The Rationale for Change and a Vision for the Future
The human species demands, at minimum, a certain quality of life. Human rights should be protected, pluralism advocated, oppression avoided, and children given a chance to live life to the fullest. To the extent that many countries cannot yet do this, the international community should reach out in friendship to help. The international community has two roles in promoting this quality of life:
Putting out fires when they are just starting.
The human species demands, at minimum, a certain quality of life. Human rights should be protected, pluralism advocated, oppression avoided, and children given a chance to live life to the fullest. To the extent that many countries cannot yet do this, the international community should reach out in friendship to help. The international community has two roles in promoting this quality of life:
Putting out fires when they are just starting.
Building capacity to help others deal with problems in non-violent ways.
The international community needs attitudes, insights, institutions, and resources to implement a farsighted, proactive approach of assistance, cooperation, and education for countries in trouble. Many will welcome such an approach, even if ambivalently. For the small number of countries that are intransigent toward outsiders, mired in hatred, and controlled by tyrants, the international community should continually seek to draw them into the community of nations, while containing and deterring as necessary with forceful means.
Foresight is necessary to prevent conflict. The international community should take the initiative to assist countries in acquiring the necessary attitudes, concepts, skills, and institutions for resolving internal and external conflict. It should be proactive in helping them build the political and economic institutions of democracy.
In offering such help, the international community will need to engage moderate, constructive, and pragmatic leaders who are committed to humane and democratic values. While such leaders exist all over the world, their situation is often precarious. The international community can assist these leaders by providing a support network, which will, over the long run, help build institutions capable of meeting basic human needs and coping with conflicts that arise in the course of human interactions. It is important to realize that the world will never be conflict-free. Ways must be found to deal with conflict, short of mass violence.
In offering such help, the international community will need to engage moderate, constructive, and pragmatic leaders who are committed to humane and democratic values. While such leaders exist all over the world, their situation is often precarious. The international community can assist these leaders by providing a support network, which will, over the long run, help build institutions capable of meeting basic human needs and coping with conflicts that arise in the course of human interactions. It is important to realize that the world will never be conflict-free. Ways must be found to deal with conflict, short of mass violence.
Fulfilling the promise of democracy requires informed, proactive, and sustained efforts to prevent deadly conflict through just solutions and improved living conditions. There is a positive correlation between open market economies and democratic transitions. It is difficult to conceive of a long-term, flourishing market economy in the twenty-first century in the absence of a democratic political system because participation in the world economy requires openness in the flow of information, ideas, capital, technology, and people.
Civil society builds democracy by allowing the evolution of democratic values through non-violent conflict. Groups compete with each other and with the state for the power to carry out their specific agendas. Within the context of institutionalized competition, tolerance and acceptance of opposition develop. Civil society provides the opportunity for coalitions of individuals to undertake innovative activities, e.g., in the service of equal opportunity or protection of human rights.
