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from
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To a degree, the Club of Rome epitomizes
the world government movement’s general blandness, mediocrity, and
mealymouthed words that jail. This is certainly true for such
Club initiatives as the RIO Project
("Reshaping the International Order"). In
his essay on chaos, J. Orlin
Grabbe says,
The liberal’s preoccupation with
social "problems" and the Club of Rome’s obsession
with entropy are essentially expressions of the Second School
view. Change, the fundamental motion of the universe, is bad.
Grabbe defines the Second
School as those who believe that "Chaos is a Result of
Breaking Laws" - a belief diametrically opposed to
natural law, hence antithetical to
the Innovist ethic, hence quite
positively evil. That said, Grabbe has jumped the gun, as
becomes clear upon a reading of Ilya Prigogine’s brief paper
on uncertainty, included above.
I find myself actually liking the Club, from what I know of
them. Many of the complaints lodged against the Club could
just as easily be lodged against myself - for example, general
indictment of the methods of systems analysis (I am, of
course, a systematician). One of the Club’s
founders was a real WWII hero, a partisan jailed by the Italian
fascists. The Club seems to be populated, at its highest
level, by people who are innocent of the many horrors orchestrated
by elites in other superficially similar organizations of this
century. After extensive exposure to frightening organizations such
as Bilderberg, the Club seems disarmingly
sincere and admitting of fallibility. The Club is mentioned
by others in ominous terms, but this seems thoroughly uncalled for.
Still, many of these Clubbers are the same sort of people who
embark on well-meaning programs in the United Nations
that often involve calamitous unintended consequences.
The Club of Rome maintains (or rather, forgets to
maintain) a web site at
http://www.clubofrome.org, which
seems a bit buggy and is littered with grammatical and lexical
errors. The Club’s Executive Committee has a mailbox,
executive.committee@clubofrome.org.
Excerpts:
A novelist would probably reject the
contacts and encounters that led up to the creation of the
Club of Rome as too improbable for a good story. An
Italian industrialist who has spent much of his working life in
China and Latin America meets, via a Russian (although this is
at the height of the Cold War), a top international scientific
civil servant, Scots by birth and now living in Paris. They find
they share similar concerns, become friends, decide to draw
others (American, Austrian, British, Danish, French) into their
discussions. Unfortunately, the first proper meeting of this
group, in Rome in Spring 1968, is a total flop but a handful
of die-hards carry on, and within a few years millions of people
all round the world are talking about their ideas.
The Club of Rome is a center of research and a
think tank, it is also a center of action, of innovation and
initiative. The Club of Rome, founded in 1968 in Rome, is a
group of scientists, economics, businessmen, international high
civil servants, Heads of State and former Heads of State from
the five continents, who are convinced that the future of
humankind is not determined once and for all and that each human
being can contribute to the improvement of our societies.
We, the members of the Club of Rome, are one
hundred individuals, at present drawn from 52 countries and five
continents.
Currently there are 30 National Associations spread across all
five continents.
1986:
The Club decided on a deliberate change of emphasis in
tackling "the predicament of mankind". While maintaining the
distinctively global approach, it chose to focus on particular
aspects, sometimes even concentrating on a single major one.
Possible topics were then defined by Alexander King in
his statement The Club of Rome, Reaffirmation of a
Mission. These topics are: governability, peace and
disarmament, population growth, human resources, and assessment
of the consequences of advances in science and technology.
As the 21st century approaches, there is a growing
sense of uncertainty and anxiety. Faced by increasing
complexity, dizzying globalization and a world subject to
constant political, economic and social upheavals, human beings
today are fearful. We appear to be in the early stages of the
formation of a new type of world society.
Nothing escapes this tidal wave that carries all before it. Yet
the greatest impact is undoubtedly on human hearts and minds.
This why our aim must be essentially normative and
action-oriented. We must develop common standards, based on a
sense of our shared responsibility towards future generations.
The basis of the new order should be an understanding that human
initiatives and institutions exist only to serve human needs.
Central to it should be values that cannot be imposed from
outside but must grow as part of the renewal occurring within
every human individual.
The essential mission of the Club of Rome is to
act as an international, non-official catalyst of change. This
role is prompted by the slowness and inadequacy of governments
and their institutions to respond to urgent problems,
constrained as they are by structures and policies designed for
earlier, simpler times and by relatively short electoral cycles.
This, in view of the confrontational nature of much of public
and international life, the stifling influence of expanding
bureaucracies and the growing complexity of issues, suggests
that the voice of independent and concerned people, having
access to the corridors of power around the world, should have a
valuable contribution to make towards increasing understanding
and, at times, jolting the system into action.
The members of the Executive Committee are frequently
consulted by decision-makers in international institutions,
governments, the business community and civil society; this has
always been an important part of our work.
Aware of the importance of the information society, the
Club has adopted a policy of world-wide communication,
using all the means available, and most recently the Internet
with our web site.
However, the Club itself tends normally to adopt a
low profile, and the passionate debate sparked by "The Limits
to Growth", updated by the authors under the title "Beyond
the Limits", has been the only and unexpected exception to
this desire to operate discreetly. We believe that we are
sometimes more effective when we work behind the scenes.
Alexander King, as the "keeper of the ideology" from the
outset, was inspired by the model of the Lunar Society of
Birmingham: a group of independent-minded people (such
as Wedgwood the potter, James Watt, Priestley
the discoverer of oxygen, Erasmus Darwin) who dined
together once a month towards the end of the 18th
century and discussed the promises and problems offered by
contemporary developments in science and industry. The
Lunatics, as William Blake called them
disparagingly, had no political power or ambitions, but they
could see the interconnections between all that was happening
around them and the potential for changing the nature of
society. No bureaucracy, just thinking and doing.
Eventually the Club did have to draw up some
statutes and choose a President (Aurelio Peccei),
but that was all. It was decided to limit the membership to 100
because it was feared that larger numbers would become
unmanageable and would necessitate a paid secretariat, hence all
the usual paraphernalia of finance committees, etc. that they
hoped to avoid. So that the Club should be seen to
be entirely independent, financial support would not be sought
or accepted from governments or industry. For the same reason,
there should be no political affiliations or appointments -
members appointed to political positions were expected to become
sleeping members while in office (this happened, for example,
for Okita and Pestel). Otherwise the membership
should range as widely as possible, in terms of expertise and
geography. A concern with the problematic, and the need to
delineate it and understand its nature, was the main requirement
for membership, irrespective of political ideology.
The majority ultimately decided that it would take too long and
cost too much to develop the Ozbekhan model to the point
where it would produce useful results.
Once again, the enterprise might have foundered; but once again,
a deus ex machina appeared, this time in the shape of
Professor Jay Forrester of MIT, who had been
invited to the meeting. For thirty years he had been working on
the problem of developing mathematical models that could be
applied to complex, dynamic situations such as economic and
urban growth. His offer to adapt his well-tried dynamic model to
handle global issues was gratefully accepted, and the way ahead
suddenly seemed less uncertain. A fortnight later, a group of
Club members visited Forrester at MIT and were
convinced that the model could be made to work for the kind of
global problems which interested the Club. An agreement
was signed with a research team at MIT in July
1970, the finance provided by a grant of $200 000 that Pestel
had obtained from the Volkswagen Foundation.
The team was made up of 17 researchers from a wide range of
disciplines and countries, led by Dennis Meadows. From
their base at the Systems Dynamics Group at MIT
they assembled vast quantities of data from around the world to
feed into the model, focusing on five main variables:
investment, population, pollution, natural resources and food.
The dynamic model would then examine the interactions among
these variables and the trends in the system as a whole over the
next 10, 20, 50 years or more if present growth rates were
maintained. The global approach was quite deliberate; regional
and area studies could come later.
In a remarkably short time, the team produced its report in
1972: The Limits to Growth, written very readably for a
non-specialist audience by Donella Meadows. The response
to the book - in all 12 million copies have been sold,
translated into 37 languages - showed how many people in every
continent were concerned about the predicament of mankind. "The
Club of Rome" had begun to make its mark, as its founders
had hoped, on the whole world.
Quite wrongly, the Report tended to be perceived as presenting
an inescapable scenario for the future, and the Club
was assumed to be in favor of zero economic growth. In
fact the projection of trends and the analysis of their cross
impacts were intended to highlight the risks of a
blind pursuit of growth in the industrialized countries, and
to induce changes in prevailing attitudes and policies so
that the projected consequences should not materialize.
Eduard Pestel was one of those deeply concerned about the
undifferentiated global approach adopted in Limits to Growth.
As a professional systems analyst (he had established his own
Institute for Systems Analysis in Hannover in 1971) he
was the obvious person to produce a better one. Accordingly,
even before the Meadows Report was published, he
and Mihajlo Mesarovic of Case Western Reserve
University had begun work on a far more elaborate model (it
distinguished ten world regions and involved 200,000 equations
compared with 1000 in the Meadows model). The research
had the full support of the Club and the final
publication, Mankind at the Turning Point, was accepted
as an official Report to the Club of Rome
in 1974. In addition to providing a more refined regional
breakdown, Pestel and Mesarovic had succeeded in
integrating social as well as technical data. The Report
was less readable than Limits to Growth and did not make
the same impact on the general public, but it was well received
in Germany and France, in
particular.
Peccei persuaded the Austrian Chancellor, Bruno
Kreisky, to host a meeting in February 1974 on North-South
problems which brought together six other heads of state or
government (from Canada, Mexico, the Netherlands, Senegal,
Sweden and Switzerland), senior representatives of three others
(Algeria, the Republic of Ireland and Pakistan) and ten members
of the CoR Executive Committee. Peccei
deliberately did not invite any of the major European powers,
the USA or the USSR so as to prevent
the debate turning into a forum for national or ideological
position statements. To encourage the participants to speak
freely, they were asked to come without accompanying civil
servants and assured that nothing they said would be attributed
to them. The two-day private brainstorming meeting ended with a
press conference for 300 journalists and the CoR Executive
Committee members issued their "Salzburg Statement",
which emphasized that the oil crisis was simply part of the
whole complex of global problems; the nine recommendations
related to many of the issues covered in the NIEO.
Scholars from the First, Second and Third Worlds were
invited to participate in the RIO project (Reshaping
the International Order), but only Poland
and Bulgaria accepted from the Communist bloc. The
basic thesis was that the gap between rich and poor countries
(with the wealthiest roughly 13 times richer than the poorest)
was intolerable and the situation was inherently unstable. What
would be required to reduce the gap to 6:1 over 15 to 30 years?
(Though still large, this ratio seemed the lowest that could be
realistically proposed.) Unlike Limits to Growth the
model allowed the developing countries 5% growth per annum,
whereas the industrialized countries would have zero or negative
growth; all, however, would benefit from more sensible use of
energy and other resources and a more equitable distribution of
global wealth. The main Report argued that people in the
rich countries would have to change their patterns of
consumption and accept lower profits, but a dissenting group saw
consumption as a symptom rather than a cause of the problems,
which stemmed rather from the fundamental power structure.
Another new development was the decision to invite prominent
world figures who share the Club’s concerns to become
Honorary Members. Although their positions may
prevent them from taking a public stance, as in the case of the
Queen of the Netherlands or the King and Queen of
Spain, they can and do give valued moral support. Among the
others are:
-
former President
Gorbachev
-
former President Richard
von Weizsäcker of Germany
-
the first President of
newly democratic Czechoslovakia Vaclav Havel
-
President Arpad Göncz of
Hungary
-
President Carlos Menem
of Argentina
-
Nobel laureates Ilya
Prigogine and Lawrence Klein
As to the more private face of
the Club, the personal diplomacy always practiced by
members was given new impetus by the gradual thaw in East-West
relations after 1985. Two examples are particularly striking.
Before the Rejkavik Summit in October 1986,
Eduard Pestel and Alexander King sent a memo to both
President Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev,
suggesting that the United States and the USSR might be induced
to work together on reducing arms sales to poorer countries -
the superpowers would gain politically, if not economically,
from such efforts, and they would benefit from the experience of
actually working together. The response from the White
House was perfunctory, but Gorbachev immediately
reacted very positively, and this led to personal contacts
between the Club and the Soviet leadership
during the crucial period of glasnost and perestroika. Similar
contacts made by Adam Schaff in Poland led
to the creation there of a National Association of the Club
of Rome, providing a meeting ground for members of the
Communist Party, the Roman Catholic church and
Solidarity.
Following the collapse of communism, National Associations
for the Club of Rome were established across
Eastern Europe, in Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic,
Georgia, Hungary, Rumania, Slovakia, Slovenia and Ukraine;
National Associations already existed in
Poland and Russia. Chapters were also created in Latin America
(Argentina, Chile, Puerto Rico and Venezuela). Currently there
are 30 National Associations spread across all five continents.
EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE
-
Ricardo Diez Hochleitner,
Président
-
Bertrand Schneider,
Secretary General
-
Ruth Bamela Engo-Tjega,
President of African NGO
-
Belisario Betancur,
ex-President of Colombia
-
Umberto Colombo, ex Minister
of Research and Universities of Italy
-
Orio Giarini, Secretary
General of the Geneva Association
-
Bohdan Hawrylyshyn,
Chairman,Council of Advisors of the Parliament of
Ukraine
-
Alexander King, co-founder
of The Club of Rome
-
Yotaro Kobayashi, President
of Fuji Xerox
-
Eberhard von Koerber,
President of ABB Europe
-
Ruud Lubbers, ex-Prime
Minister of the Netherlands
-
Manfred Max-Neef, Rector,
Universidad Australe de Chile
-
Samuel Nana Sinkam, FAO
Director for Congo
-
Ilya Prigogine, Nobel
Laureate, Professor, Université Libre of Bruxelles
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