President:
Mikhail Gorbachev
Chairman: Dr. Andrei Grachev, Executive
Director: Dr. Rolando Picchioni
The World Political Forum was the
original idea of the Nobel Prize
Laureate Mikhail Gorbachev, with a
specific mission: to foster contacts
between politicians, scientists, high
level personalities in the cultural and
religious life of different continents,
faiths, languages and cultures, in order
to analyse the issue of interdependence,
but above all to suggest solutions for
the problems of the governance of
globalisation and the crucial problems
that affect humankind today.
The World Political Forum seeks to
examine how to arrange the best possible
co-ordination of international
institutions and what models for future
order are desirable and achievable to
reduce these imbalances and differences
in the search for a new political space
where civilisations can meet and come to
an agreement to manage international
disorder. Only determined and concerted
multi-lateral and trans-societal effort
by international actors can avert this
spiral of disorder.
The World Political Forum seeks to
become a meeting point and crossroads
for cultures, religions, and leaders, an
open forum for the whole world that,
through analysis and discussion will
give guidance and provide new solutions
to global problems and strive toward a
New World Civilisation and a framework
for a democratic international order.
The Forum’s aim is to create a permanent
structure for international political
and cultural debate regarding the 21st
century’s problems, dedicating
particular attention to the inextricable
geopolitical and economic
interdependence between the different
areas of the planet. It was resolved at
the founding conference to continue the
work of the World Political Forum in
annual assemblies and regional sessions
to examine the challenges of the new
century. The WPF is not, however, just
an annual meeting of eminent and
authoritative personalities. Its
founding members have proclaimed the
intention to transform it into a
fully-fledged international research
centre based in the Bosco Marengo
Complex, to deal with the themes of
governance and globalisation.
The goal of the World Political Forum is
to identify, through intense analysis
and the exchange of diverse experiences,
concrete and politically feasible
solutions to the unprecedented
challenges of the global and multi-polar
world, opening the way towards a new
civilisation.
Presentation
by
Mikhail S.
Gorbachev
The World Political
Forum has been established to provide a
new impetus to international politics.
It fulfils this aim through its mission,
which is to develop new ideas on the
basis of profound study of the main
problems of our time and to contribute
to restoring dialogue to its rightful
place as the principal method of
addressing the world’s problems.
Politicians alone cannot cope with all
the challenges that the world presents
today. Politics has to interact with
civil society, and with the intellectual
community. Therefore, dialogue is
needed, a wide-ranging dialogue that
will help us develop workable approaches
to meeting the challenges of our
globalised world. The world needs a
vision, driven by the will and
perseverance to make this vision a
reality. We need to cultivate a new
culture and stimulate new approaches,
because the world needs a culture of
peace. Even if we have a vision
appropriate to the challenges of the
contemporary world, even if we have the
political will, we still have to make
sure that there are the mechanisms
needed to implement the decisions.
We set out from the conviction that
history cannot be, and is not,
preordained. In every kind of situation
there is always room for alternatives,
there is always room for initiative, and
this presupposes the need for political
action, not only by politicians, but
also by civil society, organisations,
and movements. We reject pessimism in
evaluating our current and future
possibilities because pessimism could
result in an irreconcilable conflict
between civilisations from which no
modern armaments could save us.
The World Political Forum is not
intended to assume the functions of the
institutions of foreign and domestic
policy-making. Our responsibility, our
mission, as I see it, is to provide
information to, and share knowledge with
politicians, the business community and
international organisations, because it
is a lack of knowledge that has often
made politics so misguided and
unpredictable, based as it is mostly on
intuition, hasty evaluations and
conclusions. Too often, we have seen
actions that have little to do with the
responsibility that politicians should
feel to their nations and to the rest of
the world but rather reflect the
calculus of how much these actions could
strengthen one’s position on the eve of
elections. We all share a common
responsibility and concern not only for
the world of today but also for the
world of the future. Many of those at
the World Political Forum were
instrumental in contributing
individually and jointly to ridding the
world of ideological confrontation and
the threat of devastating nuclear
conflict. We seek now to be instruments
once again.
The World Political Forum has become a
place for interaction, in this
particularly difficult age, of both
former and active political leaders as
well as scientists, men of letters,
artists, economists, academics and
political observers. We want to involve
as many people as possible in our
project, people with different
ideological views and origins, to
involve them in a common discussion on
the seemingly impenetrable problems of
modern politics. The World Political
Forum has chosen Italy as its home as it
is unique in its historical and
geographical significance. The country
is a meeting point at the juncture of
the European and the Mediterranean
cultures, between the Balkans and the
Middle East, between the Christian and
Muslim worlds. Italy, like the World
Political Forum, is a crossroads of
civilisations.
When we began two years ago to think
over the idea of the World Political
Forum, we could not imagine that future
events would confirm so clearly and so
painfully, that we were right in
expressing our concern over the fact
that the course of international events
was becoming chaotic, alarming, I should
even say dangerous, and politics was
substantially losing control over
events.
We are now facing an evident crisis in
world politics. We see that the decades
of the Cold War have been followed by
numerous conflicts and ‘hot wars’: that
violence, in the form of terrorism,
which mars international relations, and
war is once again used as a readily
available tool of international
politics.
The most dangerous global challenges
which the world is facing in the third
millennium differ from the previous
great threat of nuclear war, which
jeopardised mankind’s future and in fact
its very survival. Today, we are
witnessing changes in the global
environmental balance, the dissolution
of the tacit covenant of peaceful
coexistence between man and nature, and
this has caused a worldwide
transformation. In the interdependent
world of today, linked by modern means
of communication and transport, diseases
like AIDS or SARS can spread like
lightning. There are also the dramatic
problems of poverty and the hunger of
billions of people that can no longer be
considered national problems or even
regional calamities. Finally, there is
the need to manage the uncontrolled
processes of globalisation. The
spontaneous processes that were
unleashed after the end of the Cold War
have undermined the hope and optimism
that the world had then of creating a
new world order.
International organisations, conceived
as arbiters of international relations
and plenipotentiary representatives of
the emerging international community are
now in crisis, a crisis brought about by
their ineffectiveness in facing new
realities. The world needs to reform
those international institutions that
can still function, but we also need new
institutions that can keep pace with the
new politics of the twenty-first century
to help politicians properly envision
the real issues on the world’s agenda
and together seek convincing responses.
Politics is not keeping pace with the
course of events, and this lag has been
demonstrated particularly during the
Iraqi crisis. There is one question that
needs to be asked: Has the military
victory in Iraq drawn us closer to a
solution of problems that arise from the
link between terrorism and the weapons
of mass destruction? To me, it is clear
that the answer is no. This victory has
actually set us back and made such a
solution more difficult, because the
temptation of asymmetrical responses to
the overwhelming military might of the
world’s only remaining superpower has
grown instead of diminished. Terrorist
actions are occurring in many regions of
the world and are now practically
pandemic.
We have seen enough
utopias in our lifetime. The socialist
utopias, the utopia of a perfect world
order - ‘the end of history’, and now a
third utopia is appearing - that of
imposing democratic regimes through the
use of force. All of them are wrong. I
would go further, to say that every
utopia in the end makes us all pay a
high price for it.
The participation of
research centres and think tanks are of
particular importance for our mission,
not only Western ones but also those
representing Asia, Africa, the Muslim
world, and Latin America. Many of them
have already declared their willingness
to participate in the work of the World
Political Forum, and to make their
intellectual contribution available to
us for analysis and documentation. We
welcome this participation.
The World Political
Forum as a meeting point for comparison
of different viewpoints and approaches
is becoming a valuable tool for
developing new policies, for high-level
contacts, and for seeking new methods of
research leading to common solutions.
Among the most important themes for
wide-ranging international discussion
are those related to global governance.
I think it is worth repeating that only
by continuing the processes of
democratisation in the world, only by
guaranteeing democratic procedures as
the functional basis of international
institutions will it be possible to
extend to everyone the benefits of
modern society, to integrate different
proposals and choose the most
appropriate ones. Nothing can be
achieved if pressures and a quest for
supremacy replace the democratic
approach, and only the path to a new
world civilisation can lead to a culture
of peace.
Mikhail S.
Gorbachev
President of the
World Political Forum
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