far from our shores, but never really mastered or eliminated. [...] Most of all, the new perspective the world seeks should be based on a recognition that humankind is the master of its own destiny, that the external limits are not binding on us if we tap the unlimited creative potential of our own inner human resourcefulness".
These recommendations are the starting point of the debate among the Nobel Laureates and international experts gathering in Milan, to discuss how to transform conflict into an occasion for dialogue, growth and innovation.
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Economic Freedom and Competitive Federalism: Prospects for the New Century
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Saturday 7 December 1996
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There is agreement that market organization of economic activity insures a larger bundle of valued goods and services than politicized organization and control.
There is worldwide movement toward depoliticization that takes several forms: privatization, denationalization, devolution, deregulation, and federalism. Political and economic activities are being decoupled. The economic basis for large and inclusive nation-states has largely disappeared.
A re-emergence of effectively federalized political structures is consistent with new realities. Federalism allows political organization to exploit forces of competition analogous to those in markets. Competition imposes discipline on political agents. Examples abound.
To what extent must a federalized structure embody uniform devolution of authority to provincial units? What are prospects for effective political competition at the start of the new century?
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