CERCLE DIPLOMATIQUE - issue 01/2017

Fine hotels
LE MONDE ESSAY
”The future will be different from
anything we can imagine.“
CERCLE
DIPLOMATIQUE
selected by
ECONOMIQUE et TOURISTIQUE INTERNATIONAL
can also be found in these exclusive hotels:
Philippe Narval
was raised in the Austrian
Lake District. After receiving
a scholarship, he completed
his secondary education at
the Lester B. Pearson United
World College in Canada
and holds university
degrees from Kings College
London and the University
of Oxford. His background
includes project
management, PR and
fundraising work for
international NGOs and
independent art institutions.
He spent several years of
his professional life living
and working in Eastern
Europe, South America and
the Middle East. In March
2012, he assumed the role
of managing director of the
European Forum Alpbach.
Philippe Narval, Managing Director of the European Forum Alpbach, shares his
thoughts on the 2017 general theme: “Conflict and Cooperation”.
We had made such a cosy home for ourselves
in the market society that promised
us, over the decades, that each generation
would be materially better off than its predecessor.
Now we’re starting to feel that this story has come to
an end, just as the Holocene era is also coming to an
end. The end of this geological epoch, which for so
long granted our planet the most stable ecological
and climatological conditions in its history, has
passed without ceremony. Scientists have decided
that there is enough evidence to proclaim a new
epoch under the name Anthropocene.
This is the timeframe during which the human
species is the defining factor in the ecosystem. All
that’s left for the scientists to decide is which markers
in the planet’s sedimentary layers best represent the
Anthropocene’s beginning. According to scientists
like Jan Zalasiewicz, there is no shortage of candidates
for the role: they range from the radioactive sediments
left by the atomic tests of the 1950s to the massive
deposits of chicken bones – the quintessential
sign of mass animal husbandry – in our planet’s waste
heaps. In any case, the date will lie somewhere in
the 1950s and 60s, the decades of the baby boomers,
the official start of our planetary omnipotence.
A Planetary Stewardship
What would a society that offers honour and dignity
to creation look like? How would it respect our
planetary limits? How can we change our culture to
one of planetary stewardship, when the conflict
against natural forces and scarcity, to which humanity
was subject for millennia, seems so deeply anchored
in our unconscious? All over Europe people, organisations
and companies have already shifted from
the single-minded quest for profit and are setting
themselves more sustainable goals. What would it
take to promote these forms without placing the values
of an open society at risk? Could Europe maintain
its place on the global stage if it decided to restructure
its economic system?
New Battle Lines
Only a few allow themselves such thoughts in
times like these, while the battle lines are being
drawn: between generations, between nation-states
The European Forum
Alpbach with the general
theme “Conflict &
Cooperation” will take place
from August 16 to
September 1, 2017
alpbach.org
and between people living in successful technology
centres and those in the periphery. In times of uncertainty,
we rely on familiar institutions and patterns of
behaviour. This puts a supranational institution like
the European Union under pressure. Yet, the EU remains
probably the most successful exemplar of cooperation,
conflict resolution and prevention. Its
great achievement is to have created institutions in
which we “act together”. The currency and fiscal union
makes an economic union urgently necessary, but
there is no consensus on this. The EU’s security strategy
is an impressively verbose document; in reality
we present no united face to the world. The expansion
strategy has been frozen, and we’ve been dithering
over terms such as “social union” or “defence
union” for years. And no-one can really imagine acting
in solidarity beyond the frontiers of their own
country.
A minority of pioneers are now calling for a European
Republic and the dissolution of nation-states.
Whether we have a republic or not, the essential demand
is, at long last, to consistently implement the
subsidiarity principle. The disillusioned, however,
seek only a reduction of the Union’s responsibility to
the Single Market and shared external border protection,
and are willing to sacrifice freedom of movement
within Europe. But who can fall in love with
Frontex or the Single Market?
The refugees in Europe have shown us with particular
clarity where the fracture lines in the EU run.
They also challenge us to ask who we are and what
values we’re supposed to be defending. What does it
mean to be a European, what do we expect from new
arrivals, what do we actually stand for? Refugees,
along with the rest of us, require answers to these
questions.
As European-minded citizens we should, however,
also ask ourselves what we’re prepared to argue
and stand up for, abilities we’ve lost. How pleasant it
is to be passively tolerant! But without conflicts and
argument held in a civilised spirit, we won’t get by.
We won’t be capable of negotiating a shared life with
our new neighbours and we won’t be able to defend
Europe against the domestic enemies in our democracy.
We know instinctively that the future will be diffe-
PHOTOS: PETER MAYR, BERNHARD AICHNER/TIROL WERBUNG
rent from anything we can imagine, but we still cannot
help wondering about it. Societies are only as strong as
their most powerful dreams. But what are Europeans
dreaming of in times like this when the fantasy of
ever-increasing prosperity has come to an end?
What have we still to offer when the apparent task
at hand is to create future visions of a “reductive modernism”?
Do digital tools enable us to design new
forms of cooperation in a decentralised, non-hierarchical
way? The central thesis of Carl Frey and Michael
Osborne is that just under 50% of occupations
will disappear when robots move off the factory
floor and into other workplaces in the form of selflearning
systems. But is there a profit to balance out
the loss? The question is whether we’ll have to completely
redefine work itself within society.
The Juxtaposition of Conflict and Cooperation
The juxtaposition of conflict and cooperation
does not infer a simple opposition – one bad, the
other good. Transnational networks such as the mafia
or cartels only function in the economy because
they’re based on successful cooperation. Elsewhere,
there’s an important strand within organisational
studies arguing we need conflicts to drive change
processes and for fertile ground for innovation. A
society no longer able to conduct arguments in a civilised
and open way atrophies and slides into totalitarianism.
The question remains, nonetheless, how
large, violent conflicts start and end. What narratives
fuel them and what instruments can we use in the
21st century to prevent them? What conflict-resolution
tools can we deploy? World peace through global
cooperation – still a noble aim? Who still speaks
of such things today? Who dares to dream so big?
The evolutionary biologist Martin Nowak has
proved that systems based on cooperation are more
resilient in the long term. Humanity has always developed
in a zone of tension between conflict and
cooperation. We will only solve challenges of the future
on this planet together and in partnership, that
much is sure. But do we even know which structures
are suited for this; which post-nation-state models
are needed at a global level, which at a local level?
How and where can we learn to cooperate in a complex
environment? The idea of democracy as the
highest school of cooperation is worn-out, but what
would happen if we rediscovered it? We convinced
democrats must be ready to argue for democracy. If
we don’t, who will?
General Manager
KR Engelbert Jandl
VILA VITA Pannonia ****
Storchengasse 1
7152 Pamhagen
T. +43 2175 2180-0
vilavitapannonia.at
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68 Cercle Diplomatique 1/2017