Opening Remarks
Dr John Chipman, Director‑General and Chief Executive, IISS
We want to ensure we
have an opportunity to hear what I know will be very interesting presentations
to conclude our deliberations this Saturday, 4 December, for the Manama
Dialogue. We are delighted with the
panel we have been able to bring together.
Let me say a few words about each of our panellists, before turning to
the subject of the concluding plenary on the changing international framework
and regional security.
It is a real delight
for us to have again at the Manama Dialogue the Deputy Prime Minister and
Minister of Foreign Affairs of Kuwait Sh Dr Muhammad Al-Sabah Al-Salem Al-Sabah. He is a great friend of the IISS, the Kingdom
of Bahrain and the Manama Dialogue process.
We were delighted that last year he made a keynote address at this
dialogue.
I said in my opening remarks that the Manama Dialogue is not just an event but
also a process, and that the ideas and proposals presented here need to be further
elaborated, researched and analysed. We
at the IISS wish to use the Manama Dialogue so that we as an organisation
understand more intimately what the genuine concerns are of the national
security and political leadership of this region. Often it is a characteristic of outsiders to
presume to know what those concerns are, or to presume that their own concerns
must inevitably be precisely those of the people of the region. This is a conceit that the IISS, organisationally,
rejects. It is why, when we engage in
regional security debates, whether in this region, Asia, Latin America, Africa
or elsewhere, we are committed to doing so in the region. It is that that underlines our international
character, and gives credibility to our argument that we may be different from
some nationally based organisations.
When the Deputy Prime Minister of Kuwait addressed us last year, one of the
themes he put at the core of his address was the importance of understanding
the relationship between demographics and security. He made some very interesting comments about
that relationship, and it was again an idea that we did not want simply to
float or perhaps sink in the waters of debate in this region. As the IISS has built up its analytical
presence here within our office in the Kingdom of Bahrain, we have hired an
analyst who is devoted to the subject of demographics and security. We have hired a Kuwaiti analyst to do that,
again to ensure the accent of the region is blended into the analysis we offer
the wider public. We thank the Deputy
Prime Minister for the contribution that he made last year, and hope he
appreciates that we want to ensure that his proposals and thoughts received
sturdy and robust analysis, and are available to others to consider and debate.
It is with similar pleasure and pride that I also welcome to the podium Kevin
Rudd, the Foreign Minister of Australia.
Two years ago, as Prime Minister of Australia, he gave the keynote
address at the IISS Shangri‑La Dialogue in Singapore and, at that time, talked
about his ideas and those of his country for an Asia‑Pacific community. He continued to advance those ideas through
conferences that were held in Australia.
A short while after his ideas were aired, the IISS published an analysis on the
changing framework and regional security architecture in the Asia‑Pacific, in
which the APC idea that we launched there was equally advanced. Our commitment to not just provide analysis
that we believe to be of interest to the regions concerned but we know to be of
interest, is very strong. Our reactions
to the keynote addresses, at different Dialogues, from these two individuals I
hope are testament to that. Therefore,
we very much look forward to the ideas and proposals they may make this
evening, and hope to follow those up with research and analysis that our
international staff will cover.
With those prefatory comments, we would like to invite Sh Dr Muhammad Al-Sabah
Al-Salem Al-Sabah, the Deputy Prime Minister, to take the podium and address
the 2010 Manama Dialogue.
The Changing International Framework and
Regional Security
Sh Dr Muhammad Al-Sabah Al-Salem Al-Sabah, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of
Foreign Affairs, Kuwait
Bismillah ar-Rahman ar-Rahim. Thank you, John, and I am terribly sorry that our session
will be at the end of such a long day, but I promise you that I will be as
brief as possible. When John called me
and said that he wanted me to participate in this IISS Manama Dialogue and to
be in this session, I was wondering what I could say about the title. ‘The changing international framework and
regional security,’ what does that mean?
I asked him, ‘John, what does that mean?’ He said, ‘You can talk about anything you
want. You can give us the macro picture
of events,’ and that reminded me about a story of a businessman.
He owed a huge debt of
$120 million to a bank, so he hired a financial consulting firm to help
him reschedule this debt and solve this problem. After a couple of weeks, the financial
advisor came to the businessman and said, ‘I solved it. After a lot of hard work and analysis of
market trends, I found a solution to your problem.’ The businessman said, ‘What is the solution?’ He said, ‘Just deposit $10m each month and,
by the end of the year, you will have $120m.
Voilà. That’s it. I solved the problem.’ The businessman said, ‘Okay, but how can I
get $10m a month?’ The consultant said,
‘Those are the details.’ I will give you
the macro picture and will leave the details for Kevin to fill in.
It has been said that our region is immune to change because of its culture,
religion, historical experiences and the relative homogeneity of the
population, but I think that could not be further from the truth. If there is an absolute constant in
international relations, then it must be the constant state of change in the international
environment, with the exception of course of one fundamental constant, and that
is the hospitality of the Bahraini people.
Sh Khalid, thank you very much for your hospitality, and to the King.
I thought I would look at the last half‑century and see how trends are changing
and what we should expect during the next period in our region. I can identify four main areas. The first is a change in the centre of global
power. As you will recall, 50 years ago,
after the Second World War, we had a bipolar world of the US and the Soviet
Union. After the collapse of the Soviet
Union, we entered a unipolar world, where the US was the indispensable nation,
the only player on the block. That
reality is now being increasingly challenged, not for a return to the bipolar
but on to a multipolar system. We have
seen this in different areas.
In the economic area,
since the financial crisis that took place two years ago, we have seen a
fundamental shift in the way people think about the new architecture of the
international financial world. We see a
serious call for revamping or even doing away with the system that governed
international economic regulations for the past 50 years, and that is the
Bretton Woods system. Now people are
talking about restructuring Bretton Woods to enable new countries to assume
their apparent power and responsibilities.
We have started to hear about the BRIC countries – Brazil, Russia, India
and China – as an emerging engine of growth.
Thank you to China and India. If
it were not for the growth in India and China, I think the world’s economic
growth would be flat on its face. China
was invited to be on the steering helm of the IMF and the World Bank, and India
was given a vote of confidence by President Obama, during his last visit, when
he called for its admission as a permanent member of the Security Council. That is a fundamental change from what we
have been seeing over the past 50 years.
Again, we are seeing new players coming to the field. Saudi Arabia is now being considered, and
rightly so, as one of the 20th most important countries in the
world, in terms of economic and political powers. The participation of Saudi Arabia in the G20
reflects that. We also see that increasingly
the call is being made to rethink the prominence of the dollar as the
international reserve currency. People
are now talking about going back to an idea that was made about 80 years ago by
John Maynard Keynes, the father of modern economics, when he recommended the
establishment of a currency called the ‘bancor’ to replace sterling as the
international reserve currency. Now we
see the Chinese calling for the abolition of the dollar as the reserve currency. We even see the president of the World Bank,
an American, calling for a return to the gold standard. That means the prominence of the dollar and
importance of the American economy is now being questioned and challenged. This is something that we would never have
thought of taking place in the past 50 years.
It is not only in areas of economics that centres of power have now been
moving, but also, with a great deal of success and joy – as Sh Abdullah
mentioned in his presentation today – Qatar challenged the US in the
organisation of the World Cup, and won that competition. I think Sh Abdullah was very modest not to
mention that he was quite instrumental in that, and that the UAE was in fierce
competition with Germany to host the arena.
Guess who won that competition?
The UAE did. In that sense, there
is a new recognition that small countries, Qatar, UAE and Saudi Arabia, are
punching way above their weight. This is
also a recognition of the new reality, which was not the case over the past 50
years.
The second area of
change is the perception of global threat.
If you ask anyone from the security community what the principal threat
was in the past 50 years, immediately they would say ‘a nuclear showdown
or war, with the aftermath of a nuclear winter, and the existential nature of
the threat for life as we know it’. That
is not the discussion anymore. It is not
about nuclear war. In any security or
international organisation, the first threat facing humanity would be
environmental degradation. We have heard
the horror stories about what will happen to humanity if this continues, and
the impact of global change on countries and people. There are predictions that some countries
will just submerge, and will not exist in 50 years. Others are talking about major climatic
changes that may wipe out a large number of people, following natural
disasters.
We start talking about
environmental disasters as the principal cause of international threats. We talk about the issues of disease, HIV and
malaria, which are also posing international threats. Lastly, we talk about terrorism and
unconventional warfare as another form of global threat that we never talked
about in the past 50 years. These
new kinds of threats were not in existence half a century ago. We have to think about them.
The third change that I
see is what I call the ‘movers and shakers’ of policies. Fifty years ago, the principal instrument of
change had always been governments.
Governments basically control the political process through organised
political groups and media, within the framework of print press. This is not the case anymore. More NGOs are now dominating the field. There are more social cyber‑networks. As my good brother Khalid is always reminding
us, we know exactly where he is at any period of time.
If you allow me to
throw out some statistics, after the establishment of the UN in 1946, we had 41
NGOs. In 1992, that number had increased
to 700. Now, we have 3,200 NGOs in the
UN itself, which is a 78% increase over the past 18 years. I would like to just remind you that 40 years
ago, when the Pentagon Papers were published, for those of you old enough to
remember, that publication produced very little international reaction, if
any. The ongoing WikiLeaks saga is truly
another story. It is only a click
away. Anyone in the world, whether in a
desert, on an ocean or in a cave somewhere, can have access to this information
and even comment on it. I will not dwell
on this much, but leave it for the Q&A.
The last point I would
like to mention, and this is something I truly believe in, is the demographic
time bomb, the dynamics of demography.
Truly we are approaching a massive collision of tectonic plates in
demographic dynamics. We have declining
population growth in the so‑called North.
A common phrase is ‘the Dying North’, with the low birth rates. At the same time, we have a rising population
growth in the South, or the developing world.
These two tectonic plates will eventually collide, which will produce
some massive eruptions. Let me just give
you the latest UN figures.
Let us compare the two
continents of Africa and Europe. The
population in Africa is 1,033m. It is
expected that this population will be 2,000m by the year 2050. Forty years from now, the population in
Africa will almost have doubled. The
current population in Europe is about 733m.
After 40 years, it is estimated that the population would be less
than this. As a matter of fact it will
be 691m. That is a drop in population by
almost 6% and a reduction
in the number of people living in Europe.
These numbers make us worry, because we have to find an equilibrating element
to balance population against resources globally. Migration was the instrument to re-establish
this equilibrium. Does migration
continue to achieve that balance? I am
sorry to say it does not anymore. Europe
was quite hospitable to migration from different parts of the world, but that
created a backlash, as we have seen in the increasing literature of xenophobia
and other types of policy issues. Even some
prominent politicians from countries that are very well known have started
talking about the death of multiculturalism.
In that sense, migration, which was the equilibrating factor, will not
be there to balance these impacts. Here
we must be conscious about how that will impact the environment in the next
50 years.
What would be the impact of this change in the centre of global power – the
change in the instrument of influence, the nature of threats and the dynamics
of demography? How are these changes
going to impact regional security? Those
are basically just details. I gave you
the bigger picture. Thank you very much
indeed.
Dr John Chipman
Sh Muhammad, thank you
very much. Do you see what a good idea
it was when I told you to speak about what you want? Thank you very much for an excellent
presentation. I should have mentioned
also that special interest you bring in the relationship between economics and
security, which is dear to our hearts at the IISS.
You mentioned the desire to see multipolarity globally, and the fact that we
have advocates of that in different regions of the world. Just before we invite the next speaker to
address us, I would leave with you the thought that some of the strongest
advocates of global multipolarity in particular regions are perhaps less
willing to accept multipolarity regionally or locally. One of the tensions inherent in the attempt
to create regional security frameworks is precisely this uneven approach to multipolarity,
where its global advocates are perhaps a little more diffident about inviting
quite that same degree of multipolarity in the smaller region they
inhabit. It might be one of the many subjects that you
raised that we might want to pick up in discussion, but the details, Kevin
Rudd, are yours, so we await your words.
Thank you very much.
