Editorial: Towards a UNESCO World Forum

UNESCO should begin program of international conferences, involving intellectual leaders from all over the world, under the title of The UNESCO World Forum. The World Economic Forum involves political and business leaders to focus on global issues. TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) has expanded from its original focus on three fields, and can now be described as an annual event in which the world's leading thinkers gather to to find inspiration. The UNESCO World Forum would be an intellectual complement to these series.

This editorial suggests the creation of a forum that draws among the world's foremost intellectuals for discussions to determine the priority to be given by the global community of nations to the major issues of the day and of the century, and to address how those issues might best be addressed by the peoples of the world.

The major trends of our time are the increasing capacity of mankind to effect physical changes and the increasing intellectual capacity of mankind. Since the reconstruction after World War II, when priorities were clearly to prevent future world wars and to reconstruct the damage that had been inflicted by the first and second world wars, the agenda of the community of nations has expanded to include the protection of human rights, nation building, the reduction of poverty in all of its aspects, culturally sensitive management of the ever-more-rapid process of social change and the safeguarding of cultural heritage and diversity, and the protection of the environment. Unfortunately, mankind has failed to develop the wisdom with which to apply its increasing capacities to deal effectively with this agenda.

The UNESCO World Forum would draw on educational, scientific and cultural leaders of the world to meet together and to discuss and debate. It would encompass some of the functions of UNESCO's World Philosophy Forum, and of the Dialog Among Civilizations, being more inclusive than the former in its participants, and more inclusive than the latter in expanding beyond the focus on peace. Educators would be included, not only because of the intellectual power of academia, but because they bring a special understanding of how to build the solutions to global problems starting in the minds of men. Leaders from science and technology would be needed because of their in depth knowledge of mankind's problems and resources, and the technologies that can be brought to bear to apply those resources to the resolution of those problems. Cultural leaders, especially from the arts and humanities, would be included for their broad and integrating perspectives.

Historical Antecedents

The League of Nations system, having failed to prevent World War II, was replaced by the United Nations System, with the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization as an independent organization tapping into the intellectual communities in its member nations.

One of the key antecedent organizations was the International Institute for Intellectual Cooperation, which formed a secretariat for the International Committee for Intellectual Cooperation, which had enlisted such luminaries as Henri Bergson, Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, Béla Bartók, Thomas Mann, Gilbert Murray and Paul Valery. Some 40 national committees on intellectual cooperation were created linking to the International Committee, including an active one in the United States. "Numerous conferences and symposia were held under the auspices of the International Institute in Paris. Among the topics taken up by these conferences as the world situation became more menacing were the psychological causes of war and methods of promoting peaceful change as a substitute for war."

Vincenzo Pavone points out that there has been a long term tension between a global model of UNESCO which emphasized its role in the long term solution of global problems and an intergovernmental model that focused on intergovernmental cooperation in the attack of relatively immediate problems. That tension was present at the creation of UNESCO, when the model of the International Institute for Intellectual Cooperation was counterposed with the proposals of the Conference of Allied Ministers of Education (CAME) for a massive effort to rebuild the educational infrastructure of Europe and to deal with the massive physical and mental impact of World War II on Europe's children. It reflects, to some degree, the tension between the pragmatism of the Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian cultures versus the Latin Cultures of France and Latin America.

The greatest successes of UNESCO have probably been in programs that exemplify the intergovernmental cooperation model, such as UNESCO's leadership in Education for All, the World Heritage Program, the Intergovernmental Scientific Programs, and the development of the legal instruments which establish an intergovernmental system for the protection of cultural heritage and diversity. Yet the impact of UNESCO in its sixty years seeking to build the defenses of peace in the minds of men should not be underestimated.

Yet the balance has swung heavily to the intergovernmental model. The Executive Board, which once included members chosen for their intellectual star quality, now consists of representatives of governments elected by the General Conference (and of course the permanent delegates to UNESCO are diplomats named by the governments they represent.)

UNESCO was created at the time that the atom bombs were dropped by the United States on Japan; the world had been given a vivid illustration of the power to move from scientific abstraction to terrifyingly powerful technology. It is not surprising that the founders of UNESCO saw the need to leaven science with humanism. As science has become more powerful in the six decades of UNESCO's existence, the need for a consilience of knowledge, a synthesis of the knowledge of man's different communities. Unfortunately, UNESCO in accommodating its bureaucratic realities, still tends to stovepipe its educational, scientific and cultural programs. The proposed UNESCO Global Forum would be a giant step away from reductionism towards consilience.

The proposed UNESCO World Forum would seek not to draw representatives uniformly from the member nations, but from UNESCO's constituent educational, scientific and cultural communities. It would seek rather representation from different cultures and civilizations rather than from nation states.

The proposed UNESCO World Forum is not intended to detract from UNESCO's critically important efforts to promote intergovernmental cooperation in priority educational, scientific and cultural areas. Indeed, it would be best accomplished by an increase in UNESCO's already severely strained budget and staff capabilities.

Conclusion

The UNESCO World Forum is proposed to complement the pragmatic intergovernmental efforts of UNESCO by drawing on the world's intellectual leaders to address the world's agenda of long term issues, drawing on UNESCO's experience as a laboratory and clearinghouse of ideas.

John Daly
The ideas expressed in this posting are mine alone, and do not represent those of Americans for UNESCO or any other organization.

ICT in Education

The Asia-Pacific Program on ICT in Education managed by the UNESCO Office in Bangkok is publishing a series of studies on ICT in education. The program makes a large number of publications available on via the Internet.

These include:

Integrating ICTs into Education: Lessons Learned (Volume 1)

A Collective Case Study of Six Asian Countries: Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, Thailand

SchoolNetworking: Lessons Learned (Volume 2)

A Collective Case Study of Five Asian Countries: Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand

Initiating and Managing SchoolNets: Lessons Learned (Volume 3)

Experiences of Eight Asian Countries: Cambodia, Indonesia, Lao PDR, Malaysia, Myanmar, Philippines, Thailand, Viet Nam

New Edition of the UNESCO Courier

Poster© Mark Bakker (The Netherlands)
IYPE student contest
Planet Hot-Spot

Rajendra Pachauri, Chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) which won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize, encourages us to change our lifestyle to minimize our ecological footprint, the new measuring unit invented by Mathis Wackernackel, also included in this issue.

How can we “manage the unavoidable to avoid the unmanageable”, according to Italian climatologist Filippo Giorgi’s formula, is the question raised by this issue of the Courier, devoted to the International Year of Planet Earth.

Read The UNESCO Courier

UNESCO's Actions in the Field of History

The Economist this week has an article titled "Textbook wars: An intolerant attitude to a controversial history." It states:

HISTORY textbooks are a test of a country's tolerance. Do they bristle with grudges, or do they see other countries' point of view? In Germany, for example, historians have worked successfully on joint textbooks with Polish and French colleagues.

But in Slovakia, where relations with the former imperial power, Hungary, have deteriorated sharply since 2006, the mood has swung the other way. The education minister, from the Slovak National Party, has sidelined plans for a joint history textbook. That follows a decision by Slovakia's parliament last year to endorse the Benes decrees, which legalised brutal measures against the country's supposedly Hitlerite German and Hungarian populations in 1945-48.

Created at the end of World War II, one of UNESCO's first efforts was to help the nations emerging from the war to rewrite their history texts. The Nazi and Fascist governments had sought to indoctrinate their youth with party myths rather than educate them, and there was an obvious need to revise those texts. Indeed, it was clear that education for peace required a more fair balance to the history books in use in Europe.

In the six decades of its life, UNESCO has produced a number of series of historical reference books. In each case, it has established an advisory panel, not only composed of experts, but also representing a variety of nations and cultures. The effort has been not only to use the best sources and most up-to-date understanding of each historical topic, but also to define a history that avoids the biases of viewpoint that might be introduced within an given national tradition or political culture.

In recent years, UNESCO has launched a series of collected works - People writing their own history. Instead of just tracing the past of nations, these collections aim to provide a greater understanding of civilizations.

The collections aim to help readers gain a global understanding of the evolution of societies, flourishing of cultures, major currents of exchange and interaction with other parts of the world.

These collections also aim to provide a culturally relevant perspective. They provide the point of view of the populations concerned, whose past has often been distorted, discredited or treated as peripheral to the history of the colonizers and the dominant nations – those who usually write history. The idea here is to rediscover a people's consciousness and the vision it develops of its own destiny. This shift in perspective is reflected by the significant number of local historians, with impeccable academic credentials, who contributed to these collections as editors and authors.

To learn about UNESCO's these series, click on the following:

• History of Humanity
• General History of Africa
• History of Civilizations of Central Asia
• General History of Latin America
• The Different Aspects of Islamic Culture
• General History of the Caribbean

Many history texts produced under these programs are still available from UNESCO Publications.

Note especially the volumes from the History of Africa.

Video: UNESCO building peace in the minds of men

UNESCO considers education, science, social science, culture and communication as the means to achieve the ambitious objective of its founding charter: “Since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defenses of peace must be constructed.”

UNESCO has created a wonderful video, which is only 12 minutes long, to describe its origins and its work. You can see it on your own computer via streaming video.

Click here to go to the website for the video!

Questioning UNESCO's Efforts on Culture and Development

Mapping Authority and Survival or Well Being.
Source: R. Inglehart, Modernization and Postmodernization

In a recent paper for the World Bank, Amartya Sen (Nobel Prize laureate in Economics) wrote:

(C)ulture interacts with development in many different ways. It is involved in both the ends and the means of development. But the acknowledgement of the importance of culture should not be translated instantly into ready-made theories of what works, what needs to be cultivated and what must be preserved. There are complex epistemic issues involved in identifying the ways in which culture may or may not influence development, and also deeply ethical and political issue of the social choice involved in accommodating diverse concerns.

Indeed, even the values that are associated with economic development can be interpreted in quite different ways, and may require more than simple admonitions to cultivate this or eschew that.

Indeed, notably in the work of another Nobel Prize winner, Douglas North, economists have recently emphasized the importance of institutions in economic development. That emphasis has come to complement earlier emphases on fixed capital and human capital and on economic policies. The institutions of concern to these economists, such as rule of law and markets, are important aspects of culture, and depend on a variety of cultural values.

Pippa North, a distinguished political scientist, and Ronald Inglehart, one of the founders of the World Values Survey program write, emphasize the importance of culture in democratization. They recently wrote:

A fundamental problem facing the worldwide process of democratization is the continued lack of gender equality in political leadership. The basic facts are not in dispute: Today women represent only one in seven parliamentarians, one in ten cabinet ministers, and, at the apex of power, one in 20 heads of state or government. Multiple factors have contributed to this situation, including structural and institutional barriers. But what is the influence of political culture? Are attitudes toward women as political leaders a significant barrier to their empowerment? In particular, how important is culture as compared with structural and institutional factors? These are the questions that our study seeks to address.

In short, the interaction of culture and development is of critical importance in the world today. Understanding that interaction is important in ameliorating poverty and in the social and economic development of poor nations as well as in managing the transition from the industrial society to the knowledge society.

The Potential Role for UNESCO

UNESCO's middle name is "Culture". Since its creation after World War II, UNESCO has been the lead agency in the United Nations system for culture. It provides a unique forum for intellectual leaders from all over the world to come together to discuss cultural matters. It is uniquely empowered and equipped to be a clearinghouse for information and analysis of the role of culture.

UNESCO has been guided by its member nations for decades to focus its programs heavily on development and on the needs of poor people in poor nations. It has been asked to play an important role in achieving the Millennium Development Goals set forth by the United Nations. At the World Summit for the Information Society, UNESCO was given a leading role in the UN system in catalyzing development of the knowledge society.

UNESCO has played an important role in raising consciousness of the importance of preservation of cultural heritage. The World Heritage Center, perhaps UNESCO's flagship unit, has encouraged UNESCO's member states to preserve and protect hundreds of world heritage sites all over the earth. The Memory of the World program is helping to preserve mankind's documentary heritage, and UNESCO is a partner in the development of the World Digital Library.

UNESCO has negotiated seven Conventions which form the body of international law controling the protection of tangible and intangible cultural property. The looting of art from conquered countries and the distruction of archaeological sites have been greatly reduced since the creation of UNESCO because of UNESCO's ability to bring the nations of the world together to negotiate these treaties.

The aforementioned UNESCO efforts in the protection of the world's cultural heritage illustrate the role that it can play in promoting productive cultural dialog among its 193 member nations. Its Culture of Peace Program is another example of the way in which UNESCO can help its member nations come together to address a critical international issue from a cultural perspective. UNESCO's Anticipation and Foresight Program (adminstered by the Social and Human Sciences program within its Philosophy portfolio) further illustrates the ability of the Organization to serve as a laboratory of ideas, bringing the best thinking from the global intellectual community to the service of UNESCO's member states.

UNESCO does work in the field of Culture and Development. It has been a useful agency in creating knowledge about and interest in emerging fields such as sustainable cultural tourism and cultural industries for developing economies. An independent World Commission on Culture and Development (WCCD) was established jointly by UNESCO and the United Nations in December 1992 and was active in the 1990s. UNESCO played an important role in the Stockholm Intergovernmental Conference on Cultural Policies for Development in 1998.

Still, UNESCO's efforts in the field of culture and development seem less extensive and less effective than those in the field of preservation of cultural heritage. One wonders whether in the 21st Century UNESCO should redouble its efforts to bring together the leaders of the world's inellectual community and serve more effectively as a laboratory of ideas on Culture and Development. Indeed, if UNESCO can catalyze the creation of a consensus on culture-based appoaches to promote social and economic development and on cultural objectives of social and economic development, should it not then embark on a program of capacity development to assist its member states to utilize the knowledge of that consensus?

The New Edition of The UNESCO Courier is Out

British writer Doris Lessing returns to her country of birth, Zimbabwe, and denounces our jaded world. Franco-Ivorian author Véronique Tadjo explains how travels can morph into exile. Spôjmaï Zariâb tells the story of war torn Afghanistan, from her Paris vantage point. Michal Govrin, from Israel, reveals the impassioned dimension of an unending conflict. In the United States, Indian author Kiran Desai questions the fate of belonging to two cultures. Argentine poet María Medrano builds a bridge between the free world and incarceration. All are women between two shores.

© Laurent Giorgetti
"In between" is how these women define