How to respond? Let’s look to the future, with hope.
The shock of the Twin Towers is still so real, an event most readers of Briefing will have readily identified with. Going about one’s normal business, another day in the office, expecting to be away from home and loved ones for just a few hours – and suddenly the wrench of a whole life torn apart. The doomed phone call. That final jump.
Half way round the globe, the bombs start falling in dusty villages turned into another front-line in the decade old brutal civil war. Already poor peasants are driven further towards starvation. A world away from our own experience, but it’s the same small, fragile world we all share, the only one we have got.
How to make sense of it? Even the short term outlook is so uncertain as to make any prediction little more than guesswork. Instead, let us simply try to be optimistic and think about how the world could be ….
Tony Blair’s vaulting ambition for a ‘new international order showing capacity for compassion’ is embraced by other governments. Aid budgets are increased to the UN target. Companies are invited to become partners for progress, offering technology transfer, making new investments including infrastructure in schools and clinics, and bringing their high ethical standards to business and government.
Corporations line up to support both the already proposed Recovery Plan for Africa and a new ‘Marshall Plan’ for the Middle East and central Asia, once hostilities finally end and some sort of new government is in place.
In America, popular sentiment moves away from isolationism. The US government plays a constructive role in negotiations on climate change and trade disputes. The big US-based global corporations engage more fully with international initiatives such as the UN Global Compact and Business Action for Sustainable Development, preparing for next year’s Rio +10 world summit.
The anti-capitalism movement that so often seems to decry any international commerce starts to call for more and fairer trade. The spreading of prosperity draws in and opens up those nations least touched by the world economy and the free flow of goods and ideas, the very ones currently the unstable havens for terrorism.
Closer to home, we heal the divisions in our own society. The riots this summer in Oldham and Bradford are recognised as a microcosm of global tensions around ethnicity and poverty. That Cinderella of BITC’s campaigns in terms of corporate backing, Race for Opportunity, celebrates its fifth anniversary this autumn with every responsible corporate citizen joining. These companies systematically examine their community projects and their mainstream operations – everything from who we employ, where we place our contracts, and how many from minority communities really benefit from our CCI projects.
Is this possible? The natural reaction to terrible events like September 11 is to retreat behind familiar certainties. Yet if we all, as individuals, companies and nations, get out of our comfort zones and see things from the perspective of the other side, then maybe. Remember that just 50 years ago, Europe was utterly devastated by war, unspeakable atrocities and the barbarism of the Holocaust, after centuries of national and religious hate. Given the chance, economic growth can bring peace and prosperity.
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