Master of Ceremonies: Matthew Bishop, American Business Editor and NY Bureau Chief for The Economist. Introduced by Louise Blouin, Founder and Chairman of GCLS.
Panelists: Michael Chertoff, CEO of Chertoff Group, and Former Secretary of Department of Homeland Security; Luis Moreno-Ocampo, Chief Prosecutor of International Criminal Court; Pascal Lamy, Director-General of World Trade Organization; Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Managing Director of International Monetary Fund.
Panel summary by Mary Kate Nevin and Josh Sanburn, World Policy Journal
The most pressing issues facing our world today—security, trade, the environment, development, the threat of cyber- and bio-weapons, and regional and domestic conflicts—are on the 
table at the Global Creative Leadership Summit (GCLS). Kicking off the fourth annual summit at New York City’s Metropolitan Club, Louise Blouin, founder and chairman of the GCLS, reinforced the urgent necessity of global cooperative action to address these crises effectively. The principal crisis, the global financial meltdown of the past year, she attributed to a world entrenched in a culture of greed, though she noted that the international cooperation in response had been inspiring. She called on the international community to continue to foster this global synergy and reform its “collective consciousness,” citing the Internet and other technologies as important keys to cooperation.
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Former U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff addressed the promises and perils of globalization, saying that while growing interconnectedness between countries has the potential to raise the level of prosperity for people around the world, with it comes leverage for terrorists and transnational criminals. “The ocean is no longer a protective device,” Chertoff said. “The twenty-first century has made these obstacles very small.” To deal with these problems, Chertoff said a global effort must be made to deal with problems of ungoverned space in both the physical and virtual world.
In nations like Somalia and regions of Pakistan and Afghanistan, there is a vacuum of state control, allowing space for terrorists to organize attacks. Similarly, Chertoff said, there is the cyberworld where massive crimes, such as identity theft, can be perpetrated. Bio- and cyber-terrorism will be the weapons of mass destruction of this decade, said Chertoff. To combat these issues, he called for new global institutions to tackle both forms of terrorism more concretely. He added that reducing the terrorist recruiting pool would take years. “Ideologies are very powerful,” he said. “But we’re in a better position now. We need to use all the tools of military and law enforcement to contain the problem. We need to build institutions that are democratic and legal in places that are breeding grounds.”
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Luis Moreno-Ocampo, chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), identified the real problem between countries today as the implementation of global ideas on the ground and winning over citizens of that state. “The locals will react against you,” he said. “That’s the biggest challenge.” He discussed a number of cases he’s overseen as ICC prosecutor, including the fight to control gold mines in the Congo, citing the link between crime and economics. “With Sudan,” Moreno-Ocampo said, “how do you manage the big part of revenue from oil that is used for weapons?” It’s difficult to get countries to obey and respect international law, he noted, but added that Russia and the Arab League are now cooperating with the ICC, and many countries have begun relying on the international court to prosecute the most difficult cases.
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Addressing the nexus of the financial and food crises, Pascal Lamy, director-general of the World Trade Organization (WTO) suggested that in the face of such enormous challenges, the international system “has reacted in a reasonably active and coherent way.” However, the system still faces a major handicap—that global leaders must make considerable sacrifices to balance their domestic and international agendas. The economics of trade are generally accepted—liberalization leading to economic efficiency, in turn leading to greater growth and poverty reduction. But the accompanying politics are more difficult because “some people will benefit, but others may be hurt.” In order to address this contradiction, Lamy called for greater coordination between the G20, international organizations, and the UN system to “address civil society more directly than we do.” In order to achieve this, global governance must achieve greater legitimacy. Today, he pointed out, “proximity is what creates legitimacy, [but] inherently international institutions are very far away.” Improving the legitimacy of global governance is the international community’s greatest task, and according to Lamy, this can only occur within the UN system. Finally, Lamy addressed last week’s controversial trade row between the United States and China. “For the moment,” he said, it “seems to be handled by the ‘big bosses’ on both sides with a sense of responsibility,” but he still warned of the risks of protectionist tit-for-tat action in such a sensitive global economic climate.
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Dominique Strauss-Kahn asked to speak about peace, though he serves as managing director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), one of the international community’s two major financial institutions. But Strauss-Kahn pointed proceeded to emphasize the mutual dependence of economic and social stability. “It is my abiding belief that peace and economic stability are intimately entwined,” he said. “If you lose one, you are likely to lose the other one.” He chronicled the vicious cycles that can occur in developing countries between economic stagnation and conflict, and claimed that the IMF’s legacy from its handling of the financial crisis will be that “we avoided what could have been as strong as the Great Depression with huge consequences for peace.” In addition, Strauss-Kahn emphasized the reforms that can and should be made to the international institutional infrastructure. “The legitimacy problem is one of the most important ones,” he said, and “emerging countries need to have more voice.” He proposed a type of concentrated representation that would both increase the presence of developing countries while decreasing the amount of “people at the table.”