At
the time this article was written William Shaffir was a Professor and Steven Kleinknecht a graduate
student in the Department of Sociology at McMaster University in Hamilton. The
data for this paper derives from a series of forty-five informal interviews,
conducted by the senior author with former provincial and federal Members of
Parliament. In most cases, the conversations took place within five years of
the defeat.
Sixty to eighty hour work weeks are common in political life.
Individual identity becomes reflexively linked to work. The suddenness of
defeat and loss of public attention has an abrupt and direct impact on the
politician’s identity. Ideals of caring and making a difference are inexorably
sidelined and the now ex-politician is forced to deal with his or her new
reality. Coping strategies are developed to come to terms with the loss and the
stigma of political defeat. This article focuses on the dynamics surrounding
career terminations using defeated politicians as a case study in
disinvolvement and disengagement.
Newcomers to political life
must familiarize themselves with the informal culture of the legislative
assembly, the formal rules relating to that institution’s organization, the
political party’s organization including the various responsibilities that he
or she will be expected to assume. Added to these time constraints, and,
perhaps most challenging of all, are innumerable meetings with constituents and
various interest groups who always expect immediate attention.
Ex-politicians recall numerous
instances where family-related activities were sacrificed to the demands of
political office; for example, missed ballet recitals and hockey games, or
family trips and vacations that could not be planned in advance or were
suddenly postponed or even cancelled. For some, political life contributes to
the dissolution of their marriage. From the perspective of these former
politicians, the adverse effect on family is connected to the enormously long
hours required for their work, much of which removes them from the family
setting for lengthy periods.
Political life is also
exhilarating. Immersed within its subculture, politicians readily believe that
they are affecting change in a needed direction. As they are socialized into
this subculture, they become convinced that they are becoming better at doing
what they are supposed to do. Initial feelings of uncertainty and confusion are
replaced by confidence and determination. In the process, their status as
politician becomes their master status, overtaking the various other statuses
they occupy. However, while self-assured at this point, they are particularly
vulnerable. It is within this context that political defeat at the polls is
experienced as death.
The following comments capture
the essence of this feeling: “It is like the phases of death. You have loss, anger,
sadness, and then you come to accept it,” says a defeated Liberal. A more
starkly-worded description is offered by this individual when he says: “It is
as sudden as death. The only thing different is that you do not have to walk
into a funeral home, peek into the box and say, ‘Well, he was a nice guy.’”
The analogy to death is meant
to focus on the enormous regret occasioned by the loss. Political resurrection
is not entirely uncommon but its immediacy precludes any realistic long-term
perspective imagining an eventual return to the political arena. Instead, the
loss is viewed as the snuffing out of a promising political career with its
projected achievements and successes.
Quite often, the trauma of the
experience is magnified owing to the all-possessing and preoccupying
nature of political life:
... because you invest so much
of your life into this, you become preoccupied. You live and breathe this
thing. It is part of your being. So when it is taken away prematurely, of
course there is disappointment. (Progressive Conservative)
The metaphor of death, resonating with the vast majority of
those interviewed, is the terminology they use to best capture the profound
disappointment resulting from their defeat.
Although some defeated members
claim to have anticipated defeat, particularly during the campaign’s latter
stages, it, nonetheless, constitutes a severe blow to their ego both because it
occurs in public and they believe they deserved better. They are surprised and
unprepared for its impact on them. Defeat represents rejection at its extreme:
“You did not get fired by one person, you got fired by 6,000,” remarks a
defeated NDP member. Embarrassed and upset by the defeat, it is not unusual for
them to withdraw, as revealed in the following transcripts:
I can imagine that some people
were devastated and did not want to go out, did not want to go to a funeral,
did not want to go to a wedding, did not want to go to a baptism, did not want
to go to a confirmation, did not want to go to church. Did not want to do a lot
of things. (Liberal)
I thought I had come through
it fairly well. When I woke up one day about a year and a half later, I realized
that I had not responded to a single telephone call from Manitoba in those 18
months. I could not do it. (New Democratic Party)
... people crawl into shells.
They do not want to peak their head out because they think the public has
turned them down. That destroys their self-esteem. (New Democratic Party)
It is not surprising,
therefore, that in reflecting upon the defeat, former parliamentarians refer to
periods of grieving and mourning that, for some, endured for periods of several
months and even longer. As the Clerk of a provincial legislature remarks: “It
is a loss so there is a grieving process and some people handle that better
than others.... People grieve in various ways and that is a reaction people
have to being defeated.”
The mourning is not confined
to the defeated politician alone, but may extend to family members who also
experience the accompanying frustration and sadness.
There was mourning,
definitely. I mourned, my husband did. The next morning he woke up early to go
and pick up the signs and he said that he was crying the whole time. He was
very angry. Angrier than I was that the electorate was not loyal. It was very
sad. (Liberal)
Staff and volunteers do not
emerge unscathed from defeat. Their loss is not easily ignored and the defeated
member may feel some measure of responsibility for their new-found predicament.
“There is a funny thing that happened the day of the election. I felt really
bad for my people, not for me,” a defeated Liberal member reminisces. Another
defeated parliamentarian, a Progressive Conservative, observes: “ ... I think
of the concentrated time you put in and you also have a number of other people
spending this kind of time for you too. You have to feel a little bit
responsible for what happened, not just for yourself but for the others who are
involved.”
...I felt I owed a lot to the
people who had worked for me as volunteers and it is very difficult to let down
the side. Now realistically, in politics, there are always people being let
down, regularly. It is just that I had not had that experience. I had won every
time.... So, for me, it was a taste of failure that I had not been used to. For
a number of months, I felt really guilty about having let people down.
(Liberal)
The imagery of death rings
true for yet another reason. The defeat generates a series of sympathetic
telephone calls and visits from family members, friends and constituents
offering words of solace and comfort. The spouse of a defeated Progressive
Conservative member observes:
After the election, there is a
period where we are still around for a little bit. The phone would ring, people
would be leaving messages: “Sorry about this.” I remember taking one phone
call, it was our minister and he wanted to offer his condolences. People would
not know what to say to us, or me. I would say: “It is OK, we are fine, we are
OK with it.” I had to reassure them that we were OK with it. If anything, it
was the others that were not.
Intending to comfort, they
are, instead, reminders of the bitter loss: “The last thing I wanted,” recalls
a defeated Liberal, “was for people to drop by and tell me what kind of great
guy I was, and how they could not believe it happened.”
As incapacitating as defeat
may be, the defeated member must make sense of it. Expressions of mourning and
grief are not experienced to the exclusion of other lines of thought, notably
those helping to make the loss more understandable and palatable. In time, and
with the assistance of others, a series of explanations for the loss –
rationalizations – are embraced which serve to reduce the individual’s
culpability.
We now turn to the types of
accounts employed by the defeated politicians to assuage their bruised egos. In
short, they rely upon a variety of rationalizations which, whether recognized
or not, serve to deflect responsibility for the outcome. These are presented as
justifications for their defeat and situate the outcome of the election as
being outside of the politician’s control.
The Party and the Leader
In attempting to come to terms
with their defeat, ex-politicians point to a number of external factors, not
the least of which is their political party. Some rationalize that it was
simply because they were affiliated with a particular party that led to their
defeat. In terms of party dynamics, ex-politicians may also blame their
loss on their leader, the organization of the party, unpopular political
decisions, or the calling of an election at an inopportune time. In this
way, when the entire party is “swept” during an election, it supports the
sentiment that the defeat was the result of the party platform or leadership
issues rather than anything the politician could control or be responsible for.
In the process, ex-politicians distance themselves from responsibility for the
loss and attempt to shield themselves from the negative repercussions
accompanying the political defeat. For example:
I think my government at the
time caused its own defeat. So when we had the election and I lost, I was a
little more upset with my government than I was with anybody else including
myself. (New Democratic Party)
I expected to lose because
people were angry with the NDP. They were not angry with me personally. But
like you live and die with the party in this system. (New Democratic Party)
Door-to-door campaigning may
alert politicians to the possibility of defeat. As some politicians indicate,
their reception during these encounters enables them to gauge the support they
might expect to receive on election day. Some recall experiencing very direct
indications that members of the public were dissatisfied with the party:
I remember knocking on doors,
and the guy would yell at you for 15 minutes. He would say, ‘Jim you are great,
but I cannot afford the NDP.’ So Howard [party leader] asked me how is the canvassing
going and I said, ‘Howard, I am not canvassing, I am doing psychotherapy on the
doorsteps.’ There is not a hope here. I cannot win. They say, ‘you are doing a
great job, if you were not running for the NDP we would vote for you.’ We got
creamed in the election. (New Democratic Party)
Based upon experiences of this
kind, the politician is provided with evidence to support the rationalization
that it is not the individual politician with whom the constituents are
unhappy, but the political party with which they are affiliated.
Encounters such as these, offering cues from the public, help shape a
vocabulary necessary to think about and explain the defeat both to oneself but
also others.
The first broad category
of coping mechanisms involves developing ways to think and talk about the loss;
that is, framing the loss in a particular light so that it would appear as if
it were expected and thereby deflecting responsibility for the outcome. The
second category is activity-based and related to new involvements or
re-involvements that are undertaken.
In looking at party dynamics
to explain their defeat, some politicians argue that the party did not have a
sufficiently sound infrastructure in place to support its members. For
instance, some maintain that proper educational mechanisms were unavailable. In
comparing their party to other parties during the election campaign, the
competition, in their view, was better organized, thereby disadvantaging them
in their quest for victory.
Some of the blame goes to the
Liberal party of Manitoba because during the two-year period they did not
educate us, as MLAs, as to how we can build a constituency organization that
would sustain itself. We did not do it. I had a president of my association
that was running around signing petitions to ban French. That is very good. You
got a sitting MLA and you are out signing a petition to ban French?
Unfortunately the Liberal party of Manitoba did not provide the manpower
or the intellectual ability [to help build the constituency]. Take a look
at the Conservatives in our area. They have a constituency and one phone call
and everybody’s there. The NDP is the same.... (Liberal)
It was an unusual situation.
We were, in a way, handicapped going from 1 seat to 20. We started from nothing.
We had no money, there was no communications director, no research.... We had
to build that up.... Had we had a majority government we would have had 4,
close to 5 years to get our feet wet, to get organized... and so on. So as a
result for having it for only two years, I was not known all around the riding.
(Liberal)
Tied to the issue of party
organization is a belief that the party leader can either make or break one’s
own political campaign. Therefore, in an attempt to distance oneself from
the defeat, ex-politicians also look to place some of the blame on the leader
of their party. Once again, cues from the public often supply the
ex-politician with the ammunition necessary to re-direct the blame for the loss
in this manner:
To be honest with you, I blame the loss only on one
person, and that was our leader. Number one, people were telling me on
the street that Sharon was no longer the leader they thought she was. Number
two, she does not have the ability to lead. Number three, Phil, we like you, we
admire you, you got a lot of chutzpah, but not your leader.(Liberal)
So what was more disturbing is
that when you got the negative stuff, none of it was directed at me. It was all
because I was part of Filmon’s team. So while that contributed immensely to me
winning in 1995, it dragged me down in 1999. (Progressive Conservative)
Additionally, having to
compete against a party with a particularly charismatic leader can feed into a person’s
belief that it is a party’s leader who should be held most accountable for the
political defeat:
I pretty much knew I was going
to lose. I had access to polls. In fact, I warned the caucus we were all likely
to lose our seats. Bob Smith and I were the only ones that stood a chance of
holding our seats until Klein became Tory leader. When he became the Tory
leader, I knew that my goose was cooked, because for some reason the man has
some kind of magnetic appeal among the voters in my part of Calgary. I
was probably more angry with my own party than I was with the electorate. (New
Democratic Party)
While believing ahead of time
that a loss was imminent may bring some consolation by providing the politician
some time to plan and prepare for the defeat, there are still accompanying
feelings of anger and possibly sorrow and guilt that need to be dealt with.
However, if these emotions can be displaced onto something external to
the politician, it helps to dampen the assault on one’s ego.
The Policy
Decisions that directly impact
on the public, such as taxation, public spending, and legislation, can have a
tremendous influence on how the party is seen as a whole. If these
decisions do not sit well with the public, the belief is that there is nothing
any one politician can do to overcome these impediments to re-election. “What
happens here, is the death of a thousand paper cuts. It is the toll highway, it
is the nursing home, hospitals, it is the policing.” (Liberal) As the following
examples indicate, ex-politicians tend to rationalize these kinds of decisions
as a significant component contributing to their defeat.
I knew we were going down. I
mean the timing was bad. We were in the second year. We put in a really nasty
budget, raising taxes and all that. Normally in a 4-year mandate, you do your
bad stuff in the early part. So we had done the bad stuff and we were running
on the bad stuff, right. Aside from that, we had raised rates in the auto
insurance and people were just going nuts about that. (New Democratic Party)
Going into it, I did not think
we were going to lose because I had won the previous election by the second
highest majority. We had gone through a difficult time where we had spent in
largesse from the standpoint of the schools, hospitals and for the first time
we were in debt and we did not know how long we would be in debt.... And, of
course, when we moved to 1989, the price of oil and gas had gone up...
Whereas you had a lot of support earlier on in the re-election process,
you started getting the finger as you were standing and freezing on the
overpass waving to people.... So you got the impression that things were not
going as well as they should. (Liberal)
The province had been
suffering attitudinally, psychologically, economically. And in 10 years we
completely turned the province around. It took some hard medicine and it
required a whole lot of little no’s to everybody, which eventually added up.
That is why we lost in June. (Liberal)
Timing
In the eyes of politicians, the
timing of an election is crucial. In order to understand their defeat, some
ex-politicians rationalize that the government chose a poor time to call
an election; for example, the economic climate was not conducive to winning the
election, or that key elements of the electorate, for one reason or another,
were simply unavailable to support the candidate.
A majority government enjoys
considerable discretion as to when the next election will be called. Polls can
be used as indicators of public support and certain strategies can be
implemented to prepare a positive political setting in which to hold the
election. While in theory this may be true, even this sort of preparation
does not always provide the advantage it is expected to. However, serving
in a minority government may place certain restrictions on the party members –
for example, minority governments typically become bound to a shorter time
period during which they will call an election. As a result, the
governing party may not have adequate time to become well-organized and
implement policies that are conducive to re-election. Therefore, public
sentiment may be poor, thus hampering an individual’s bid for re-election.
Additionally, politicians
rationalize that there are situational factors such as recessions and public
service crises which create a political atmosphere that is not conducive to
re-election. In the following example, a defeated member situates these
unanticipated developments in the “bad luck” category:
We had some very bad luck. I lost by 100 votes,
which is 50 votes really. Here is what happened the week before the election.
10,000 people without a doctor in St. John’s. Major crisis – X-ray technicians
are on strike. ‘Tom, if you cannot do something about this I am not going to
vote for you.’ This is two or three days ahead of the election. Then a
strike on the day of the election. (Liberal)
The next example illustrates
how the timing for the election can hamper a member’s chances to win. The
individual in question develops a detailed rationalization which outlines how
his regular supporters were not around when the election was called:
You have to remember that a
lot of people in our area are seniors. They go to the beaches. They do
not stay around. Only the younger people stay. And those are the
younger people who voted and they voted... for the Conservatives. So I got my
butt kicked. Had my senior population stayed, I probably would have given a
good run for the money or I might have even won. But that was not to be. (Liberal)
In certain instances, the
argument advanced is that the poor timing of an election was the result of a
bad decision made by their party or party leader.
By developing a
rationalization which situates blame on a variety of seemingly external
factors, the ex-politician if offered a more convincing justification as
to why he or she was unsuccessful. At the same time, it allows the
ex-politician to save face and deal with negative feelings experienced as the
result of the defeat.
By viewing oneself as being at
the whim of one’s party, defeated politicians are able to feel some consolation
when their party is “swept”; that is when a large proportion of members of the
same party lose in their bid for re-election. When a recently defeated
politician sees that a significant proportion of his or her fellow party
members also lost their seat, it allows for the rationalization that their
individual defeat was influenced by some factor related to the party as a whole
rather than anything they did or did not do as a member of that party.
While this may produce feelings of anger towards the party, it also helps
ex-politicians come to terms with the defeat in a way which allows them to
focus responsibility on something beyond their control. For example:
When the election came, I was
defeated by a 2-1 count which was a shock; however, the shock was diminished by
the fact that by the time the election returns started coming in, until I got
word that I had lost, the whole province had gone down. (Liberal)
Having people encourage the
belief that the loss had to do with the government as a whole and not the
individual, allows the ex-politician to accept this rationalization. In
the next example, we see that having friends indicate that the defeat was the
result of her party affiliation rather than anything which she could have
controlled, helps the individual come to terms with the defeat:
I guess, for me, I was able to
say to myself, and others said to me and my friends said to me, ‘You went down
with the government. It did not have anything to do with you.’ They believe I
went down with the government. So my social stature has not changed very much.
(Liberal)
The following example further
illustrates the point that the defeat may be de-personalized by
attributing responsibility to something beyond one’s control:
I think what was different,
here, is that we all lost, all of our caucus lost. And it was really
clear on the doorstep that people were saying, I am not voting against you, I
want someone to defeat the Tories and they were voting Liberal. And that is why
I knew I would not win, and that also took that personal sting out of it. That
was a kind of unique set of circumstances. (Progressive Conservative)
However, as the wife of a
defeated member observes, this rationalization may offer only minor comfort:
It was a landslide for the
PCs. And there is some comfort in that, but just some comfort. And so there are
a whole lot of you. Big deal, you still lost. (New Democratic Party)
The Media
There is a strong consensus among
ex-politicians that negative publicity, especially when disseminated via the
media, can have a very detrimental impact on one’s chances for re-election.
Note the following observations:
So no matter how good you are,
it does not matter. It matters what they are saying on the front page and the
editorial page, and they have not changed their tune one iota over the last 3
years. So you have to look at those things. Now all that can change in 24
hours. (Liberal)
I think the media really
turned against us as we started going for that re-election. They did not want
to hear what we had to say, distorted my words and took them out of context. It
was as if they created the stories in advance and were waiting for you to say
something to reinforce their story that was already there. (New Democratic
Party)
Whether the coverage is
directed towards the party as a whole or focussed on a particular politician,
the outcome in terms of one’s chances for re-election are significantly
impaired. More often than not, the ex-politician believes that the media
provides inaccurate or biased coverage of issues which frame the politician or
the party in a negative light. For example, ex-politicians may reason
that a particular newspaper publisher had a vendetta against the party or that
the paper was simply trying to bolster sales by writing a provocative smear
campaign involving the politician or the party. Based upon this type of
reasoning, ex-politicians are able to formulate a further rationalization that
situates blame for political defeat on the media.
A former east coast MLA argued that his chances for
re-election were hindered by erroneous media coverage of a particular project
the party had completed:
The year leading into the
election, the media turned on us. The Moncton paper was unjustifiably vicious.
One issue was the park we built ... wonderful deal, worked out well, but the
paper crucified us there. (Liberal)
The media are seen to provide
a significant source through which politicians have an opportunity to express
their particular platform to the public. However, as the next example
demonstrates, there is a great deal of competition fostered through the media,
not only between parties, but also certain interest groups. In the
following example, an ex-politician points out that it does not matter how
truthful the claims being made are; even more important is that well-presented,
even if inaccurate, claims made through the media can have a powerful impact on
public sentiment:
In this election, rightly or
wrongly, we built this toll highway and I will be honest with you, I never
agreed with it. But the toll busters ran a very effective campaign against the
government. They ran ads that were as effective as the conservative campaign
against the government... So there was no truth and ads were flashed on TV.
They bought the time and put it on during the Stanley Cup finals. We could not
spend the money even if we had it to counter that sort of thing and you could
not counter it anyway. (New Democratic Party)
As some politicians indicate,
one can use the harshness and extent of negative media attention to judge how
they might fare in an up-coming election. By being able to judge one’s
chances for re-election through the media, the ex-politician is provided with
the opportunity to brace him or herself for possible defeat.
I knew in my town I would have
a difficult time because the local media, two years prior to the election, was
extremely rough with us and had not stopped being rough with the Liberal party.
I mean 45-day front-page campaigns on the toll highway, 21-day front page on
the project, which I was defending, a seven-day campaign on another
major, so it was just incessant. (Liberal)
Personal Health Issues
In discussing one’s personal
health and the impact it had on attempts to secure re-election,
rationalizations take on a somewhat different focus. Rather than placing
the blame on a factor far beyond the individual, some ex-politicians
rationalize the defeat in terms of a very personal factor, their own
well-being. While placing the responsibility for defeat more directly on
oneself, by attributing the loss to issues relating to personal health, the
ex-politician is able to displace blame onto an illness, something which they
could not control.
For a number of months, I felt
really guilty about having let people down. If only I had not been sick. I do
not think there is any doubt that had I not been ill, I would have been able to
get out a couple of hundred votes. It does not take much effort to swing a
couple of hundred votes. (Progressive Conservative)
So I was ill from before the
election. I had a kind of very serious laryngitis. There were times when I
could not talk, which means I had to write notes. I tried to go out twice
during the election, campaign door-to-door, that is the way it is done here. I
could not. I got ill both times. I would be out an hour and I would not be able
to talk. So I lost by a few votes. (Progressive Conservative)
By rationalizing defeat as the
result of personal health, ex-politicians are able to also frame their defeat
in a positive light. As the following examples illustrate, political
defeat is sometimes viewed as the best medicine for the stress induced
illnesses that become associated with a career in politics. Very powerful
personal examples are also offered as possible benefits of having lost an
election due to health concerns:
By the time the election had
come, I still had not fully got on my feet. Sleeping on the chesterfield in the
office, getting up and going again for 10 or 12 hours, diabetes out of control.
It is constant. (Liberal)
Another term like that in
government would have killed me. It truly would have. I worked that hard and I
was just wasted so the defeat, when it came about, was a good thing because I
was able to become my wife’s number one care giver. She passed away on December
24 of the same year, having been diagnosed with lung cancer. She was not well
in September and then October came the diagnosis and December came the death.
(Progressive Conservative)
The following example further
illustrates how the ex-politician rationalizes a defeat in terms of personal
health. For this individual, personal health may not have been the most
significant factor contributing to his defeat, but he believes it was quite
influential when combined with a second justification:
I spend 14 days in bed in the
middle of the campaign with bronchial pneumonia out of the 35-day campaign. So
my health may have contributed to it. I was the lightning rod for all the
antagonism and rage over the language issue from 1983-4. It is now 1986. It
should have been forgotten but people needed to express it. I lost by 55 votes.
The doctor was going to put me in the hospital if I was not going to promise to
stay home in bed, so I did. If I could not have swung 28 votes in two weeks,
then I should not have been in politics. So you can blame it on bronchial
pneumonia, but the bottom line was it was the French language issue.(New
Democratic Party)
Globalization to Help All Citizens
UNESCO’s Outreach to Parliamentarians
by Ahmed Sayyad
Ahmed
Sayyad is Assistant Director General of Foreign Relations and Co-operation with
the United Nations Economic and Social Council (UNESCO).
Parliamentarians rank among UNESCO’s major partners in the
promotion of human development and peacekeeping through the various programs
the organization is known for including fields such as education, science,
culture and communication.
UNESCO’s programme for a
dialogue with parliamentarians was launched in1994 to ensure that the
Organization’s values and objectives are clearly reflected in all national
policy-making and legislation. Both as members of civil society and as its
elected representatives, parliamentarians are responsible for implementing
these national policies and legislation. They introduce the concerns of their
electorates into parliamentary debates and adopt lines of action in order to
address these issues in the most effective manner.
By facilitating dialogue
amongst legislators across all regions, UNESCO aims to reinforce this global
network representing civil society and to enhance its ability to resolve global
issues in national contexts. In so doing, UNESCO is trying to ensure that globalization
can work for all. The programme is open to legislators actively involved in
parliamentary institutions and associations at national, regional and
international levels. Consequently UNESCO’s co-operation is wide-ranging and
includes partnerships with national leagues of parliamentarians, regional
parliamentary bodies, and international organizations such as the
Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU).
The following are some
examples of how the partnership has worked in various countries.
Mexico
- UNESCO and the Mexican committee for
education and culture have signed a letter to improve communication and
the sharing of information.
Africa
- The recent establishment of the
Forum of African Parliamentarians for Education (FAPED) was spearheaded by
the parliaments of Senegal and Mauritius and its goal is to develop
partnerships through the Education for All Program.
Thailand
- The UNESCO office in Bangkok plans to
establish ties between legislators and major regional organizations1 to
develop a cooperative approach to solving problems related to sustainable
development.
Israël
- This type of cooperation also existed in
Israël, where a commission for future generations will soon be established
as part of the Knesset. This was possible thanks to the active participation
of the UNESCO national commission and of the Friends of Parliament League.
Also, other parliamentary
bodies will be mobilized as part of UNESCO's action for the World Summit on
Sustainable Development (Johannesburg, September 2002) and for the World
Information Summit in 2003 and 2005.
These examples are just a few
illustrations of the prolific action that has resulted from the Co-operation
Agreement signed between UNESCO and the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU) in
1997. This served to define the terms of reference for dialogue so that
parliamentarians may be better informed about UNESCO`s domains of expertise.2
Globalization with a Human
Face
The Millennium Declaration of
2000 that was signed by political leaders at the United Nations Millennium Summit
took stock of the major issues facing humankind during the 1990's and
highlighted the policies implemented worldwide to resolve all crises.
This Declaration has been an
important inspiration in the shaping of UNESCO's programme priorities such as the
right of all to education, the strengthening of international scientific and
intellectual co-operation, the promotion of cultural pluralism, and broadening
public access to information.
Specifically, all UNESCO
action is oriented towards two key objectives, namely to reduce poverty3
and to provide easier access to knowledge so that globalization no longer means
marginalization.
A Round Table was organized as
part of this summit to discuss the Dialogue of Civilizations. Mr.
Koïchiro Matsuura, Director General of UNESCO, remarked that intercultural
dialogue is essential to furthering peace between nations and peoples.
Thus, the United Nations
Millennium Summit ushered in a new era where everyone would learn to live
together in what is commonly known as “the global village”. This had
already been forecast in the Report of the International Commission on
Education in the 21st Century set up by UNESCO in 1996 under the chairmanship
of Jacques Delors, former President of the European Union. And it is
precisely for this type of action that UNESCO needs help from its partners.
The Medium Term Strategy
and the Role of Parliamentarians
Cooperation between
parliamentarians and UNESCO is essential for the implementation of a medium
term strategy focusing on certain priorities, namely education and public
access to information, environmental protection, ethics in the fields of
science and technology, as well as cultural diversity. In order to
complete its projects, UNESCO will adopt a 3-phase approach.
The first step for the
organization is to establish universal principles and norms, based on shared
values, a sort of universal code of conduct for living harmoniously in a global
world.
UNESCO is justly proud of its
many accomplishments in this regard – its conventions in areas such as the
preservation of cultural and global heritage, or the international recognition
of degrees and diplomas in higher education.
Other declarations made by
UNESCO members are also noteworthy such as those pertaining to cultural
diversity or the human genome. UNESCO Member States provided valuable
assistance to these programmes and to improving certain situations through
their willingness to debate subjects of widespread interest.
Consequently, parliamentarians are now effective in fighting alongside
UNESCO.
The second UNESCO approach is
based on the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which recognizes human
dignity, encourages tolerance, and seeks to ensure universal respect for
justice, for fundamental rights and freedoms, but also cultural diversity.
Parliamentarians have a vested interest in promoting cultural
diversity as a safeguard to equality among all citizens.
And it is precisely this last
point that is the focus of UNESCO’s second strategic programme because cultural
preservation is essential in this era of globalization. It is important
to note that several million people are living this reality in their cities,
local communities, or even in their workplace.
Today, all states must
recognize the ethnic and cultural richness that exists within their borders and
everyone must remember that cultural diversity is essential for people to
maintain their own culture and identity.
Each and every nation must
therefore be committed to building a civic community whose values can be shared
by all, without neglecting the differences in languages, art, traditions and
religious beliefs. It also goes without saying that any form of
discrimination would merely be a source of conflict.
Cultural diversity has been a
topic of increased reporting and debate. Furthermore, all legislators
agree that the notion of development cannot be dissociated from that of respect
and acceptance of differences. In 1996, the World Commission on Culture
and Development tabled a report entitled “Our Creative Diversity”, which
focused on this very issue.
Another area of UNESCO involvement is exclusion in
education (100 million children have no access to primary schooling and 800
million adults are illiterate), in science (the research costs are increasingly
affordable to only the wealthiest countries) and in communication (80% of the
entire world's population lives without electricity) and this is why the third
area of UNESCO involvement stresses citizen participation in what is known as
“knowledge-based society”.
The prerequisites for this
process, which is closely linked with the notions of democracy, justice and
development, are equal opportunity, the sharing of knowledge and expertise,
access to education for all and the preservation of minority cultures.
In conclusion, increasing
capacity goes hand in hand with the notion of diversity since all citizens have
huge opportunities to grow thanks to the sharing of knowledge and skills, and
this must clearly evolve in a context of respect for human rights, equality,
dialogue, peace and tolerance.
Notes
1. Such as ASEAN (Association of South-East
Asian Nations) or ESCAP (Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the
Pacific)
2. The capacity to ensure that civil society
is involved in public debate is an example thereof.
3. Poverty and exclusion affect 50% of the
world's population.
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