Foreign Minister Tuomioja: New architecture needed for global governance
Press release 181/2004
30 August, 2004
A new architecture of global governance is needed to resolve global problems, said Finnish Foreign Minister Erkki Tuomioja on Monday, 30 August, in Dar es Salaam, and called for like-minded governments, parliamentarians, non-governmental organisations and businesses to form coalitions of change. Minister Tuomioja was addressing the meeting of the Helsinki Group in Tanzania on behalf of himself and the co-chair of the Helsinki Process, Tanzanian Foreign Minister Jakaya Kikwete. The three-day meeting will identify an agenda of global challenges that would be tackled in the globalisation report of the Helsinki Group next year. The work is based on the reports of three track groups.
Increasing inequality between nations and regions is one the most prevasive features of our time. The deepening development gap has mobilised extreme reactions of discontent. There is an urgent need for new efforts to overcome the disease of poverty, said Tuomioja.
The G8 of leading economies of North represent traditional coalitions. The formation of new coalitions has been most visible in the Doha round of the WTO talks in which leading Southern countries have formed a counter coalition to balance the heavy influence of the North in trade talks. There is space for new coalitions that bring together governments from the North and the South in order to tackle the areas, like commodity prices, development funding and debt relief. It seems increasingly clear that without the establishment of a new, ambitious regime of debt relief, the development effort of most indebted countries cannot be jump started.
The most immediate way to make global governance more democratic is to enhance the role of national and regional parliaments in international trade and financial issues, said Tuomioja. Cooperation between business, civil society and governments is also needed. This kind of hybrid governance seems to be increasingly needed in such fields as the control of the international trade in small arms.
"The Helsinki Process on Globalisation and Democracy, facilitated by Finland and Tanzania, is in search of novel and implementable solutions to these issues of global governance. In order to work on the implementation of proposals animating from the Helsinki Process bilateral meetings with other foreign ministers are to start at the UN General Assembly in New York", said Tuomioja.
Further information: Programme Manager Juha Mustonen (Dar es Salaam), Helsinki Process Secretariat, gsm + 358 40 583 0945