Soft power approach.

• Position: NGOWatch

Michel Rocard, Co-President of the recently established International Ethical, Political and Scientific Collegium and Chairman of the Administrative Board of the Association for the Collegium (www.Collegium-International.org), is a former Prime Minister of France and currently Chairman of the Commission for Culture, Education and Media at the European Parliament. He spoke on the telephone with Russell Taylor of the UN Chronicle.

What are the aims of the Association for the International Ethical, Political and Scientific Collegium?

The initiative for the creation of the Collegium was launched in New York in February 2002 by a group of statesmen and academics inspired by the intellectual and moral leadership of President Milan Kucan of Slovenia and by the aspirations formulated in the Millennium message by United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan. We share this deep concern for the deterioration of the planet, the loss of ecological balance, deforestation and climatic changes, which profoundly affect our daily lives, as well as the lack of effective remedies to pandemics, such as AIDS and malaria. We felt the need to overcome the scandalous discrepancies in the access to basic public goods by separate members of the human family, resulting in new forms of violence, warfare and terrorism. A new effort is obviously called for to improve the quality of world governance, which can be initiated by a collective body of philosophers, economists, sociologists and biologists, as well as of present and former heads of Government who have shown a high degree of democratic efficiency and command respect.

Thus constituted, the Collegium intends to take up specific challenges and present recommendations or advice on actions to be taken to improve world governance. Our appeal has already been signed by some seventy personalities from all parts of the world who share the conviction that the Collegium can be an instrument of a new ambitious vision of the future. As you see, this is a "soft power", and not a "hard power", approach. The recommendations arrived at by the Collegium would not be binding for an body- they would just remain recommendations.

Globalization is a fact. Whether it touches economics, the world's financial regulations or the environment, it is nonsense to refuse globalization--it is here to stay. But the problem lies in making it respond to the basic needs and the human rights of the worlds citizens. This will be one of the main...