THE 4TH ANNUAL CAPITAL LINK FORUM CONFERENCE
Monday October 30, 2000

H.E. Mr. Elias Gounaris

Ambassador,

Permanent Representative of Greece to the United Nations

"Greece in the era of globalization"

Ladies and Gentlemen

As the Greek Foreign Minister Mr. Papandreou said in his speech to the 55th United Nations General Assembly on 14 September this year, we believe that now is the time to turn the UN from an organization working to globalize democracy into an organization able to democratize globalization'. This is a concept pregnant with implications.

Globalizing democracy assumes that democracy is itself a goal to be pursued on its own merits. Trying to make democracy global is the political equivalent of evangelism i.e. of spreading the good message to the unconverted. Democratizing globalization on the other hand, presupposes that democracy is not just good but also useful to the expansion of the market. Fortunately, either approach promotes democracy and more generally rule-governed behavior.

There is, however, nothing automatic about a process that would allow democracy to be ushered in, as it were, on the coat tails of a globally expanding market. For one thing, international economic integration, i.e. globalization, is not an unstoppable steamroller. It is an innovation whose fate is still in the balance -and not because of the street protests in Seattle and Prague.

Rulers can choke the benefits of a market innovation and keep their people cowed and isolated at their mercy. Many a government today would simply love to strangle the Internet that allows its users to communicate and gives them access to uncensored information.

This then is the buzzword of this third millennium of ours: Information, i.e. a commodity that, like maternal love, can be shared and yet remain undiminished, enjoyed and used but never used up. As more and more information, stored up as a string of zeroes and ones, is sent anywhere in the world at negligible cost 'we the peoples of the world' - as the UN Secretary-General keeps reminding us to call ourselves - begin to realize that information technology and globalization were made for each other. For the first time in our history, we have started deriving so much benefit (prosperity, knowledge, pleasure) from each other's company.

In a truly global world then, goods, services, capital, persons, but also - if allowed - arms, terrorists, drugs, pollutants and viruses will circulate more freely than ever before. Markets, however, are not just mechanisms spinning in space. They will only work efficiently in a law-governed context that will safeguard the rights to property of all the transactors, their freedom to trade, their freedom of expression and, yes, ultimately their freedom to elect their governments, petition them and hold them accountable for their actions. Markets, modern economists insist, are more than ever embedded into the civic structure of a (now increasingly global) society, an integral part of its moral order.

This is where traditionalists start raising an eyebrow. Morality as we know it, they maintain, is not global - as markets tend to become, it is Western: it developed slowly, painfully in Europe; it cannot easily be defined let alone exported. Homer's heroes were judged by their strength, courage and cunning, honor being their main virtue. In classical Greece the virtues were refined and expanded by Plato and Aristotle to include moderation (the golden mean) wisdom and prudence. Socrates taught that virtue was its own reward. Christianity introduced charity and interpreted the Greeks' 'natural law' as 'God's law. Secularism arrived with the European Enlightenment adding personal freedom, solidarity and equality to the list.

Cutting through this theoretical undergrowth, business leaders have nonetheless tried to derive practical rules of behavior from general principles that will allow them to 'do well by doing good'. Trust, fairness, integrity are the concepts they use. They know for instance that shoppers want to know what exactly they are buying otherwise, they won't. They know that when goods can be bought more freely than judges this is good for business. In his paper issued recently by the US National Bureau of Economic Research entitled 'Natural Openness and Good Government' Mr Shang-Jin- Wej of Harvard University shows conclusively that the more a country opens itself to global trade, the less corrupt it becomes.

Once again, there is nothing automatic about this process. Although few of the world's leaders are openly against globalization as such, some would simply love to reap its benefits and at the same time continue in their old protectionist, authoritarian and corrupt ways. As Mark Twain once put it: 'I am all for progress; it's change I don't like'.

We in Greece live in an area, the Balkans, where resistance to change usually in the name of sovereignty, has, as you know, been historically quite strong. We have seen Governments asking to be respected while at the same time oppressing their citizens and aggressing their neighbors. Such rulers want their borders open to investment but closed to the emerging new global ethos. This is not possible. Globalization does indeed promote diversity, which is, after all, at the root of any fruitful exchange, but it turns those who trample on its rules into outcasts .

In the old colonial days, Rudyard Kipling would wax lyrical about 'the white man's burden' having to teach rule-governed behavior to those he contemptuously relegated to 'the lesser breeds without the law'. Today 'we the peoples' of all colors, races and creeds must shoulder the burden of ensuring that the rules are enforced and that those violating them are excluded from the game, exactly like athletes using steroids.

The game itself is inclusive but not open to cheaters. Those autocratic, corrupt rulers who use sovereignty as the last refuge of the scoundrel, come, these days, to a sticky end, sooner rather than later. Countries that are candidates to the rule-governed globalization club but persist in their own unreconstructed ways must choose whether they really wish to qualify for membership or remain forever pure, untouched and untouchable i.e. pariahs.

The country I represent has long made her choice and is ready to help its neighbors follow in her path. We are fully aware that predation, i.e. pillaging and plundering, has been a constant in history but also that it has never led to self-sustaining growth anywhere. For the first time we Greeks as well as 'we the peoples' have a chance to be prosperous, free and live in peace. We therefore fully subscribe to the principle developed by Mr. Koffi Annan in his article in the 'Economist' of 1 8 September 1999 that today 'the collective interest is the national interest' and we fully endorse Mr. Papandreou's suggestion that such principles be consolidated throughout the world by the democratization of globalization.

Ladies and Gentlemen, thank you for your attention

ORGANIZERS