2022 Conference proceedings

08:30 – 10:00 | Plenary session 1

Geoeconomics and Development in a Fragmented World

Masood Ahmed

President of the Center for Global Development, former Director of the Middle East and Central Asia Department of the IMF

International development and politics – international politics, geopolitics – have always been connected, so it is not as if this is something new. The question we will explore in this panel is how the relationship is changing and what that means for the way in which we think about development and development cooperation. I would like to propose that there are at least three ways in which that relationship is changing.

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Aminata Touré

Representative of the Senegalese National Assembly, former Prime Minister, former President of the Economic, Social and Environmental Council of Senegal

We live in a deeply fragmented world. Even in wealthy countries, people feel left behind, and inequality is a major issue that needs to be addressed. It is clear to me that our concepts of international development need to be re-evaluated, so they reflect the reality of a fragmented society. This is particularly true in Africa, where the future of nutrition will be decided.

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Jean-Marie Paugam

Deputy Director General of the WTO

There is not a clear trend towards de-globalization in trade figures. While there have been some trends, such as an apparent slowdown in the rate of openness or global trade on GDP, this can be attributed to various statistical phenomena, such as variations in commodity prices and the composition of GDP. However, there are new forces that will shape globalization and make it more complex, leading to increased transaction costs for businesses and governments.

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Kim Heungchong

President of the Korea Institute for International Economic Policy

The fragmentation and “blocization” of global economies are now substantial. All of these hinder the stable provision of global public goods that the emerging economies have hitherto utilized for their growth. The digitalization of ODA will be the revolution for increasing the effective distribution of global public goods while responding to the climate crisis through green technology.

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Bertrand Badré

Managing Partner and Founder of Blue like an Orange Sustainable Capital, former Managing Director and Chief Financial Officer of the World Bank Group

The convergence of traditional crises – economic, social, and energy – coupled with fundamental transformation across several domains has created a complex global situation. This transformation is geopolitical, with decarbonization and biodiversity at the forefront of discussions, and technological changes, such as artificial intelligence, rapidly evolving.

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Jeffry Frieden

Professor of Government at Harvard University

The highlighted points here are the current geoeconomic and political situation and the constraints that they impose on developing countries. We are in the midst of a fundamental change in the constraints and opportunities faced by developing countries and that this is going to be a very challenging period to come.

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Vincent Koen

Deputy Director of Country Studies at the OECD

China’s near closure during the three years of the pandemic has come on top of other factors working in the direction of deglobalization: the Made in China 2025 strategy, which seeks to reduce China’s dependence on foreign technology; Trump’s trade war, with titfor-tat tariff hikes starting in 2018; the US Chips and Science Act and the EU Chips Act; and the US Inflation Reduction Act. Against the backdrop of geopolitical tensions, all this translates into less FDI and knowledge exchange.

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Debate

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10:00 – 11:30 | Plenary session 2

Is the International Economic Order Collapsing?

Jean-Claude Trichet

Vice Chairman of the Académie des sciences morales et politiques, former Chairman of the European Central Bank, Honorary Governor of the Bank of France

The question is whether we should have a new international economic order and I guess the response is yes, because checking what has been said, all speakers, whether President of the US, President of all countries in the world or of China, they all say we need a new international order, implicitly or explicitly a new economic international order. The problem is, which one exactly, which international order that would be new and appropriate for the new world in which we live? Should it be multipolar or unipolar?

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Taeho Bark

President of Lee&Ko Global Commerce Institute, former Minister for Trade of Korea

It may not be realistic or even feasible to suddenly cut off all trade between the US and China. I think we should consider limiting the US decoupling from China to a few technologically sensitive sectors, which are directly related to national security.

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Yann Coatanlem

CEO of DataCore Innovations LLC, Founder and President of Club Praxis, Board member of GlassView and the Paris School of Economics

It would also be very useful to have some kind of extreme risk measure of the entire world economy, across many dimensions: market risk, credit risk, climate risk, cyber security, operational risk. Nothing new here: let’s reuse the same models and stress tests that are applied to institutions that are deemed too big to fail.

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Gabriel Felbermayr

Director of the Austrian Institute of Economic Research (WIFO), former President of the Kiel Institute for the World Economy (IfW)

I think we should have a broader perspective on the institutions that matter, that is not just the IMF, the World Bank, the World Trade Organization, the World Health Organization, etc. We must bring in the big international enterprises. We need to mobilize them for the common good, public and civil society, NGOs and many more.

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Motoshige Itoh

Professor Emeritus at the University of Tokyo, member of the Council on Economic and Fiscal Policy of Japan

I would like to particularly emphasize the importance of COP’s efforts to address climate change. It is necessary, of course, to address the issue of climate change by promoting initiatives on common human issues with the participation of all the world’s major countries.

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John Lipsky

Senior Fellow of the Foreign Policy Institute at Johns Hopkins University’s Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), former First Deputy Managing Director of the IMF

I have concluded that renewed focus on a more cooperative and coherent approach toward setting macroeconomic and financial policy is needed to avoid creating new risks of protectionism and reduced efficiency of international financial markets. Such negative developments inevitably would reduce potential growth and increase economic volatility.

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Qiao Yide

Vice Chairman and Secretary General of Shanghai Development Research Foundation

In the short-term, I guess it is very important for the US to do more cooperation on macroeconomic policy among other major economies. Also, many countries are currently experimenting for CBDC under the framework of BIS […]. I think it is good to facilitate the transaction and payment system.

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Nicolas Véron

Senior Fellow at Bruegel, Senior Fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics

The Basel III accord on banking capital requirements, leverage, liquidity and stress testing, has been an extraordinary international success. It has been implemented in a more globally consistent way than the previous Basel II accord. Sadly, the European Union is still not compliant but most other jurisdictions are and I think that has led to great resilience in the financial system, in the banking system.

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Debate

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11:30 – 13:00 | Official Opening

Thierry de Montbrial

Founder and Executive Chairman of Ifri and the WPC

Our ambition remains unchanged. It continues to be to work in favor of a governance that safeguards the chances for a “reasonably open” world, away from the two extremes of, one the one hand, a return to division into blocks that are radically separated by ideology, and on the other hand, the Fukuyama-style “flat world” dreamed of following the Cold War by liberal globalist ideologues.

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Reem Ibrahim Al Hashimy

Minister of State for International Cooperation of the United Arab Emirates

The path forward in the UAE is clear, it can only happen through constructive dialogue, but we do not meet with each other to simply talk to one another, we must meet to also ensure that we are bringing more to the table by being innovative and inventive and bold. We do have to look at ways where we also do not become echo chambers where we simply repeat and agree with one another about what the path forward needs to look like.

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HH Bartholomew I

Archbishop of Constantinople – New Rome and Ecumenical Patriarch

The ethno-religious fanaticism inculcated in Russian youth stifles prospects for peace and reconciliation. The Orthodox world is divided and this fragmentation is projected onto poor countries, whose people hoped to find relief in the faith. Above all, it harms the Russian Church since sooner or later the people will realize the excesses of a Church subject to objectives that have nothing to do with its original mission.

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Haïm Korsia

Chief Rabbi of France

All religions advocate the diversity that alone can lead to unity, which is actually the opposite of uniformity. Uniformity is an illusion, for we can never all be the same. To speak about unity, it is therefore necessary to speak about difference. Religions represent a way for everyone, each in his or her own way, to turn to the same person, to God, without wanting to get rid of others. No possibility of eliminating the faith of others has ever been imagined.

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14:30 – 15:30 | Plenary session 3

The Future of Geopolitics and Business: Building Resilience and Adapting to a New Global Reality

Nikolaus Lang

Global Leader for the Global Advantage practice, Managing Director and Senior Partner of Boston Consulting Group

In my view, there are six dimensions in which business leaders must act in the emerging world, embedding geopolitics in corporate decision making, supply chain resilience, investing in people and strategy, innovation, cybersecurity, and accelerating climate action.

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Abdullah Al Mazrui

Chairman of the United Arab Emirates Chambers of Commerce and Industry

“Geopolitical changes have a significant impact on the world economic ecosystem, and recent events such as the war in Ukraine and the Covid-19 pandemic have led to global economic challenges. To minimize geopolitical tensions, businesses can increase their flexibility and resilience, develop practical methodologies for risk management, and adapt to the economic reality.”

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Maurice Gourdault-Montagne

Former Ambassador, former Permanent Under Secretary of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs

“Multi-alignment” is the new behavior of countries which behave according to their own interests and India is a champion in that respect. The rest of the world is a swarm of middle-sized countries or smaller countries trying to survive because of inflation, security, grain, pesticides. Around 140 countries are following this pattern.

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Helle Kristoffersen

President Strategy & Sustainability and member of the Executive Committee of TotalEnergies

In the recent reports on risks published by insurance companies and risk assessment specialists, we can notice that the top three risks identified across all regions are geopolitics, cybersecurity, and climate change. These three risks are inherently linked, and inaction on climate change will lead to geopolitical tensions, migrations, droughts, water conflicts, and more.

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Sam Okwulehie

Chairman and CEO of LATC

Sustainability: protection of our future via sustainable business practices is now undoubtedly important in our global ecosystem and could be the natural resilience build that global supply chains require today and tomorrow.

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Debate

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15:30 – 16:30 | Plenary session 4

Innovative Leaders: Climate Crisis and Circular Economy

Lucia Sinapi-Thomas

Executive Director of CG

The climate warming limit translates into a need to drastically curb carbon emissions by the middle of the century and at this point, some would say that failing national commitments to make it happen, the next-zero by 2050 remains aspirational. As a matter of fact, adapting to climate change comes with a cost.

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Andrew Brown

Junior Environmental Policy Analyst at the OECD

We break circular economy down into three particular parts. We think about efficiency, how we can use natural resources more efficiently and get more economic productivity out of a certain amount of resource use. How we can slow our resource use, meaning how we can use and keep products at the highest value possible for the longest period of time possible. Then we also want to close our economic systems.

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Yim Hyo-sung

Vice President of the Corporate Strategy Center of Hyosung Corporation

The point I want to make here is that there are many recycled products out there already. The technology is there but the problem is, is there a demand for these products currently in the market? Sadly, the answer is no because no one is willing to pay for it.

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Bruno Langlois

Business Development and Partnerships Director at Carbios

It is interesting to see that we have multiplied the quantity of waste by 12 in the last 50 years, when the population has been multiplied by less than three. We are obviously going in the wrong direction in terms of producing more and more at lower cost, making objects with lesser value that are quickly thrown away.

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Lívia Ribeiro de Souza

Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer at Mimicrete Ltd.

In the past 10 years or so at Cambridge, we have been investigating self-healing technology for cementitious materials, mimicking what happens in nature. If there is a scratch on a tree or our own skin, our bodies and nature have that intrinsic self-healing capacity. We can learn from nature and apply this ability in our infrastructure.

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Florent Andrillon

Global Head of Sustainability Services at Capgemini Invent

A lot of the circular economy principles were just principles and were not easy to implement in the bast beyond burning waste to produce heat or energy. Now, with the development of a lot of new technology and the fact that everything is connected, it is possible to develop circularity.

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Yim Hyo-sung

Vice President of the Corporate Strategy Center of Hyosung Corporation

I think government subsidies are undoubtedly the most important factor going forward to bring down the cost of hydrogen and make it affordable for customers.

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Andrew Brown

Junior Environmental Policy Analyst at the OECD

I think that the average citizen’s first interaction with circular economy may be with the public sector in terms of their municipality, which are often doing recycling systems, so this starts at a very local stage. However, there are also policies at the national level as well as at international level that are quite important for circular economy.

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Lívia Ribeiro de Souza

Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer at Mimicrete Ltd.

It takes time to implement a new technology on a construction, and we are working with a company in the UK for investigate the pathways for this implementation. Currently, we need a departure from a standard, which can take from a couple of weeks to a couple of years.

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Bruno Langlois

Business Development and Partnerships Director at Carbios

To move to circularity what is important, if I can say that, is that we square the circle. There are several issues everywhere, we need industrial strengths, investment in biotechnology, which is also close to the chemical sector at the level we see in the pharmaceutical industry, for instance.

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Debate

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16:30 – 17:30 | Plenary session 5

The Sahel and West Africa: Geopolitics and Geoeconomics

Thierry de Montbrial

Founder and Executive Chairman of Ifri and the WPC

To shed some light on the subject, we will address the economy, social problems and security issues, in that order. Since many analysts and commentators posit that the social and economic situation is the root cause of insecurity, we will discuss them first.

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Romuald Wadagni

Senior Minister in charge of Economy and Finance of Benin

So we focused our efforts on laws and texts to have good governance and on the formation of human capital: training young people. With well-trained, well-educated young people who can use their hands, you create the conditions for better governance and less corruption.

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Alain Tchibozo

Chief Economist of the West African Development Bank (BOAD)

Moreover, some people perceive other problems as being more urgent, such as food security. This is a complex issue. Output is insufficient; agricultural productivity is very low.

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General Francis A. Behanzin

Co-Founder and Chairman of the Réseau mondial des professionnels de sécurité et de défense pour la prévention et la lutte contre le terrorisme, former Commissioner Political Affairs, Peace and Security of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS)

The common denominator of all these rebellions lies in their denunciation of the inequalities in development between the regions of the South and the North in the countries concerned and the inability of the states to provide for the needs of the populations of the North.

Nshuti Manasseh

Minister of State in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation in charge of East African Community of Rwanda

I must admit that sometimes bilateral engagements are more effective than multilateral ones but the two kind of work together, so you can have a blend of the two. Bilateral engagements can be effective because we respond in time to a problem we understand. Multilateral engagements take time with bureaucracy, when the problem is not bureaucratic, so we need a blend of the two types of interventions.

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Debate

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17:30 – 19:00 | Plenary session 6

The Rest of the World Facing the US-China Rivalry

Douglas Paal

Distinguished Fellow at the Asia Program Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, former Senior Director of Asian Affairs and Special Assistant to the President in the US National Security Council

I would propose this is a good time if China wants to changeits tactics. We are seeing, in various subtle ways, China pulling back on its aggressiveness in the South China Sea, the Senkaku Islands. They are not changing fundamental positions, but they are being less aggressive. Maybe that will be true on the Indian line of actual control as well.

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John Andrews

Contributing Editor to The Economist and Project Syndicate

There are only 20 countries in the UN who name the US as their number one trading partner. You take how many countries name China as their lead trading partner, it is at least 120. If push comes to shove, what choice will countries make?

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Jean-Pierre Cabestan

Senior Researcher Emeritus at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) attached to the French Research Institute on East Asia (IFRAE) of the National Institute of Oriental Languages and Civilisations, Professor Emeritus at Hong Kong Baptist University

Another trend which has taken place for some years – even before these recent tensions in the Taiwan Strait – is the fact that the European Union itself has moved away from a kind of naïve and full engagement with China to a much more balanced China policy. We know the three pillars of this policy now – one is economic cooperation; the other one is economic competition; and the third one is the idea that China and we are systemic rivals.

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Renaud Girard

Senior Reporter and International Columnist at Le Figaro

Obviously, France does not want to be stuck in the middle of the rivalry between China and the United States, the collateral victim of some Thucydides trap. That is certain. Moreover, France realizes that it no longer carries enough demographic, economic, trade or military weight to be a major player in the great global game.

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Yuichi Hosoya

Professor of International Politics at Keio University in Tokyo

As the world’s third largest economy, Japan is considered a frontline state, vulnerable in the event of a war between the two great powers. However, Japan has close relationships with both countries and has developed two strategies to respond to this difficult question.

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Lee Hye Min

Senior Advisor of KIM & CHANG, former G20 Sherpa of Korea

The intensifying and expanding tension between the US and China is a very serious issue to all of the world, but much more serious to Korea, because of history and geography. The international political order that Korea wants to pursue is non exclusive and we highly value cooperation with every country of the world, including China.

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Samir Saran

President of the Observer Research Foundation of New Delhi

The lure of money, the lure of return, has made Europe incompetent and incapable of taking a unified position against China. If you think you are going to see a Russia style mobilization against China, we are all living in La La Land. Europe is the weak link for the US if it has to mobilize any sort of consortium against China.

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Wang Jisi

President of the Institute of International and Strategic Studies at Peking University in Beijing, Peking University Boya Chair Professor

Europeans share a negative opinion of China regarding human rights, but Europe will maintain its strategic autonomy vis-à-vis China in economic and technological terms. In terms of ideology and geopolitics, the European Union and the United Kingdom will turn to the United States.

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Panelists debate

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Debate

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19:30 | Dinner Debate

Kevin Rudd

President of the Asia Society Policy Institute, former Prime Minister of Australia

Xi Jinping’s visit to Riyadh is a significant one because China has embarked over the last five to seven years on an advanced economic diplomacy towards the Gulf states in particular. There is one background point, however, which is that China has a much longer standing relationship with Iran.

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Debate

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08:00 – 09:30 | Plenary session 7

The Future of EU and European Security After the Ukraine War

Ali Aslan

International TV Presenter and Journalist

This is one of the most pertinent and timely sessions of this year’s World Policy Conference. The title is, “The Future of the EU and European Security After the Ukraine War”. I wish we could sit here today and speak about the state of the world after the war in Ukraine, unfortunately we are not quite there. However, I could not have asked for a better panel and more esteemed speakers to dive into this very timely and important subject.

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Peter Beyer

Member of the German Bundestag, Coordinator of Transatlantic Cooperation of the Federal Government

I do not buy that we are still lagging behind. Six months ago, we should have made the right political decisions quickly, like delivering heavy weaponry and air space defense, which we have now done.

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Bogdan Klich

Senator in the Polish Parliament, Chairman of the Foreign and EU Affairs Committee in the Polish Senate

There are also two more operational goals that are important not only for Ukraine but also for the European and Atlantic communities, I would say the destabilization of the European Union and the paralysis of NATO. They were expressed just before the war began in Ukraine, in the famous ultimatum from President Putin to the West.

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Hubert Védrine

Founder of Hubert Védrine Conseil, former Minister of Foreign Affairs of France

A West that shies away from assessing its policies in the 1990s is a West to be worried about. What military circles call “feedback” is essential.

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Zaki Laïdi

Personal Advisor to the High Representative and Vice President of the Commission EEAS

We never had a Ukrainian policy, our Ukrainian policy was a by-product of our Russian policy. That led to a certain number of uncertainties, mistakes, and hesitations, including the question of NATO, which I am not personally in favor of in the case of Ukraine, but we did not give a clear precise indication.

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Tsakhiagiin Elbegdorj

Former President of Mongolia

The global implications mean that the frontline of the Ukrainian is much wider, it is the frontline between the free and totalitarian worlds, and it even goes across Africa and Asia, everywhere. If Ukraine loses, I think it will encourage the autocrats but if it wins, those autocrats will be discouraged.

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Peter Beyer

Member of the German Bundestag, Coordinator of Transatlantic Cooperation of the Federal Government

Support is high but there is certainly that concern. We not only have energy prices shooting through the roof and, I have to say, it is only just the beginning, next winter, by the end of next year, will be much more expensive. […] Taken together, this is really a challenge for any government, be it on a Federal or more regional or local level, to hold the side together.

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Bogdan Klich

Senator in the Polish Parliament, Chairman of the Foreign and EU Affairs Committee in the Polish Senate

It is much better than at the beginning of the war. It means that there is a growing understanding in Europe, not just in some parts of Europe, of the role of Ukraine and the principle that the security of Europe depends on Ukraine’s independence. The security of the European Union, at least, depends on the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine.

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Hubert Védrine

Founder of Hubert Védrine Conseil, former Minister of Foreign Affairs of France

About the future, I think Westerners, and Europeans, will stand their ground, and therefore, Putin cannot win. However, I do not think the Americans will help the Ukrainians attack Crimea, although I may be wrong about that of course. I believe that after various twists and turns there will be a stalemate.

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Zaki Laïdi

Personal Advisor to the High Representative and Vice President of the Commission EEAS

We need to have a strong European pillar without NATO capable of dealing with what the French military said, to be prepared for a war of high intensity in Europe. This war is going to cause a sea-change in the perception and the strategic perception of our security, but we do indeed need to take more responsibility.

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Debate

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09:30 – 10:30 | Plenary session 8

The Relevance of “Indo-Pacific” as a Geostrategic Concept

Thierry de Montbrial

Founder and Executive Chairman of Ifri and the WPC

The Indo Pacific concept emerged relatively recently and the key question I would like to ask the four panelists is, is this new geopolitical concept meant to represent something like an alliance against China? Most people who partly think the answer is yes, would publicly say no. My question is simple: what do we mean by Indo-Pacific?

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Hiroyuki Akita

Commentator of Nikkei, Japan

Then, the highest and most difficult approach is the sharing values approach. Under this approach, likeminded countries that can share values, maybe from the Western point of view, the value of democracy, and will cooperate with each other and try to promote common values.

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Mayankote Kelath Narayanan

Executive Chairman of CyQureX Systems Pvt. Ltd., former Senior Advisor and National Security Advisor to the Prime Minister of India (Manmohan Singh

From India’s standpoint, it is the rapid pace at which China is pursuing its version of the Revolution in Military Affairs, largely driven by Artificial Intelligence Systems, that is cause for real concern for countries in the region. […] China’s disregard for international covenants, as also its willingness to use force to achieve its objectives in the South China Sea, are the reasons compelling India to revisit some of its earlier options.

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Douglas Paal

Distinguished Fellow at the Asia Program Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, former Senior Director of Asian Affairs and Special Assistant to the President in the US National Security Council

APEC had its moment in the 1990s and then we went into the period of globalization, and we did not think so much in terms of Southeast Asia, East Asia or Africa, we thought in terms of movement of capital, global supply chains, seeking opportunities.

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Panelists debate

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Yim Sung-joon

Senior Advisor at Lee International IP & Law Group, former Deputy Minister for Foreign Affairs, former National Security Advisor to President Kim Dae-jung

From the beginning, the US sought to persuade South Korea to join the FOIP framework, but South Korea refrained from officially engaging in it. South Korea is by location an Indo-Pacific country and a middle power that wields influence as a strong democracy, unchanging ally to the US and the 3rd largest economy in East Asia.

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Debate

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10:30 – 12:15 | Plenary session 9

Space Governance: The Implications of Globalized Access to Space Technologies

Patrick Nicolet

Founder and Managing Partner of Linebreak Ltd., former Group Chief Technology Officer of Capgemini

The pace at which space technologies are advancing is unprecedented in the history of spacefaring, and the democratized access to such technologies implies that not only a handful of prominent actors are involved and competing, but that corporations, civil society and a plethora of new nations are now in the race too.

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Amer Al Ghafri

Senior Director of the Space Engineering Department at the Mohamed bin Rashid Space Center in Dubai

The UAE looks at space as an important and critical sector driving the bigger goal, which is science and technology here in the UAE.

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Kazuto Suzuki

Professor of Science and Technology Policy at the Graduate School of Public Policy at the University of Tokyo

Today, space 2.0 is all about the democratization and everyone is now a participant in space activities, including the UAE. The second is the commercialization. The third aspect is the militarization, with space now being used for military purposes and commercial services like Starlink also being used for military services.

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Daniel Andler

Professor Emeritus at Sorbonne University, member of the Académie des sciences morales et politiques, Philosopher

While an update of the Five Treaties and international cooperation on such problems as debris and orbit management might help, a much more resolute ethical deliberation is required, one which involves all stakeholders, one in which all relevant factors, including the uncertainties and risks, are taken in due consideration.

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Meir Sheetrit

Former member of the Israeli Knesset, former Minister of Intelligence Affairs and the Committee of Atomic Energy, former Minister of the Interior

A new invention from an Israeli company aims to clean up space. With an investment of between USD 100 million and USD 200 million, the first idea was to send a satellite that would push the parts away into deep space. Then they had a better idea to build a satellite that will move close to every satellite that has stopped working and recharge it so that it can work for many more years without just being space junk.

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Patrick Trinkler

Founder and CEO of CYSEC

I will start by presenting space as a 3.0 evolution not 2.0. From my point of view, it is really the finalization of the digitalization of the world, to give access to the Internet to two to three billion people, to be able to connect a billion IoT devices in the world.

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Geoffrey Bouquot

CTO and Group Vice President Strategy & External Relations at Valeo, former Technical Advisor for Industrial Affairs in the Cabinet of the French Minister of Defense

The blurred frontiers between the civilian and the military activities is very important when it comes to IoT devices and I think that is where we are all heading with the ownership of constellations by some private companies raising the problems you already mentioned. Therefore, independence of technology is still the new frontier, even in space.

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François Barrault

Founder and Chairman of FDB Partners, Chairman of IDATE DigiWorld

I think satellites present fantastic opportunities because we have moved from defense and survey, to now giving everybody access. The solution will be a kind of hybrid between fiber, 4G and 5G and access to satellite and maybe, I will achieve my dream of having everybody in the world connected like water, food and electricity.

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13:30 – 14:00 | Plenary session 10

Conversation avec Dmytro Kuleba

Dmytro Kuleba

Minister of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine

One of the outcomes of this war will be full integration of Ukraine into the European Union and NATO because we have to think strategically. Yes, the country is at war now and it is hard to imagine us joining NATO right now, but the future of Euro Atlantic security is being decided on the battlefield in Ukraine, and after the war, Ukraine will have one of the most capable armies in the world and definitely the most capable army in Europe, taking into account its combat experience, morale, and military equipment. Therefore, it would be very unwise for NATO to ignore or not to accommodate such a contributor to Euro Atlantic security.

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14:00 – 15:00 | Plenary session 11

Eastern Europe, South Caucasus and Central Asia Facing the Ukraine War

Tatiana Kastouéva-Jean

Research Fellow and Director of the Russia/NIS Center of Ifri

Ukraine is the first victim of Russian aggression, but other neighboring countries are also suffering from shocks at different levels. I think about the flood of migrants, and I think about energy pressures from Russia.

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Question 1

“Olga Rosca The post Soviet or former Soviet Union, that is the parts that we, Moldova, have not chosen and we do not necessarily see that it defines us now. Therefore, the preference is that we use the present and the future to define ourselves, so I would rather hear, instead of post Soviet Moldova, an EU hopeful Moldova, candidate for EU membership Moldova, reform oriented Moldova, western leaning Moldova or, shall I say, freedom loving Moldova.”

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Question 2

“Lasha Darsalia Unfortunately, the situation on the ground is not even static but is fast deteriorating regarding the humanitarian and human rights situation. People who are living on the ground literally are used as hostages to put pressure on the government of Georgia. The situation on the ground is, therefore, deteriorating fast, and this is not only about the occupied territories. We see increased pressure on Georgia, and all of these hybrid tools, which were previously implied, have been brought to bear on the rest of Georgia as well.”

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Question 3

“Roman Vassilenko In Kazakhstan we do have Russian channels available, but so is Euronews and so is the BBC and so is CNN. However, I will tell you that in Kazakhstan the media itself works in Kazakh and also in Russian, in addition to 10 other languages of some other ethnic groups, such as Germans who live in Kazakhstan. The challenge for us, therefore, is to strengthen the informational independence, if you will,”

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Question 4

“Lasha Darsalia I just want to say that Georgia is strongly supporting Ukraine generally, but one of the dimensions of that is the help being given by the government of Georgia to the Ukrainian refugees who are in Georgia. It is several tens of thousands, which is actually a small amount, and there are different programs to support them, including not only physically supporting them, but, for example, several Georgian schools are operating in Ukrainian now for the children who are from Ukraine.”

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Question 5

“Olga Rosca European integration and European membership is an absolute priority for the current government. This is also the mandate that the government got from the citizens, so we spare no effort to press on with the reforms despite all the challenges that I have described before. We are aware that there are no shortcuts. We are committed to hard work. We are committed to reforms.”

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Question 6

“Roman Vassilenko If we talk about where we stand, we stand for democracy, for the market economy, for the international rule of law, international law primarily, written down, clearly spelled out, and that is also, by the way, a difference with the so called international rules based order. We stand for international law, a law that is written, that is agreed upon by everybody. We also stand for international cooperation.”

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Debate

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15:00 – 15:30 | Plenary session 12

Conversation with Khaldoon Khalifa Al Mubarak

Khaldoon Khalifa Al Mubarak

Chairman of the Executive Affairs Authority, Group Chief Executive Officer and Managing Director of Mubadala

Today, the UAE is home to three of the world’s largest and lowest-cost solar plants. Almost 25% of our power needs are met through clean energy, and we have clean energy projects spanning 70 countries.

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15:30 – 16:00 | Plenary session 13

Conversation with Anwar Gargash

Anwar Gargash

Diplomatic Advisor to the President of the United Arab Emirates

I think it is very reductionist and very simplistic to say the UAE is neutral on Ukraine. The UAE is not neutral on Ukraine. The UAE is affected by the crisis in Ukraine and is trying to find the right balance between our principles and the necessity for a political solution and an end to the Ukraine war.

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16:00 – 17:00 | Plenary session 14

Critical Raw Materials – How to Secure the Crucial Resources for our Industries?

Friedbert Pflüger

Director of the European Cluster for Climate, Energy and Resource Security (EUCERS) at the University of Bonn, Founding Partner of Strategic Minds Company GmbH

We need diversification and that is even more true when it comes to lithium, cobalt, copper, nickel, vanadium, and rare earths, which we all need for the devices we need daily in our modern lives. Therefore, this subject has an enormous geopolitical meaning. If we are not able to secure affordable, reliable raw materials, our industries cannot survive.

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Philippe Chalmin

Founder of Cercle Cyclope, Professor at Paris-Dauphine University, Consultant for various International Organisations (OECD, EEC, UNCTAD)

For a long time, rare earths were not rare, and the center of rare earth metallurgy was in France. Today, we have all exported, delocalized our environmental problems and, of course, you know now about 80% of rare earths are produced in China.

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Jonathan Cordero

Head of Corporate Development at Eurasian Resources Group

Where states and national policymakers find their national boundaries, global market participants need to take responsibility for protecting our environment, for enforcing human rights, for the host communities we operate in, in short transparent and responsible sourcing cradle to grave.

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Ingvil Smines Tybring-Gjedde

Non-Executive Director at Norge Mining, former State Secretary for the Ministry of Petroleum and Energy of Norway

The EU has historically imported most of its phosphate from Russia and the invasion of Ukraine has created an urgent requirement to prevent dependency on Russia. There could not be any better time to develop the phosphate industry in a stable environment in the heart of Europe, in Norway. It will create security of supply in Europe and beyond, thereby contributing to food security and positively reflecting thousands of miles away.

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Peter Handley

Head of the Energy-Intensive Industries and Raw Materials Unit in the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Internal Market, Industry, Entrepreneurship and SMEs

We will focus on the raw materials that are particularly strategic for the technologies the EU has decided it needs to develop fast for the energy transition, digitalization, and security. We want to encourage EU Member States to do much more systematic exploration.

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Debate

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17:00 – 19:30 | Parallel Workshops

Workshop #1 – Finance and Economy

Jean-Claude Trichet

Vice Chairman of the Académie des sciences morales et politiques, former Chairman of the European Central Bank, Honorary Governor of the Bank of France

What is the likelihood of central banks of the advanced economies succeeding in regaining control of inflation? […] Are we correctly assessing the divergences between the advanced economies, the developing world, and emerging countries? What about the fragility of the developing countries and the probability of major disruptive issues? What is the likelihood of a financial crisis triggered by major market corrections?

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Serge Ekué

President of the West African Development Bank (BOAD)

The first [key policy objective] one is addressing food insecurity, which I think is a major threat we have to deal with in a region where the median age of the population is 20, and we all know that our population doubles every 25 years. That is a real threat in the context you previously described.

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Raed Charafeddine

Central and Commercial Banker, former First Vice Governor of the Central Bank of Lebanon

The Lebanese economy is facing stressful conditions for the third year in a row, resulting from the multi-dimensional crisis it has been going through, aggravated by the global and regional economic turbulences. Lebanon’s crisis emerged after a decade of regional turmoil on the one hand and the difficulties in public finances in terms of deficit in the budget and the exacerbation of public debt and its service on the other hand.

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Jeffry Frieden

Professor of Government at Harvard University

I think we face a very difficult time in the making of economic policy where monetary policy seems to have no choice but to focus on fighting inflation and fiscal policy that could dampen or soften some of the blows of that restrictive monetary policy is tightly constrained.

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Akinari Horii

Special Advisor and member of the Board of Directors of the Canon Institute for Global Studies, former Assistant Governor of the Bank of Japan

China’s exports to the US stopped growing, but at the same time exports of Korea, India, and ASEAN countries are increasing. […] At the same time, US exports to China have continued to increase, and so has US direct investment in China. As long as it is in the interests of American companies to do business in Chinese markets, globalization seems unlikely to become deglobalization soon.

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Kyung-wook Hur

President of the Korean Bretton Woods Club, Chairman of the Board of the Korea Center for International Finance, former Vice Minister for the Ministry of Strategy and Finance, former Senior Economist for the IMF

When you have seen such a big rollercoaster movement on the foreign exchange markets, I still think there must be some more structured way for non-convertible currency countries to have reasonable expectations of access to the Fed, which is still missing. The last one was given unilaterally during the pandemic so that may be something that is missing from international financial architecture up until now.

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Pierre Jacquet

President of the Global Development Network, Professor at the École nationale des Ponts et Chaussées

What I would like to emphasize is that speculative crises are not new. What is new, in each crises, is that it has specific short-term causes that will differ from the previous one. What strikes me is the continuity of the profound reasons for crises, which are very basic: they result from periods of overinvestment followed by periods of excessive disillusion.

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André Lévy-Lang

Founder and Chairman of the Louis Bachelier Institute

The fact that finance is used as a weapon has implications in terms of systemic risk, the behavior of financial institutions and the markets, and it is not clear to us, and we are working on that, how finance in general can support and make it feasible to accomplish these huge investments without creating systemic risk, breaking the system of creating major, unmanageable situations.

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John Lipsky

Senior Fellow of the Foreign Policy Institute at Johns Hopkins University’s Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), former First Deputy Managing Director of the IMF

We have experienced a period of slow growth, low investment, lower than anticipated labor force participation and at the same time, unexpectedly strong corporate profits. That combination has been associated with sustained, unexpectedly low real interest rates.

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Jean-Claude Meyer

Vice Chairman International of Rothschild & Cie

Central bankers live in a tragic dilemma because their measures have adverse collateral effects, – such as medicines for doctors –, and therefore fine tuning is difficult for them. Their key question is how much can they increase interest rates to reduce inflation and avoid a recession.

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Jean-Claude Trichet

Vice Chairman of the Académie des sciences morales et politiques, former Chairman of the European Central Bank, Honorary Governor of the Bank of France

The fact that we have the same level of underlying inflation, core inflation on both sides of the Atlantic and not the same level of headline, underlines what many of us have said, namely that there are differences between the US and Europe because in Europe it is very much more of a supply problem and in the US more of a demand problem.

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Debate

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Workshop #2 – Energy and Environment

Olivier Appert

Chairman of France Brevets, Scientific Advisor of the Center for Energy & Climate of Ifri, former President of the French Energy Council

The European Union rapidly took embargo measures on coal and oil. We may question the real impact of these measures on the Russian economy. The coal and oil markets are both deep and Russia has been able to redirect its exports. For example, India increased its imports of oil from Russia by a factor of 10. However, the situation is fundamentally different for natural gas. Clearly, therefore, in the near future we may anticipate geopolitical tension on the oil and gas market.

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Narendra Taneja

Chairman of the Independent Energy Policy Institute of New Delhi, Founder President of the World Energy Policy Summit (WEPS)

Now we are even thinking of looking at using LNG wherever we can. What we basically need to look at are energy transitions. Transitions: it may depend on your situation, your reality on the ground, your circumstances. In Germany they may do it faster. Good luck to them. In Norway they may do it even faster. However, in India and some other economies it may take longer.

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Florent Andrillon

Global Head of Sustainability Services at Capgemini Invent

Green hydrogen is on everyone’s lips. As you know, it is very trendy. There is a lot of money out there. It will probably not reach the level required to decarbonize the economy, which is 15% – we are not on that path – one of the reasons being the lack of green electricity available. That means that large amounts of green electricity will need to be imported from other regions, so the geopolitics will have to change a bit because clearly some regions will be in a new position of exporting energy through the hydrogen carrier.

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Igor Yurgens

Scientific Director of MGIMO Centre for Sustainable Development and ESG Transformation

Russia actually has to start renewables from scratch. We had such cheap gas, oil and coal that we didn’t have motivation to use other sources. However, I would say that the prerequisites are all there. Yakutia, which is in the extreme north of Russia and which has temperatures of minus 40 degrees in winter, has more sunny days than France, for example. Russia is a pretty solar area. Winds are no problem at all and of course, plenty of water is available. From this point of view, 20% of the world production of hydrogen was the target for the Russian Federation according to this decarbonization plan.

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Marc-Antoine Eyl-Mazzega

Director of the Center for Energy & Climate of Ifri

We mentioned the electricity systems. I mean, frankly, with the inflation that we have, with the money all going to the US, are we realistically going to be able to lay out all the solar panels that we are talking about? I doubt it. However, what is for sure is that even the numbers and the trajectory we are on – that is 2 trillion in investments by 2030 versus 1.2 last year – are two times less than what is needed for a 1.5-degree trajectory. In any case, therefore, we are missing the targets, but then what are the consequences of failure?

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Workshop #3 – Africa

Robert Dossou

President of the African Association of International Law, former Minister of Foreign Affairs of Benin, former President of the Constitutional Court of Benin

The first need was to build a nation-state and then the new societies’ socio-economic foundations. Sixty years on, has the mission been accomplished? What are the challenges? Nothing is out of bounds.

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Alain Antil

Director of the Sub-Saharan Africa Center of Ifri

There is indeed the question of international terrorism. Nonetheless we can read these revolts as uprisings of the peripheries against the political centers. We can read them as revolts of the countryside against the cities. We can read them as uprisings of yesterday’s dominated […].

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Cheikh Tidiane Gadio

President of the Institute for Pan-African Strategies, Peace-Security-Governance, Special Envoy of the OIF, former Minister of Foreign Affairs of Senegal

The other big problem today is that there are two foxes in the chicken coop. There are the terrorists, but there are also our Russian friends. Things must be called by their name. Our Russian friends have entered the game, almost without our knowing it. They have occupied the Internet. They have sometimes activated some of their local supporters, who have abundantly used the weapon of fake news.

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Elisabeth Guigou

Founding President of Europartenaires, former President of the Anna Lindh Foundation for the Dialogue between Cultures, former President of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the French National Assembly

What should the European Union do to help Africa better? First, I think it should devote as much attention and as many priorities to Africa as it does to Eastern Europe. This is obviously very difficult. It has become even harder since the fall of the Berlin Wall. There was already an imbalance well before the war in Ukraine, but the war has made it even worse.

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Aminata Touré

Representative of the Senegalese National Assembly, former Prime Minister, former President of the Economic, Social and Environmental Council of Senegal

Statistics show that if Africa’s 54 countries were taken as a whole, it would be the world’s eighth largest economy. This means that Africa generates wealth and could generate more if we managed to make our voices heard.

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Juliette Tuakli

Chief Executive Officer of CHILDAccra Medical, United Way Worldwide Chair Immediate Past (IP), Mercy Ships Africa Ambassador, Medical Director

The impact of inequitable distribution of energy and shortages of energy on health and education is considerable in our continent. An estimated 600 million people in Africa have had no experience of electricity, that is half of the entire population of Africa. In addition, there is growing recognition of our vulnerability to climate shocks and the impact on the livelihoods of our youth, both present and in the future.

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Lionel Zinsou

Co-Founder and Co-Chair of SouthBridge, Chairman of Terra Nova think tank, former Prime Minister of Benin, former Chairman of PAI Partners

The percentages show that progress is being made. Only half the population is still in darkness. Only half of people give birth with flashlights. Half of the children are no longer poisoned by kerosene lamps. But the number of people without power has risen from two to six million.

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Debate

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20:00 | Gala Dinner with Laurent Fabius

Laurent Fabius

President of the French Constitutional Council, President of the COP 21, former Prime Minister of France

COP21 was a success, not only thanks to French diplomacy but because there was an extraordinary conjunction between what I call the “three planets”: the scientific planet – scientists, engineers –, the civil society planet – cities, regions, public opinion, private companies, financial institutions – and the governments planet.

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Debate

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08:00 – 09:00 | Reports from parallel workshops

Pierre Jacquet

President of the Global Development Network, Professor at the École nationale des Ponts et Chaussées

Our debate this year has pointed to some differences between the United States and Europe, with the demand component of the inflationary shock more potent in the United States, while in Europe inflation seems more supply driven, notably given Europe’s dependency on Russian energy. It was observed that monetary policy is a poor instrument to react to supply driven inflationary shocks because it does not act on supply but can only restrain demand to adjust to the new supply equation.

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Marc-Antoine Eyl-Mazzega

Director of the Center for Energy & Climate of Ifri

Another point that was raised was how we democratize global energy and climate governance. The view was expressed that this governance was weighted towards the North and that some of the leading institutions are based in the North, driven notably by the OECD or the IEA. Obviously, there is need for rebalancing there and there was a consensus that somehow that needs to be democratized and more dialogue was needed among all the stakeholders. The idea of setting up an energy security council was raised, which is quite interesting although if you start thinking in practical terms you immediately come up with a number of questions and issues.

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Robert Dossou

President of the African Association of International Law, former Minister of Foreign Affairs of Benin, former President of the Constitutional Court of Benin

La solution est qu’il faut massivement investir sur les jeunes, dans la formation, dans les débouchés, mais également investir sur les femmes. Cette double donnée est essentielle. Pour investir sur les jeunes et sur les femmes, il faut nécessairement des capitaux et des garanties pour pouvoir orienter les investissements vers le continent africain. C’est en cela que la promotion du secteur privé sur le continent a été soulignée comme une nécessité.

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09:00 – 10:00 | Plenary session 15

Perspectives on Covid-19 and Other Pandemic Threats

Michel Kazatchkine

Special Advisor to the World Health Organization Regional Office for Europe, Senior Fellow at the Global Health Centre of the Graduate Institute for International and Development Studies in Geneva

The pandemic is not over. As we speak, hospitalizations are increasing again, at least in Europe and the US. The pandemic continues to have a profound impact on lives and livelihoods as economies slowly begin to recover in at least the wealthiest countries, but still falter in low-income countries.

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Antoine Flahault

Director of the Institute of Global Health at the University of Geneva, Deputy Director of the Swiss School of Public Health, former Founding Director of EHESP

Fine particle air pollution is an important determinant of Covid-19 and its severity. The role of fine particles in outdoor air pollution, whether from fossil fuel combustion or desert sands, was already recognized in influenza epidemics. It has been shown to be a major determinant of Covid-19 epidemics, increasing contamination and severity of infection.

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Juliette Tuakli

Chief Executive Officer of CHILDAccra Medical, United Way Worldwide Chair Immediate Past (IP), Mercy Ships Africa Ambassador, Medical Director

Vaccine production facilities were developed. There were some existing facilities available, but they have been considerably strengthened and enhanced across six African countries. We have 12 facilities based primarily in Algeria, Egypt, Morocco, Senegal, Rwanda and South Africa and these have been particularly effective and strong in their output.

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Maha Barakat

Director General of the Frontline Heroes Office and Senior Advisor at Mubadala

The UAE started clinical trials on vaccination as early as summer 2020, by September there was emergency use of vaccination and by June 2022, the United Arab Emirates had achieved 100% vaccination of its target groups. I think this is a key component of a country’s ability to reduce hospitalizations and death.

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Qiao Yide

Vice Chairman and Secretary General of Shanghai Development Research Foundation

Transparency should be the first principle of dealing with an unknown virus or X disease in the future. By this I mean giving an alert on the virus, gene sequence, evolution and the possible harms to human beings and all this information should be released to the public, government departments and the CDC on time.

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Christian Bréchot

President of the Global Virus Network, Senior Associate Dean for Research in Global Affairs and Associate Vice President for International Partnerships and Innovation at USF Health Morsani College of Medicine, former President of Institut Pasteur

The coalition for epidemic preparedness and innovation has been a progress for vaccines but still not sufficient for several reasons and we lack support for antivirals and diagnostics. In fact, I personally believe that the importance of diagnostics has been very much underappreciated in this Covid-19 crisis.

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Debate

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10:00 – 11:00 | Plenary session 16

Global Governance and Public Health

Michel Kazatchkine

Special Advisor to the World Health Organization Regional Office for Europe, Senior Fellow at the Global Health Centre of the Graduate Institute for International and Development Studies in Geneva

As the pandemic progressed, health moved from being a sort of soft power agenda to becoming a critical economic and security issue, that took up last parts of the deliberations of regional summits, like the European Council, the G20, the G7, the World Trade Organization. No meeting of the G7, G20 or the European Council in the last two years did not include or had the issue of health as a dominant component.

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Anders Nordström

Ambassador for Global Health at the Ministry for Foreign Affairs of Sweden

The agenda needs to change. I do not think we need a global platform for vaccines in the future, we need stronger regional platforms, but we still need global cooperation to share information, the data, but also ways of working, the management, the flow of then access to products. We need to rethink the global functions based on the fact that we have stronger regions today.

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Lionel Zinsou

Co-Founder and Co-Chair of SouthBridge, Chairman of Terra Nova think tank, former Prime Minister of Benin, former Chairman of PAI Partners

While the use of vaccines has become widespread in Africa, Africa produces only 1% of them. While recently there have been major strides in treatments and the use of drugs, a record-breaking 95% of those drugs are imported. On the other hand, the WHO says that Africa accounts for 40% of the volume of counterfeit drugs in the world, a topic that would bring us into a discussion on organized crime.

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Haruka Sakamoto

Project Researcher at the Department of Global Health Policy of the University of Tokyo, Senior Fellow at the National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies

In the field of pharmaceuticals, which is a major industry for many countries, there is a desire to continue to protect the industry through intellectual property, but there are also moves to restrain rule-making by China in this field. How to handle IP and technology transfer, especially in times of emergency, will continue to be an important issue to consider.

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Farida Al Hosani

Official Spokesperson for Health sector of the United Arab Emirates

Talking about innovation and research is very important because we should not stop in terms of accelerating research. Time was critical during Covid and our governance in terms of research approvals and prioritizations are really very slow and do not match the global needs.

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Jacques Biot

Board member and Advisor to companies in the field of digital transformation and artificial intelligence, former President of the École Polytechnique in Paris

Another level of international governance pertains to intellectual property, this one comes under heavy fire, I will not elaborate on related issues today in the interest of time, but this subject will resurface relentlessly in the future. Going down the geographical scale, we have to recognize the fact that all countries, albeit along very different models, do maintain the principle of a national health governance.

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11:00 – 12:15 | Plenary session 17

Food Security in a Fragmented World

Jean-Michel Severino

President of Investisseurs & Partenaires, former Director General of the French Development Agency, former Vice President for Asia at the World Bank

There is an underlying global fear of a shortage of production in the world and I think we will address whether this is fantasy or reality, especially in the long run. It also shows how political this market remains. It is not just about exchanging goods it is about being in international relations.

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Máximo Torero Cullen

Chief Economist and Assistant Director General for the Economic and Social Development Department of the FAO

Addressing the challenges to move away from business as usual implies facing contrasting objectives. Just to mention a few of them, we have to increase agricultural output while reducing its environmental footprint, pursuing sustainable deals while minimizing land use expansion, and increasing productivity while preserving employment. We need an agricultural system transformation that brings future sustainability and resilience, or these trade-offs will create a great imbalance.

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Pierre Jacquet

President of the Global Development Network, Professor at the École nationale des Ponts et Chaussées

So we need to think of trade as a way to increase food availability outside the realm of free-trade ideology. A mechanism must be found to make the amounts of food necessary for life available. I think this is the right way to think about it and that trade rules must be designed with this in mind.

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Bayu Krisnamurthi

Associate Professor in the Department of Agribusiness the Faculty of Economics and Management of the Bogor Agricultural University, former Vice Minister of Trade and former Vice Minister of Agriculture of the Republic of Indonesia

I think we need to do something more drastic than business as usual in dealing with this problem. I would recommend that we should strengthen global food governance. First, let us do our utmost to resume and maintain open food trade, build trust again that food is not just a business but part of a shared moral obligation, it is a part of humanity.

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Mariam Al Mheiri

Minister of Climate Change and Environment of the United Arab Emirates

Countries must plan because food security, which is not just agriculture by the way, is food and loss, waste, nutrition, food safety, the way we consume, what we buy in the supermarket, what ends up in the bin, that all has a huge influence on our food systems today. Most of us always think agriculture, agriculture but there is actually a huge part on the demand side as well and changing and reflecting on how we are consuming.

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Debate

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12:15 – 13:15 | Plenary session 18

New Technologies for New Geopolitics of Energy

John Andrews

Contributing Editor to The Economist and Project Syndicate

This is a panel on new technologies and the new geopolitics of energy. I have to make an immediate confession, what is my qualification for being here? I am not a technologist, I am not a scientist, so my only real qualification for being here is that I am […] a human being. Therefore, I do have a vested interest in what is happening to our planet and to this energy future. Also, of course, as a human being I consume energy, so I am part of the problem, and I hope this panel will be part of the solution.

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Frank Obrist

CEO of OBRIST Powertrain

Since the 1950s CO2 concentration has been rising from 300 to 421ppm and it keeps going up like hell. But the good news is, if we do have a technology to reduce it just as quickly as released then we can get rid of or biggest problem, in only 100 years.

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Franklin Servan-Schreiber

Co-Founder and CEO of Transmutex

What do we want? Of course, energy security but also reduction in CO2. It is very clear that for energy security nuclear is more scalable and it is also more scalable for CO2 reduction; there is no contest.

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Nicolas Piau

Co-Founder and CEO of TiLT Capital Partners

The real challenge we are experiencing, which is fundamental to the way we think about the energy system, is that we are moving away from those energy-dense technologies to energy “undense” technologies. That means it is no longer a matter of production, it becomes a matter of logistics and optimization.

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Friedbert Pflüger

Director of the European Cluster for Climate, Energy and Resource Security (EUCERS) at the University of Bonn, Founding Partner of Strategic Minds Company GmbH

What can we do in this situation? I think we have embarked on the wrong path and that path is goals and government micromanagement, which forbids certain technologies and interferes in markets and that will not go anywhere. What we have to do is to unleash technologies, and there we are.

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Debate

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14:15 – 15:45 | Plenary session 19

The Middle East in the New Geopolitical Context

Steven Erlanger

Chief Diplomatic Correspondent, Europe, for The New York Times

There is so much to talk about: the impact of Russia’s return to the region, China’s Belt and Road, the notion of US retrenchment and whether it is real or not, intensified regional competition. What does it mean for these countries to have a green carbon-free world? […] Then there is the quite interesting question of the return of Bibi Netanyahu at the head of a very different Israeli government. What does this new coalition mean for Israel, for the Palestinians, for Israel’s reputation, frankly?

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Memduh Karakullukçu

Founding Board member of the Global Relations Forum, Founding Partner of Kanunum, Chairman of Kroton Consulting

I think we are now at a stage where Middle Eastern players including my country, Saudi Arabia, and GCC, are empowered for different reasons and have taken a hyper-pragmatic approach to regional challenges. That means swift maneuvers, deals, bargains have become the currency of the moment.

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Gilles Kepel

Director of the Middle East-Mediterranean Chair of the École normale supérieure, Professor at Paris Sciences et Lettres, Special Envoy of President Macron for the Middle East

What is happening in Iran, regardless of what happens with JCPOA, no JCPOA, pause JCPOA, etc., is now significantly different from whatever happened in the past, with the green revolution or whatever it was called where the police arrested a number of people, sentenced, put them in jail and then it was put down. This is not happening […].

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Mona Makram Ebeid

Egyptian Senator, Advisor to the UN High Representative for the Alliance of Civilizations

After the region was reduced to global war on terror and for two decades we heard nothing but that; this is their claim to fame. However, today the Middle East is now seen through the lens of the great power competition narrative. Increasingly, the Middle East is defined as a battleground between the US and China, and to a lesser extent Russia. What is new is the trend towards Middle Eastern strategic autonomy […].

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Itamar Rabinovich

Vice Chairman of the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS) in Tel Aviv, Distinguished Fellow at the Brookings Institution, former Chief Negotiator with Syria

Internationally, we will have to see what the implications of the Ukraine war for its position in Syria and its ability to be effectively active in the Middle East. The US always raises the familiar question of whether it is pivoting away or not. In fact, the number of US troops in the region has not declined but the message is not very clear.

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Abdulaziz Othman Sager

Founder and Chairman of the Gulf Research Center

It is also interesting that the region has started making its own sovereign decisions without waiting for the superpowers’ instructions, which is a clear signal. You can see it in the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Algeria, and many other countries in the Arab world that are starting to say that we need to protect our interests. This is another crucial dimension.

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Debate

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15:45 – 17:00 | Plenary session 20

The End of Illusions?

Thierry de Montbrial

Founder and Executive Chairman of Ifri and the WPC

Instead of the session that usually ends the World Policy Conference, we will give the floor to five members of our club and ask each of them to talk about an issue of their choice that, in their opinion, has not been sufficiently addressed or that they want to look at from a different angle.

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Michel Foucher

Member of the Center for Higher European Studies, former French Ambassador in Latvia

Ukraine is the scene of the fratricidal and deadly revenge of Russia’s leaders for the collapse of their empire upon itself, three decades earlier, as if it were an expiatory victim. Unable to analyze the real causes of the collapse of the Russian-Soviet form of their State, they understood even less about the national consolidation of Ukraine and the other peripheral republics, which they thought was only the insidious result of a US plot.

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Cheikh Tidiane Gadio

President of the Institute for Pan-African Strategies, Peace-Security-Governance, Special Envoy of the OIF, former Minister of Foreign Affairs of Senegal

The consequence is that we have not moved African unity forward. We have found ourselves saddled with an enormous amount of problems and in a battle where African youth just about everywhere has stood up against what is called sovereignty and independence. They deny everything and denounce everything today.

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Marc Hecker

Director of Research and Communications at Ifri, Editor-in-Chief of Politique étrangère

The war in Ukraine can be seen as a shock of illusions. There were an enormous amount of misperceptions and mistaken analyses on both sides. In the West, many leaders and analysts got it wrong. They thought that Russia would never invade Ukraine. In the end, they did.

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Holger Mey

Vice President of Advanced Concepts Airbus Defence and Space

Most of the younger officers who write for military journals and magazines often begin their article with “we are the army, the air force, the navy” and systematically prepare for the most likely scenarios. I think this is a big mistake, because one should prepare for risk, and risk is the combination or the product of likelihood times damage level.

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Fathallah Oualalou

Senior Fellow at the Policy Center for the New South, former Minister of Economy and Finance of Morocco

So we have a sort of fragmentation. This fragmentation is ominous. Bipolarization is dangerous. The world needs something new; the world needs multipolarity. I think Europe can fill those shoes, but under three conditions, which might be an illusion.

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17:00 – 18:00 | Plenary session 21

US Foreign Policy After the Midterm Elections

Jim Bittermann

Senior European Correspondent in Paris for CNN

You would think with that makeup of Congress that the next two years could be a disaster. They might be, but it may not be as bad as everybody predicts, especially given Mr. Biden’s deftness at negotiating and handling things. Also, given the fact that there is a lot of bilateral agreement on the main two issues that the US views are confronting the world today, China and Russia-Ukraine.

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Stuart Eizenstat

Senior Counsel at Covington & Burling LLP, former Chief White House Domestic Policy Advisor to President Jimmy Carter

With respect to China, even with the midterm elections there is bipartisan support for a hard-line position against China. I think this will continue and Biden going into a potential Presidential race, does not want to be seen or criticized by the Republicans as being weak on China.

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Josef Joffe

Professor of Practice at Johns Hopkins, Editorial Advisory Council of the German weekly Die Zeit

On the one hand, Biden did cozy up to Europe. On the other, the Inflation Reduction Act is protectionism with a fancy new label. The gist is that non-US companies will not profit from lavish subsidies, which puts them at a competitive disadvantage on the U.S. market. Worse, the Act may force Europeans to export production and jobs to the U.S.

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Jean-Claude Gruffat

Vice Chairman of the American Hospital of Paris Foundation, member of the Leadership Council of United Way Worldwide, Chairman of the Competitive Enterprise Institute

NATO, which the previous administrations had questioned, is also now strengthened by the inclusion of Sweden and Finland, which would have been unthinkable if we had not had the conflagration in Ukraine. We are in a situation where effectively the US has greatly benefitted from this conflict in Europe, this is only a part of it, but this is the reality.

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Renaud Girard

Senior Reporter and International Columnist at Le Figaro

Germany no longer respects France because it has not met its own obligations, in particular financial obligations with respect to the euro. Its public finances are in a mind-boggling mess, which means the Germans do not see it as a serious partner. I think we have forgotten that.

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Debate

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18:00 | Closing

Prince Faisal bin Farhan Al Saud

Minister of Foreign Affairs of Saudi Arabia

Last year we actually signed a strategic framework with the European Union, between the GCC and the European Union, which has already brought significant progress. We restarted our FTA talks after they had been stalled for many years, which is a positive sign and I think Europe is still one of our main trade partners and a very important technological partner. There is a lot we can do with Europe, and I would say that Europe needs to be more engaged in this region. We have a lot to offer Europe and of course, we are already a very important energy partner, but we are also a very important partner for the energy transition. Europe cannot achieve its carbon neutrality goals without this region because you cannot produce enough renewable energy in Europe.

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2021 Conference proceedings

08:30 – 10:00 | Plenary session 1

How Will Globalization Mutate?

Jean-Claude Trichet

European Chairman of the Trilateral Commission, former President of the ECB

Can we address the negative externalities of globalization, on climate, health, economic and financial instabilities during the last years, and inequality, without losing the benefits of the division of labor at a global level and all the benefits to developing countries of catching up to become first emerging countries and, then, as wealthy as the present advanced economies in the future ?

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Masood Ahmed

President of the Center for Global Development, former Director of the Middle East and Central Asia Department of the IMF

The process of globalization and its management are going to become more complicated in the years to come. We can think of this in terms of five different forces that are going to work in different directions and must be balanced and managed.

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Bertrand Badré

Managing Partner and Founder of Blue like an Orange Sustainable Capital, former Managing Director and Chief Financial Officer of the World Bank Group

Are we capable of being inclusive with all the world and channeling the money necessary to go the sustainable route and climate ? Or will the OECD countries be too comfortable and say, yes, no, we know the rules and we will protect ourselves ?

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Bark Taeho

President of Lee&Ko Global Commerce Institute, former Minister for Trade of Korea

In order to see globalization evolve in a desirable direction in the future, it would be crucial to provide the right business environment with transparent and fair multilateral rules in various fields.

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Thomas Gomart

Director of Ifri

I think a phenomenon is emerging, the phenomenon of cognitive confrontation, which became quite clear during the lockdowns, when bodies were stuck at home, but bodies with brains that had never been so digitally interconnected.

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Yuichi Hosoya

Professor of International Politics at Keio University

I think China is trying to get closer to ASEAN which today, is China’s biggest trading partner. In the current coronavirus situation, China is trying to create a very deep and strong Asian economic space. The question is how the United States, Europe and Japan will try to face the current difficulties.

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Mari Kiviniemi

Managing Director of the Finnish Commerce Federation, former OECD Deputy Secretary-General, former Prime Minister of Finland

Covid-19 showed how dependent we are on each other and in that sense, it also made us see how important it also is to make sure that in the future we can ensure that global value chains continue to function.

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Debate

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10:00 – 11:30 | Plenary session 2

World Political-Economic Outlook After the Pandemic

Lionel Zinsou

Co-Chair of SouthBridge, Chairman of Terra Nova think tank, former Prime Minister of Benin

I think unprecedented crises are piling up. The current crisis is unprecedented. It has exceptional characteristics, but the previous one, in 2008, was also unprecedented because of its suddenness and the depth of the recession it caused, although now we have broken recession records.

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Nicolas Véron

Senior Fellow at Bruegel, Senior Fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics

We will have more problems with scarcity and difficulties of adjustment, with read-across in terms of inflation, which frankly I do not think any economist can predict with certainty at this point.

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Qiao Yide

Vice Chairman and Secretary-General of Shanghai Development Research Foundation

The competition between the United States and China will last for many years in the future. I think that in the future the political and economic outlook of the world will largely depend on the relationship between the United States and China and whether they can handle their relationship successfully.

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Aminata Touré

Senegalese politician, former Prime Minister

There is space to grow but we have to go beyond the boundaries and see how we are going to put together this major project, the first being as I said, medical and pharmaceutical independence. The last thing we want to see happen is Covid becoming a permanent public health issue.

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Serge Ekué

President of the West African Development Bank

On the question of how in this context, public debt can be paid down without slowing down economic growth and provoking a crisis of confidence, the debt write off can be a very seductive. We do not believe that it is the ultimate situation.

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Pierre Jacquet

President of the Global Development Network, former Chief Economist of the French Development Agency, former Deputy Director of Ifri

I believe globalization is here to stay, and the debate is more on how to manage it. This is a deeply political challenge, which involves what used to be called “high politics”, on which the post-war institutional system was agreed on and shaped.

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Conclusion Lionel Zinsou

Co-Chair of SouthBridge, Chairman of Terra Nova think tank, former Prime Minister of Benin

Even in Africa, what we have seen is better collective governance in the African Union, which means that multilateralism at the level of a continent has progressed enormously.

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11:30 – 13:15 | Plenary session 3

Transatlantic Relations, Russia and China

Karl Kaiser

Senior Associate of the Project on Europe and the Transatlantic Relationship, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard University

We have to look beyond the tumultuous events of contemporary international politics and try to identify how the key actors and regions are affected by the ongoing tectonic shifts of geopolitics. That also applies to the NATO withdrawal from Afghanistan and the AUKUS agreement.

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Jean-Claude Gruffat

Chairman of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, member of the Leadership Council of United Way Worldwide

There has been in transatlantic relationship, a continuity of policies, largely with a bipartisan consensus, in DC. Some elements of protectionism, more so with the Democrats. Trump changed effectively the focus from Russia to China.

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Elisabeth Guigou

Founding President of Europartenaires, President of the Anna Lindh Foundation for the Dialogue between Cultures, former President of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the French National Assembly

I hope there will not be a new Cold War, for I fail to see how the climate crisis can be solved if we are in the middle of a Cold War with China, the world’s leading CO2 emitter. Europeans must refocus on their priorities.

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Bogdan Klich

Senator in the Polish Parliament, Chairman of the Foreign and EU Affairs Committee in the Polish Senate

Russia is trying to re-integrate as big part as possible of the post-Soviet space and we are witnessing the soft annexation of Belarus, which is not recent, it began before the Freedom Revolution there but accelerated recently.

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Zaki Laïdi

Senior Advisor to the High Representative and Vice President of the European Commission, Professor at Sciences Po

In comparison to the Cold War, there is a difference which is that the competition between the United States and China is much wider. Indeed, it includes an economic and technological component that did not exist during the Cold War.

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Ana Palacio

International Lawyer, former Minister of Foreign Affairs of Spain, former Senior Vice President and General Counsel of the World Bank Group

Law is not what it used to be; it is not just treaties, but soft law. But what is very striking today is how it is contested.

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Wang Jisi

President of the Institute of International and Strategic Studies at Peking University

As for China’s reaction to the changes in Afghanistan, Beijing regards it as a failure of Western-type democracy in a poor country, as well as a reflection of the “East rising, West declining” tide in global politics in general and the waning of US power in the greater Middle East in particular.

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Igor Yurgens

Chairman of the Management Board of the Institute of Contemporary Development, Vice President of the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs

The new dangerous situation is in Afghanistan. I will not analyse Biden’s decision to withdraw, but it is a smart move from the point of view of US-Russia confrontation, because it puts Taliban problems on the Russian border.

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Debate

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13:15 – 14:45 | Lunch debate

Louise Mushikiwabo

Secretary-General of the International Organisation of La Francophonie

Country groupings will increasingly be by mutual interest or by theme, rather than by geographical location or even the geopolitical groupings we see presently, as with the G7 or the United Nations itself. Increasingly, we will see nations joining forces over a specific issue.

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Debate

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14:45 – 15:15 | Plenary session 4

Conversation with Josep Borrell Fontelles

Josep Borrell Fontelles

High Representative of the EU for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, Vice President of the European Commission

If Europe wants to be a pole in a multipolar world, we must fight against the force that is pushing us to shrink, i.e., to remain in our own immediate environment. We must have an Indo-Pacific strategy, just as we must have a Gulf strategy.

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Debate

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15:15 – 16:45 | Plenary session 5

The Digital World After the Pandemic

François Barrault

Founder and Chairman of FDB Partners, Chairman of IDATE DigiWorld

When you add the impact of the pandemic to the technological revolution, there is a culture shock and the virtuous circle of innovation is quite easy to understand. Technology changes uses, uses change business models and business models change investments in technology.

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Benoît Coeuré

Head of the BIS Innovation Hub, former member of the ECB’s Executive Board

We should not fool ourselves: there are powerful forces acting against international cooperation in this field. First, as I said, money is an attribute of sovereignty, so in the end that is something to be decided nationally. Second, we are talking about technology, and today’s wars are technological wars.

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Kazuto Suzuki

Professor of Science and Technology Policy at the Graduate School of Public Policy at the University of Tokyo

There are different ways for handling data. The United States focuses on the company and the company does all the collection, maintenance and management of the data. Whereas in China, data is collected and controlled by the state and in Europe, the EU model focuses more on the ownership by the individual.

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Agnès Touraine

Chief Executive Officer of Act III Consultants, McKinsey Senior Advisor, former Chairwoman of the French Institute of Directors (IFA)

Can we let anonymity continue? This is a real issue that, once again, touches on economic sovereignty, when it comes to cyber, etc., political and obviously social sovereignty.

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Patrick Nicolet

Founder and Managing Partner of Line Break Capital Ltd., former Capgemini’s Group Chief Technology Officer

The token economy can also be considered a sustainable development if we ensure there is a proper business market for it. As with all things pertaining to money, authorities are often reluctant to allow parallel systems to emerge, for it has always been considered sovereign.

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Carlos Moreira

Founder, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of WISeKey, former UN Expert on cybersecurity

This morning, everyone was talking about the Cold War and we are actually no longer in that, we are in an invisible war. The invisible war between countries that want to control the metaverse.

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Jean-Louis Gergorin

Senior lecturer at Sciences Po Paris, owner of the cyber and aerospace consultancy JLG Strategy

What is needed is to integrate discussions of the underlying geopolitics of conflicts with talks on moderating and limiting the weaponization of cyberspace. A forum is needed for that, and I think the most legitimate one is the United Nations Security Council.

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17:00 – 19:00 | Official opening

Welcoming remarks by Sheikh Nahayan Mabarak Al Nahayan

Minister of Tolerance and Coexistence, United Arab Emirates

Abu Dhabi has seized its opportunities and become a truly global city, not only a center for finance, business, education, health, energy, technology, and culture but also a nurturing source of innovation and creativity that promises to benefit the whole world.

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Thierry de Montbrial

Founder and Chairman of Ifri and the WPC

More than ever, I believe in the WPC’s calling as it has been defined since its inception in 2008: medium-sized powers must work together to put across their views on the conditions required to keep the world reasonably open.

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HH Bartholomew Ist

Archbishop of Constantinople – New Rome and Ecumenical Patriarch

Cooperation and joint action are imperative in the face of this towering contemporary crisis. No state, religion, institution, leader or science alone can face major problems without the collaboration of other bodies.

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Edi Rama

Prime Minister of the Republic of Albania

At these times of global challenges, which are also times for trust challenges, a global approach is required. The commitment of all of us within the structures we have set up is required.

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Patrick Achi

Prime Minister of the Republic of Côte d’Ivoire

I want to believe that the extraordinary times we are going through, which has quickly imposed many unprecedentedly complex, multiple challenges on Africa, my continent, will also be one of redoubling ideas and commitments.

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Message of Prince Faisal bin Farhan Al Saud

Minister of Foreign Affairs of Saudi Arabia

Joining the world in achieving a sustainable recovery also means working together to find creative ways to tackle climate change while maintaining energy security and efficiency.

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19:30 | Dinner debate

Thierry de Montbrial

Founder and Chairman of Ifri and the WPC

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Paul Kagame

President of the Republic of Rwanda

Another area where good partnerships can produce results is in the fight against insecurity, terrorism, extremist ideologies, including genocide ideology. There are cross-border challenges that require close cooperation.

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Panelists debate

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Debate

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08:30 – 10:00 | Plenary session 6

Asia and the Sino-American Rivalry

Thomas Gomart

Director of Ifri

What is the nature of this rivalry. In which fields it should be observed. Is it in the military field, for example, what about Taiwan? Is it more about technology and chips, a topic we dealt with yesterday?

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Hiroyuki Akita

Commentator of Nikkei, Japan

The United States and China are escalating into more intense and deeper competition. Before this pandemic, two powers competed over the high-tech hegemony and the geopolitical primacy, mainly on the maritime domain.

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Renaud Girard

Senior reporter and war correspondent at Le Figaro

I think main goal of Xi Jinping – his legacy to China from his time in power – is getting back Taiwan. I even think his attitude towards this borders on obsession. However, I do not think that China wants to fight in this conflict.

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Lee Hye Min

Senior Advisor of KIM & CHANG, former G20 Sherpa, former Deputy Minister for Trade of Korea, former Chief Negotiator for the Korea-EU FTA

How to remain a good and reliable partnerof the US without confronting and provoking China is the most serious challenge for Korea in the coming years.

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Mayankote Kelath Narayanan

Executive Chairman of CyQureX Systems Pvt. Ltd., former Senior Advisor and National Security Advisor to the Prime Minister of India

The Asian continent has possibly the largest number of rivalries between nations today. Sino-American rivalry has far reaching consequences for an Asia already plagued by tensions between India and China.

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Marcus Noland

Executive Vice President and Director of Studies at the Peterson Institute for International Economics

American attitudes toward China across the political spectrum have been hardening at both the elite and mass level. That consensus appears to be largely attributable to the assumption that the government of China is engaged in increasingly oppressive behavior internally as well as aggressive external behavior.

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Wang Jisi

President of the Institute of International and Strategic Studies at Peking University

The external environment is not favorable to China. First, many media reports indicate that public opinion in Western countries, Japan, South Korea and India is increasingly unfavorable to China.

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Debate

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10:00 – 10:30 | Plenary session 7

Conversation with Kevin Rudd

Kevin Rudd

President of the Asia Society Policy Institute, former Prime Minister of Australia

I think we should not anticipate any early move by China against Taiwan. That is not because China has eschewed the use of force but because China believes that the balance of power will be more to its advantage against the United States by the end of the decade rather than at the beginning.

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Debate

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10:30 – 11:45 | Plenary session 8

Health as a Global Governance Issue: Lessons from Covid-19 Pandemic

Michel Kazatchkine

Former Executive Director of the Global Fund to fight AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria, Senior Fellow at the Global Health Centre of the Graduate Institute for International and Development Studies, Geneva

The world was not prepared. Although public health officials, experts, and previous international reviews had warned of potential pandemics since the first outbreak of SARS, Covid-19 took large parts of the world by surprise.

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Christian Bréchot

President of the Global Virus Network

We should also never forget the pending issue of the longterm medical consequences and the real impact of, for example, what we call long Covid. I believe that this is something where there is still uncertainty.

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Juliette Tuakli

Chief Executive Officer of CHILDAccra Medical, Chair of the Board of Trustees of United Way Worldwide

The pandemic highlighted health inequities that had been ongoing, also other systemic weaknesses such as insufficiencies, ineffective and unequal national health systems.

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Jean Kramarz

Director of the Healthcare activities of the AXA Partners Group

Health is a strategic issue and as such, governments should invest in Health massively before a crisis occurs, not after. Stocks of medical goods should be looked after with the same focus as military assets.

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Robert Sigal

Chief Executive Officer of the American Hospital of Paris

What makes the fight effective is coordination between general practitioners and hospitals, and less obviously, between the private and public sector. Most important, was the coordination orchestrated by public agencies.

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Haruka Sakamoto

Assistant Professor at the School of Medicine, Department of Health Policy and Management, Keio University

Global health governance is often discussed in negative terms, such as the weakening of the World Health Organization, the absence of leadership and the structure of the US-China conflict being brought into global health.

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Conclusion Michel Kazatchkine

Former Executive Director of the Global Fund to fight AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria, Senior Fellow at the Global Health Centre of the Graduate Institute for International and Development Studies, Geneva

We have to adapt our governance structure and work on preparedness and response culturally and politically to regional patterns.

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Debate

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11:45 – 12:45 | Plenary session 9

Global Health: Technology, Economics and Ethics

Patrick Nicolet

Founder and Managing Partner of Line Break Capital Ltd., former Capgemini’s Group Chief Technology Officer

Innovation must be socially acceptable, economically viable, and technologically feasible. In the field of healthcare, too often have we considered the later with little to no consideration to the other two criteria.

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Jacques Biot

Board member and Advisor to companies in the field of digital transformation and artificial intelligence, former President of the École Polytechnique in Paris

My presentation addresses the difficulty of reconciling supply and demand in the ever-burgeoning field of healthcare services and products, and proposes to introduce some strategic drive to maximize the benefit for society in this domain which to-date is guided by no invisible hand.

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Daniel Andler

Emeritus Professor at Sorbonne University, member of the French Academy of Moral and Political Sciences

Ethics is important in healthcare. Not because people have a human right to health, and it is our individual and social duty to provide it, but because discharging this duty is no simple matter.

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Kim Sung-Woo

Chief Executive Officer of MiCo BioMed Co. Ltd.

We will enter the ubiquitous healthcare era with the innovative tele-diagnostic system in the near future. Wide applications can be adapted to the many global institutes such as WHO, USA CDC and Institut Pasteur.

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Carlos Moreira

Founder, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of WISeKey, former UN Expert on cybersecurity

In the 4th Industrial Revolution, the power of better health will increasingly be placed into the hands of the individual. As this power is transferred, groups of individuals will be both inspired and empowered to share the benefits.

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Patrick Nicolet

Founder and Managing Partner of Line Break Capital Ltd., former Capgemini’s Group Chief Technology Officer

If we get together some more holistic views, we should be able to map some ways forward and anticipate, as was said before, and prepare for the future. I am not Utopian, but rather on the optimist side of the technology.

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Debate

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12:45 – 13:15 | Plenary session 10

Conversation with Didier Reynders

Didier Reynders

Commissioner for Justice in charge of Rule of Law and Consumer Protection at the European Commission

Since the banking crisis and sovereign debt crisis 10 years ago, we have enhanced controls on the budget. Now maybe with the evolution in some member states to authoritarian regimes, we are also paying more attention to values and that is very new.

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Debate

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15:00 – 15:30 Plenary session | Plenary session 11

Conversation with Anwar Mohammed Gargash

Anwar Mohammed Gargash

Diplomatic Advisor to the President, United Arab Emirates

After the fall of the Soviet Union, the international system witnessed a very brief American moment. Although the United States remains dominant and most important, the international system is clearly not unipolar.

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Debate

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15:30 – 16:30 | Plenary session 12

Geopolitical Dimensions of the Future Supply of Critical Raw Materials

Holger Bingmann

President of the German Section of the International Chamber of Commerce, Honorary Chairman of the German Emirati Joint Council for Industry and Commerce

Climate focused politics are here to stay in Europe, so the economy and the industry need a constant and secure supply of necessary resources in order to comply with the Green Deal.

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Ingvil Smines Tybring-Gjedde

Non-Executive Director at Norge Mining

As a former Minister for Public Security, I will say that it is at least a huge challenge because 30 million jobs in the EU are directly dependent on access to raw materials.

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Peter Handley

Head of the Energy-Intensive Industries and Raw Materials Unit in the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Growth

When the then Chinese President said, “The Middle East has oil, but China has rare earths” that was the starting signal for China to build a strong position in the metals and minerals value chain.

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David Wurmser

Founder and Executive member of the Delphi Global Analysis Group, former Senior Advisor to the US Vice President on Middle East

We are discarding essential current knowledge and human capital. The lowering of value creation and outsourcing, especially in fields like mining, by Western countries, has led to a rise in the atrophy in key talent.

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Debate

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16:30 – 19:00 | Parallel workshops

Workshop #1 – Money and Finance

Jean-Claude Trichet

European Chairman of the Trilateral Commission, former President of the ECB

I do not therefore consider at all that it is a catastrophe that we have inflation ! I consider first that it is exactly what the central banks were aiming at. It is positive from that standpoint.

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Abdul Aziz Al Ghurair

Chairman of the Board of Directors of Mashreq

Financial players will need to massively set up their technology, their partners, their relationships with developers and to think strategically on how to survive.

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Raed Charafeddine

Central and Commercial Banker, former First Vice Governor of the Central Bank of Lebanon

Monetary policy measures would remain of limited impact in terms of timeframe and macroeconomic factors if they are not accompanied by and integrated with the development of a comprehensive and integrated economic financial plan in the short, medium and long term.

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Serge Ekué

President of the West African Development Bank

Emerging countries in Africa, with vaccination rates of between 2% and 4%, face an additional hurdle with a risk of being marginalized from international trade flows.

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Jean-Claude Meyer

Vice Chairman International of Rothschild & Cie

We are at a crossroads with a lot of uncertainty. Overheating and inflation are threatening as the Federal Reserve has shifted its stance to give more leeway to inflation and greater priority to employment.

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Jacques Michel

Chairman of BNP Paribas Middle East and Africa for Corporate and Institutional Banking

We have been in a new paradigm since 2015 when oil prices dropped by more than 50% and the Gulf countries came to take loans on the bond market.

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Debate

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Workshop #2 – Energy, Climate and Sustainable Development

Introduction

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Arnaud Breuillac

Senior Advisor to the Chairman & Chief Executive Officer of TotalEnergies

Gas is an enabler of the energy transition, both in power and in industry. Development of greener liquid and gas as fuel is going to be an important contributor.

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Debate

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Mariam Al Mheiri

Minister of Climate Change and Environment, United Arab Emirates

Food security as a subject itself is about food trade, nutrition, food loss and food waste, food safety and ensuring you have national reserves, especially for a country that does not have the typical agricultural lands.

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Debate

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Isabelle Tsakok

Economist, Consultant on Agriculture and Rural Development, Senior Fellow at the Policy Center for the New South

Governments and markets must work together – not a laissez-faire approach. This holistic approach can also be looked at in terms of the Development Trilogy of growth, equity and stability.

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Olivier Appert

Chairman of France Brevets, Scientific Advisor of the Energy Center of Ifri, former President of the French Energy Council

The power system has to balance supply and demand in real time everywhere around the network, taking into account the fact that electricity storage is difficult and very expensive, especially on a large scale.

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Debate

Débat

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Peter Handley

Head of the Energy-Intensive Industries and Raw Materials Unit in the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Growth

We are also sitting down and talking to the European Investment Bank to see how we can finance these things and where European funds like InvestEU can be deployed.

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Marc-Antoine Eyl-Mazzega

Director of Ifri’s Center for Energy & Climate

Gas is being singled out in Europe, but the real enemy is coal. European countries (especially Germany) are not doing enough to phase out coal, and the G7 should mobilize to help South Africa, Vietnam, Indonesia and India gradually do without it.

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Conclusion

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Workshop #3 – Africa

Robert Dossou

President of the African Association of International Law, former Minister of Foreign Affairs of Benin, former President of the Constitutional Court of Benin

Why cannot African countries get organized so that their own armies can fight this scourge?

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Sheikh Shakhbut bin Nahyan Al Nahyan

Minister of State, Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation, United Arab Emirates

There is no doubt that the UAE is wholeheartedly invested in the future of Africa and its people and of course we continue to hopefully play a proactive and valuable role in Africa.

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Nathalie Delapalme

Executive Director of the Mo Ibrahim Foundation

If Africa’s youth prospects continue to shrink, we will see more uncontrolled migration, a growing attractivity of terrorist and criminal networks, more social unrest, and more conflict.

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Cheikh Tidiane Gadio

Vice President of the National Assembly of Senegal, President of the Pan-African Institute for Strategies, Peace-Security-Governance

The profound leadership crisis is especially visible in security management because terrorism is the main threat to the African continent.

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Elisabeth Guigou

Founding President of Europartenaires, President of the Anna Lindh Foundation for the Dialogue between Cultures, former President of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the French National Assembly

An extremely thorough study of special industrial zones across Africa reveals that the most successful ones use labor and favor structural transformations that benefit Africans.

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Aminata Touré

Senegalese politician, former Prime Minister

Africa is talked about as though we speak the same language, dance to the same music and have the same funeral rites. We do not. Africa is a diverse place. It has diverse cultures and paths.

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Juliette Tuakli

Chief Executive Officer of CHILDAccra Medical, Chair of the Board of Trustees of United Way Worldwide

I noted at the onset of Covid-19, it struck me how in Africa we seemed to have terrific strategy with an enormous lack of capacity. In the West, there was an abysmal strategy with enormous capacity.

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Lionel Zinsou

Co-Chair of SouthBridge, Chairman of Terra Nova think tank, former Prime Minister of Benin

We have to lament the fact that we had to go into debt during Covid, albeit much less than Europe and infinitely less than North America. But still, we had to go into debt like everyone else to meet emergency expenses and deal with the effects of the lockdown.

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Nardos Bekele-Thomas

UN Resident Coordinator in South Africa

We have to bring our youth into the center and at the front, we have to bring our learning institutions, research institutions and technology centers in the planning and implementation of our programs.

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Alain Antil

Director of the Ifri Sub-Saharan Africa Center 20:

15 or 20 years of high growth has sometimes left huge swaths of the country untouched. This is a major governance problem that I want to ask you about. How can this be addressed?

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Debate

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20:00 | Gala dinner with Khaldoon Khalifa Al Mubarak

Introduction – Thierry de Montbrial

Founder and Chairman of Ifri and the WPC

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Khaldoon Khalifa Al Mubarak

Chairman of the Executive Affairs Authority, Group Chief Executive Officer and Managing Director of Mubadala

As a gateway between East and West, the UAE is deeply invested in strong diplomatic ties around the world, undoubtedly strengthened during the pandemic.

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09:00 – 10:00 | Reports from parallel workshops

Workshop #1 – Report

Pierre Jacquet

President of the Global Development Network, former Chief Economist of the French Development Agency, former Deputy Director of Ifri

We had a lively exchange on the current economic and financial situation, during which we also addressed some structural transformations that are taking place.

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Workshop #2 – Report

Marc-Antoine Eyl-Mazzega

Director of Ifri’s Center for Energy & Climate

If we are to feed a growing world population then we obviously look again at genetically modified crops, but also develop a more resilient agriculture to manage the climate change challenges we are facing.

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Workshop #3 – Report

Robert Dossou

President of the African Association of International Law, former Minister of Foreign Affairs of Benin, former President of the Constitutional Court of Benin

Colonization cobbled together several entities that since independence that have not succeeded in turning the administrative apparatus inherited from colonization into a real state exempt of patrimonialism.

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10:00 – 10:30 | Plenary session 13

Conversation with Nabil Fahmy

Nabil Fahmy

Founding Dean of the School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the American University in Cairo, former Foreign Minister of Egypt

We are actually engaging with Europe quite strongly economically but the debate on general policy issues is more formal than intense. I would love to see a stronger European engagement on how we work on the Mediterranean

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Debate

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10:30 – 11:30 | Plenary session 14

The Middle East and External Powers

Fareed Yasseen

Ambassador of Iraq to the United States

So we have a stage that is set: a region where you have an interplay between global powers, the ambitions of emerging regional powers and national interest by countries who want to assert their sovereignty.

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Khalifa Shaheen Almarar

Minister of State at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, United Arab Emirates

The Middle East and our region, especially over the last decade or so, has gone through a lot of crises and conflicts that have taken a lot of efforts and resources and shook the foundation of national state institutions.

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Vitaly Naumkin

President of the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Senior Political Advisor to the Special Envoy of the Secretary-General of the UN for Syria

One example of how Russia is trying to help its different partners or different players I should say, even those who are not very friendly to Russia, is our dialogue with the Taliban.

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Stuart Eizenstat

Senior Counsel at Covington & Burling LLP, former Chief White House Domestic Policy Advisor to President Jimmy Carter

Even if there is a re-entrance of the US and Iran into the JCPOA or a slightly expanded JCPOA, the US continues to maintain separate sanctions on Iran for its nuclear missile program and its support for terrorism.

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Memduh Karakullukçu

Founding Board member of the Global Relations Forum, Founding Partner of Kanunum, Chairman of Kroton Consulting

The whole region unfortunately rests on centuries old rifts, fault lines, ethnic, sectarian, religious and it is all over the place. At the sub-state level, state level, subregional level, regional, region-wide, it is just a fragmented, ethnically sectarian fragmented geography.

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11:30 – 13:00 | Plenary session 15

Afghanistan

Ali Aslan

International TV Presenter and journalist

Welcome back to what is promising to be a very insightful session on probably one of the most pertinent, imminent, geopolitical challenges of our times, of the 21st century.

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Debate

The current situation in Afghanistan

I think the withdrawal from Afghanistan basically is a signal that the US is not going to fight any further regional conflicts that do not make a big difference to their strategic ambition, whatever the strategic policy is for the United States.

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Debate

The failure of the USA-led “nation building”

This is something that the American military always makes a mistake at – and that is to teach them how to use our high-tech weapons and things like that; and then, when the infrastructure for the high-tech weapons goes away, they are at sea.

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Debate

Dealing or not with the Taliban

I think we should engage with the Taliban, or the government, and also with the people. So, it is not a matter of limiting our engagement to the government. Afghanistan has had enough, so we need to support the Afghan people.

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Debate

The consequences of US domestic politics on Afghanistan

We have to remember that there is something worse than political dictatorship, which is anarchy. There is something worse than anarchy, which is civil war. Now, in Afghanistan, we are between dictatorship and anarchy, a little bit of both. Please let us not go back to civil war.

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Panelists debate

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Debate

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15:00 – 16:15 | Plenary session 16

The Middle East in 2030: Geopolitical and Economic Aspects

John Andrews

Contributing Editor to The Economist and Project Syndicate

If you think of outsiders’ influence and interventions in the Arab world and Iran, an awful lot of it has been because of oil and gas and the struggle to control them. The past has been quite complicated but perhaps we are moving towards a post-oil era.

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Ebtesam Al-Ketbi

President and Founder of the Emirates Policy Center

The entanglement of security, economy and politics with history, religion and questions of identity are highly likely to continue and both societal agreement on the legal system and the management of public sphere, the system of rights and freedom, are all linked to a single question.

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Itamar Rabinovich

Vice Chairman of the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv, former Israeli Ambassador to the US, former Chief Negotiator with Syria

The dominant trends in the current Middle Eastern arena are the continuing unrest in the Arab World, the rise of Iran and Turkey as two major regional powers, the pivoting away of the United States, and the dramatic improvement in Israel’s relationship with part of the Arab world mitigated by the lingering effect of the Palestinian issue.

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Bernardino León Gross

Director General of the Anwar Gargash Diplomatic Academy

Demography is going to be a huge factor and I would say the main one in the coming decade, affecting and influencing at the same time economic and political issues. The subfactor that is important to bear in mind here is migration.

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Mona Makram Ebeid

Egyptian Senator, Advisor to the UN High Representative for the Alliance of Civilizations

I would say that the access to energy resources has unquestionably long been a driver for foreign policy. Therefore, the challenge for any state is working out how to use energy as a geo-economic asset and to successfully turn it into both a source of income and of state power.

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Volker Perthes

Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Sudan and Head of the UN Integrated Transition Assistance Mission in Sudan

The main difficult part but also the most interesting dimension of this transition for this region, the Middle East and North Africa, is the political transition. This is the most difficult because power sharing between the military and the civilians is rather exceptional in this part of the world.

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Panelists debate

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Debate

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16:15 – 17:00 | Plenary session 17

Stakes of Space Competition

Thierry de Montbrial

Founder and Chairman of Ifri and the WPC

Nowadays everybody is interested in space. It is a question of technology and the future world economy is going into space and that will be based on technology and all technology today depend on space one way or another.

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Sarah Al Amiri

Minister of State for Advanced Technology, President of the UAE Space Agency

What better and more challenging sector can you use to expedite the development of your technological capabilities in a short amount of time? That is why the space sector was used from the start.

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Philippe Baptiste

Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of the French Centre for Space Studies (CNES)

While space traffic in low Earth orbit has been doubling every two years, we observe new space players from both the public and private spheres arriving with new ambitions.

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Panelists debate

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Debate

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17:00 – 18:00 | Plenary session 18

Young Leaders: Gov Tech

Lucia Sinapi-Thomas

Executive Director of Capgemini Ventures

There is a clear acceleration in the pace of innovation with technology driving change and data-driven digital calling for transformation.

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Debate

Defining the concept of GovTech

GovTech is a contraction of “government” and “technology” and to put it simply, I define it as the use and purchase of innovative technological solutions by state actors to carry out a defined policy.

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Debate

Big tech and state sovereignty

Citizens have to be able to express themselves on the subject of GovTech because in the end it is the quality of public services that it is at stake and eventually, their personal data.

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Debate

Healthcare data governance

The data is critical because it brings in AI which brings a more powerful tool to make diagnoses and empower people and maybe one day everybody will be using ultrasound because it is non-invasive and safe.

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Debate

Europe’s stance on tech

I think that European sovereignty very much lies on its ability to foster an ecosystem of industrial actors in the GovTech sector and in that sense, the pandemic has raised awareness.

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Conclusion

Looking at Europe’s demographic trees we have a big boomer generation that is now in all the power positions, in society, business and government especially. I think that is a big problem.

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Debate

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18:00 | Envoi

Thierry de Montbrial

Founder and Chairman of Ifri and the WPC

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2020 Conference proceedings

09:00 – 09:30 | Opening

Global Governance and Public Health

Thierry de Montbrial

Founder and Chairman of Ifri and the WPC

We are living through the greatest of all shocks since the beginning of the WPC, COVID-19, which probably belongs to the highest category of conceivable shocks. As a result, we will have to introduce health as a fundamental subject in all the discussions and reflections about the future of global governance.

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Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus

Director-General of the WHO

The pandemic has shown us that international cooperation is the only solution to an international crisis. Working together might not always be easy, but it is essential. We must rethink and strengthen multilateralism to address the pressing challenges of our world in a coordinated and coherent way.

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09:30 – 11:30 | Session 1

The lessons of COVID-19

Michel Kazatchkine

Special Advisor to the Joint United Nations Program on AIDS in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, Senior Fellow at the Global Health Centre of the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies

Against a certain lack of interest in certain health issues that has prevailed in recent years, the world is now realizing how much among all global issues, it is health in the short-term that has the greatest potential for disruption in our globalized world.

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Antoine Flahault

Director of the Institute of Global Health at the University of Geneva

In a collaboration between the University of Geneva and the two engineering schools of Zürich and Lausanne (ETHZ and EPFL), we provide on a dashboard […] with daily updates of COVID-19 forecasts for 209 countries and territories.

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Debate 1

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Alexandre de Germay

Senior Vice President Global Head of Cardiovascular and Established Products at Sanofi

Overhauling healthcare systems is an onerous undertaking – and requires many actors engaging in concert behind common or complementary objectives. But the COVID-19 crisis has shown us that it is possible to effect wide and large-scale change […]

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Jean Kramarz

Head of Business Line Health at Axa Partners

The purpose of Insurance is to cover for unexpected events in a predictable, measurable environment. COVID-19 taught us in a hard way that the Health environment was less predictable and measurable than we all thought.

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Juliette Tuakli

Medical Director, Chief Executive Officer of Family, Child & Associates, Chair of the Board of Trustees of United Way Worldwide

Agile coherent leadership was noted in the most COVID-19 resilient African nations. Whilst there was some politicization of COVID-19 management, as in other parts of the world, Africa fared much better than feared.

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Elhadj As Sy

Co-chair of the WHO/World Bank Global Pandemic Preparedness Monitoring Board, Chair of the Kofi Annan Foundation Board

This time, we are being reminded that perhaps we should not go back to normal because normal has not worked.

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Debate 2

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11:30 – 13-30 | Session 2

Technology, Economics, Health Ethics

Introduction

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Jacques Biot

Board Member and Advisor to companies in the field of digital transformation and artificial intelligence, former President of the Ecole Polytechnique in Paris

Innovation in the field is still mostly science and technology driven, a favorable feature to provide disruptive remedies to some major health issues, but which allows for no reasonable marketplace to reconcile demand with supply and rationalize economic flows.

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Alexandra Prieux

President of Alcediag, Founder of SkillCell

The extensive use of technologies permanently changes medical practice as well as the role of the doctor who becomes more and more a technology user. Alongside with the progresses carried by technologies come new challenges that will need to be overcome.

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Debate 1

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Daniel Andler

Emeritus Professor at Sorbonne University, Member of the French Academy of Moral and Political Sciences

Over the last three decades health technologies have produced a steady flux of revolutionary inventions, disrupting established practices and common understandings of some basic ethical and anthropological notions. Hence the need for guidelines, which provide a legible representation of the ethical and legal issues which allows agents in the field to navigate the situations they encounter daily.

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Arthur Stril

Chief Business Officer and member of the Executive Committee of Cellectis

The 21st century will be the century of biology and medicine, fuelled by the rapid accumulation of biological engineering breakthroughs such as viral vectors, gene editing, and reproductive medicine, which are drastically reshaping human healthcare. But does the end justify such technological means?

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Debate 2

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Patrick Nicolet

Capgemini’s Group Chief Technology Officer

Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) form the backbone of our societies, but their usage so far has been centered on short-term convenience slowly taking a toll on the Earth finite resources. In this context, what if the most pressing healthcare challenge for mankind isn’t COVID-19 itself but a deeper transformation of our individual and collective practices and behaviors through planet-centric design.

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Carlos Moreira

Founder and Chief Executive Officer of WISeKey, former United Nations Expert on Cybersecurity and Trust Models

We must rethink the way the internet is built in order to unleash the potential of technology for healthcare as this sector is still mainly an analogue sector waiting to be digitally transformed.

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Conclusion

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14:30 – 16:00 | Session 3

Mental Health and Addiction

Introduction

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Michael van den Berg

Health Economist and Policy Analyst at the OECD

Slowly but surely, a paradigm shift is taking place in the way we think about healthcare, with a focus on the people who use it. Policymakers, academics, healthcare providers and patients are joining forces to make health systems more people-centered.

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Roberto Burioni

Professor of Microbiology and Virology at the Vita-Salute San Raffaele University, Milan

Together with a pandemic caused by the new coronavirus, we must face a second pandemic, made of fake news that are widely circulated and believed by the general population.

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Jean-Pierre Lablanchy

Medical Doctor and Psychiatrist, member of the Supervisory Board of Edeis

Mental health issues that have emerged for some time in the public debate are not new, but COVID-19 contributed to exacerbate some of them.

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Debate

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Conclusion

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2019 Conference proceedings

08:30 – 09:45 | Opening session

Thierry de Montbrial

Founder and Chairman of Ifri and the WPC

At the 11th WPC a year ago in Rabat, the prevailing view among experts was that the world economy was doing well and had a bright outlook, subject only to political shocks that might affect it. However, there was no shortage of them, even beyond the trade war.

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Amadou Gon Coulibaly

Prime Minister of Côte d’Ivoire

The event bringing us together today also offers us an opportunity to reflect in depth on the challenges facing Africa and the world.

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Édouard Philippe

Prime Minister of France

“Politics is a bit like the weather. Whether it’s a clear or cloudy day, you always have to break through the clouds of the future.” You probably recognize these words of His Majesty King Hassan II.

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Debate

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09:45 – 11:15 | Plenary session 1

World political economic outlook in the context of the rise of China

Gabriel Felbermayr

President of the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, Professor of Economics and Economic Policy at Kiel University

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Olivier Blanchard

Former President of the American Economic Association, former Chief Economist of the IMF

Interest rates are amazingly low; as you know the yield curve, the structure of interest rates looking forward, for the Eurozone is negative for 25 years, which has never been seen before, similar in Japan, and not terribly far from this in the US […].

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Arkebe Oqubay

Senior Minister and Special Advisor to the Prime Minister of Ethiopia

Since 2007, […] the global economy is in a slowdown mode; it has not yet been able to return to the growth rates that were observed a decade back before the financial crisis.

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Salaheddine Mezouar

President of the General Confederation of Moroccan Companies, former Minister of Foreign Affairs, Finance and Industry

[China] has allowed African leaders to regain some sovereignty in investment and development policy decisions.

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Sergey Storchak

Deputy Finance Minister of the Russian Federation

There is plenty of evidence that China has become a new super-power, and, from a Russian point of view, we enjoy the fact and, frankly speaking, we are relying on the fact, and it helps a lot in terms of overcoming some difficulties in terms of different economic and financial restrictions.

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Il SaKong

Chairman Emeritus of the Institute for Global Economics, former Minister of Finance of the Republic of Korea, former Chairman of the Presidential Committee for the G20 Summit

With slowing exports and decreasing business investments, Korea’s economy is currently growing only at around 2%.

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Naoki Tanaka

President of the Center for International Public Policy Studies, Tokyo

I want to pick up the potential growth rate of China: Three factors exist when we measure the potential growth rate: labor input, capital input, and innovation. China’s labor population is decreasing, and as to capital input I am not so optimistic.

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Debate

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11:15 – 12:00 | Plenary session 2

Sustaining globalization – the Chinese position

Ronnie C. Chan

Chairman of Hang Lung Properties

I cannot help but think about what the most anti-globalized country in the world is today. It is no longer China; after having been a part of globalization, China closed itself off, and now is finally globalized again.

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Eric Li

Founder and Managing Partner of Chengwei Capital

We [need to] create a more networked world. It is networked pluralism, as opposed to hegemonically led universalism, and that is, I think, what China’s proposition will be. It is still in a nascent stage, but I think the world should […] work with China on this.

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Leung Chun-ying

Vice Chairman of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, former Chief Executive of Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, People’s Republic of China

Hong Kong is not a sovereign state, Hong Kong is part of China, so when we look at democracy or the process of democratization in Hong Kong, we should not compare Hong Kong with a sovereign state.

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Debate

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12:00 – 12:30 | Plenary session 3

Conversation with Jean-Paul Agon, Chairman and CEO of L’Oréal

Jean-Paul Agon

Chairman and CEO of L’Oréal

I think the future belongs to the light footprint, which means having a smaller presence with more mobile, more agile and more adaptable investments allowing you to shift your priorities and plans depending on which way the world is heading.

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Debate

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12:30 – 14:30 | Lunch debate

His Excellency Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim Al-Thani

Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs of the State of Qatar

Although the Middle East is a region of turmoil, we in Qatar view it as a critical region with global importance. It is the global intersection of air, sea and land, and even the birth of faith.

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Debate

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14:30 – 15:45 | Plenary session 4

Trade, direct investment and Trust

Virginie Robert

Foreign Desk Editor, Les Echos

The new Head of the IMF, Kristalina Georgieva, issued a stern warning for her first public speech, worldwide growth is slowing because of commercial tensions.

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Debate

US-China’s partial deal

Donald Trump is an avowed protectionist. The people who surround him are not friends of the WTO. They would like to return to the world of the GATT when there was no dispute settlement mechanism.

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Debate

Damage of the US-China trade war

If you look at the big macroeconomic aggregates, investment is by far the most volatile, and it reacts most to news or to changed information, and also to uncertainty. You can postpone investment but you cannot postpone consumption so much.

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Debate

Revision of trade deals

There is a positive side and a negative side of this most recent Japan/US trade agreement. First of all, from a Japanese perspective, it was quite a good agreement because we could avoid the imposition of 25%, duties on Japanese cars exported to the US.

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Debate

WTO’s governance

The US has been the positive leader for more than 70 years in trade policy, starting before the GATT, and they have used trade policy as an element of their foreign policy, as an instrument of peace policy.

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Debate

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15:45 – 17:00 | Plenary session 5

The politicization of the international system of payments and the future of the international monetary system

John Lipsky

Peterson Distinguished Scholar at Johns Hopkins University’s Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, former First Deputy Managing Director of the IMF

The Dollar’s dominance survived the end of the formal Bretton Woods system in the sense it moved to floating exchange rates, survived the oil shock, survived the Latin debt crisis and in 1990, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the entry of China and India into the global trading system, began the period of what I call true globalization, and the Dollar remained dominant again.

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Jeffry Frieden

Professor of Government at Harvard University

Dollar dominance has rested in large part on the expectation that the American political order would protect and defend the real value of the US currency, along with the stability and openness of its financial system.

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Akinari Horii

Special Advisor and Member of the Board of Directors of the Canon Institute for Global Studies, former Assistant Governor of the Bank of Japan

Market confidence matters a lot for an actively-used international currency. It is not only confidence in the value of the currency, but confidence in its integrity that matters. The integrity of a currency is maintained only when it functions properly as a means of exchange, unit of account and store of value.

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Hélène Rey

Professor of Economics at London Business School, Member of the French National Economic Commission, Member of the High Council for Financial Stability

Clearly, the number two currency is currently the Euro. However, we still miss a euro area safe asset, the equivalent of US Treasuries. Europe needs to complete the financial architecture of the Euro area for the Euro to become a truly global currency.

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Sergey Storchak

Deputy Finance Minister of the Russian Federation

We are living in a world where the monetary system, or I could better say financial infrastructure of one particular country is being used as a political weapon. It is a really bad story. However, it is happening […] Therefore, it can be done in different ways, but what is really interesting about US Dollars, you cannot escape the fact that the biggest invoicing is taking place in US Dollars.

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Jean-Claude Trichet

Chairman of the Board of Directors of Bruegel, European Chairman of the Trilateral Commission, former President of the ECB

The main problem we have, in my opinion, in Europe, if we want a Europe establishing an appropriate balance with the US, is mainly of a political nature. Both the treasuries and the safe bonds, which are not there, and the geopolitical capacity to tell our partner(s): if you blackmail us, then we will blackmail you.

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Debate

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17:00 – 18:00 | Plenary session 6

The weaponization of Law and globalization

Laurent Cohen-Tanugi

Member of the Paris and New York Bars, former Chairman of French governmental task force on Europe in the global economy

We seem to be moving from an era – from the end of World War II through the past 70 years – where law has been key to the building of an international world order based on the rule of law […] to a more chaotic system of international relations where law seems to be used more and more as a pretext for arbitrary or unilateral action.

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Anne-Thida Norodom

Professor of Public Law at the University of Paris Descartes, Secretary-General of the French Society for International Law

Lawfare can be a useful tool when it comes to communicating how to utilize the law in modern conflicts and appears as a substitute for traditional weapons.

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Stuart Eizenstat

Senior Counsel at Covington & Burling LLP, former Chief White House Domestic Policy Advisor to President Jimmy Carter, former US Ambassador to the European Union

Why is there an upswing in lawfare? There is a positive reason, that is that major nation states know it would be catastrophic to engage in shooting wars in a nuclear age.

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Lee Hye-min

Senior Advisor of KIM & CHANG, former G20 Sherpa, former Deputy Minister for Trade and Chief Negotiator for the Korea-EU FTA

The reappearance of unilateralism, wherein the members are abusing the national security exception and paralyzing WTO dispute system, abusing the principle of consensus are important examples of the weaponization of the law in the international trade.

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Michael Møller

Former Director-General of the United Nations Office at Geneva

Underlying the framing of our debate today on the weaponization of law and globalization is a pervasive concern that fundamental tenets of the international and indeed national order are fraying.

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Debate

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19:00 | Dinner debate

Thierry de Montbrial

Founder and Chairman of Ifri and the WPC

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Paul Kagame

President of the Republic of Rwanda

Africa is nobody’s prize to win or lose. Not at all. It is our responsibility as Africans to take charge of our own interests and develop our continent to its full potential.

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Debate

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08:30 – 09:45 | Plenary session 7

Technology, society and politics

Jim Hoagland

Contributing Editor to The Washington Post

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François Barrault

Chairman of IDATE DigiWorld, Chairman and Founder of FDB Partners

The machine will never take control of our life as long as we are reasonable.

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Jean-Yves Le Gall

President of CNES, President of the International Astronautical Federation, Chair of the Council of the European Space Agency

For climate change, space is very, very important, because out of the 50 essential climate variables which are defined to measure the climate, 26, which are more than half, can be observed just from space and with satellites.

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Susan Liautaud

Lecturer in Public Policy and Law at Stanford University, Interim Chair of Council at the London School of Economics, Founder and Managing Director of Susan Liautaud & Associates Ltd

We need to reconceptualize what it means to have a society in which democracies function, because the reality is that it is no longer about individual human beings and their institutions. The connective tissue is machines, apps and data.

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Holger Mey

Vice President, Advanced Concepts, Airbus, Munich; former President and CEO of the Institute for Strategic Analyses, Bonn

Freedom and security is not a trade-off relationship, as it is often being put. […] I think without a certain degree of security, we probably have no freedom and cannot enjoy any freedom.

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John Sawers

Executive Chairman of Newbridge Advisory, Senior Advisor at Chatham House, former Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) of the United Kingdom

The role of technology is central to the great power rivalry which is going to be the design model of the world of the coming decade or two.

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Debate

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09:45 – 10:30 | Plenary session 8

Cyber powers and the cyber threat

Thomas Gomart

Director of Ifri

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Patrick Nicolet

Group Chief Technology Officer and Group Executive Board Member of Capgemini

Despite the governments’ efforts to retain it, a large part of cyber power is now owned by a very limited number of companies.

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Jean-Louis Gergorin

Former Director of the Policy Planning Staff of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs

The cyberthreat is growing for three reasons: the acceleration of the digital transformation in every activity, the fact that the more we digitalize the more vulnerable we become and the growing involvement of states in cyberattacks on companies and critical infrastructure.

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Meir Sheetrit

Former Member of the Knesset, former Minister of Intelligence Affairs and the Committee of Atomic Energy, former Minister of the Interior

This was done from far away. Nobody has been there. Nobody touched it. Nobody attacked it, and still they ruined all the infrastructure of Iran for producing, for enriching uranium.

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Debate

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10:30 – 11:15 | Plenary session 9

Climate and environment

Thierry de Montbrial

Founder and Chairman of Ifri and the WPC

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Laurent Fabius

President of the Constitutional Council, former President of the COP 21, former Prime Minister of France

Governments, some of which deny climate change or have taken a wait-and-see attitude, bear an eminent responsibility because they must work for their countries’ general welfare, and more widely.

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Patrick Pouyanné

CEO of Total

The good substitute for coal is gas. It is the only choice allowing us to have a reliable, sustainable energy mix that meets demand in all seasons. […] It is unrealistic to think that renewables will solve the problem.

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Debate

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11:15 – 12:15 | Plenary session 10

The status of health care delivery in Africa: challenges and opportunities

Brian A. Gallagher

President and CEO of United Way Worldwide

Africans endure 17% of all the disease in the world and yet are 11% of the population.

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Nardos Bekele-Thomas

Resident Coordinator of the United Nations in South Africa

There are two countries in one country: the country that has high tech and expensive health care system which caters for 10% to 15% of the population and the country that has poor to mediocre health services, with the characteristics of any least developed country.

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Juliette Tuakli

Founder and Medical Director of Family CHILD & Associates, Ghana; United Way Worldwide’s Chair of Governance Committee

There needs to be some refinement such that NHS empowers and advocates more for access, for women specifically. We have done a good job with lowering child mortality, and morbidity.

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Robert Sigal

CEO of the American Hospital of Paris

If you look |…] at how many physicians you have per 10,000 people in Algeria, you have 18 doctors, in Morocco 7. If you look at South Africa, you are at 9. […] it can go as low as 0.5 physicians per 10,000 people in Nigeria, so there is clearly a quantitative problem.

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Pierre M’Pelé

Mercy Ships Ambassador for Africa and Africa Bureau Director

In a country of 100 million people, it is about 18,000 health posts. That is amazing. […] Nurses and women community leaders of the “Women Health Development Army” have been at the center of the progress made in improving the health of the people in Ethiopia. Women are agents of change for health in Ethiopia.

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Panelists debate

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Debate

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12:30 – 14:15 | Lunch debate

Kevin Rudd

President of the Asia Society Policy Institute, former Prime Minister of Australia

On Xi Jinping’s worldview, I always think the beginning of wisdom in international relations is to understand how the other side thinks and why they think that way.

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Panelists debate

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14:15 – 15:45 | Plenary session 11

European uncertainties

Steven Erlanger

Chief Diplomatic Correspondent, Europe, for the New York Times

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Hubert Védrine

Former Minister of Foreign Affairs of France

A distinction must be made between immediate, short-term uncertainties and deep, structural, perhaps even vital uncertainties.

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Volker Perthes

Executive Chairman and Director of the German Institute for International and Security Affairs (SWP), former UN Assistant Secretary-General

A rising power, China, is not a benign partner but still has to be a partner because we do not want to decouple, as some Americans probably think they should.

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Ana Palacio

Former Member of the Council of State of Spain, former Senior Vice President of the World Bank, former Minister of Foreign Affairs of Spain

What we see today is a pervasive irrationality and emotion everywhere. In the end, however, Europe is a legal construction and all our instruments are geared towards that end.

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Artem Malgin

Vice-Rector of the MGIMO University, Professor of the Department of International Relations and Russia’s Foreign Policy

It brings additional problems when it comes to overall organization of world trade and makes all the EU’s agreements with its neighbors and traditional partners, including African or ACP partners, more complicated since the US behaves in the world trade system in an absolutely, let us say, non-WTO way.

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Michael Lothian

Member of the House of Lords, former Conservative Member of Parliament

I think there is a very big void now in Europe for a military force and I do not see it being a European one, for the reason that there are certain countries that would not want to join it.

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Enrico Letta

Dean of the Paris School of International Affairs at Sciences Po Paris, former Prime Minister of Italy

I think Europe can be a third superpower, only by being united and taking leadership on two main subjects, which are subjects for the future: […] climate change and the second one is technological humanism, if I may say.

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Panelists debate

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15:45 – 16:45 | Plenary session 12

Where is Latin America heading?

Jim Hoagland

Contributing Editor to The Washington Post

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Andrés Rozental

Senior Policy Advisor at Chatham House, President of Rozental & Asociados, former Mexico’s Ambassador to the United Kingdom

The region is not doing well. Countries like Brazil and Mexico, the two largest economies in the region, are growing at either minimal rates or, in the case of my country, not at all.

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Carlos Ivan Simonsen Leal

President of the Getulio Vargas Foundation, Brazil

The disaster manifested itself at full force after the beginning of the second term for Dilma Rousseff and it was very fast. GDP started falling. The rate of investment fell enormously. There was a lack of trust and Dilma was actually impeached after two years of her second term for disobeying the fiscal laws.

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Miguel Ángel Moratinos

High Representative for the United Nations Alliance of Civilizations, former Minister of Foreign Affairs and Cooperation of Spain

Do you know what the pressure of fiscal reform in Latin America is? The average is 10%, compared to 40% in Germany, 38% in Spain, and 50% in Sweden. They do not pay taxes and they have not been introducing this fiscal reform.

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Bertrand Badré

Founder and CEO of Blue like an Orange Sustainable Capital, former Managing Director and Chief Financial Officer of the World Bank

If you look at the continent as a whole, which, in addition, is pulled down by Venezuela, a country that weighs heavily on Latin America’s macro growth, we are just above zero according to the IMF’s latest estimates for this year, although they forecast an upturn next year, driven mainly by Brazil’s recovery.

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16:45 – 19:15 | Parallel workshops

Workshop #1 – Finance and economy

Jean-Claude Trichet

Chairman of the Board of Directors of Bruegel, European Chairman of the Trilateral Commission, former President of the ECB

I see populism and a level of frustration among the citizens, in all the advanced economies without exception. I see that inflation is extraordinarily low, and I cannot help making the connection. There is an anomaly in the functioning of our system which means that Phillips curve has not functioned since the crisis as it did in the past.

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Bertrand Badré

Founder and CEO of Blue like an Orange Sustainable Capital, former Managing Director and Chief Financial Officer of the World Bank

The social purpose of business is to find profitable solutions for the planet and its people. It is not profit as an end to an end but profit as a means to an end. […] At the end of the day, we connect capitalism with people, the territories etc.

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Daniel Dăianu

Chairman of the Fiscal Council and Advisor to the Governor (Euro Area Affairs), former Board Member of the National Bank of Romania

There is an increasingly wild world, with a lot of fragmentation and dissonance among actors in many respects. There is a massive erosion of multilateralism, in view of what prevailed after the Second World War, the so-called liberal international order.

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Jeffry Frieden

Professor of Government at Harvard University

There are perceptions that globalization has created pools of wealth that are undeserved, and it has contributed to the decline of communities, and of entire regions. This is a perception that is very widespread. It is not just American. It is not just French. It is not just Brazilian. It is virtually global […].

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Akinari Horii

Special Advisor and Member of the Board of Directors of the Canon Institute for Global Studies, former Assistant Governor of the Bank of Japan

Manufacturing in the world economy is in large part influenced by the so-called silicon cycle. The most recent expansionary phase began in early 2016 and peaked in early 2018. If the two year rule continues to hold good, then it will be early 2020 or around the turn of the year, when the cycle hits the bottom and begins to recover.

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Hur Kyung-wook

President of Korean Bretton Woods Club, former Advisor to the ASEAN+3 Macroeconomic Research Office, former Vice Minister for the Ministry of Strategy and Finance, former Senior Economist for the IMF

During the 2008 crisis, we had global coordination. We all remember that the G20 played a very instrumental role. […] Now we do not have it, and we conveniently say there is a so-called new normal about this low interest rate.

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André Lévy-Lang

Affiliate Emeritus Professor of Finance at Paris-Dauphine University

I would like to focus quickly on the state of the global financial industry 12 years after the crisis. The US is in very good shape and the US financial system is in good shape. There is no question about that. In Europe, we have a problem. Today, the market value, the market cap of the major European banks is well below their net book value.

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John Lipsky

Peterson Distinguished Scholar at Johns Hopkins University’s Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, former First Deputy Managing Director of the IMF

One common thread connecting the sluggish outlook for global growth is the widely experienced weakness in fixed investment in capital goods, equipment and software.

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Hélène Rey

Professor of Economics at London Business School, Member of the French National Economic Commission, Member of the High Council for Financial Stability

We do not understand exactly why [real rates] are so low. That constrains monetary policy massively. That creates huge financial risk, not just potentially on the banking sector, but also, and people have not talked about this, on the insurance sector and various types of asset management, on pension funds etc.

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Debate

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Workshop #2 – Energy and environment

Nobuo Tanaka

Chairman of the Sasakawa Peace Foundation, former Executive Director of the IEA

Women are hit much harder by climate change, especially in African countries, because more women are farmers, and with climate change, much more effort is required to fetch water from more distant places.

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Olivier Appert

Scientific Advisor of the Energy Center of Ifri, former President of the French Energy Council (French Committee of the World Energy Council)

Most of the attention today is focused on solar and wind, thanks to their spectacular expansion and cost reduction. However modern bioenergy is playing the dominant role because it is the only renewable source that can provide energy for all end use.

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Leila Benali

Chief Economist, Head of Strategy, Energy Economics and Sustainability at the Arab Petroleum Investments Corporation

The energy sector is really competing with other sectors that are deemed much more attractive for investors in terms of returns. The problem is that the gap is really wide.

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Richard Cooper

Professor of International Economics at Harvard University, former Chairman of the National Intelligence Council, former Under-Secretary of State for Economic Affairs

I see in my own view that in the end, we will do solar. The end is several decades away, and I see natural gas as being the bridging fuel to solar. In particular, natural gas is a great substitute for coal in generating electricity, as well as other uses.

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Cosmin Ghita

CEO of Nuclearelectrica, Romania

Today’s realities call for immediate action, and based on IEA data that was vehiculated here, energy consumption worldwide grew by 2.3% in 2018 alone. This is nearly twice the average rate of growth since 2010.

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Tatsuo Masuda

Visiting Professor at the Graduate School of Nagoya University of Commerce and Business on energy-climate nexus, Chairman of FairCourt Capital in London, Strategic Committee Member of Elion House in Singapore

Many heads of state came to Rio to make wonderful speeches and agreed upon an action oriented declaration. […] But did actions follow? No, nothing serious happened. We have to do something real and we cannot leave all these younger generations behind or keep the generation gap wide open.

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Ali Zerouali

Director of Cooperation and International Development of the Moroccan Agency for Sustainable Energy

Can we imagine going back to fossil fuels for a moment? There would be so much pressure on the price of fossil resources that it would jeopardize the already sluggish growth taking place at the moment. Renewable energy differs from fossil fuels in that there is no competition between countries.

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Debate

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Workshop #3 – Africa

Robert Dossou

Former Minister of Foreign Affairs of Benin, former President of the Constitutional Court, President of the African Association of International Law

The 1990s saw the rise of great expectations in Africa, which came onto the international stage. In addition, Africa’s heads of state have grown aware of the need to solve all the old problems that were holding Africa back.

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Sean Cleary

Founder and Executive Vice Chairman of the FutureWorld Foundation, Chairman of Strategic Concepts (Pty) Ltd

We must also consider how to use the African regional organizations and the African Union, the continental institution to enable growth and sustainable development.

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Elisabeth Guigou

President of the Anna Lindh Euro-Mediterranean Foundation for the Dialogue Between Cultures, former Minister, former Member of the French Parliament and President of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the National Assembly

Uncontrolled migration is a tragedy for Africa because it is being drained of talent, and you’ve seen the effects of this in Europe: the rise of extremes and populism and the closing of borders. There is no solution unless we tackle these issues together.

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Sheikh Tidiane Gadio

President of the Institute for Pan-African Strategies, Peace, Security and Governance, former Minister of Foreign Affairs of Senegal

For 20 years I’ve argued that the EU was not our model. We want the model our leaders and great thinkers—Kwamé Nkrumah, Sheikh Anta Diop and Marcus Garvey—laid out before us. We want the United States of Africa. We want a united Africa.

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Karim Lotfi Senhadji

CEO of OCP Africa

We see, on the one hand, that the world will have to overcome the challenge of food security. On the other hand, Africa has today all the potential to meet the challenge of global security, not only for its population, which will rise to one billion by 2050, but also for the rest of the world.

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Pierre M’Pelé

Mercy Ships Ambassador for Africa and Africa Bureau Director

We said that Africa has made tremendous strides in the field of health. Life expectancy has risen because mortality has dropped by nearly 37%. Life expectancy has increased from 40 to over 60 and even 65 years in many countries.

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Juliette Tuakli

Founder and Medical Director of Family CHILD & Associates, Ghana; United Way Worldwide’s Chair of Governance Committee

Our poor citizens build their homes and even cities on ground that we now know is going to be submerged in a few years! We must start considering green economies seriously, […] this might be another space for civic society to play a role.

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Aminata Touré

President of the Economic, Social and Environmental Council of Senegal, former Prime Minister of Senegal

Corruption is an issue, but it is an issue for the whole world. This is another stereotype that we have suffered from for a long time: Africa, the land of corruption. However, the biggest corruption scandals are not in Africa: Enron, Exxon, Madoff.

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Debate

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08:00 – 09:00 | Reports from parallel workshops

Workshop #1 – Report

Hélène Rey

Professor of Economics at London Business School, Member of the French National Economic Commission, Member of the High Council for Financial Stability

There is a lot of weakness in investment, which has been linked to deep uncertainty.

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Workshop #2 – Report

Nobuo Tanaka

Chairman of the Sasakawa Peace Foundation, former Executive Director of the IEA

Carbon dioxide emissions are growing 2% per year, and this is the trajectory of the average growth of C02 since the Industrial Revolution.

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Workshop #3 – Report

Robert Dossou

Former Minister of Foreign Affairs of Benin, former President of the Constitutional Court, President of the African Association of International Law

Le passé colonial pèse encore à certains égards et la bonne gouvernance appelle la mise en oeuvre de meilleures normes.

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09:00 – 10:15 | Plenary session 13

Middle East and North/West Africa

Volker Perthes

Executive Chairman and Director of the German Institute for International and Security Affairs (SWP), former UN Assistant Secretary-General

In quite a number of the states in the region, it is on state level, whether Libya, Mali, Syria or Yemen: order is being undermined through either civil war, war or the weakness of states that has undermined institutions and societal relations.

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Mohamed Ibn Chambas

Special Representative of the Secretary-General and Head of the United Nations Office for West Africa and the Sahel

In general, that is the threat in the Sahel, which is particularly linked to terrorist groups that have been known to exist in the north of Mali that have declared links with international terrorist groups, such as Al Qaeda, Islamic State, etc.

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Memduh Karakullukçu

Vice Chairman and Founding President of the Global Relations Forum

The Middle East would be better off with constructive engagement from external parties, provided that they, particularly the EU and the US, adjust to the new realities of the power configuration both globally and in the region.

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Abdulaziz Othman bin Sager

Chairman of the Gulf Research Center, Saudi Arabia

Today, Saudi has very strategic challenges on both its north and south borders, because on the north side Iran continuously supports all the militia groups, which are fully-funded, trained and supported by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard and at the same time in Yemen.

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Dong Manyuan

Vice President of China Institute of International Studies

China seeks no proxy in the Middle East; does not seek to fill the power vacuum; and does not seek regime change.

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Debate

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10:15 – 11:15 | Plenary session 14

Cross-border illegal trade: a destabilizing factor for the global economy

Alvise Giustiniani

Vice President for Illicit Trade Prevention of PMI

The OECD issued a report a couple of years ago on illicit trade and quantified its dimensions: they came up with a staggering figure above USD 2 trillion around the world for the turnover in illicit trade.

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Laurent Marcadier

Former Magistrate, Senior Advisor in charge of Legal Affairs of LVMH Group

Counterfeiting is now the world’s second-leading criminal activity after drug trafficking.

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Carlos Moreira

Founder and CEO of WISeKey

In the last five years a new technology has arrived with the name blockchain, which could be the beginning of solving the problem.

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Jean-François Thony

Prosecutor-General, President of the Siracusa International Institute

There are as many different kinds of illicit trade as there are products. Furthermore, the criminal organizations behind them are not of a single type but protean.

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11:15 – 12:45 | Plenary session 15

The consequences of Trump, Act III

Jim Bittermann

Senior European Correspondent for CNN in Paris

When you look at a geographic frame where has Trump had some kind of impact, some consequences from his three-year old Presidency? Well, it is just like everywhere.

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Renaud Girard

Senior reporter and war correspondent for Le Figaro

Macron, in my opinion, was smart enough to understand that Trump was highly sensitive to personal dealings, and that he did not really read the memos he was given, receptive to direct explanations between leaders. He was well aware of that, and this particular aspect of Trump’s character may be detrimental further down the line.

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Motoshige Itoh

Emeritus Professor at the University of Tokyo, Professor at the Gakushuin University, Member of the Council on Economic and Fiscal Policy, Japan

My point is Mr. Trump may be populism stage one, and there may be populism in stage two. As long as globalization continues there is always a pressure for democracy to be loaded by populism. […] Whether Mr. Trump continues or we have another, maybe leftist, Democrat or whatever, we still have to prepare to work on the populism.

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Jean-Claude Gruffat

Chairman of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, Washington DC

American citizens care about international policy when it affects their own personal selfish interests, or when they belong to a community that is very important and has some influence on the political process.

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Josef Joffe

Publisher-Editor of the German weekly Die Zeit

It is important to notice continuities. I don’t want to compare Obama to Trump in terms of breach of etiquette and nastiness, but in foreign policy there is more similarity between them than meets the eye.

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Qiao Yide

Vice Chairman and Secretary-General of Shanghai Development Research Foundation

Xi Jinping said one thing that has not been mentioned by many people particularly in the West. He said, we have 1 000 reasons to have good relations with the US, no single reason to have worse relations with the US. That is very important, so the general feeling is that China wanted to make some compromise.

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John Sawers

Executive Chairman of Newbridge Advisory, Senior Advisor at Chatham House, former Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) of the United Kingdom

The disdain for alliances means that other countries around the world, […] they will simply not rely on America in the same way they did before. They will have to balance those relationships and they will have to be more autonomous for their defence and security. That may not be a bad thing, but it is a consequence of Trump.

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Debate

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13:00 – 15:00 | Lunch debate

Thierry de Montbrial

Founder and Chairman of Ifri and the WPC

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Aminata Touré

President of the Economic, Social and Environmental Council of Senegal, former Prime Minister of Senegal

About the democracy, we have changed presidents peacefully over time. We have what we call a republican army, which means we have an army that follows the rules of democracy.

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Arkebe Oqubay

Senior Minister and Special Advisor to the Prime Minister of Ethiopia

Ethiopia does not have petroleum, diamonds or other large resources, and its entire growth was achieved by the hard-working people of Ethiopia and its focus on attracting investment.

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15:00 – 16:30 | Plenary session 16

Young Leaders

Patrick Nicolet

Group Chief Technology Officer and Group Executive Board Member of Capgemini

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James Stuewe

Manager, Public Sector, Canada

I actually do not think it is reasonable that for us to assume people will just submit to changes in taxes, higher prices, submit to their behaviors being changed because of climate change. This is the challenge.

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Xavier Ploquin

Former Advisor for Energy, Industry and Innovation at the French Ministry for the Ecological and Inclusive Transition

President Macron had a climate plan in his political program, which was adopted in 2017. There are many things in this plan so I would just say that it leads to the adoption of carbon neutrality in 2050, which is a huge step.

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Peter Bruce-Clark

Operating Partner at Social Impact Capital

That circular economic ways of thinking will actually be the foundation upon which countries will prosper going into this century. I believe countries who aggressively drive this way of thinking, financially supporting, underwriting and generating huge industries that tackle the climate crisis, will be richer than the ones that do not.

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Jihane Ajijti

Head of Business Development, Digital and Communication within OCP Africa

Africa needs to increase its yields to be able to feed the growing population in the context of climate change and to do that, we need to support the agricultural value chain throughout the continent, to be able to invest and modernize agriculture.

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Wu Liang

Co-Founder and CIO of Green City Solutions

We did some research and discovered that there is a technology millions of years old capable of partially solving the pollution problem. We have discovered special moss cultures, which we have patented in our own system, which are literally able to eat-up the air pollution and convert it into biomass.

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Polina Vasilenko

Founder and CEO of HelioRec

I am founder and CEO of HelioRec, which builds floating solar power plants, an innovative and cost-effective solution for electricity production.

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Debate

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16:30 – 17:30 | Plenary session 17

New foreign policy trends in East Asia

Steven Erlanger

Chief Diplomatic Correspondent, Europe, for the New York Times

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Chiyuki Aoi

Professor of International Security at the Graduate School of Public Policy, University of Tokyo

It is the currents of our time that liberal ideals and values are intensively challenged from within, from forces favoring populism and unilateralism as opposed to multilateralism, and also from without, from entities that challenge fundamentally liberal ways of managing political relations.

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Kim Hong Kyun

Former Special Representative for Korean Peninsula Peace and Security Issues

South Korea is on the verge of divorcing with its closest neighbour country, Japan, with which we share common values, common security interests and the ally.

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Douglas Paal

Distinguished Fellow at Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, former Director of Asian Affairs in the US National Security Council

The movement of US policy with respect to China from engagement to containment is eroding those spokes and making it difficult for the various countries, each of which has its own relations with China, to sustain a kind of counterbalance that will come if they also try to remain close to the United States.

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Qiao Yide

Vice Chairman and Secretary-General of Shanghai Development Research Foundation

Trump tried to resolve the North Korean nuclear issue by establishing personal relations with Kim Jong-un, but so far has not been successful.

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Panelists debate

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17:30 – 19:00 | Plenary session 18

Final debate

Thierry de Montbrial

Founder and Chairman of Ifri and the WPC

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Assia Bensalah Alaoui

Ambassador-at-large of His Majesty the King of Morocco

Can we get rid of these lifestyles that are devastating the planet? Without naivety and with a strong will, I could say – and this will obviously shock many people, because that is the paradox – that here and now, could the Mediterranean, thanks to over 2,000 years of adaptive wisdom, become the world’s laboratory?

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Karl Kaiser

Senior Associate of the Project on Europe and the Transatlantic Relationship at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Adjunct Professor Emeritus of Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, former Director of the German Council on Foreign Relations, former Advisor to Chancellors Brandt and Schmidt

In the G2 world of US-China rivalry, the United States will continue to need Europe in this competition. The US cannot allow China to dominate the western rim of Eurasia. That is a geopolitical given. Europe also needs the United States in order to survive in this kind of rivalry.

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Mona Makram Ebeid

Egyptian Senator, former Member of Parliament, Distinguished Lecturer at the Political Science Department of the American University in Cairo

If Egypt and Saudi Arabia succeed in their ambitious economic and social plans and break through to high levels of growth and employment, that would raise living standards and relive domestic pressure.

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Manuel Muñiz

Dean of the School of Global and Public Affairs at IE University and Rafael del Pino Professor of Practice of Global Transformation

I think that the collision with China […] is very structural and is connected to very deep trends in how economics work in the digital area and in the capacity for technology to change the sustainability of an authoritarian regime.

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Fathallah Oualalou

Former Minister of Economy and Finance of the Kingdom of Morocco

Africa and the Southern Mediterranean countries […] must come together and make their political system and economic strategy credible. This would seek to restore the Mediterranean’s peace, dynamism and centrality, which are necessary for a more balanced, more multipolar world […].

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Yoichi Suzuki

Adjunct Fellow at the Japan Institute for International Affairs, former Special Assistant to the Foreign Minister of Japan, former Chief Negotiator of the Japan EU Economic Partnership Agreement

China talks about each country having its own specific model. That is not enough. Drawing up multilateral guidelines is indispensable to avoid falling into debt traps or accelerating climate change.

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Debate

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2018 Conference proceedings

08:30 – 09:45 | Opening session

Thierry de Montbrial

Founder and Chairman of the World Policy Conference

Some said technology would eventually erase borders and promote the rapid onset of a blissful globalisation. Instead, we are witnessing an exacerbation of nation-based realities, which irresistibly mirrors the past two centuries back to us.

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Amadou Gon Coulibaly

Prime Minister of Côte d’Ivoire

Africa has solid foundations for becoming a pillar of global growth and prosperity.

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General Michel Aoun

President of Lebanon

The recognition of the unity of the human family in its diversity and plurality and the attention paid to the unified dignity of each person must be given impetus in the responsibility to protect every human being

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His Holiness Bartholomew I

Arcbishop of Constantinople, New Rome and Ecumenial Patriarch

Global interdependence was expected to bring about more equality, freedom and even democracy. But by using the failures of globalisation as a scapegoat, populism fuels hatred of others.

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09:45 – 11:45 | Plenary session 1

09:45 – 11:45

Jeffry Frieden

Professor of government, Harvard University

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Kemal Dervis

Senior Fellow in the Global Economy and Development Program at the Brookings Institution, former Head of the UNDP, former Minister of Economic Affairs of Turkey, former Vice president of the World Bank

We are in a much more multipolar world, although the US and China are by far the two big giants that are dominant.

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Marcus Noland

Executive Vice President and Director of Studies at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, Former senior economist at the Council of Economic Advisers in the Executive Office of the President of the United States

The bottom line is the Trump administration is focused on undoing past deals and instituting border restrictions. It remains unclear whether this protectionism is a means to an end.

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Il SaKong

Chairman of the Institute for Global Economics, former Chairman of the Presidential Committee for the G20 Summit, former Minister of Finance of the Republic of Korea

It is therefore urgent for the G20 countries to make efforts togethers to resuscitate the G20 Summit process to fill the global leadership gap for adequately facing the global economic challenges of the next 5 years.

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Qiao Yide

Vice Chairman and Secretary General of Shanghai Development Research Foundation (SDRF)

The most important is how China deals with trade escalation with the US. Everybody knows that the trade war was not initiated by China, but in this regard, I guess China can do more.

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Panelists debate

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Debate

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Jeffry Frieden

Professor of government, Harvard University

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Karl Brauner

Deputy Director-General at the WTO

The WTO is about rule-guided globalisation and replacing the rule of law by the deal of the day would be very bad.

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Patrick de Castelbajac

Head of Airbus Strategy and International

For all of us large companies today, the Brexit uncertainty and the possible consequences forces us to revise our view on what we will do in the UK tomorrow.

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Suzanne Hayden

Former Senior Prosecutor for the US Department of Justice, PMI Impact Expert Council Member

Governments particularly, tend to focus on the thing that is most harmful to them at any given time in terms of trade, whether it is drugs, wildlife, nuclear trafficking, fissile materials, etc. However, criminals are not so discriminating.

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Itoh Motoshige

Emeritus Professor at the University of Tokyo, Professor at the Gakushuin University, Member of the Council on Economic and Fiscal Policy, Japan

Abenomics is a very, very unorthodox expansionary policy, combined with an inflation target and it was successful. To just get out of the very serious lack of demand, you may need some kind of very unorthodox method.

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Debate

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11:45 – 12:15 | Plenary session 2

Conversation

Jean-Paul Agon

Chairman and CEO of L’Oréal

An international company is a company that is based somewhere and sells its products everywhere in the world. A global company is a company that is already based everywhere in the world.

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Debate

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12:15 – 12:45 | Plenary session 3

Conversation

Jim Hoagland

Contributing Editor, The Washington Post

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Jean-Yves Le Gall

President of the Centre National d’Études Spatiales (CNES), President of the International Astronautical Federation (IAF), Chair of the Council of the European Space Agency (ESA)

Africa is now opening a space chapter. Because of digitalisation and militarisation, the cost of the satellites is decreasing very strongly, and you have more and more countries that have a space program.

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Debate

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13:00 – 14:45 | Lunch debate

Thierry de Montbrial

Founder and Chairman of the WPC

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Olivier Blanchard

Fred Bergsten Senior Fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, former Chief Economist of the IMF

The big challenge for an economist is to think about how the political and geopolitical risks can translate into economics in the relatively short run.

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Debate

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15:00 – 16:00 | Plenary session 4

Migrations and the future of multiculturalism

Sean Cleary

Founder and Executive Vice-Chairman of the FutureWorld Foundation and Chairman of Strategic Concepts (Pty) Ltd

Migration seems likely to increase, firstly because of levels of geopolitical instability, uncertainty, gaps between personal circumstances, economic and otherwise, in the developing and the developed worlds, and the uncertain impact of climate change on significant parts of the developing world.

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Jean-François Copé

Former Minister of the Budget, Mayor of Meaux, Lawyer at the Paris Bar

What is new today is that if you have a look at the political deal in democracies, the divide is between populists and traditional government parties. […] What is a stake now is the capacity for democracies to face this kind of problem.

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László Trócsányi

Minister of Justice of Hungary

The States need to be given their freedom; Europe’s values need to be demonstrated in practice. That is why the Schengen Agreement is very important.

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Bogdan Klich

Senator, Minority Leader of the Polish Senate, former Minister of Defense and Member of the European Parliament

In some countries of Central and Western Europe, we have the re-emergence of very dangerous political tendencies, which are populism and nationalism.

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Jim Hoagland

Contributing Editor, The Washington Post

The migration pressures that we have seen have driven populist victories, but I am not sure we have seen populism and populist parties come up with solutions to the pressures that created their victories.

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Panelists debate

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Debate

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16:00 – 17:00 | Plenary session 5

Preparing children and youth for jobs in the 21st century

Brian A. Gallagher

President and CEO of United Way of America/United Way Worldwide

Every child born in the world is going to develop their brain most substantially within the first few years of life. If we would like to make a positive intervention, early in a child’s life seems to be the time to do it.

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Juliette Tuakli

Member of United Way Worldwide Leadership Council, CEO and Chief Medical Officer of CHILDAccra, Ghana

Health in Africa is critical for the preparation of youth for the future. Nothing is more painful to witness than the young with access to education, unable to learn because of their suboptimal health. It is painful because it is preventable!

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Eduardo de Campos Queiroz

CEO of the Maria Cecilia Souto Vidigal Foundation, Brazil

Health, education and social development must work together to help the families, especially the vulnerable ones.

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Chittaranjan Kaul

Director of the Centre for Learning Resources, India

Having long term goals helps us navigate skilfully through the short-term challenges of bringing up our children.

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Panelists debate

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Debate

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17:00 – 17:45 | Plenary session 6

Religion and politics in China

Thierry de Montbrial

Founder and Chairman of the WPC

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Franciscus Verellen

Director of the EFEO Hong Kong Centre, former Director of the Ecole Française d’Extrême-Orient

International relations and sovereignty are important dimensions of Chinese religious policy today, especially bringing foreign religious organisations under the authority of the Communist Party and regulating the religious activities of foreigners in China.

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Jean-Pierre Cabestan

Director of Research at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), Professor and Head of the Department of Government and International Studies at Hong Kong Baptist University

The fact that among the elites and the counter-elites in China you have more and more Christians is both an issue for the authorities and a factor of potential political change.

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Debate

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17:45 – 19:15 | Plenary session 7

Middle East

Steven Erlanger

Chief Diplomatic Correspondent, Europe, New York Times

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Renaud Girard

Senior reporter and war correspondent, Le Figaro

I will look at the Middle East from the outside. The most striking thing I see is the West’s strategic impotence.

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Odeh Aburdene

President of OAI Advisors, Member of the Council on Foreign Relations

The way the Middle East is structured today you have several major regional powers. It would remain unstable but no one power would dominate.

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Mona Makram Ebeid

Egyptian Senator and former Member of Parliament, Distinguished Lecturer at the Political Science Department of the American University in Cairo

Egypt holds several geopolitical cards that, if it is played rationally, can be major assets.

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Miguel Ángel Moratinos

Former Minister of Foreign Affairs and Cooperation of Spain, former EU Special Representative for the Middle East Peace Process

Why do not the South Eastern Mediterranean countries, instead of fighting for demarcation of the oil and gas reserves, create something like a European high authority that can share and coordinate the use and exploration of energy?

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Itamar Rabinovich

President of the Israel Institute (Washington and Jerusalem), Professor Emeritus of Middle Eastern History at the Tel Aviv University, Distinguished Fellow at the Brookings Institution

The normalisation of Syrian life, statehood, and politics will take several more years and the region and the world will have to continue to live with a Syrian problem that needs to be better managed in the future, than it has been in the past.

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Panelists debate

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20:00 | Cocktail & Dinner debate

Thierry de Montbrial

Founder and Chairman of the WPC

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Laurent Fabius

President of the Constitutional Council, former Prime Minister, France

The threat faced by the environment and the climate is not of the same magnitude as the others. It is thus a race against the clock, between the action we can take and the aims we need to pursue.

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Debate

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08:30 – 10:15 | Plenary session 8

The consequences of Trump

Steven Erlanger

Chief Diplomatic Correspondent, Europe, New York Times

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Michael Fullilove

Executive Director of the Lowy Institute, former Adviser to Prime Minister, Australia

President Trump is not really interested in solving policy problems; he is interested in being seen to win.

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Rozlyn Engel

Former Senior executive in charge of the Office of Macroeconomic Analysis in the U.S. Treasury Department, Non-resident Scholar in the Geo-Economics and Strategy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

The Trump phenomenon is really built around a struggling, white, lower middle-class American voter, who has been in a lot of pain over the last two decades.

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Ichiro Fujisaki

President of Nakasone Peace Institute, former Deputy Foreign Minister, former Ambassador to the United States, Japan

It is a pity that the US have opted out from TPP and the Paris Accord, but we are going to do this by ourselves with likeminded countries.

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Wang Jisi

President of the Institute of the International and Strategic Studies at Peking University

Some people say that Trump is helping China. He is damaging the US in the world, making way for China’s rise.

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Ryu Jin Roy

Chairman and CEO of Poongsan Group, Vice Chairman of the Korea-US Economic Council, Vice Chairman of the Federation of Korean Industries

America and the world will survive Donald Trump, whether it takes two more years or four more years.

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Igor Yurgens

Chairman of the Management Board of the Institute of Contemporary Development, Russia

Protectionism, demagoguery, populism are not the way forward but are the retrograde movement. By moving backwards we exhaust the planet and civilization we live in.

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Hubert Védrine

Former French Minister of Foreign Affairs

The United States will one day return, not to the theory of multilateralism, but to the practice of international cooperation, once it has seen the relative failure of the “every man for himself” motto during Mr. Trump’s term, on the Chinese question and other issues.

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Panelists debate

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Debate

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10:15 – 10:45 | Plenary session 9

Conversation

Thierry de Montbrial

Founder and Chairman of the WPC

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Carlos Ghosn

Chairman and CEO of Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi, Chairman and CEO of Renault, Chairman of Nissan Motor Company and Mitsubishi Motors

People are ready to cooperate when they have a common project as long as this cooperation is not a threat to their identity. It is the same with companies.

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Debate

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10:45 – 12:00 | Plenary session 10

The North Korean issue

Vuk Jeremić

President of the Center for International Relations and Sustainable Development (CIRSD), former Minister of Foreign Affairs of Serbia

The North-Korean issue has been dominating the agenda of international relations for decades.

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Tsakhia Elbegdorj

Former President of Mongolia

I do not believe that North Korean society will change in the face of the current leadership.

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Wang Jisi

President of the Institute of the International and Strategic Studies at Peking University

One thing that is very peculiar between China and North Korea is their long-term ideological affinity.

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Douglas Paal

Vice President for studies of Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

Trump will have satisfied the American desire to keep the Koreas separate from China.

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Yim Sung-Joon

Senior Advisor at Lee International IP & Law Group, former Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Korea

For the first time in the US-NK negotiations, Washington has essentially accepted, whether or not graciously, NK’s wish list on sequencing.

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Hosoya Yuichi

Professor at the Faculty of Law of Keio University, former Member of the Advisory Board at Japan’s National Security Council (NSC)

Japan can also play a very significant role in the process of reconstructing North Korea once the rapprochement and peace talks are advanced.

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Georgy Toloraya

Director of Asian Strategy Center at the Institute of Economics of the Russian Academy of Sciences

Now we have the most peaceful and promising period in the Korean situation for many years.

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Panelists debate

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Debate

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12:00 – 13:00 | Plenary session 11

One Belt, One Road

Ronnie C. Chan

Chairman of Hang Lung Properties

The Silk Road accomplished something geo-economically and a little bit geopolitically, but the cultural exchange has perhaps affected the world more than anything else.

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Leung Chun-Ying

Vice Chairman of the National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, former Chief Executive, Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China

Much has been said about the successes and failures of the international and regional infrastructure projects, but there are actually five connectivities under the BRI – policies, facilities, trade, capital and people-to-people connectivity.

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Shiv Vikram Khemka

Vice Chairman of SUN Group, Executive Chairman of The Global Education & Leadership Foundation, India

Russia today sees BRI as a tremendous opportunity to encourage growth within Russia, to create greater connectivity with Asia, and a viable strategy to engage with the East.

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Bayu Krisnamurthi

Former Vice Minister of Trade of Indonesia

BRI needs to serve the Sustainable Development Goals – poverty reduction, food security, energy security, employment creation and so on.

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Panelists debate

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Debate

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13:15 – 15:00 | Lunch debate

Thierry de Montbrial

Founder and Chairman of the WPC

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Mustapha Bakkoury

President of the Moroccan Agency for Solar Energy (Masen)

Today, where renewable technologies are concerned, there is a proven maturity that is indisputable. However, what is not necessarily so is our approach to using such and such a technology.

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15:15 – 16:15 | Plenary session 12

The future of the euro

Jean Pisani-Ferry

European University Institute, Tommaso Padoa-Schioppa chair, and Senior Fellow at Bruegel

We are facing a new situation in Italy, not so much about the sort of short-term disputes between the Italian Government and the EU about the budget but more fundamentally about how Italy has failed in the Euro area.

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Ashoka Mody

Charles and Marie Robertson Visiting Professor in International Economic Policy at the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University

The Euro has been a source of division and will continue to be so, because the interests are naturally different.

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Jean-Claude Trichet

President of Bruegel and former President of the ECB

What is lacking in Europe vis-à-vis the US is a full-fledged banking union and capital union, because it plays a more important role in the US in terms of countering, stability and asymmetric shocks than the fiscal channel itself.

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Olivier Blanchard

Fred Bergsten Senior Fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, former Chief Economist of the IMF

At the euro level, we need a higher average inflation, to allow countries which need to depreciate to do it without requiring decreases in nominal wages. This is the job of the ECB.

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Panelists debate

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Debate

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16:30 – 19:00 | Parallel workshops

Workshop #1 – Finance and economy

Jean-Claude Trichet

President of Bruegel and former President of the ECB

Conflicts and geopolitical tensions in many regions of the world could also be adverse to sustained global growth.

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Qiao Yide

Vice Chairman and Secretary General of Shanghai Development Research Foundation (SDRF)

If the two largest economies are in the phase of going down in the economic cycle, it will drag down the economy of rest of the world.

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Jean-Claude Meyer

Vice-Chairman International of Rothschild & cie

Our only hope is that we will not see a deep crisis, – but just a correction, a soft landing scenario.

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Jeffry Frieden

Professor, Harvard University

The financial system is in many ways a creature of public policy, and it is heavily affected by public policies.

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Daniel Daianu

Member of the Board of the Central Bank of Romania, Member of the European Council for Foreign Relations, former Finance Minister of Romania

In spite of global supply chains and strong interdependencies in the world economy, there is a shift toward emphasizing regional arrangements as well.

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Itoh Motoshige

Emeritus Professor at the University of Tokyo, Professor at the Gakushuin University, Member of the Council on Economic and Fiscal Policy, Japan

Drastic monetary policy is very important when we are in a critical position of deflation.

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Bertrand Badré

Founder and CEO of Blue like an Orange Sustainable Capital, former Managing Director and Chief Financial Officer of the World Bank Group

We are starting to be obsessed with the tree of the next financial crisis and we have forgotten about the forest of the climate crisis.

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Debate

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Workshop #2 – Energy and climate

Nobuo Tanaka

Chairman of The Sasakawa Peace Foundation, former Executive Director of the IEA

Can Japan compete with other countries if the cost of electricity is so high? How can we make a cheaper mix of electricity by using more renewables etc. and be competitive?

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Olivier Appert

President of the French Energy Council and of the French committee of the World Energy Council

The clear objective is to make America energy-independent, and the energy independence of Obama has been replaced by an energy dominance.

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Leila Benali

President of the Arab Energy Forum

There is a growing awareness in the industry that energy storage is of incredible and paramount importance.

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Richard Cooper

Professor of International Economics at Harvard University, former Chairman of the National Intelligence Council, former Under-Secretary of State for Economic Affairs

In the short run, the thing we need to do above all is prevent the building of new coal fired power plants, which contribute greatly to climate change and are heavily polluting.

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Tatsuo Masuda

Visiting Professor at the Graduate School of Nagoya University of Commerce and Business (NUCB)

From a climate policy perspective, China is consolidating the leading position in both the deployment of renewable energy and the establishment of a huge carbon market.

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Ladislas Paszkiewicz

Senior Vice President-Strategy & Climate at Total SA

We do genuinely believe that an oil and gas company like ours can gradually decrease the carbon intensity of the energy products that it sells to its customers.

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Debate

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Workshop #3 – Africa

Nathalie Delapalme

Executive Director (Research and Policy) of the Mo Ibrahim Foundation

The ability to offer job prospects to young people arriving on the labour market in massive numbers is a major challenge for Africa and its immediate vicinity.

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Uri Dadush

Senior Fellow at the OCP Policy Center and non-resident scholar at Bruegel

Convergence, international trade liberalisation, only works in conjunction with the strengthening of domestic policies.

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Elisabeth Guigou

President of the Anna Lindh Euro-Mediterranean Foundation for the Dialogue Between Cultures, former Member of the French National Assembly and President of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the National Assembly

If we want Franco-African relations, and especially European-African relations, that are up to the challenges we face together, we need to establish a new and equal partnership.

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Mostafa Terrab

Chairman and CEO of OCP Group

We have to ask ourselves what good is free trade if we cannot produce the goods and services that we will trade within the continent.

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Othman El Ferdaous

Secretary of State to the Minister of Industry, Investment, Trade and Digital Economy, in charge of investment, Kingdom of Morocco

A free trade agreement will not work without territorial continuity.

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Juliette Tuakli

Member of United Way Worldwide Leadership Council, CEO and Chief Medical Officer of CHILDAccra, Ghana

We really have to build our domestic policies to have a much sounder social contracts between the state and populations they should serve.

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Lionel Zinsou

Co-chair of SouthBridge, former Prime Minister of Benin

I strongly believe that the digital modernisation of the informal sector is extremely useful because it is a remarkably productive and efficient sector.

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Hailemariam Desalegn

Former Prime Minister of Ethiopia

CFTA is one of the ways that we can integrate our continent; it is very important milestone.

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Debate

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20:00 | Cocktail & Gala Dinner

Nasser Bourita

Minister of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation of the Kingdom of Morocco

The fundamentals of international relations are shaking. Borders, sovereignty, responsibility, even applicable law—threats and opportunities know no frontiers.

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08:30 – 09:45 | Plenary session 13

Young Leaders

Patrick Nicolet

Group Chief Technology Officer and Group Executive Board Member of Capgemini

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Mathilde Pak

Economist in the Structural Policy Analysis Division of the Economics Department at OECD

Gig economy platforms seem rather excitingly innovative. […] Policy makers first challenge is to adapt existing regulations.

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Marco Janmaat

Founder and Director of VR Owl, Netherlands

Currently, we have built up a digital system with screens everywhere. […] But in the future with AR, we have the possibility to replace this digital information and show it via a glass.

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Natasha Franck

Founder and CEO of EON Group, United States

The Internet of Things (IoT) also introduces new challenges at the intersection of policy, big-data and environmental product stewardship.

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Tarek Ouertani

Head of Marketing, ProGlove, Germany

The pace of technological change is high, and we need to keep up with this pace in terms of regulation.

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Hermine Durand

Head of division at the French Nuclear Safety Authority

Going digital is necessary to improve the regulation of nuclear power plants for the benefit of citizens but must be undertaken carefully.

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Debate

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09:45 – 11:00 | Plenary session 14

Some basic European strategic issues

Ali Aslan

TV host and journalist, Deutsche Welle TV

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Josep Borrell

Minister of Foreign Affairs of Spain, former President of the European Parliament

Migration is not limited to a period or a circumstance. It is not a matter of effective management, but of strategy for the future. It will not pass; it will amplify.

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Karin Kneissl

Minister of Foreign Affairs of Austria

To make progress together, we will need well-enforced rules, transparency, openness in the awarding of public contracts, in particular intellectual property and risk-sharing.

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Michael Lothian

Member of the House of Lords, former Conservative Member of Parliament

The UK is leaving the European Union with Brexit, but it is not leaving Europe. […] We are an inextricable part of Europe.

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Nicolas Veron

Senior Fellow at Bruegel and at the Peterson Institute for International Economics

Completing the banking union and building it into a capital markets union is what will make or break the international role of the Euro going forward.

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Jean-Louis Bourlanges

Member of the French Parliament, former Member of the Court of Auditors and of the European Parliament

We are now seeing, after a period of illusion during which the threat faded away, a strong surge in all the threats, which is creating, once again, extremely strong pressure for Europe to unify.

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Panelists debate

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11:00 – 12:30 | Plenary session 15

Some impacts of a connected world

Virginie Robert

Chief Editor of the international desk, Les Echos

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François Barrault

Chairman of IDATE DigiWorld Institute, Chairman and Founder of FDB Partners

What the big revolution technology has brought is instant access to knowledge and information anytime, anywhere.

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Chang Dae-Whan

Chairman and Publisher, Maekyung Media Group, Member of the Global Commission on Internet Governance, former acting Prime minister of Korea

Smart cities can solve problems that even nations cannot and they are very important factor in global governance in this connected world.

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Patrick Nicolet

Group Chief Technology Officer and Group Executive Board Member of Capgemini

Trust is fundamental to all human interactions, whether in business or between states, and technology is fundamentally changing how trust will be handled.

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Tobby Simon

Commissioner with the Global Commission for Internet Governance (GCIG), Member of the Trilateral Commission, Founder and President of Synergia Foundation

The biggest challenge at the national level for politicians and policymakers worldwide is the need to balance the enormous benefits of global openness and connectivity with national priorities and policies.

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Francis Gurry

Director General of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO)

Regarding the impact of the connected world on governance, the greater the connection, the greater the dependence that is created, and the greater the dependence, the greater the vulnerability and risk.

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Debate

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12:45 – 14:30 | Lunch debate

Thierry de Montbrial

Founder and Chairman of the WPC

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Hailemariam Desalegn

Former Prime Minister of Ethiopia

Many of us relegate young people to the future but they continue to assert that they are equally the current leaders of Africa.

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Lionel Zinsou

Co-chair of SouthBridge, former Prime Minister of Benin

Fertility does not explain our demographic growth. Our demographic growth comes from life expectancy, which is rising due to better nutrition, education and health care.

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Panelists debate

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14:45 – 15:45 | Reports from parallel workshops

Ihssane Guennoun

Program Officer, OCP Policy Center

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Tatsuo Masuda

Visiting Professor, Nagoya University of Commerce and Business Graduate School, Japan

China is greening its energy system very fast and it will be accelerated.

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Ihssane Guennoun

Program Officer, OCP Policy Center

Migrants should not be perceived as a threat but rather as an opportunity to contribute to the growth of the European continent but also to the African continent.

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Jean-Claude Trichet

President of Bruegel and former President of the ECB

Leverage has continued to grow after the crisis and has augmented less than before in the advanced economies but much more than before in the emerging economies.

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15:45 – 17:45 | Plenary session 16

Final debate

Thomas Gomart

Director of Ifri

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Assia Bensalah Alaoui

Ambassador-at-large of HM the King of Morocco

The tremendous rapidity of technological change is already a source of anxiety. […] The rising inequalities and disparities, in that respect may mean massive “digital refugees”.

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Stuart Eizenstat

Partner, Covington and Burling LLP

Trump has transformed decades of bipartisan American trade policy, showing a deep distrust of multilateral trade agreements, and seeking instead through unilateral actions to reach bilateral or regional deals that he asserts are essential to our national security.

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Donald Johnston

Chair Emeritus of the McCall MacBain Foundation, former Secretary General of the OECD

As the US leaves the global stage, China may become the international rule setter and global leader in commerce and finance.

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Tadakatsu Sano

Attorney-at-law at Jones Day, Former Director-General of the Trade Policy Bureau and Vice Minister for International Affairs, Japan

In fact, the US-China trade war is about hegemony, in particular in the field of cyber-technology, cyberspace, AI and so forth.

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Bernardino León Gross

Director General of the Emirates Diplomatic Academy in the UAE, former Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General and Head of the UN Support Mission in Libya

The idea of an Arab NATO, of this military alliance of the Gulf countries with Egypt and Jordan, is stronger than ever.

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Pierre Morel

Director of the Observatoire Pharos, former EU Special Representative for Central Asia and the Crisis in Georgia

Everyone is against unilateralism officially, but everyone is starting to practice it. […] We have multi-unilateralism.

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Artem Malgin

Vice-rector of MGIMO-University

We need multilateralism, because multilateral regulations usually build through great tendencies, great changes.

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Manuel Muñiz

Dean of the School of International Relations at IE University and Rafael del Pino Professor of Practice of Global Transformation, Senior Associate at Harvard’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs

We will live in a place with more walls and less movement of people and less commerce, and that basically means that we are living the return of history.

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Fathallah Oualalou

Senior Fellow at the OCP Policy Center, former Minister of Economy and Finance, Kingdom of Morocco

The multipolar world, the world of sharing, is a world that recognizes the contribution of all civilisations.

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Debate

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17:45 | Envoi

Thierry de Montbrial

Founder and Chairman of the World Policy Conference

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2017 Conference proceedings

9:00 – 10:00 | Opening session

Thierry de Montbrial

Founder and Chairman of the World Policy Conference

Over the years the WPC has continuously stressed the importance of medium powers and the need for each State to include the structural stability of the international system and its components in formulating their own national interests.

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HM The King Mohammed VI

King of Morocco

In-depth reflection and constructive debate will certainly lead to the emergence of new ideas and fresh solutions that will further improve our countries’ development models.

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Emmanuel Macron

President of France

I could easily take on WPC’s goal as my own – thinking about ways to maintain reasonably open global governance, capable of absorbing shocks while also facilitating desirable changes

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Bartholomew 1st

Archbishop of Constantinople-New Rome and Ecumenical Patriarch

We must therefore note the imperative need for dialogue in order to respond to contemporary conflicts, beyond the religious or non-religious nature of these conflicts. Dialogue is not a negotiation. Nor is it a controversy. There are no winners or losers in it.

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10:00 – 10:45 | Plenary session 1

The future of South-East Europe

Thierry de Montbrial

Founder and Chairman of the World Policy Conference

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Ana Brnabić

Prime Minister of the Republic of Serbia

There is basically one key disagreement, but we are trying to find a way to discuss it and talk about it in a way that will bring us closer to a resolution, and show that we do not want to leave this for the generations that will follow.

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Edi Rama

Prime Minister of the Republic of Albania

People are no longer so frustrated and so reluctant to meet with each other, to come and go, to build business projects, to have cultural projects and so on, so it is a new way to live in the Balkans, which is fundamentally in discontinuity with our culture of living in the past.

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Panelists Debate

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10:45 – 12:00 | Plenary session 2

Investing in Africa

Jean-Michel Severino

President of Investisseurs & Partenaires

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Miriem Bensalah-Chaqroun

President of the General Confederation of Moroccan Companies (CGEM)

As investors, we see education as human capital skills. We need skilled human resources, so we can match our competitiveness and productivity.

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Christoph Beier

Vice Chair of the management board, Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ)

I think we are at the stage to rethink and re-evaluate our joint experiences, and then to come up with a more coherent, more comprehensive, more selective, and more promising development approach.

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Mostafa Terrab

Chairman and CEO, OCP Group

Indeed, we are Arabs, we are part of MENA, but it overlooks the fact that we are fully African, and this has consequences.

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Rémy Rioux

CEO of the Agence française de développement (AFD), Chairperson of the International Development Finance Club (IDFC)

In 1900, there were 100 million Africans. Now, there are 1.2 billion. As on all continents, that will spur endogenous employment and economic growth with a speed and power no other part of the world has ever seen.

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Shinichi Kitaoka

President of the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA)

In the recent past, I think that resourceless countries are making, generally speaking, better progress, development than resourceful countries.

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Debate

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12:00 – 12:30 | Plenary session 3

With Peter Maurer, President of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC)

Thierry de Montbrial

Founder and Chairman of the World Policy Conference

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Peter Maurer

President of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC)

Confidentiality and transparency are two different things. Transparency does not necessarily mean that everybody must know everything all the time. But accountability mechanisms must be set up.

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Debate

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12:45 – 14:30 | Lunch debate

With Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim Al-Thani, Minister of Foreign Affairs, State of Qatar

Thierry de Montbrial

Founder and Chairman of the World Policy Conference

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Sheikh Mohammed Bin Abdulrahman Bin Jassim Al-Thani

Minister of Foreign Affairs, State of Qatar

We hope that one day, wisdom will prevail and that the countries who are trying to avoid engagement, avoid talking and addressing any of the security concerns, will understand they are our concerns too. They have to come to the table and solve the issues.

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Debate

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14:45 – 16:15 | Plenary session 4

Trends in the Middle East

Miguel Ángel Moratinos

Former Minister of Foreign Affairs and Cooperation of Spain

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Youssef Amrani

Chargé de mission, Royal Cabinet, Morocco

The major challenge today in our region, in the entire Arab world is to deconstruct the jihadist narrative and also to propose an alternate narrative.

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Jihad Azour

Director of the Middle East and Central Asia Department, IMF

It is important that we develop a forward-looking perspective on how things can develop in the years to come, so that we can define a certain number of actions that can have an impact and change the economic and social conditions of the people in the region.

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Stuart Eizenstat

Partner, Covington and Burling LLP

The upsurge of nationalist, populist, protectionist, anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim sentiments and the weakening of the political centre are the thread that connects Brexit, the Trump election, the rise of right-wing anti-EU parties and attitudes in the Netherlands, Sweden, Germany, Austria, Poland and Hungary.

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Renaud Girard

Senior reporter and international columnist at Le Figaro

Does the return of national feeling mean the proliferation of wars, the war of all against everyone in the Middle East?

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Odeh Aburdene

President of OAI Advisors, member of the Council on Foreign Relations

The Arab region has to combine good education, science, and technology to achieve economic growth and jobs for their young population.

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Itamar Rabinovich

President of the Israel Institute, former Ambassador to the United States, Israel

We are now in what we call the post-Arab turmoil phase. We had an Arab Spring. We then had the Arab turmoil and the foundations of several Arab states have been shaken.

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16:15 – 17:30 | Plenary session 5

Trust and truth in the digital age

Steven Erlanger

Chief Diplomatic Correspondent, Europe, New York Times

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Haïm Korsia

Chief Rabbi of France

The truth does not lie in the affirmation of one thing, but in an ethical tension between two positions, which requires finding a balance.

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Susan Liautaud

Founder and Managing Director, Susan Liautaud & Associates Limited

Technology has disempowered state institutions. Starting with the law, we see that legal systems lag very far behind technology, which is constantly changing and at an increasingly fast pace, and the law simply cannot keep up.

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Oliver Bussmann

Founder & Managing Partner at Bussmann Advisory, Zug/Switzerland, former UBS and SAP Global CIO

In the end, we are talking about significant financial benefits, such as simplification, speed and transparency, so the technology itself is a new technology of trust that the community will build and there is momentum across the region that I think is unstoppable.

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Anne-Thida Norodom

Professor of public law at the University of Rouen, France; Member of the Strategic Advisory Board of Ifri

What is at stake is sovereignty in the digital age, the idea that States can protect their laws, protect their values, by justifying the application of their national law to digital activities, knowing that American companies basically have a monopoly on those activities.

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Stefan Heumann

Member of the management board of Stiftung Neue Verantwortung (SNV)

Fake news and disinformation on the Internet have become major challenges. We need to study this problem more carefully to better understand it. Coming up with solutions won’t be easy as we need to avoid undermining freedom of speech.

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Debate

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17:30 – 18:45 | Plenary session 6

The world economy

Richard Cooper

Professor of Economics, Harvard University

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Uri Dadush

Senior Fellow, OCP Policy Center, Non-Resident Scholar, Bruegel

Protectionism in the United States is bound to be profoundly destabilising, both at home and abroad, and it is going to give a very bad example to the developing countries that we hope would be the future of our long-term prosperity.

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Kemal Dervis

Vice President and Director of Global Economy and Development, Brookings Institution, former Minister of Economic Affairs of Turkey

On the one hand, you have this booming technology innovation, and on the other hand, you have measured productivity, which in terms of GDP statistics, is actually slowing down, where growth is slower than it has been for decades.

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Jung Sung-Chun

Vice President, Department of International Macroeconomics & Finance, Korea Institute for International Economic Policy (KIEP)

The real wage growth is weak in the European economies, and that is, I think, the main barrier to the active recovery of the European economies.

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Itoh Motoshige

Emeritus Professor of University of Tokyo and Professor of Gakushuin University, former Advisor to the Prime Minister

There are many discussions about the increasing protectionism, and yes, that is a concern, but at the same time, we can still have some prospects about the increase of a free-trade regime.

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Qiao Yide

Vice Chairman & Secretary General, Shanghai Development Research Foundation

The income inequality has been reduced among different countries, but in each country, no matter whether advanced or developing, how do we solve the wide gap of income inequality?

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Debate

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18:45 – 19:45 | Plenary session 7

The future of transportation: connectivity and governance

Jim Hoagland

Contributing Editor, The Washington Post

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François Barrault

Chairman of Idate/DigiWorld Institute; former CEO of BT Global Services and a BT Group PLC board member

You are not smart because you know better than somebody else, you are smart because you share, and young people and the Internet have put us in the sharing economy.

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Patrick de Castelbajac

Head of Airbus Strategy and International

How close are we to urban air mobility and to the dream of flying around? From a technological standpoint, we are not very far.

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Jean-Yves Le Gall

Chair of the ESA Council and President of the Centre National d’Etudes Spatiales (CNES), France

There is a strong need to conduct trials, to allow industry to design innovations for autonomous vehicles and to give governments enough data to inform policy decisions and legislation.

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Panelists Debate

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20:30 | Dinner debate

With Patrick Pouyanné, Chairman of the Board and CEO, Total

Thierry de Montbrial

Founder and Chairman of the World Policy Conference

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Patrick Pouyanné

Chairman of the Board and CEO, Total

The first huge effort we thus need to make collectively is an effort to save energy and achieve energy efficiency. We need to avoid consuming energy.

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Debate

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09:00 – 10:30 | Plenary session 8

America and the world one year after Trump’s election

Richard Burt

Managing Director, McLarty Associates, former US Ambassador to Germany

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Juan Gallardo

Chairman, Organización Cultiba SAB de CV, Mexico

Where are we right now in the renegotiations of NAFTA? I think we are facing a great opportunity, and at the same time a great threat.

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Yukio Okamoto

President, Okamoto Associates, Inc., former Special Advisor to two Prime Ministers of Japan

Mr. Trump or the United States’ most serious concern is North Korea, which is the same for Japan. It is our highest national security agenda.

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Ryu Jin Roy

Chairman and CEO, Poongsan Group, Republic of Korea

The good days of an entire family immigrating to America for better lives and opportunities are almost over unless you are qualified with some skill sets and are able to speak English

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Alexander Panov

Member of the Advisory Board of the Security Council of the Russian Federation, Professor and Head of the department of diplomacy of MGIMO

Political dialogue on all levels has almost frozen. If witch hunts continue in the United States I cannot see a possibility of improving bilateral relations.

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Hubert Védrine

Former French Minister of Foreign Affairs

The entire planet reacted very well to Trump’s decision on climate change, saying, “Whatever he does, we will continue honouring the agreement.”

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John Sawers

Former head of the Secret Intelligence Service, United Kingdom

China is now replacing America in many places as the supporter and upholder of public goods, like action against climate change and in support of global trade.

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Debate

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10:30 – 11:00 | Coffee break

11:00 – 12:00 | Plenary session 9

Artificial intelligence and the future of human labor

Ali Aslan

TV host and journalist, Deutsche Welle TV

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Masood Ahmed

President, Center for global Development, former Director, Middle East and Central Asia Department, IMF

Artificial Intelligence is happening, and it is coming much faster than we anticipated.

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Mari Kiviniemi

Deputy Secretary-General, OECD; Former Prime Minister of Finland

When it comes to the basics of elementary education, people need a mix of strong cognitive and soft skills, to complement their ICT skills.

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Holger Mey

Vice President, Advanced Concepts, Airbus

Once we start with automation and autonomous systems we automatically run into liability problems.

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Patrick Nicolet

Group Executive Board Member, Capgemini

The way we look at the world compared to the past is fundamentally different and the type of work organisation will be completely distributed, so the hierarchical, social model, none of our institutions are geared to address these elements.

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Debate

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12:00 – 13:15 | Plenary session 10

The future of trade and international investments

Nicolas Barré

Managing Director, Les Echos

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Marcus Noland

Executive Vice President and Director of Studies, Peterson Institute for International Economics

The real threat is the interaction between the macro policy and the trade policy.

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Bark Taeho

President, Lee&Ko Global Commerce Institute, former Minister for Trade, Republic of Korea

There seems to be a growing consensus about the need to help all citizens share the opportunities and benefits of trade liberalisation.

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Francis Gurry

Director General of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO)

The vacuum that is being left by the policies of the current Trump administration is creating an opportunity for many countries to move into the space, and in particular China.

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Stefan Mair

Member of the Executive Board, Federation of German Industries (BDI)

There is no alternative to resort to global governance, even if it means weakening national sovereignty. We have to strengthen supranational governance in the European Union.

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Yi Xiaozhun

Deputy Director-General, WTO

We must be aware that many people feel disconnected from economic progress and attitudes towards trade and globalisation have hardened recently.

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Debate

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13:30 – 15:00 | Lunch debate

With Ahmet Davutoglu, Former Prime Minister of the Republic of Turkey

Thierry De Montbrial

Founder and Chairman of the World Policy Conference

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Ahmet Davutoglu

Former Prime Minister of the Republic of Turkey

We need integrity, inclusivity, institutionalisation, interest optimisation and implementation of decisions.

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Debate

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15:15 – 18:15 | Parallel workshops

Workshop #1 – Finance and economy

John Lipsky

Senior Fellow, Foreign Policy Institute at Johns Hopkins University’s Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS); former First Deputy Managing Director, IMF

Despite the good news, US business investment has remained relatively weak, which explains the slow productivity growth that has been accompanied, despite the low unemployment, by low labour participation.

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Akinari Horii

Special Advisor and a member of the Board of Directors of the Canon Institute for Global Studies, former Assistant Governor of the Bank of Japan

In economics terms, inflation expectation is more adaptive than rational, or more backward looking than forward looking. People have to see actual inflation through their eyes, before they believe that the inflation is reality.

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Bertrand Badré

Founder and CEO, Blue Orange Capital; Former Managing Director, World Bank

For 10 years we were miserable talking about the Eurozone and for once, I think it is okay.

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André Levy-Lang

Former Chairman & CEO of Banque Paribas, Affiliate emeritus professor in Finance at Paris-Dauphine University

I think that France is now realising that it has to take care of itself and not wait for Germany and I think that this is what is going to happen.

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Jeffrey Frieden

Professor of government at Harvard University

I think that one of the unheralded and perhaps unexpected successes of the last 10 years was the extent of multilateral cooperation in the aftermath of the September/October 2008 crisis.

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Raed Charafeddine

First Vice- Governor of the Central Bank of Lebanon

What the Central Bank did was actually stimulating the economy and at the same time, taking the precautions so as not to impact inflation.

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Debate

Old sins cast long shadows and the shadow that Argentina’s restructuring casts on the region and beyond is still quite dark.

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Daniel Daianu

Member of the Board of the Central Bank of Romania; former Finance Minister of Romania

In spite of the efforts to maintain what is called the liberal international order, deep currents are working against it.

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Debate

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Workshop #1 – Finance and economy – Synopsis

Bertrand Badré

Founder and CEO, Blue Orange Capital; Former Managing Director, World Bank

The system needs to think out of the box and is paralysed, because the system does not allow you to think out of the box. How can we move this?

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André Levy-Lang

Former Chairman & CEO of Banque Paribas, Affiliate emeritus professor in Finance at Paris-Dauphine University

I think that there is no bank in Europe that creates a systemic risk. The European banking system is sound, but there is a problem in terms of profitability […] partly because of the vagaries of the capital markets.

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Raed Charafeddine

First Vice- Governor of the Central Bank of Lebanon

What the Central Bank did was actually stimulating the economy and at the same time, taking the precautions so as not to impact inflation.

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Daniel Daianu

Member of the Board of the Central Bank of Romania; former Finance Minister of Romania

Financial innovation goes on and toxic products are put on the market and used, in spite of an allegedly more effective regulation and supervision system.

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Jeffrey Frieden

Professor of government at Harvard University

I worry that, when the next crisis comes, intervention by the major powers, and in particular by the US, will be more destructive than constructive.

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Akinari Horii

Special Advisor and a member of the Board of Directors of the Canon Institute for Global Studies, former Assistant Governor of the Bank of Japan

The dearth of active mangers makes the market prone to herd behavior, which could induce runs in the market when a shock is applied to it.

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John Lipsky

Senior Fellow, Foreign Policy Institute at Johns Hopkins University’s Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS); former First Deputy Managing Director, IMF

The IMF’s lack of an effective crisis prevention instrument remains a systemic weakness that can and should be addressed.

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Workshop #2 – Energy and climate

Nobuo Tanaka

Former Executive Director of the International Energy Agency, Chairman of the Sasakawa Peace Foundation

The energy sector is probably one of the most impacted by the unpredictability or uncertainty of the US policy.

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Olivier Appert

Chairman of the Conseil Français de l’Energie

I will make a non‑politically correct statement by saying that Trump’s energy policy will have no direct impact on the CO2 emissions of the US.

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André Caillé

Director of Junex Inc., former Chairman of the World Energy Council and Deputy Minister of the Environment of Quebec

It is not only the withdrawal from the Paris Accord but also the resurrection of coal fired power plants, supposedly clean, and the retirement of many regulations that could greatly impact US emissions.

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Lee Hye-Min

G20 Sherpa, Ambassador for International Economic Affairs, Republic of Korea

The developing countries led by India and Turkey in particular stress the importance of parallel implementation of the Paris Agreement obligations, which are mitigation, adaptation and climate financing.

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Tatsuo Masuda

Visiting Professor, Nagoya University of Commerce and Business Graduate School, Japan

We should not wait for governments to act, but rather communities, companies and civil societies can do everything.

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Ladislas Paszkiewicz

Senior Vice President Strategy and Climate, Total

The difficulty for us as a corporation is how to supply this energy while at the same time decreasing our carbon footprint, which of course energy has an impact on.

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Friedbert Pflüger

Director, European Centre for Energy and Resource Security, King’s College London

We will continue to need oil for a long time, especially in the developing nations, but gas can be a low-emission partner of renewables in the long run.

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Discussion

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Debate

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Workshop #2 – Energy and climate – Synopsis

Nobuo Tanaka

Former Executive Director of the International Energy Agency, Chairman of the Sasakawa Peace Foundation

To produce a transport revolution, very strong government intervention is necessary.

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Lee Hye-Min

G20 Sherpa, Ambassador for International Economic Affairs, Republic of Korea

The Paris Agreement is irreversible and the global community will move towards its implementation, though the road ahead will be very bumpy.

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Friedbert Pflüger

Director, European Centre for Energy and Resource Security, King’s College London

Politicians tend to set goals for a distant future, in which they cannot be held accountable anymore.

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Olivier Appert

Chairman of the Conseil Français de l’Energie

Trump’s energy policy will have no direct impact on the CO2 emissions of the US.

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André Caillé

Director of Junex Inc., former Chairman of the World Energy Council and Deputy Minister of the Environment of Quebec

Natural gas should be used to replace coal.

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Tatsuo Masuda

Visiting Professor, Nagoya University of Commerce and Business Graduate School, Japan

I think technology is a real game-changer in fighting climate change. Even people’s mindset will change accordingly.

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Ladislas Paszkiewicz

Senior Vice President Strategy and Climate, Total

The difficulty for us as a corporation is how to supply this energy while at the same time decreasing our carbon footprint, which of course energy has an impact on.

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Workshop #3 – China

Park, In-kook

President, Korea Foundation for Advanced Studies (KFAS)

In the wake of 19th Party Congress, what kind of economic reforms will we see? What impact will they have on the world economy?

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Jia Qingguo

Dean of the School of International Studies of Peking University

The message is that you do not have to follow the Western approach in your development. Instead, you can find you own path of development according to your situation.

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Qiao Yide

Vice Chairman & Secretary General, Shanghai Development Research Foundation

The conclusion is that China is moving towards the centre of the world stage. The detail is that we will continue to make a great contribution to the global GDP growth.

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Douglas Paal

Vice President, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

There are many more positives in addressing the challenge that China presents to the long-term American presence in the region.

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Richard Cooper

Professor of Economics, Harvard University

These are poor countries west of China; they can use some help, and if China is willing to give the financing, we should applaud it so long as it turns out well.

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Bark Taeho

President, Lee&Ko Global Commerce Institute, former Minister for Trade, Republic of Korea

After the conclusion of the Party Congress, there seems to be an agreement that China’s policy of reform and opening will be continued.

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Yuichi Hosoya

Professor, Department of Political Science, Keio University

Without strong American commitment, I think that Japan has to change a previous strategy for the region, to create something like TPP without the United States.

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Jean-François Copé

Mayor of Meaux, former delegate Minister of the Budget, France

I think that the European Union today is ready, provided it has its own capacity to continue and intensify the structural reforms, to be at a good level to be one of the major partners for China and Asia.

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Debate

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Workshop #3 – China – Synopsis

Douglas Paal

Vice President, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

The United States ought to be coming forward with a policy of co‑optation of China’s new desire to be a more responsible stakeholder in the world.

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Park, In-kook

President, Korea Foundation for Advanced Studies (KFAS)

The most critical factor is whether the Trump administration continues to maintain the North Korea challenge as its top priority.

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Bark Taeho

President, Lee&Ko Global Commerce Institute, former Minister for Trade, Republic of Korea

If certain industries enter into the restructuring process, the implementation of the market opening policy may face difficulties and possibly be delayed.

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Richard Cooper

Professor of Economics, Harvard University

These are poor countries west of China; they can use some help, and if China is willing to give the financing, we should applaud it so long as it turns out well.

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Jia Qingguo

Dean of the School of International Studies of Peking University

The principal contradiction facing Chinese society is the contradiction between the unbalanced and inadequate development and the people’s ever-growing need for a better life.

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Qiao Yide

Vice Chairman & Secretary General, Shanghai Development Research Foundation

The Chinese people is still and will remain for a long time, in the initial stages of socialism.

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Yuichi Hosoya

Professor, Department of Political Science, Keio University

It is essential for the Japanese Prime Minister or government to try and invite the United States to come back to the regional order as a leader of this region.

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Jean-François Copé

Mayor of Meaux, former delegate Minister of the Budget, France

Globalisation is changing shape and the “new Silk Road” symbolises this change.

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Workshop #4 – Russia in twenty years

Igor Yurgens

Chairman of the Management Board of the Institute of Contemporary Development, Russia

The fourth industrial will probably make the distances in Russia, that were our curse in many ways, a nonissue.

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Alexander Dynkin

President, Institute of World Economy and International Relations (IMEMO), Russia

If nothing were to happen and Russia were to continue with the growth of an average of 2% a year, what does it mean in the global hierarchy?

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Michel Foucher

Chair of applied Geopolitics at College of World Studies; Former Director of the policy planning staff of the French Foreign Ministry

Russia is certainly one of the countries that took less benefit from globalisation.

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Donald Johnston

Chair of the McCall MacBain Foundation; Former Secretary-General of the OECD

Russia, with its rich human resource base, has the capacity to become once again a major global force in twenty years.

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Yaroslav Lissovolik

Chief Economist, Eurasian Development Bank

A key issue for Russia will be quality rather than quantity. In terms of quantity, Russia is currently one of the highest recipients of labour markets in the world.

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Artem Malgin

Vice-rector for general affairs and corporate relations, Moscow State Institute of International Relations (MGIMO)

There will be strong growth with Central and Eastern Europe and the Balkans, because now, there are no more emotions when it comes to Russia’s policy towards the Balkans.

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Alexander Panov

Member of the Advisory Board of the Security Council of the Russian Federation, Professor and Head of the department of diplomacy of MGIMO

For Russia and China, if both countries would like to be the leaders of the world, it will be a chance to create a new international order using new international laws.

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Debate

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Workshop #4 – Russia in twenty years – Synopsis

Igor Yurgens

Chairman of the Management Board of the Institute of Contemporary Development, Russia

The fourth industrial will probably make the distances in Russia, that were our curse in many ways, a nonissue.

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Alexander Dynkin

President, Institute of World Economy and International Relations (IMEMO), Russia

The demise of empires almost always brings tectonic shifts in the world order, and it also leaves long‑lasting territorial conflicts.

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Michel Foucher

Chair of applied Geopolitics at College of World Studies; Former Director of the policy planning staff of the French Foreign Ministry

If we are not able to set up a new European order in the next 20 years, a new European concert, we will remain weak in the international sphere and be unable to promote stability in the critical neighbourhood that EU and Russia are sharing.

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Donald Johnston

Chair of the McCall MacBain Foundation; Former Secretary-General of the OECD

Russia, with its rich human resource base, has the capacity to become once again a major global force in twenty years.

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Yaroslav Lissovolik

Chief Economist, Eurasian Development Bank

Russia is doing it together with the European Economic Union, but there are dozens of countries that are waiting in line to forge a free trade area with Russia and its Eurasian partners.

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Artem Malgin

Vice-rector for general affairs and corporate relations, Moscow State Institute of International Relations (MGIMO)

In 20 years, Russia will be much more self‑centred and self‑concerned, with policy and ambitions made-to-measure.

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Alexander Panov

Member of the Advisory Board of the Security Council of the Russian Federation, Professor and Head of the department of diplomacy of MGIMO

For Russia and China, if both countries would like to be the leaders of the world, it will be a chance to create a new international order using new international laws.

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20:00 – 20:30 | Cocktail

20:30 | Gala Dinner

With Nasser Bourita, Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Kingdom of Morocco

Thierry de Montbrial

Founder and Chairman of the World Policy Conference

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Nasser Bourita

Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Kingdom of Morocco

Morocco does not consider itself a “power” (sub-regional, regional or international) but a “hub” of diplomacy, action and ideas for building an imaginative new paradigm.

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08:30 – 09:30 | Reports from parallel workshops

Workshop #1 – Report 1

John Lipsky

Senior Fellow, Foreign Policy Institute at Johns Hopkins University’s Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS); former First Deputy Managing Director, IMF

Even though in the medium-term there are certainly fundamental issues that need to be faced, the principal risks in the near-term are those stemming from political or geopolitical developments.

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Workshop #2 – Report 2

Nobuo Tanaka

Former Executive Director of the International Energy Agency, Chairman of the Sasakawa Peace Foundation

International coordination is necessary, but private sector efforts will yield a very significant improvement for the future of climate change mitigation.

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Workshop #3 – Report 3

Park, In-kook

President, Korea Foundation for Advanced Studies (KFAS)

In the next five years, China will have more continuity than change in foreign policy, and there will be more of a Xi imprint, and Chinese foreign policy will be more pragmatic.

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Workshop #4 – Report 4

Igor Yurgens

Chairman of the Management Board of the Institute of Contemporary Development, Russia

Negative scenario: in 20 years, we are in a real fight between autocracy and democracy, and positive scenario: we manage to build bridges, to create new ideas, and we make a huge step forward in terms of global governance, of togetherness.

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09:30 – 11:00 | Plenary session 11

The European Union and the world

Ali Aslan

TV host and journalist, Deutsche Welle TV

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Richard Burt

Managing Director, McLarty Associates, former US Ambassador to Germany

We are going through a really crucial and historical change in which the message from Washington to Europe and the EU is now: ‘You are on your own.’

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Steven Erlanger

Chief Diplomatic Correspondent, Europe, New York Times

The Germans are desperate to have a France that is in better shape, partly to share the responsibility and the blame for European leadership, because there is a lot of anti-German feeling in Southern and Eastern Europe.

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Elisabeth Guigou

President of The Anna Lindh Euro-Mediterranean Foundation for the Dialogue Between Cultures, Former Member of Parliament and President of the Commission of Foreign Affairs at the Assemblée nationale, France

But Brexit is also an opportunity for the 27, who, for the moment, have stood united in the negotiations in order to overcome their divisions, agree on their common interests and take their destiny in the global world into their hands.

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Bogdan Klich

Senator, Minority Leader of the Senat, former minister of Defense, Poland

That is why, in this deteriorating environment, we have to do something with our European capabilities in the sphere of security and defence. It means that Europe should take more responsibility for its own security.

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Michael Lothian

Former Member of Parliament, United Kingdom

One of the keys to the change we are seeing around us in the world is the growth in anti‑establishment feeling.

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Yukio Okamoto

President, Okamoto Associates, Inc., former Special Advisor to two Prime Ministers of Japan

Who in the world can we partner with? There is only the EU. The EU is the best partner for Japan in this new campaign.

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Debate

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11:00 – 11:30 | Plenary session 12

With Tsakhiagiyn Elbegdorj, Former President of Mongolia

Tsakhiagiyn Elbegdorj

Former President of Mongolia

We are really proud of our history, we are really proud of our present state, and Mongolia is the only liberal political and economic establishment since 1990 in the region.

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Debate

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11:30 – 12:30 | Plenary session 13

The development of Africa

Sean Cleary

Founder and Executive Vice-Chairman of the FutureWorld Foundation and Chairman of Strategic Concepts (Pty) Ltd, South Africa

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Nizar Baraka

Chairman, Economic, Social and Environmental Council (CESE)

How to integrate our entire continent? (…) I believe that this is the real bold move that will enable us to enjoy endogenous growth, growth that carries Africa, and that will truly make Africa the master of its fate, looking ahead to a time of involvement and integration with its partners.

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Cheikh Tidiane Gadio

President of the Institute for Pan-African Strategies (IPS), Former Foreign Minister of Senegal

For Africans and their friends, it is time for a change in paradigm; it is time to reflect again on how to save this continent.

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Aminata Touré

Former Prime Minister of Senegal

We also need to build solidarity, to tackle challenges such as corruption, terrorism, illegal migration, climate change impact, and solidarity in sharing progress.

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Lionel Zinsou

Co-President of the Fondation AfricaFrance, Former Prime Minister of Benin, Former President, PAI Partners

We have no economic suspense, but we have a political and social suspense, because our model does not resolve any of our social problems on its own, unless we design policies that are extremely well-suited to this very particular constraint.

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Debate

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13:00 – 14:30 | Lunch debate

With Aziz Mekouar, Ambassador of Morocco, in charge of the negotiations on climate

Thierry de Montbrial

Founder and Chairman of the World Policy Conference

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Aziz Mekouar

Ambassador of Morocco, in charge of the negotiations on climate

If you look at all the decisions taken by many countries, especially China, but also in Norway and other countries (…), we see a lot happening in terms of research, in terms of science, and in terms of transforming science into implementation.

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Debate

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15:00 – 16:30 | Plenary session 14

Security in Asia

Marcus Noland

Executive Vice President and Director of Studies, Peterson Institute for International Economics

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Yim Sung-Joon

Senior Advisor at Lee International IP & Law Group; Former Deputy Minister for Foreign Affairs and National Security Advisor to the President, Republic of Korea

Continuation of stringent sanctions on North Korea plus extended US deterrence and show of strength would be the best option to deter North Korean provocation.

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Yuichi Hosoya

Professor, Department of Political Science, Keio University

The Japanese strategy is, of course, to avoid war but, at the same time to try to denuclearise North Korea.

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Jia Qingguo

Professor and Dean of the School of International Studies of Peking University

The good news is that President Xi and President Trump seem to have gotten along with each other so far, it is quite impressive that these two strong characters find each other worthy of respect.

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Michael Yeoh

Founder & CEO of the Asian Strategy and Leadership Institute (ASLI)

We need to have more intelligence sharing among countries in Asia because that is so important in the fight against terrorism.

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Jusuf Wanandi

Co-founder, Vice Chairman of the Board of Trustees and Senior Fellow of the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) Foundation, Indonesia

On the one hand the rise of China, and especially with President Xi Jinping’s strong leadership, and on the other the election of President Trump, with his capriciousness, have created many uncertainties for us, because we cannot follow his thinking and where he would like to go.

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Mayankote Kelath Narayanan

Former Governor of West Bengal, The Raj Bhavan, India

Afghanistan may be in South Asia, but I think it is the heart of Asia.

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Debate

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16:30 – 17:45 | Plenary session 15

Young Leaders session

Patrick Nicolet

Group Executive Board member, Capgemini

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Natalie Cartwright

Co-founder of Finn.ai

I think AI is going to bring amazing changes. Our challenge is how we build governance structures, policies, and systems that are as nimble, innovative, and equitable as the companies they will support.

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Edouard Nattée

Founder and CEO of Fox Intelligence

Transparency and accountability are the only way towards change. Starting by setting transparency as the default mode, while always protecting privacy and personal information, is the first step any leader should take.

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Allen Ali Mohammadi

Co-founder, Hippogriff AB

We are living in a time where we have access to advanced technologies and high‑quality infrastructure that can empower us to tackle the challenges we are facing.

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Arthur Stril

Co-founder, Zinc

We are on the cusp of a healthcare revolution and that there is truly a time, which is now, where healthcare is going to profoundly change, especially in the way it is delivered.

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Aurélien Billot

Head of the Commercial and development policies Unit at the General Secretariat for European Affairs, France

In this thriving environment, we need an entity with democratic ownership that can address these issues of data governance, of access versus security, and of a level playing field, and I think that the EU has a chance here and could help fill this gap for all of us.

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Debate

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17:45 – 19:45 | Plenary session 16

The state of the world

Jim Hoagland

Contributing Editor, The Washington Post

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Assia Bensalah Alaoui

Ambassador-at-large of HM the King of Morocco

It is clear that if you do not give people the chance to take up real issues in their societies, you do not provide the sustainable foundation for security. That is what we are trying to do in Morocco, thanks to the ambitious democratisation programme.

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Kriengsak Chareonwongsak

Former Prime Ministerial Advisor of Thailand, Senior Fellow Harvard University and Chairman, Nation-Building Institute

There is a need for revolution coming that will change the entire architecture of the new global order so that economic, political, and social paradigms will be shifted and changed because today we experience a broken world that we cannot repair.

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Ju Chul Ki

President of the Overseas Koreans Foundation, Former Senior Secretary for Foreign Affairs and National Security, Office of the President of the Republic of Korea

It is my view that the Iranian nuclear deal should be upheld. It would be very difficult to envisage another solution. I hope, personally, that the US Congress will take some decision on this matter.

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Ashwani Kumar

Senior Advocate Supreme Court; Former Union Minister for Law & Justice, India

We are all individually and collectively duty bound – not once, not twice, but over and over again, to repeat what we believe is right because as Dante cautioned us – the hottest places in hell, said Dante, are reserved for those who in period of moral crises, which we face today, preserve their neutrality.

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Mona Makram Ebeid

Egyptian Senator, Distinguished Lecturer, Political Science Department, American University in Cairo

The corollary to the growing influence of the security establishment has been the neutralizing of civilian politics. Civil society is under relentless pressure and its activities have been severely curtailed.

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Fathallah Oualalou

Former Minister of Economy and Finance, Morocco

From the torment between this globalised present and the depths of culture and history, we must move on to managing coexistence between modernity, globalisation, and the depths of historical and cultural specificity.

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Meir Sheetrit

Member of Parliament, Israel

I believe the only solution to reach peace with the Middle East is through what we call the Saudi Initiative, or the Arab Peace Initiative.

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Yukari Niwa Yamashita

Board Member, Director, The Institute of Energy Economics, Japan (IEEJ)

I believe that we do not need more signatures on a piece of paper, but we need far more conviction and actions.

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19:45 | Envoi

Thierry de Montbrial

Founder and Chairman of the World Policy Conference

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2016 Conference proceedings

08:30 – 09:30 | Welcome coffee

09:30 – 10:30 | Opening session

Thierry de Montbrial

President and Founder of the World Policy Conference

A quarter of a century after the end of the cold war, the age is no longer conducive to dreaming of naïve globalisation and of the end of History. But we must learn to live better with globalisation as it really is, i.e. with a degree of interdependence that will deepen even more considerably.

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Sheikh Abdullah bin Naser bin Khalifa Al-Thani

Prime Minister, Qatar

We are probably all aware that our contemporary world is going through an unprecedented phase, abundant with grave challenges to safety, stability and sustainable development in the shadow of the impaired world order that suffers from double standards in dealing with people’s affairs.

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Jean-Marc Ayrault

Minister of Foreign Affairs and International Development, France

Faced with the world’s disorders, the only response is to join our forces, to show solidarity and to find collective solutions to shared problems. We need to continue our action. To act ceaselessly. To act while remaining loyal to our principles. Never to give up. That is France’s conviction.

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Jim Hoagland

Contributing Editor, The Washington Post

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Ahmet Davutoglu

Former Prime Minister of Turkey

The question is clear. Are we going towards global governance or towards world disorder? If you visit these capitals, you will see that there is a source of concern everywhere. What will be the future of international systems? What will be the future of the EU? What will be the policy of the new American president, Donald Trump? What will be the future of the Middle East?

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10:45 – 12:30 | Plenary session 1

The future of the Middle East

Jim Hoagland

Contributing Editor, The Washington Post

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Youssef Amrani

Royal Cabinet, Morocco

Fear took over and now, globalisation is seen as the root of all evil. So do we abandon the globalisation experiment? Or do we try and save it as it is and engage in a useless fight to save “business as usual”. Of course, the answer is neither.

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Saeb Erekat

Palestinian Chief Negotiator, Palestine

Mark my words very carefully; what is going on in the Arab world is exactly what Europe went through on 15 March 1848, when Chancellor Metternich had to flee his palace after three weeks of peaceful demonstrations in Vienna.

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Jim Hoagland

Contributing Editor, The Washington Post

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Xiaosheng Gong

China’s Special Envoy on the Middle East Issue

First, passing initially through Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Libya, those four hot spots in crisis should be considered together. The international community should not emphasise the crisis in just one or two and forget others, especially Palestine issues.

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Riad Hijab

Former Prime Minister, Syria

This escalation of the war waged by the regime and its Russian and Iranian allies falls under the shadow of pivotal transformations at all regional and international levels.

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Miguel Ángel Moratinos

Former Minister of Foreign Affairs and Cooperation of Spain

We can and should try to solve this lasting conflict because instability in the Middle East will continue if the Palestinian Israeli issue is not resolved, even if we want to defeat Daesh or make peace with Syria internally.

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Jim Hoagland

Contributing Editor, The Washington Post

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Abdulaziz Othman bin Sager

Chairman of the Gulf Research Center, Saudi Arabia

Today, six years later, we could say that this Arab Spring was only able to achieve a few of its objectives.

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Jim Hoagland

Contributing Editor, The Washington Post

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Itamar Rabinovich

President of the Israel Institute, Distinguished Global Professor at New York University (NYU) and Distinguished Fellow at the Brookings Institution

What we are witnessing now is the collapse of a large number of states, at least six or seven states in the region meet the classic definition of failed state.

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Panelists Debate

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Debate

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12:30 – 13:30 | Plenary session 2

Ethics and Government-Business relations

Susan Liautaud

Vice Chair of Court London School of Economics and Political Science, Founder and Managing Director Susan Liautaud & Associates Limited

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Kriengsak Chareonwongsak

President of the Institute of Future Studies for Development; former Prime Ministerial Adviser, Thailand

The main idea is that all sectors, public, private and people, should collaborate fully to take charge of social well being.

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Mari Kiviniemi

Deputy Secretary-General, OECD; Former Prime Minister of Finland

The ease with which individuals can avoid tax by shifting profits offshore has been simplified and as a result, multinational companies can move their most valuable assets to offshore low or no tax centres, where value creation does not happen.

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Ashwani Kumar

Senior Advocate to the Supreme Court; Former Union Minister for Law & Justice, India

While the technological revolution has empowered people with unprecedented access to information and knowledge, questions arise about the ethical dimensions of a technology driven society.

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Bruno Lafont

Co-chairman of the Board of Directors, LafargeHolcim

There is one interesting topic, which is rarely spoken about, which is whether we are all working for the general interest.

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Panelists Debate

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Debate

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13:30 – 14:45 | Lunch debate

Thierry de Montbrial

President and Founder of the World Policy Conference

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Guillaume Pepy

Chairman of SNCF’s Executive Board and Chairman and CEO of SNCF Mobilités

The only option we have is to address three game changes: the impact of climate change, of course; the urban population explosion; and the increasing scarcity of resources.

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15:00 – 15:30 | Plenary session 3

Turkey’s European and international role

Thierry de Montbrial

President and Founder of the World Policy Conference

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Ali Babacan

Member of Parliament and former Deputy Prime Minister, Turkey

In these kinds of organisations, the followers are asked to stop thinking, close their minds, lock their minds and do every kind of crazy things.

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Debate

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15:30 – 16:30 | Plenary session 4

Health: Technological development and global governance

John Andrews

Contributing Editor, The Economist

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Sheikh Dr. Mohammed bin Hamad Al-Thani

Director of Public Health, Ministry of Public Health in Qatar

Modern technology has changed the structure and organization of the entire medical field.

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Christian Bréchot

President of the Institut Pasteur, France

Scientists in the field of biomedical research do need infrastructures, equipment and technological platforms. This is at several levels.

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Zhu Yan-Mei

Executive Vice President of the Beijing Genomics Institute

Last year, from the year 2000, the human genomics project has almost completely deciphered the genome.

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Panelists Debate

You are making such advances in science and medicine. At some point, there must already be ethical boundaries.

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16:30 – 18:00 | Plenary session 5

Technological change and the New Social Contract

Masood Ahmed

Director, Middle East and Central Asia Department, International Monetary Fund

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Tobby Simon

Founder and Chairman, Synergia Foundation

Every couple of generations, we script new social contracts, and they keep evolving to better reflect our social norms and values.

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Chang Dae-Whan

Chairman and Publisher of Maekyung Media Group, Republic of Korea

The fourth industrial revolution covers IoT, and I just learned IoL, which means life. There are robotic sensors, driverless cars or drones, and the genetic engineering, and fintech.

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Patrick Nicolet

Group Executive Board Member, Capgemini

There is no question that technological change is drastically disrupting both workplaces and the social environment.

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Sébastien Bazin

Chairman & CEO, AccorHotels

You are going to have more job destruction over the next 3 4 years than job creation. You have a gap of time for people to adapt to this new evolution.

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Debate

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18:00 – 18:30 | Coffee break

18:30 – 19:00 | Plenary session 6

UK after Brexit

Thierry de Montbrial

President and Founder of the World Policy Conference

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John Kerr

Member of the House of Lords, former British Ambassador to the United States and the EU

The die will not be cast irrevocably when, by March, the government triggers the withdrawal proceedings.

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Debate

Are we making too big a deal of Brexit? […] Basically, the UK has become a lot more competitive than it was before.

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19:00 – 19:45 | Plenary session 7

Security and Economic Development in Africa

Thierry de Montbrial

President and Founder of the WPC

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Cheikh Tidiane Gadio

President of IPS, Former Foreign Minister of Senegal

Africa is gradually becoming the epicentre of global terrorism.

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Nathalie Delapalme

Executive Director, Research and Policy, Mo Ibrahim Foundation

Africa is 54 countries with 54 geographies, 54 different histories, 54 often-divergent trajectories.

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Panelists Debate

Africa is becoming a battleground for the world’s great powers. The tragedy is that Africans are often sitting on the sidelines.

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20:30 | Dinner debate

Thierry de Montbrial

President and Founder of the WPC

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Chey Tae-won

Chairman, SK Group, Republic of Korea

Instead of genuinely contributing to society, many CSR activities tend to focus on building the company’s image and promoting the brand.

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Kevin Rudd

President of the Asia Society Policy Institute in New York, Australia’s 26th Prime Minister and Former Foreign Minister

It can be argued that historical forces of inertia, entropy and chaos constitute the “steady state” of international relations.

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08:30 – 09:45 | Plenary session 8

European Union: what next?

Steven Erlanger

London bureau chief of The New York Times

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Elisabeth Guigou

Member of the French Parliament and President of the Commission of Foreign Affairs at the Assemblée nationale

The shock of the Brexit provides all the more evidence of the preexisting necessity to reshape the European project.

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Norbert Röttgen

Chairman of the Foreign Affairs’ Committee, Bundestag, former German Federal Minister for the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety

We are at a point and situation not seen since World War II. There have not been so many crises at the same time, abroad and internally, in Europe and confronting Europe.

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Panelists Debate

Germany still has a long way to go in this objective of a greater contribution to a foreign and defence policy. The only option I can see is for France and Germany to work on more coherent policies.

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Debate

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10:00 – 12:30 | Parallel workshops

Workshop #1 – Workshop 1: Finance and Economy

Jean-Claude Trichet

President of Bruegel; Former President of the European Central Bank

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John Lipsky

Senior Fellow, Foreign Policy Institute at Johns Hopkins University’s Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS)

Taking stock of where things stand today in regards of those goals, I would conclude that none of the [G20] goals have been attained.

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Raed Charafeddine

First Vice- Governor of the Central Bank of Lebanon

After the 2008 crisis, Central Banks have shifted from being pure regulators overseeing the financial sectors into important players in the real economies.

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Daniel Daianu

Member of the Board, Central Bank of Romania, former Finance Minister of Romania

The impact of the financial crisis is also significant: estimates are that the Great Recession has brought GDP potential growth below 1,5% in the EU for the next 5-10 years.

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Hur Kyung-Wook

Senior Advisor to Bae, Kim & Lee LLC; Former Vice Minister of Strategy and Finance, Republic of Korea, former Ambassador of Korea to the OECD

Most Asian countries have turned to domestic consumption as well as investment, fuelled by Asian money both domestic and from abroad as well.

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Kiyoto Ido

Vice Chairman, Institute for International Economic Studies, Japan

Abenomics is based on the three arrows of monetary easing, flexible fiscal policy and growth strategy.

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André Levy-Lang

Affiliate emeritus Professor at Paris-Dauphine University, former CEO of Banque Paribas

Banks and insurance companies are no longer active players in capital markets and they used to be one of the stabilising forces in capital markets.

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Debate

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Workshop #2 – Workshop 2: Energy and Climate

Donald Johnston

Chair of the McCall MacBain Foundation, Geneva, Switzerland, Former Secretary-General of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in Paris

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Olivier Appert

Chairman of the Conseil Français de l’Energie

Every two years, a new Norway has been put into production in the US, and the US has become the most significant oil producer, surpassing Saudi Arabia and Russia.

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Ladislas Paszkiewicz

Vice President Strategy & Climate, Total

Oil and gas is responsible for about 37% of the GHG emissions […]

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Debate 1

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Tatsuo Masuda

Professor, Nagoya University of Commerce and Business Graduate School, Japan

Maybe technology is the solution to all the problems that we face regarding energy and climate change.

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Daniela Lulache

Chief Executive Officer, Nuclearelectrica, former Counselor of the Vice-Governor of the National Bank of Romania

We cannot reach this target of decarbonisation and we cannot solve all the climate change problems that are occurring without nuclear.

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Lee Hye-Min

G20 Sherpa and Ambassador for International Economic Affairs, Republic of Korea, Former Ambassador to France, former Deputy Minister for Trade, Republic of Korea

We need to implement a commitment regarding mitigation and adaptation, but developed countries should provide financial means.

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Debate 2

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Workshop #3 – Workshop 3: China in transition

Park In-Kook

President, Korea Foundation for Advanced Studies (KFAS), former Ambassador and Permanent Representative of the Republic of Korea to the United Nations

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Jia Qingguo

Professor and Dean of the School of International Studies of Peking University

The country biggest challenge is how to sort out the rules so that people can do things legitimately and quickly.

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Qiao Yide

Vice Chairman & Secretary General, Shanghai Development Research Foundation

The Chinese government defines six industries as ‘emerging industries with strategic importance’: cyber economy; high-end manufacturing; digital economy; green and low carbon; bio economy.

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Richard Cooper

Professor of Economics, Harvard University

What can we expect of a Trump administration? And how will it affect China?

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Douglas Paal

Vice President, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

It will be a good time for China. That is widely felt in the business community and outside official ranks.

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Bark Taeho

Professor, GSIS, Seoul National University

The Doha Round of multilateral trade negotiations is stalled going nowhere.

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Michel Foucher

Chair of applied Geopolitics at College of World Studies (FMSH-ENS), former Director of the policy planning staff of the French Foreign Ministry

It’s important to understand that the general context has changed. […] So classical Realpolitik is the new norm, with areas of influence, pacts and alliances, logistical and military facilities abroad.

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Yuichi Hosoya

Professor, Department of Political Science, Keio University

President Trump will focus on an ‘America First’ policy, which means that the United States will reduce in some way its engagement in East Asia.

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Debate

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12:45 – 14:15 | Lunch debate

Thierry de Montbrial

President and Founder of the World Policy Conference

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Shivshankar Menon

Chairman of the Advisory Board of the Institute of Chinese Studies in New Delhi, and Distinguished Fellow at the Brookings Institution, Washington, Former National Security Adviser to the Prime Minister, India

India is undergoing massive internal change, so rapid that we really still have to come to terms with it.

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14:15 – 16:00 | Plenary session 9

Post-American Elections

Jim Hoagland

Contributing Editor, The Washington Post

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François Bujon de l’Estang

President, FBE International Consultants, former Chairman of Citigroup France

Many questions also have been posed about a deeply divided America, which was really the background to this election.

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Ichiro Fujisaki

Chairman of the Institute of International Relations, Sophia University, Japan, Former Ambassador of Japan to the United States

What will happen? On three fronts, policy may have to be watched in the following areas: environment, trade and the Middle East.

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Jin Roy Ryu

Chairman and CEO, Poongsan Group

President elect Trump’s campaign slogan “Make America great again” captured the hearts of those who voted for him.

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Juan Gallardo

Chairman, Organizacion Cultiba SAB de CV, Mexico

There are also more Mexicans coming back to Mexico than going to the US now for at least two to three years running. The idea of having a well-controlled and properly monitored border has been alive and working strongly.

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Vuk Jeremic

President, Center for International Relations and Sustainable Development (Cirsd), former Minister of Foreign Affairs, Serbia

One can see how Donald Trump’s election victory may serve as a boost to populist movements, ideas, and candidates in the forthcoming Western European elections.

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Wang Jisi

President of the Institute of International and Strategic Studies, Peking University, and professor of the School of International Studies, Peking University

China has been one of the largest beneficiaries of economic globalization, and the next step of reform and opening will continue to depend on open markets and free interflow of capital.

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Ryan Evans

Founder, CEO, Editor – ‎War on the Rocks

We actually have to be prepared for the breakdown of democracy in the United States and perhaps even the introduction of some form of autocracy.

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Debate

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16:00 – 16:30 | Plenary session 10

Space as a major technological and governance adventure

Thierry de Montbrial

President and Founder of the World Policy Conference

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Jean-Yves Le Gall

President of the Centre National d’Etudes Spatiales (CNES), President of the International Astronautical Federation (IAF), co-Chair of the Council of the European Space Agency

Satellites are crucial instruments supporting efforts to curb climate change.

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Debate

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16:30 – 17:00 | Coffee break

17:00 – 18:30 | Plenary session 11

Fighting Terrorism

Justin Vaïsse

Directeur du Centre d’analyse, de prévision et de stratégie du ministère des Affaires étrangères, France

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Sergei Karaganov

Honorary Chairman of the Presidium of the non-governmental Council on Foreign and Defense Policy of Russia, Founder and former Deputy Director of the Institute of Europe of the Academy of Sciences of USSR/Russia

[Terrorist organisations] are also the result of unjustified, totally incompetent and irresponsible intrusion by foreign powers.

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Mayankote Kelath Narayanan

Former Governor of West Bengal, The Raj Bhavan, Former Senior Advisor and National Security Advisor to the Prime Minister of India

The Internet will become a crucial weapon in the hands of the ISIS, once it morphs into ISIS 2.0. Already the ISIS has plans to use the ‘deep web’ and the ‘dark net’.

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Jamal Khashoggi

General Manager, Editor in Chief Of AlArab News Channel

We have to go for the root cause of the problem. The root cause of the problem is chaos and anarchy.

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Wang Jisi

President of the Institute of International and Strategic Studies, Peking University, and professor of the School of International Studies, Peking University

Anti-terrorism has assumed a higher place on China’s domestic agenda – it occupies a higher place on the list of priorities.

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Jehangir Khan

Director of the UN Counter-Terrorism Implementation Task Force (CTITF) and the UN Counter-Terrorism Centre (UNCCT) in the Department of Political Affairs (DPA) in the UN Secretariat

The reason we are concerned about terrorism is that it has a human face. What is that human face? It is the face of the victim.

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Panelists Debate

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Debate

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18:30 – 19:30 | Plenary session 12

Political and Economic Stability in East Asia

Richard Cooper

Professor of International Economics, Harvard University

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Ichiro Fujisaki

Chairman of the Institute of International Relations, Sophia University, Japan, Former Ambassador of Japan to the United States

Japan is seen as one of the countries bringing stability to the region. This is because our relations with countries around us have changed very drastically.

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Jia Qingguo

Professor and Dean of the School of International Studies of Peking University

One of the hotspots is North Korea’s nuclear development. This challenge is approaching a threshold.

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Ju Chul-Ki

President of the Overseas Koreans Foundation, former Senior Secretary for Foreign Affairs and National Security to the President, Korea

There are always sources of instability in East Asia for it to continue to leap forward.

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Debate

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20:00 – 20:30 | Cocktail

20:30 | Official Dinner

Thierry de Montbrial

President and Founder of the World Policy Conference

Soltan bin Saad Al-Muraikhi

Minister of State for Foreign Affairs, Qatar

The State of Qatar has played a key role in mediation to reach peaceful settlements to conflicts in several areas of the world.

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08:45 – 10:00 | Plenary session 13

Virginie Robert

Foreign desk Editor, Les Echos

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Panelists Debate

Maurice Obstfeld said that turning back the clock on trade can only deepen and prolong the world economy’s current doldrums, yet we see less and less support for trade agreements in the US, as in Europe.

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Debate

The US cannot be isolated from the global economy, so what alternative could there be?

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10:00 – 11:15 | Plenary session 14

Steven Erlanger

London bureau Chief of The New York Times

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Panelists Debate

Hydrocarbons are very important in this region and will remain an important for decades for many reasons.

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11:15 – 11:45 | Coffee break

11:45 – 12:30 | Reports from parallel workshops

Workshop #1 – Report 1

Jean-Claude Trichet

President of Bruegel; Former President of the European Central Bank

The poor level of investment was quoted frequently as one of the reasons why growth was so mediocre; the abnormal level of investment is not preparing the way for growth and labour productivity programmes, because the stock of capital is not what it should be.

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Workshop #2 – Report 2

Marie-Claire Aoun

Director of the Center for Energy at the French Institute for International Relations (Ifri)

While peak oil supply threats were dominating the debates 10 years ago, today we are more talking about the peak oil demand which will probably be the outcome of energy transition policies.

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Workshop #3 – Report 3

In-kook Park

President, Korea Foundation for Advanced Studies (KFAS), former Ambassador and Permanent Representative of the Republic of Korea to the United Nations

Chinese economy’s structural transition from export oriented economy to domestic consumption-led economy has already begun to manifest.

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12:30 – 13:00 | Plenary session 15

Education and the role of women

Mona Makram Ebeid

Egyptian Senator and former member of Parliament, Distinguished Lecturer, Political Science Department, American University in Cairo

Two main issues concerning education and the role of women: one of them is flagship educational programs in the Arab world; the second is women as an untapped resource in the fight against terrorism.

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Hamda Hassan Al-Sulaiti

Secretary General, Qatar National Commission for Education, Culture and Science

Qatar has [long] been interested in teaching young girls. This started in 1956, when it embarked on providing education to women.

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Debate

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13:00 – 14:30 | Lunch

14:30 – 15:45 | Plenary session 16

Diversification, Education and Employment in the Middle East

Mohamed Kabbaj

President of Lafarge Morocco, Chancelor of Euro-Mediterranean university of Fès and member of the Hassan II Academy of Science and Technology, former Advisor to His Majesty the King Mohammed VI, former Minister of Finance and Foreign Investment, Morocco

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Uri Dadush

Senior Fellow, OCP Policy Center, non-resident scholar, Bruegel

Over the next several years the demographics will be favourable for solving the unemployment problem, not in the sense that it will be good, but that is will not be as bad as it has been in the past.

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Masood Ahmed

Director of the IMF’s Middle East and Central Asia Department

Going forward, GCC governments are not going to have the resources to be able to employ all the nationals in the public sector, so they have to be employed increasingly in the private sector.

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Mona Makram Ebeid

Egyptian Senator and former member of Parliament, Distinguished Lecturer, Political Science Department, American University in Cairo

It is simple: Egypt cannot reach its full potential without women. Great nations draw their strength from all their people. Harnessing that strength means tolerating differences that are peacefully expressed.

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Hassan Al-Derham

President of Qatar University

With the discovery of oil and the exploitation of oil, people took the easy road, and that means the more comfortable road. This involves heavy reliance on government subsidies, government allowances, and government jobs as well.

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Debate

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15:45 – 17:00 | Plenary session 17

Young Leaders Session: Disruption, Populism and the World of Tomorrow

Manuel Muñiz

Director, Program on Transatlantic Relations, Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard University

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Li Yi-Fan

CEO, Hesai Photonics Technologies

In this fast-evolving world, we are trying to see things in a different dimension, where you can jump out of this 2D dimension and to look at it in a different angle. And you come to a complete different conclusion and it is always disruptive.

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Lionel Baraban

Co-Founder & CEO, FAMOCO

Populism is basically a lack of trust, and in the real world, like the digital world, you need to bring trust.

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Caroline Goulard

CEO & Co-Founder, Dataveyes

Our ability to implement smart technologies exceeds by far our ability to understand how the algorithms that feed them work.

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Pierre Dubuc

Co-Founder, OpenClassrooms

There needs to be a much stronger link between learning and employment. Today, recent graduates are struggling to find work that matches their skills.

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Essa Al-Mannai

Executive Director at Reach Out To Asia, Qatar Foundation, Qatar

The youth are asking to be not just on the other side of the table as the recipient of the humanitarian work but to have an active, engaged, responsible player within the process itself.

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Debate

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17:00 – 17:30 | Coffee break

17:30– 19:30 | Plenary session 18

Final Debate

Bertrand Collomb

Honorary Chairman, LafargeHolcim

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Hubert Védrine

Former French Minister of Foreign Affairs

Current events challenge not so much the present global order […] but the hopes and illusions of Westerners and of all the globalised elites.

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Renaud Girard

Senior reporter at Le Figaro

Given their education and philosophical background, it is reasonable to think that Western leaders would take only rational, carefully considered decisions. They do not.

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Michel Foucher

Chair of applied Geopolitics at College of World Studies (FMSH-ENS), former Director of the policy planning staff of the French Foreign Ministry

During a period of threats, it is appropriate to strengthen the exercise of basic sovereign functions and let it be known to opinion makers.

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Manuel Hassassian

Ambassador of Palestine to the United Kingdom

Peace, stability and security in the Middle East have been lacking for decades now. The simple answer to this is the lack of a resolution to the Palestinian Israeli conflict.

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Marcelo Sanchez Sorondo

Chancellor, Pontifical Academy of Sciences and Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences

The real solutions lie in making a heartfelt effort to defend human dignity and the liberty not only of every individual, but also of different populations.

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Donald Johnston

Chair of the McCall MacBain Foundation, Geneva, Switzerland, Former Secretary-General of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in Paris

You cannot imagine what a miracle the post war evolution of Europe has been. That is too often forgotten.

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Yim Sung-Joon

Senior Advisor, Lee International IP & Law Group; Former President, Korea Foundation

As election day approached, these media even rated the chance of Clinton winning by over 90%.

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Tadakatsu Sano

Attorney-at-law at Jones Day; Former Director-General of the Trade Policy Bureau and Vice Minister for International Affairs; Chief Executive Assistant to Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama

The real loser seems to me to be the traditional establishment. Trump attacked career politicians, Media, Academia, business people in the finance industry and international institutions.

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François Barrault

Chairman and Founder of FDB Partners SPRL

We have two worlds. There is the 1.0 world which is an extrapolation of the past […] Then there is the 2.0 world, which is the digital world.

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Panelists Debate

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Debate

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19:30 | Envoi

Thierry de Montbrial

President and Founder of the World Policy Conference

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Hassan bin Ibrahim Al Mohannadi

Director of Diplomatic Institute, MOFA, Qatar

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2015 Conference proceedings

08:30 – 09:45 | Opening session

Thierry de Montbrial

President and founder of the WPC

Our goal is to help to improve governance, in all its aspects, in order to foster the emergence of a world that is more open, more prosperous, more just and respectful of the diversity of States and nations.

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Didier Burkhalter

Federal Councillor, Head of the Federal Department of Foreign Affairs, Switzerland

Globalisation cannot bring about progress if it is perceived as a risk, if it moves too swiftly and if it benefits only the few. Making progress, and not merely moving forward, is the key.

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09:45 – 11:00 | Plenary session 1

Global economic order at the Crossroads

Virginie Robert

Foreign desk editor, Les Echos

We are indeed at a crossroads, and one of the questions is that, in the light of the new dangers facing our world, whether global governance is adequate.

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John Lipsky

Senior Fellow, Foreign Policy Institute at Johns Hopkins University’s Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS); former First Deputy Managing Director, IMF

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, there was a filling-out of the multilateral institutions that formed the basic financial and economic architecture of the post-World War Two era.

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Il Sakong

Chairman of the Institute for Global Economics, former Finance Minister of Korea

The G20 was not meant to be a formal global institution; it was an informal “steering committee”, so to speak, for the world, to exert collective leadership for global economic affairs.

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Motoshige Itoh

Professor, Graduate School of Economics, Faculty of Economics, University of Tokyo, Advisor to the Prime Minister

The IMF, the World Bank, GATT and the WTO are still very important, but it has to be admitted that the world community has become much more sophisticated now than when it was established.

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Mario Monti

Chairman of the High Level Group on Own Resources, European Commission, former Prime Minister of Italy

I believe Europeans are thought by many to be sinners through an excess of virtue, particularly by the Americans and others.

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Debate

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11:00 – 11:30 | Coffee-break

11:30 – 12:45 | Plenary session 2

The future of central banking

Arthur Rutishauser

Editor-in-Chief, SonntagsZeitung

When I heard the news that we had terrorist attacks in Mali, I wanted to know from someone who has a lot of experience of economies whether he thinks that the terrorist attacks we have seen in Europe will impact the European and global economies.

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Jean-Claude Trichet

Former President, ECB

From the very beginning the Euro, as a currency, was considered with great scepticism, and I was a witness of that in America and Asia before the Euro was created.

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Jacob Frenkel

Chairman of JPMorgan Chase International, Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Group of Thirty (G-30), Former Governor of the Bank of Israel

Historically speaking, the creation and management of the Euro is a fantastic development, a huge change, and of course the effort to maintain and strengthen it is in place.

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Marek Belka

President, National Bank of Poland

We should remember that Europe has taken and absorbed, broadly successfully, tens of millions of immigrants, or refugees if you prefer, in the last few decades.

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Jacob Frenkel

Chairman of JPMorgan Chase International, Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Group of Thirty (G-30), Former Governor of the Bank of Israel

What is unique about [the G-30] is that it is composed primarily of current and former central bank governors. The reason I mention this is that, after so many years since the beginning of the crisis, it was time to take stock and see what we have learned.

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Jean-Claude Trichet

Former President, ECB

It is not surprising that those who were on the front line were the central bankers, who had to cope with absolutely exceptional circumstances, and very fortunately they were up to their responsibilities […].

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Mugur Isarescu

Governor of the National Bank of Romania, Former Romanian Prime Minister

Since they are elected, politicians enjoy democratic legitimacy. In hard times, but for limited periods, technocrats could step in and I have been in such a situation myself.

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Marek Belka

President, National Bank of Poland

Fortunately, the world is not like theoretical models, and we have a lot of leeway to choose both the level and dynamics of interest rates, to prevent unwanted inflows and outflows of capital […].

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Jean-Claude Trichet

Former President, ECB

We paid a terrible price in the crisis for not respecting the framework. The framework is there and it was reinforced by the crisis, so it has to be respected.

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Jacob Frenkel

Chairman of JPMorgan Chase International, Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Group of Thirty (G-30), Former Governor of the Bank of Israel

The European project in its historical dimensions is one of the biggest projects of modern humanity, because it has much wider implications beyond currencies.

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Marek Belka

President, National Bank of Poland

We think that the procrastination is probably more destabilising, even for those countries that are more fragile than we are, than the increase itself.

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Jean-Claude Trichet

Former President, ECB

It is absolutely normal that the central banks are concentrating on their own problems.

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Mugur Isarescu

Governor of the National Bank of Romania, Former Romanian Prime Minister

Regarding capital movement, there is volatility and unpredictability; it is very difficult to predict capital movement.

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Jacob Frenkel

Chairman of JPMorgan Chase International, Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Group of Thirty (G-30), Former Governor of the Bank of Israel

As was indicated, Europe is in a different phase of the cycle. The US started its actions early on. Europe started its actions a bit later.

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Debate

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13:00 – 14:30 | Lunch debate

Thierry de Montbrial

President and founder of the WPC

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Khalid Bin Mohammed Al Attiyah

Minister of Foreign Affairs of the State of Qatar

Our region is very important to the world. […] Our stability and prosperity is important to each and every one of you here attending today, and to your countries, for so many reasons.

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Debate

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14:45 – 15:30 | Plenary session 3

Washington’s view of the political and geopolitical implications of November 13th attacks in Paris

Jim Hoagland

Contributing Editor to The Washington Post

There are, of course, echoes of 9-11 in what has happened in Paris. It will change the way France looks at things and acts, just as it changed the ways the US looked at the world and reacted.

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Nelson Cunningham

President, McLarty Associates; former Special Advisor to President Clinton

The horrific events in Paris and what has followed will accelerate the narrowing of the fields of candidates on both the Republican and Democratic sides.

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Debate

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15:30 – 16:30 | Plenary session 4

Trade Agreements from the Viewpoint of Middle Powers

Kemal Dervis

Vice President and Director of Global Economy and Development, Brookings Institution, former Minister of Economic Affairs of Turkey

[We] have to remember that at the end of the day the two arenas of politics and economics are linked, and a well-functioning world economy is another way to create hope, employment and jobs, and also to ease tensions which in the end will help the cause of peace.

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Bark Taeho

Professor at Seoul National University, former Minister for Trade, Republic of Korea

The multi-lateral trading system is really in great trouble and maybe it is now at a kind of critical crossroads. In response to that I think many parts of the world are moving for more bilateral FTAs, so far but very recently many countries are participating in a larger kind of scale that we call mega-regional trade agreements.

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Jonathan T. Fried

Ambassador and Permanent Representative of Canada to the WTO; former Associate Deputy Minister for Foreign Affairs and International Trade ; former Senior Foreign Policy Advisor to the Prime Minister, Canada

The challenge of the trading system is to smooth the way in effect from the producer directly to the consumer and all the barriers along the way, not just at the border but throughout the stream of commerce.

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Bark Taeho

Professor at Seoul National University, former Minister for Trade, Republic of Korea

Korea has very many different FTAs including very big FTAs with the United States and the EU, but our consumers are complaining because we are not getting many benefits. The reason is that our distribution sector is not very competitive.

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Jonathan T. Fried

Ambassador and Permanent Representative of Canada to the WTO; former Associate Deputy Minister for Foreign Affairs and International Trade ; former Senior Foreign Policy Advisor to the Prime Minister, Canada

In the light of the WTO’s success in dispute settlement and in forcing a code of rules within a limited universe, we tend to put too much weight on the WTO as the solution to everything.

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Debate

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16:30 – 17:30 | Plenary session 5

Do Firms have a Nationality?

Nicolas Barré

Managing Director, Les Echos

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Charles-Édouard Bouée

Chief Executive Officer, Roland Berger Strategy Consultants

When you look at geopolitics, when you look at the economy, you see that, at the end of the day, there is still something behind companies. There is a nationality.

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Nelson Cunningham

President, McLarty Associates; former Special Advisor to President Clinton

Despite companies wanting to be local, it is impossible for them to run away from their national origins and from the flags that they carry.

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Tadakatsu Sano

Attorney-at-law at Jones Day; Former Chief Executive Assistant to Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama

Because of the globalised capital market we do not know who really owns each company. Even though the company name is originally from the United States or France or Germany or somewhere else, you still do not know who owns and controls it.

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Nelson Cunningham

President, McLarty Associates; former Special Advisor to President Clinton

We learned then that the most important thing is actually not to be with an institution that is too big to fail, but rather to be with an institution that has its home in a country that is too big to fail.

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Charles-Édouard Bouée

Chief Executive Officer, Roland Berger Strategy Consultants

I think the link between companies and their mother country’s government is, paradoxically, of growing importance. And it is reciprocal.

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Nelson Cunningham

President, McLarty Associates; former Special Advisor to President Clinton

There is tremendous pride in the US for having had a leading role in the Internet’s development, and the Internet has obviously been a magnet both for investment in the US, and for foreigners coming to the US.

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Tadakatsu Sano

Attorney-at-law at Jones Day; Former Chief Executive Assistant to Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama

I think that China wants to create its own independent regime even in the fields of Internet, ICT and technology. One reason is because they use a completely different language than some others.

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Charles-Édouard Bouée

Chief Executive Officer, Roland Berger Strategy Consultants

I think that any company, any institution has its own peculiarities at the beginning. Like human beings, companies have different styles, created by the founder or the founders.

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Debate

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17:30 – 18:00 | Coffee-break

18:00 – 19:30 | Plenary session 6

The future of the Middle East

Thierry de Montbrial

President and founder of the WPC

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Elisabeth Guigou

President of the Committee on Foreign Affairs of the French National Assembly

We have a common enemy, an ideology of death and destruction that clearly has nothing to do with Islam, but takes Islam hostage. We must confront this foe together because, if we do not, I fear it will continue to thrive.

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Youssef Amrani

Royal Cabinet, Morocco

We as Moroccans think that respecting the independence, the unity and the territorial integrity of states is essential. We cannot create more states, because more states means more vacuums, more ISIS, and more movement.

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Mona Makram Ebeid

Egyptian Senator and Member of the Senate Constitutional Committee

What reforms are needed to make Egypt’s security sector effective, accountable and in line with international human rights?

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Vitaly Naumkin

Scientific Director of the Oriental Studies Institute, Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences

We have to understand the future of the Middle East not only through the lens of terrorism and extremism but also through the lens of this crisis and how to solve it.

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Jim Hoagland

Contributing Editor to The Washington Post

Public opinion in the U.S. largely supports the President’s policies in the Middle East. […] But people are war-weary and eager not to get more deeply involved, and the President for his own reasons has augmented that support.

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Thierry de Montbrial

President and founder of the WPC

I would like to ask each of you to answer yes or no to the question whether the Iranian nuclear agreement is good news from the perspective of the reduction of the degree of chaos in the Middle East.

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Bernard Siman

Senior Fellow, Geopolitical Information Service AG

The regional state actors have clearly taken the position of abandoning the globalist agenda and the global game in favour of a classical zero-sum power struggle in their own back yards.

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Debate

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20:30 | Dinner debate

Thierry de Montbrial

President and founder of the WPC

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Patrick Pouyanné

Chief Executive Officer and President of the Executive Committee, Total

I think it would be useful to recall some facts about oil and gas, starting with the geography of oil and gas reserves and production. You’ll understand why oil and gas are intertwined with geopolitics in the countries I am going to mention.

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Debate

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08:00 – 09:30 | Plenary session 7

Security in Asia in a Historical Perspective

Dominique Moïsi

Special Advisor, Ifri

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Kim Hak-Joon

President of the Northeast Asian History Foundation; Chairman of the Asia Journalist Association, Republic of Korea

[…] Northeast Asia. It is the one and only sub-region where the world’s four major powers, that is, the US, Japan, China and Russia, can easily meet and interact and their respective interests compete.

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Mayankote Kelath Narayanan

Former Governor of West Bengal, India

[…] Asia also provides an example that stability is not the natural state as far as the global strategic environment is concerned. Peace, everywhere, tends to be highly elusive.

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Yukio Okamoto

Founder and President of Okamoto Associates, Inc., former Special Advisor to the Prime Minister of Japan

Security and the fate of Asia is an integral part of a world in which Europe is one of the key members.

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Igor Yurgens

Chairman of the Management Board of the Institute of Contemporary Development, professor of the Higher School of Economics, Russia

Russia is still in search for its Asian soul. It found its European soul many centuries ago, but then it felt offended by our European friends, felt betrayed in the sanctions period […] and rushed to Asia.

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Zhang Yunling

Professor of International Economics, Academy Member and Director of International Studies, Chinese Academy of Social Science (CASS)

Regional security should be based on multiple institutions, on consultation, on self-restraint, and on more functional institutional arrangements to make the situation stable.

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Debate

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09:30 – 10:00 | Coffee-break

10:00 – 10:45 | Plenary session 8

Peaceful coexistence of religions?

Thierry de Montbrial

President and founder of the WPC

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Lionel Zinsou

Prime Minister of Benin

Le Bénin est, en Afrique de l’Ouest, un des pays qui voit une coexistence des religions extrêmement féconde et traditionnellement extrêmement apaisée, extrêmement pacifique, ce qui n’était pas une évidence.

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Thierry de Montbrial

President and founder of the WPC

Devant cette asymétrie entre la profondeur historique et le risque d’une destruction […], il n’y a pas de tâche plus importante, qui est de notre responsabilité à tous, que d’empêcher à tout prix pareil désastre.

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10:45 – 12:00 | Plenary session 9

Food and water security

Kemal Dervis

Vice President and Director of Global Economy and Development, Brookings Institution, former Minister of Economic Affairs of Turkey

In terms of moving beyond poverty, without progress in ending hunger and food insecurity, we will never succeed in providing not only economic but social security and stability.

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Mostafa Terrab

Chairman and CEO, OCP Group

We need a global approach on the agricultural front, with a strong focus on Africa. Africa can help feed the world, so to speak.

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Arkebe Oqubay

Minister and Advisor to the Prime Minister of Ethiopia

When food security is linked to the broader human security issues, it is important that we consider whether Africa could be part of the problem or the solution. I am a firm believer that Africa could be part of the solution.

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Kostas Stamoulis

Director, Strategic Programme Leader, Food Security and Nutrition, FAO

Urbanisation will mean that some of the stresses on water resources will come from competition between agricultural water and water for other uses, including municipality water.

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Panelists debate

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Debate

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12:15 – 13:45 | Lunch debate

Thierry de Montbrial

President and founder of the WPC

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Thomas Bagger

Head of Policy Planning, German Federal Foreign Office

What is clear, I think, is that we have a renewed sense of the fragility of the European integration project, that it is not something that inevitably only moves forward in some teleological fashion.

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Peter Hill

Director, Strategy, Foreign and Commonwealth Office

Are we under threat? Well, clearly, we face more threats than we probably have at any time in the history of the European Union, but how you deal with threats is a large part of how real those threats are.

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Justin Vaïsse

Director of the policy planning staff, French Ministry of Foreign Affairs

I think that the reasons to be worried are well founded. If we look back 15 years ago, when we see Europe’s ambitions and Europe’s burst of enthusiasm in the 1990s, we are obviously in a very, very different place.

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Panelists debate

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Debate

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14:00 – 14:45 | Plenary session 10

Israeli-Palestinian dialogue

Jim Hoagland

Contributing Editor to The Washington Post

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Itamar Rabinovich

President of the Israel Institute, Distinguished Global Professor at New York University (NYU) and Distinguished Fellow at the Brookings Institution

It is vital for us to separate from the Palestinians and to have a two state solution. This means a Palestinian state as a nation state of the Palestinian people and Israel as the nation state of the Jewish people, coexisting peacefully with one another.

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Manuel Hassassian

Ambassador from Palestine to the United Kingdom; former representative at the Ministry of Higher Education and at the Association of Arab Universities

Today, the struggle between Palestinians and Israelis is a struggle for existence and it is also the struggle to maintain the national identity, the geography and the demography of the Palestinian people.

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Panelists debate

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Debate

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14:45 – 16:00 | Plenary session 11

The global challenges of the digital technologies

Francois Barrault

Chairman of Idate/DigiWorld Institute; former CEO of BT Global Services and a BT Group PLC board member

Not only has this digital transformation changed the way we live, but it has changed many aspects, like knowledge. For many years, knowledge has been an asset that people kept for themselves. Now, knowledge is something that people share […].

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Patrick Nicolet

Member of the Group Management Board, Capgemini

Big Data is primarily what is generated by connected devices. Another term used in our industry is the Internet of Things. Just to give you two numbers, in 2010, there were 12.5 billion connected devices.

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Fyodor Lukyanov

Editor in Chief, Russia in Global Affairs

If we look at […] the approach to this dilemma between freedom and security, what is more connected to the spread of the digital world and the Internet? This dilemma is absolutely the same in Russia as it is anywhere else and we see that trends are more or less similar to trends that we can see in the Western world.

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Mari Kiviniemi

Deputy Secretary-General, OECD, former Prime Minister of Finland

In order to be able to use the potential of digital technolgoies in the 21st century, keeping the Internet open and accessible is absolutely key.

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Susan Liautaud

Vice Chairman of the London School of Economics and Political Science Council and Court of governors, Visiting Scholar at the Stanford Center of Philanthropy and Civil Society

Digitalisation […] has infiltrated all of the other global risks that come out in our discussions in this conference […]. When we are dealing with the ethics of digitalisation, by definition, we are also dealing with the ethics of all of these other risks.

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Debate

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16:15 – 19:15 | Parallel workshops

Workshop #1 – Energy

Bertrand Badré

Managing Director and Group Chief Financial Officer, World Bank

Energy is fundamental to economic growth and sustainable development. […] Energy underpins progress in all areas of development. When countries lack reliable, sustainable sources of energy, people and economies suffer.

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Olivier Appert

President, Conseil Français de l’Energie; former President, IFP Energies Nouvelles

The recent decline in the oil prices has been dramatic, by 50% in just a few months, and the question is, is it temporary or structural?

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Masood Ahmed

Director of the IMF’s Middle East and Central Asia Department

I will not talk about the impact on the oil importing countries, because it is small and predictable. They all benefit a little bit from lower oil prices, but it does not change their outlook dramatically. However, for the oil exporting countries, it does have a dramatic impact.

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Tatsuo Masuda

Visiting professor at the NUCB Graduate School

Every time oil prices dropped in the past, they naturally rebounded. I would like to be able to say that history may repeat itself, but my evaluation is not this time. This is because of the energy transition taking place due to risks to the climate.

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Antoine Rostand

Senior Advisor, Schlumberger

The US are now producing enough gas to supply their own market, at a very competitive price. Gas is replacing coal, which is leading to a significant reduction in US carbon emissions. The US are now in a position where they can cover the global LNG market for anything between 20 and 50 years.

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Debate 1

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Pierre Sigonney

Chief Economist, Corporate Strategy Department, Total

There was already a crisis 7 years ago, with a strong drop in 2008, but it was very short, and it was due to the fall in demand. Today, it is quite different. It is much more a supply-crisis, because there has been in recent years a strong increase in light tight oil supply in the US.

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Nobuo Tanaka

Former Executive Director of the International Energy Agency; President, The Sasakawa Peace Foundation

There is something interesting about the newest world energy outlook, which was revealed recently, about two weeks ago. The growth happens in Asia, in developing economies, and India, not China, will bring the largest increases up to 2040.

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Lee Hye-Min

G20 Sherpa, Ambassador for International Economic Affairs, Republic of Korea

Energy is fundamental to economic development. That is the reason why it is important for G20 countries to talk about energy issues in order to help address the energy challenges of today and the future.

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Debate 2

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Conclusion

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Workshop #2 – Economy and Finance

Jean-Claude Trichet

Former President, ECB

The external observers and investors were keen to mention that, despite the slowdown of the emerging economies […], it does not prevent them from remaining the major source of global growth in the years to come, and projections for 2020 are still flattering.

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First part

Global economy and various visions of it

Globally, the most likely outcome is for continued moderate growth, but it is worth noting that if the IMF’s base case forecast is correct, global growth will remain slightly below its medium- and long-term average. In this case, the outlook isn’t terrible, but it certainly is not great.

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Second part

Monetary policy

Was the unconventional monetary policy effective overall? Asking the economists in main central banks, they would say it was, and they would point to the lowering of interest rates throughout the whole interest rate curve; there is no doubt about it.

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Third part

G20 Financial Stability Board, financial supervision, rules, regulations, standards and codes

The global imbalances have still been considerably reduced, but you will tell me that they have been reduced under pressure of the crisis, not that it was a deliberate ex ante action. However, I would not say that this process has been useless.

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Conclusion, Jean-Claude Trichet

Former President, ECB

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Workshop #3 – China

Park In-Kook

President of the Korea Foundation for Advanced Studies; Co-chairman of the Beijing/Shanghai Forum

The rise of China is no longer news at all. […] But the rise of China’s economy also raises the question of whether the world is headed towards harmony and co-prosperity – or doomed to fall in the Thucydides Trap.

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Jia Qingguo

Dean of the School of International Studies of Peking University

When people talk about China US relations, many argue that the relationship is heading for conflicts and confrontation and you can find a lot of conflicts to illustrate that point. […] However, that is just part of the story.

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Zhang Yunling

Professor of International Economics, Academy Member and Director of International Studies, Chinese Academy of Social Science (CASS)

One [priority] is to deepen domestic reform, moving from building a market towards the market deciding. That is a fundamental change and it means that you need to change the role of the Government and the risk structure that is SOEs and many assets of the deepening of reform. This is a very hard work for China.

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Richard Cooper

Professor of International Economics at Harvard University

I think that the potential for cooperation is very strong and it is a question of skillful management in both Beijing and Washington to realise that potential. It is happening now in a number of areas and there are many possibilities going forward.

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Qiao Yide

Vice President & Secretary General, Shanghai Development Research Foundation

I will not address the Chinese issue today but rather will give an alternative perspective to address some reasons for the cognition gap between Chinese decision makers and international economists and investors on specific issues […].

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Bark Taeho

Professor at Seoul National University, former Minister for Trade, Republic of Korea

There are many reasons why we are not able to produce the outcome here and one is that the big trading nations, such as the United States and China, cannot find any common ground to conclude the negotiations.

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Michel Foucher

Chair of applied Geopolitics at College of World Studies; Former French Ambassador to Latvia; Former Director of the policy planning staff of the French Foreign Ministry

As regards the European perspective, it seems to me important to understand the Chinese view before coming to any conclusion.

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Debate

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19:30 – 20:00 | Cocktail

20:00 | Gala dinner

08:00 – 08:45 | Reports from parallel workshops

Marie-Claire Aoun

Director of the Center for Energy, Ifri

The workshop revealed […] the different perceptions we all have from the effects of this oil prices decline. One American participant told us that we should cheer up. […] Oil prices decline does not seem however to be a good news for international oil companies who are struggling to adapt their costs to these new conditions.

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Daniel Daianu

Member of the Board of the Central Bank of Romania; former Finance Minister of Romania

One has to accept the reality that the forecasts, which have been invalidated for years by dynamics, show that there will be lower economic growth rates in the immediate period to come. What does this indicate? There is still much that gives us food for thought, and one has to link it with what some people have called secular stagnation and the lack of investment.

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Park In-Kook

President of the Korea Foundation for Advanced Studies; Co-chairman of the Beijing/Shanghai Forum

The issue on China is too diversified and with too much magnifications. [Our] four items were: […] characteristic features of Sino-American relationship, […] the New Silk Road Initiative or One-Belt-One-Road, […] the Chinese stock market crash this summer and its impact [and] the internationalization of the Renminbi […].

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08:45 – 09:45 | Plenary session 12

Health and global governance

Christian Bréchot

President of the Institut Pasteur

We are living in the context of a new era of technology. Technology is transforming biomedical science, and we know this. It has a major impact for surveillance, for monitoring.

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Bertrand Badré

Managing Director and Group Chief Financial Officer, World Bank

It is not surprising that [the] decline in poverty goes hand in hand with accelerated improvement in health.

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Louise Fresco

President of Wageningen University and Research, The Netherlands

Health is linked to the way we function as a planet. Pathogens have always been there […]. Therefore, I will argue that unless we link pathogens, or health more generally, to the ecosystem, we will not really get a grip on these issues.

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Debate

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09:45 – 11:30 | Plenary session 13

Climate and Environment

Introduction, Richard Cooper

Professor of International Economics at Harvard University

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Laurent Fabius

French Minister of Foreign Affairs and International Development

As you know, our main goal is to reach an agreement between governments, all governments, that will limit global warming from greenhouse gas emissions to two degrees or, if possible, 1.5 degree, by 2100.

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Yukari Niwa Yamashita

Board Member, Director, The Institute of Energy Economics, Japan (IEEJ)

450ppm scenario is an ideal target which we may ultimately need to aim at but for more practical point of view, it may be more pragmatic to consider various scenarios and options other than only the 450ppm scenario. Just like our diet target, we need to be more realistic.

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Bruno Lafont

Co-Chairman of the Board of Directors, Lafarge Holcim Group

Most European companies, or the bulk of European industry, is in favour of a global agreement as soon as possible and is probably also in favour of an agreement which goes beyond what COP 21 will do.

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Jean-David Levitte

Distinguished fellow, Brookings Institution and member of the International Advisory Board of the Atlantic Council of the United States; Former Senior Diplomatic Adviser and sherpa of President Nicolas Sarkozy

We are the first generation aware of the fact that global warming poses an existential threat to our planet’s future. We are also the last generation that can come up with a decisive solution to that existential threat.

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Marcelo Sanchez Sorondo

Chancellor, Pontifical Academy of Sciences and Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences

We do have a special responsibility towards the Earth, for it is a gift that God created for humankind; we must therefore preserve and protect it as our own home because this is where we live.

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Debate

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11:30 – 12:15 | Plenary session 14

Iran and Middle East

Hossein Amirabdollahian

Deputy Foreign Minister for Arab and African Countries, Iran

The current transitional period of Middle-East requires new security order and the secret of new security order of Middle-East are efficient inbreeding policies, collective role-playing of governments and considering legitimate demand of people.

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Q & A

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12:15 – 13:45 | Plenary session 15

Europe’s refugee crisis

Karl Kaiser

Director emeritus of the German Council on Foreign Relations, Harvard University

Very often, one says of the present exodus that it is the biggest since the great flow of refugees immediately after World War Two. That comparison is only partially correct […]. The new flow is very different.

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Haïm Korsia

Chief Rabbi of France

The refugee issue is essential. It is even vital, insofar as there are two levels, in my opinion. The first is a political level, and others on this panel will be able to talk about that much better than I can. But there is also an individual level.

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Kemal Dervis

Vice President and Director of Global Economy and Development, Brookings Institution, former Minister of Economic Affairs of Turkey

Claiming that there is a solution to what is happening, to the drama we are experiencing today, is unfortunately impossible. We must talk about how we have reached this point and what the underlying causes are.

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Vuk Jeremic

President of the Center for International Relations and Sustainable Development (CIRSD), former President of the UN General Assembly, former Minister of Foreign Affairs of Serbia

The refugee crisis is perhaps the most serious crisis that Europe has come to face since the end of the Second World War. The very foundations—of values, institutions, and tenets—of the European construct are in danger as a result of this.

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Sergei Karaganov

Honorary Chairman of the Presidium of the non-governmental Council on Foreign and Defense Policy, Russia

We have to understand the magnitude of the problem. It is not just Syria, but Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq and other countries down the list, and then there is Africa. We have a problem of several million people and maybe even more than several ready to come.

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Hubert Védrine

Former French Foreign Minister

Migratory flows will continue growing worldwide. It is absolutely necessary for the departure countries, the transit countries and the arrival countries to move towards co-management.

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Debate

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14:00 – 15:00 | Lunch

15:00 – 16:45 |  Plenary session 16

Final debate

Dominique Moïsi

Special Advisor, Ifri

Ce qui m’a frappé dans cette huitième édition de la World Policy Conference, c’est un certain nombre de moments […] où nous avons parlé d’identité et où je me suis rendu compte que le grand péché du monde occidental n’était pas nécessairement l’arrogance, mais tout simplement le manque de curiosité.

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Ribal Al-Assad

Founder and Director of the Organisation for Democracy and Freedom in Syria and Chairman of the Iman Foundation

We should not be focusing on the brand name. ISIS is only a brand. We should go after the underlying, poisonous ideology and all groups who share it.

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Meir Sheetrit

Member of the Israeli Knesset

I have come to the conclusion that the best way to achieve peace is through the Arab initiative, or what is called the Saudi Initiative. […] The Saudis came out with an initiative which in my opinion is very courageous and also very wise.

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Miguel Angel Moratinos

Former Minister of Foreign Affairs and Cooperation of Spain

I think Europe has something to say in the global governance that is taking shape. We have got a responsibility, and the best way to make our voices heard in this new world is by listening, identifying problems and addressing all the complexity you have mentioned several times in various talks.

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Bilahari Kausikan

Ambassador-at-Large and Policy Advisor in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Singapore

I heard Asia described as being divided into two blocks. One is the China led Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) block and the other is the US led Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) block. This is at best a caricature and in fact, it is profoundly misleading.

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Narendra Taneja

Chairman, Energy Security Group of the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI)

In my opinion, this will be Africa’s century, and countries like India, China, Japan, South Korea and Indonesia will play a big role in helping that happen.

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Renaud Girard

Journalist at Le Figaro, Editor at Questions Internationales

War has changed since the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, when the signatories sincerely, but vainly, hoped to ban war as the continuation of politics by other means once and for all. Now it has many faces, all of them, of course, bearing the scars of history.

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Dominique Moïsi

Special Advisor, Ifri

Let us not get trapped by our own emotion. Let us distinguish between the reality and the way we want it to be. In a way, it is a summary of everything we said during this eighth edition of the WPC.

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16:45 | Envoi

2014 Conference proceedings

09:15 – 10:00 | Opening session

Thierry de Montbrial

President and founder of the WPC

We aim to contribute to improving all aspects of local and regional governance, with a view to promoting a world that is more open, more prosperous, fairer and more respectful of the diversity of states and nations.

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Park Geun-Hye

President of the Republic of Korea

I believe that building a framework of trust and cooperation on the Korean Peninsula and in East Asia will be crucial for a more peaceful and secure future for our world.

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10:00 – 11:30 | Plenary session 1

“Security governance in East Asia and in Europe”

Introduction by Thierry de Montbrial

President and founder of the WPC

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Jean-David Levitte

Distinguished Fellow, Brookings Institution

In my view, the US, both in Europe and Asia, has to play the role of balancing power, like the UK did in the 19th century in Europe.

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Richard Haass

President of the Council on Foreign Relations

Asia is a much more complex geography than Europe with much less institutionalism and it is much more about territorial and other kinds of disputes.

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Han Sung-Joo

Former Republic of Korea’s Minister of Foreign Affairs

With its rebalancing policy, the US appeared to be placing more weight on its Asia policy and presence, but it now finds itself with problems elsewhere around the globe from which it cannot easily pivot away.

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Igor V. Morgulov

Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation

In the time of a fundamental transformation of the system of international relations, the world faces growing number of conflicts and challenges.

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Shotaro Oshima

Chairman, Institute for international Economic Studies (IIES) and Visiting Professor, Graduate School of Public Policy, University of Tokyo

One of the most important elements in East Asia is obviously the rise of China, and it is creating certain instabilities in the region.

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Debate

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11:30 – 13:00 | Plenary session 2

“Prospects for the Korean Peninsula and Northeast Asia”

Introduction by Choi Young-Jin

Professor at Yonsei University Graduate School of International Studies; former Ambassador to the US; former Head of the UN Mission in Côte d’Ivoire.

The rise of East Asia will be recorded in history as the most significant phenomenon of the second half of the 20th century, along with the Cold War.

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Thomas Bagger

Head of Policy Planning, German Federal Foreign Office

I think the German/Korean relationship is far broader than the rather superficial similarity of having a history of division, but it is quite interesting that we come back to this issue of division and unification on the Korean Peninsula.

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Ju Chul-Ki

Senior Secretary for Foreign Affairs and National Security, Office of the President of the Republic of Korea

Unification can be the silver bullet to resolving many of the key challenges that plague the Korean Peninsula such as the nuclear issue, human rights abuses, and North Korea’s social economic challenges.

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Thierry Mariani

French Member of Parliament for French Citizens Abroad (Asia, Russia, and Oceania)

The economic dynamism of Northeast Asia except, of course, North Korea, has enabled them to carry weight on the international stage. South Korea is an example.

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Marcus Noland

Executive Vice President and Director of Studies, Peterson Institute for International Economics

The first scenario is one side conquers the other one militarily. The second one is that the peninsula experiences a peaceful, gradual consensual unification that is measured in decades […] The third possibility is […] an abrupt German-style collapse of the North and its absorption by the South.

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Anatoly Torkunov

Rector of the Moscow State Institute of International Relations

The Korean Peninsula remains the hub of bilateral, regional and global problems.

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Debate

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13:15 – 14:45 | Lunch debate

Introduction by Thierry de Montbrial

President and founder of the WPC

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Lee Hong-Koo

Former Prime Minister of the Republic of Korea

The most crucial requirement is to bring the major powers together to guarantee the peaceful coexistence of two Korea working together towards an eventual unification.

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Conclusion by Thierry de Montbrial

President and founder of the WPC

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15:00 – 16:30 | Plenary session 3

“Inequalities and globalization”

Introduction by Susan Liautaud

Visiting Scholar at the Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society; Founder of Susan Liautaud & Associates Limited (SLA)

Our topic for this 90‑minute session is vast and it is inequality and globalisation. It is indeed a topic that Christine Lagarde and others have called one of the most important stories of our time.

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Mari Kiviniemi

Deputy Secretary General of OECD; former Prime Minister of Finland

Inequality is not only bad socially, ethically and on a human level, it is also bad economically.

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Rhee Changyong

Director, Asia and Pacific Department, IMF

We have to be very careful when we talk about inequalities. It is not about inequality in general; it is more about inequality in opportunities, and excessive inequality is quite detrimental to growth.

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Richard Cooper

Professor of International Economics at Harvard University

The Gini coefficient is a very clever coefficient, but it is a single number, and inequality is typically much more complicated than can be captured in a single number.

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Il Sakong

Chairman of the Institute for Global Economics; former Finance Minister of Korea

Income and wealth inequality have been rising throughout the world during the last three decades or so, particularly in the advanced economies.

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Jean Pisani-Ferry

General Commissioner for Strategy, Office of the Prime Minister, France

The WTO and the IMF are increasingly concerned about inequality. Paradoxically, the EU, which is a political institution with a mandate in the treaties of improving the whole of society, has proved relatively indifferent to these issues of inequality.

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Debate

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16:30 – 17:15 | Plenary session 4

Introduction by Thierry de Montbrial

President and founder of the WPC

H.R.H. Prince Turki Al Faisal

Chairman of the King Faisal Center for Research and Islamic Studies (KFCRIS)

Governance in Libya, Yemen, Tunisia, Egypt and Syria is in such a tenuous condition, and the perfect conditions for terrorist cells to take root […]. This is something that will continue to happen as long as we do not treat the illnesses and continue to treat the symptom. The main disease in that area is the failing states.

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Debate

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17:15 – 17:45 | Coffee-break

17:45 – 19:15 | Plenary session 5

“Africa in a global context”

Introduction by Marie-Roger Biloa

CEO, Africa International Media Group

Nowadays, conversations about Africa no longer tend simply to vilify it as hopeless, but instead highly praise its economic progress and golden business opportunities.

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Wu Jianmin

Executive Vice Chairman of China Institute for Innovation and Development Strategy

Asian countries have been very active in Africa’s rise, and in the 21st century, Afro-Asian solidarity will play a very important role.

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Lynda Chalker

Founder and Chairman of Africa Matters Ltd; former UK Minister for Overseas Development and Africa

We are beginning to see a real combination of experience being shared from Asia into Africa, and with third countries too.

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Nathalie Delapalme

Executive Director, Research and Policy, Mo Ibrahim Foundation

There is no doubt about the narrative of the African rising, but I still think that the economy is not the only measurement; we should be careful not to be overly optimistic, but should take into account the early warning signs of insecurity, domestic unrest, inequality and jobless growth.

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Youssef Amrani

Chargé de mission, Royal Cabinet, Morocco

Africa must take its future in its own hands, overcome the barriers to its socio-economic development and create jobs for its youth, who are the continent’s real driving force.

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Elisabeth Guigou

President of the Committee on Foreign Affairs of the French National Assembly

Europe must become more aware that its security depends on what happens in the Sahel.

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Debate

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20:00 | Dinner debate

Introduction by Thierry de Montbrial

President and founder of the WPC

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Yun Byung-Se

Republic of Korea’s Minister of Foreign Affairs

A reunified Korea will be nuclear weapons-free; a beacon for human rights and democracy; at peace with neighbors; an engine of global economic growth; and a promoter of regional and global peace and prosperity.

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Conclusion by Thierry de Montbrial

President and founder of the WPC

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08:30 – 11:30 | Parallel workshops

Workshop #1 – The state of the world economy and finance

Introduction by Jean-Claude Trichet

Former President of the ECB

We’re still living in the shadow of the deepest economic crisis since the Second World War. It might have been even worse had central banks and governments not taken extraordinarily bold, swift steps.

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Jeffry Frieden

Professor of government at Harvard University

There are major political and economic blocks to a resolution of the crisis in Europe, which causes concern both in Europe and around the world.

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Yutaka Aso

President, Aso Group

The strong intention of Governor Kuroda of the Bank of Japan is working. He says the bank will do whatever it can to overcome the deflation that has long undermined Japanese economy.

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Daniel Daianu

Member of the Romanian Academy; former Minister of Finance of Romania

Extreme events keep us under constant pressure. All this is very bad because there are economic, institutional, social, and political entailed costs; these costs show up in individual mindsets and in the collective psyche of people.

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Debate 1

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Jun Gwang-Woo

Former Chairman of Korean Financial Services Commission (FSC)

In general, older people tend to have a low risk tolerance and not aggressively engage in venture type investment. So, the result is: saving more, spend less and prefer safer assets.

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Bozidar Djelic

Partner, Lazard; former Deputy Prime Minister of Serbia

There is no commonly agreed model, where all the banks would in the same way use the same model.

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Marek Belka

President of the National Bank of Poland

I do not think that we have really experienced a full-blown currency war which some of the colleagues, say, from Brazil, were quite concerned about.

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Debate 2

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Workshop #2 – Energy, climate change and environment

Richard Cooper

Professor of International Economics at Harvard University

I will give my own pessimistic view about the COP process we are involved in. I do not see how 193 countries with a huge diversity of interests can reach a meaningful agreement – the word ‘meaningful’ is important – by a process of consensus.

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Laurent Fabius

Action is possible. Greenhouse gas emissions must be cut; that’s where energy comes in. We must reduce our reliance on fossil fuels, save more energy and use more renewable sources.

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Vuk Jeremic

Former President of the UN General Assembly; former Minister of Foreign Affairs of Serbia

Global problems require global awareness for global solutions […] It is an illusion to believe that negotiations on post-2015 agenda and climate change can take place in isolation from general international trends.

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William Ramsay

Senior Advisor of the Center for Energy, Ifri; former Deputy Executive Director, International Energy Agency (IEA)

We cannot emit any additional CO2 from 2040 if we want to achieve the two-degree target, which is not particularily realistic.

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Debate 1

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Bertrand de la Noue

General Representative of Total in China

Energy companies have for a long time been quite mute on the climate debate. […] Total has been over the past years at the forefront of a profound change in industry response.

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Tatsuo Masuda

Professor at Nagoya University of Commerce and Business Graduate School, Japan

Energy and environmental challenge is symbolically seen in Asia, where some 60% of the global increment of energy demand growth up to 2040 will take place.

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Luigi Colantuoni

Group Representative of Total in Japan and South Korea

Climate change and energy transition are considered major issues for the world economy and for the sustainable future of humankind.

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Debate 2

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Christian Bréchot

President of the Institut Pasteur

Eco-epidemiological impacts are extremely important. There will be increasing health risks from natural disasters and increasing health challenges linked with human displacement.

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Sverre Vedal

Professor, University of Washington (UW) School of Public Health; Chinese Research Academy of Environmental Sciences (CRAES)

While most air pollutants are climate warming, some important ones are climate cooling, and that complicates mitigation strategies.

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Debate 3

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Lee Seung-Hoon

Professor emeritus of the Seoul University; former Co-Chairman of Green Growth Committee of the Korean government

With tools energised by fire, greedy mankind has built up astounding prosperity on the one hand, and degraded the environment to the level of destruction on the other.

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Anil Razdan

Former Power Secretary of India

The OECD said in 2010 that seven out of ten world cities most exposed to climate change are in developing Asia.

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Debate 4

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Workshop #3 – Agroindustry in Africa and Asia

Introduction by Jean Yves Carfantan

Senior Consultant, AgroBrasConsult

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Suresh Kumar

Chief Editor of Africaindia.org; former Head and Director of the Department of African Studies, University of Delhi

Agriculture extension is an important component of agriculture universities throughout the world, which will help Africa Agriculture Education System to strengthen in rural areas.

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Khalid Meksem

President of the University Mohammed VI

The pre-colonial part of agriculture in Africa was sustainable, local and harmonious. […] people who are interested in sustainability today will fly to remote locations in Africa and learn from the locals.

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Debate 1

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Krishan Jindal

CEO, NABARD Consultancy Services Pvt. Ltd.

NABARD has been able to facilitate credit flow to agriculture and also helped in adoption of technology by small farmers to operate in a profitable and sustainable way.

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Debate 2

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Rod A. Wing

Professor, University of Arizona

The greatest challenges that we face in plant breeding is to be able to link genome sequences to functional traits that could be used to create superior and sustainable varieties.

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Philippe Chalmin

Professor, Paris-Dauphine University

Debate 3

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11:30 – 11.45 | Coffee-break

11:45 – 13:15 | Plenary session 6

“The geopolitics and geo-economics of Eurasia”

Introduction by Fen Osler Hampson

Director of CIGI’s Global Security & Politics program; Co-director of the Global Commission on Internet Governance; Chancellor’s professor at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada

I think that it is important to note that the Eurasian region has witnessed a number of cooperative governance initiatives in both the economic and security spheres.

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Michel Foucher

Chair of applied Geopolitics at College of World Studies; former French Ambassador to Latvia; former Director of the policy planning staff of the French Foreign Ministry

The reference for the Eurasian economic union is the European Union. It’s cut-and-paste in formal and institutional terms.

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Dong Manyuan

Vice President, China Institute of International Studies (CIIS)

President Xi Jinping proposed a cooperation initiative through the Silk Road economic belt cooperation initiative. It brings about new opportunities for economic cooperation on the Eurasian continent and has been welcomed by the majority of countries that lie alongside the continent.

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Alexander Panov

Member of the Advisory Board of the Security Council of the Russian Federation

There are a number of projects in which Moscow, Seoul and Pyongyang are already involved in, particularly those in the transport and energy sectors.

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Justin Vaïsse

Director of the policy planning staff, French Ministry of Foreign Affairs

If the European Union and the Eurasian Union discussed common economic projects and trade, we’d see that as something very positive, because it would add to South Korea or China’s efforts to develop the region.

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Yu Myung-Hwan

Chairman of Sejong University; former Republic of Korea’s Minister of Foreign Affairs

South Korea’s Eurasia Initiative is still at a very nascent stage […] and is trying to implement the Eurasia Initiative with forward-looking and creative thoughts.

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Debate

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13:30 – 15:30 | Lunch debate

“What about American leadership?”

Part 1

Americans never had full hegemony. There is a bit of a myth about the past, that there was a period when the Americans could do anything and now we can do nothing, and the truth is somewhere in between.

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Part 2

Giving more resources to Ukraine is a good idea in principle, but the problem is that in practise, there is zero evidence that more resources will be used well.

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Part 3

I do not think we are on the verge of a great détente with Iran, because there are too many interests where there is divergence.

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Part 4

China quite simply does not use the influence it has to rein in either North Korea’s nuclear programme, or more broadly, North Korean behaviour. There is a sense that China could and should do more, not to control North Korea, but to influence it.

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15:30 – 17:00 | Plenary session 7

“Trade and politics”

Introduction by Patrick Messerlin

Professor of Economics and Director of the Groupe d’économie mondiale (GEM) at Sciences Po Paris

Many people tend to believe, and yesterday we had this impression, that trade and politics are a source of increasing conflicts and interactions.

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John Manley

President and CEO, Canadian Council of Chief Executives

The world is increasingly complex, and our political economies are all engaged in dealing with a myriad of very deep and difficult issues.

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Alejandro Jara

Senior Counsel, King & Spalding; former Ambassador and Permanent Representative of Chile, WTO

The trade agenda is increasingly intrusive and touches upon very sensitive domestic political issues in many countries.

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Bark Taeho

Professor at Seoul National University; former Minister for Trade, Korea

The current consensus-based decision making mechanism of the WTO faces serious limitations. We have to discuss honestly how to save the Doha Round with all options open.

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Pascal Lamy

Honorary President of Notre Europe; former Director-General of the WTO

The relationship between trade and politics, whether domestic or international, is fundamentally changing as we are transitioning from an old world of trade into a new one, and we are somewhere in between these two worlds.

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Debate

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17:00 – 18:30 | Plenary session 8

“Middle East in a global context”

Introduction by Dominique Moïsi

Special Advisor at Ifri

I would say there are three words that characterise the ‘new’ new Middle East: fragmentation, […] radicalisation, […] and expansion.

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Hubert Védrine

Former French Minister of Foreign Affairs

Turmoil and problems have been rocking the Middle East for 50, 70, even over 100 years!

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Ribal Al-Assad

Chairman of the Iman Foundation

We saw the rise of the Islamic State as ISIS in 2006, but it came to Syria because there was a certain atmosphere that allowed it to prosper, that allowed it to grow.

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Meir Sheetrit

Member of the Knesset; former Minister of Internal Affairs of Israel

Many countries at last understood that Israel was standing alone in fighting terror, and now we are fighting together against radical Islam.

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Sergei Karaganov

Honorary Chairman of the Presidium of the non-governmental Council on Foreign and Defense Policy of Russia

Stop exporting democracy or socialism or whatever, and, by the way, stop ostracising Israel. It is the only beacon of stability there, and we see more and more ostracising of Israel.

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Miguel Angel Moratinos

Former Minister of Foreign Affairs of Spain

I think the Middle East deserves all this time, because it is the quintessence of the new challenging world, where all traditional security concerns, traditional military intervention, energy and trade converge in the new challenges of today’s world, which are global terrorism, food security, water scarcity, and culture division.

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Debate

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19:15 | Cocktail

20:00 | Gala dinner

Report

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09:00 – 10:00 | Reports from parallel workshops

Jeffry Frieden

Professor of government at Harvard University

There have been some notable steps forward in cooperative measures among the major financial and economic centres, especially with respect to the harmonisation of financial regulation. At the same time, the global macroeconomic situation remains quite troubled and quite troubling, with Europe being the most worrisome cause for concern.

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Marie-Claire Aoun

Director of the Energy Centre at Ifri

To be successful, the fight towards climate change should reflect local, regional and global alliances, including private sector, and civil society and should be driven by a strong and sustainable political will.

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Jean-Yves Carfantan

Senior Consultant, AgroBrasConsult

In the small group that was present at the workshop, we did believe that increasing production in the farm sector in Africa is one of the main challenges the world is faced with in the coming years.

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Debate

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10:00 – 11:30 | Plenary session 9

“The economic and political consequences of the revolution of Big Data”

Nicolas Barré

Managing Director, Les Echos

In 2000, that is less than 15 years ago, only a quarter of the existing data in the world was digital and today it is almost 100%.

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Chang Dae-Whan

Chairman of Maekyung Media Group, Republic of Korea

Now that we are entering the world of IoT, Internet of Things, our everyday lives will change. The Internet of Things is a new, emerging power.

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Luc-François Salvador

Executive Chairman for Asia-Pacific, Capgemini Group

We should see the impact of the big data revolution from different aspects and in different areas, touching all domains of our private, professional lives as well as citizens.

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Ben Scott

Senior Advisor, Open Technology Institute at the New America Foundation; Program Director, European Digital Agenda, Stiftung Neue Verantwortung

We have to convince people that the Internet offers more benefits than risks. Not just today, but tomorrow and in 15 years and, to do that, we need to establish legitimacy at least for democratic governments and their conduct online.

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Joseph Nye

University Distinguished Service Professor, Center for Public Leadership, Harvard Kennedy School

When you have the capacity of computing power doubling every 18 months, the ability to analyse data has outgrown our social mores and norms and laws, which set limits on this in the past.

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Debate

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11:30 – 12:00 | Coffee-break

12:00 – 13:00 | Plenary session 10

“The US and Asia in the 21st century”

Robert M. Gates

Former Secretary of Defense of the United States

People talk a lot about the emergence of China, when I think it is more accurate and provides greater historical context to talk about the re-emergence of China.

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13:15 – 14:45 | Lunch debate

Conclusion by Thierry de Montbrial

President and founder of the WPC

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Mehmet Ceylan

Deputy Minister of Development of Turkey

The rise of Turkey’s economy is much admired because of the fact that it goes hand in hand with democratic and modern values.

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Debate

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15:00 – 17:00 | Plenary session 11

« General debate »

Introduction by Dominique Moïsi

Special Advisor at Ifri

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Mohamed Laichoubi

Former Minister of Labor and Social protection of Algeria

The reorganisation of the world and the emergence of new players have made it clear that new instruments are necessary. Defining a new multilateralism has become an absolute necessity.

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Jeffry Frieden

Professor of government at Harvard University

Global governance is only really justified if there are global public goods that cannot be supplied by national governments.

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Liu Chen

Professor, China’s Foreign Studies University in Beijing

Thanks to the overall positive economic and political effects of the Reform and Opening up, the smoke has cleared in the state-market battle in China and there is an increased tendency toward connecting China with World.

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Kunihiko Miyake

Research Director, The Canon Institute for Global Studies, Japan

The most important element is the rise of nationalism on the planet. Nationalism is back and I think that we should focus on how to control it.

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Tobby Simon

Founder and Chairman, Synergia Foundation, India

Global warming and rising waters, caused by climate change is a major threat. Another consequence of global warming is the spread of diseases and emergence of multi-resistant strains.

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Carlos Pérez-Verdia

Head of the Private Office of the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Mexico

In Latin America we have no significant religious, ethnical or cultural rivalries and no significant border disputes. We are therefore more or less absent from the debate on spheres of influence.

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Michael Yeoh

Founder and CEO of Asian Strategy & Leadership Institute of Malaysia

Southeast Asia will continue to play a key role in the regional architecture of Asia and the hope is that we will become a middle power in the years to come.

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Conclusion by Dominique Moïsi

Special Advisor at Ifri

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Debate

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17:00 | Closing

Envoi

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2013 Conference proceedings

14:30 – 15:30 | Opening session

H.S.H. Prince Albert II

Sovereign Prince of Monaco

Democracy cannot be imposed but must be built progressively according to each State’s history.

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Thierry de Montbrial

President and founder of the WPC

Regardless of whether today’s international system be described as zero-polar, bipolar or multipolar, the simple reality is that the most powerful states no longer wish or are no longer capable of exercising their power. It is, in my view, more constructive to focus on the ‘middle powers’.

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Introduction by Thierry de Montbrial

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Ali Babacan

Deputy Prime Minister of the Republic of Turkey

For many of our domestic reform efforts, the European Union has been a key external anchor. The standards, benchmarks and criteria that the European Union has for incoming countries are very important for us because it is a measure of quality of our reform efforts.

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Debate

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15:30 – 17:00 | Plenary session 1

“The state of the world economy and global governance”

Introduction by Nicolas Barré

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Kemal Dervis

We need to pay more attention to income distribution, to how growth is taking place and to how it is spreading through societies.

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Henri de Castries

We are probably seeing the end to the Westphalian states. Classical borders are becoming irrelevant in more and more areas.

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Jacob Frenkel

The world’s centre of gravity has moved and that businessmen and entrepreneurs were able to recognise and seize these opportunities.

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David de Rothschild

In 2014, there will be another round of stress tests and there will be another asset‑quality review. Therefore, I think that by the end of 2014, we will have a fairly stable environment in all this.

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Il SaKong

The G20 should have more frequent and structured meetings for finance deputies, finance ministers and Sherpas before the Summit. Leaders’ time is the scarcest resource in the world, so they cannot meet often.

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Pascal Lamy

We need to de‑monopolise international governance from the Westphalian system, from sovereign nation states. We need to look at greater diversity of public institutions.

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Debate

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17:00 – 17:45 | Plenary session 2

Mohammad Javad Zarif

We should never forget that trust is a two-way street. Today’s regional and international crises require every one of us to have a sense of responsibility and to cooperate with one other to rebuild peace and stability.

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Debate with Ali Ahani

Ambassador of Islamic Republic of Iran to France and to Monaco

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17:45 – 19:15 | Plenary session 3

“Middle East”

Introduction by Steven Erlanger

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Masood Ahmed

There has to be a focus on trying to give young people in particular some hope by giving them opportunities for employment in the short term. That means reallocating some spending towards job creation.

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Renaud Girard

I believe that our leaders have not grasped the fact that in Syria, a very deep and profound fracture has existed for a very long time between a party that I would describe as secular and a Muslim Brotherhood party.

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Bassma Kodmani

The djihadists’ best ally is the violence that was introduced by al-Assad. The djihadists’ best ally today is the chaos created by the regime.

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Mona Makram-Ebeid

For Egypt to advance, it has to go back to the slogan of the 1920s, which was ‘Religion is for God and the homeland is for all’. Otherwise, there is no future.

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Sergey Karaganov

Russia’s experience with Iranians has shown that they have been acting very constructively in calming crises in the former Soviet Central Asia and quite responsibly in calming crises in the Caucuses, including in Chechnya and elsewhere.

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Elisabeth Guigou

I believe that Europe must return, that Europe must abandon its navel-gazing and start to assert itself in the world again.

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Debate

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19:15 | Welcome cocktail

20:00 | Dinner debate

With Herman Van Rompuy

President of the European Council

The simple idea that people should have a say in their own governance has achieved a near universal status, and more of the world’s population lives in democratic countries than ever before in the history of the mankind.

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Debate

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08:00 – 09:45 | Plenary session 4

“Asia’s strengths and weaknesses”

Introduction by Michael Yeoh

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Bruno Lafont

Asia is rising and what is very interesting to see is the development of the cities in Asia. I think the most important trend in Asia today is harmonisation.

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Jin Roy Ryu

I think one of Asia’s weaknesses is that Asia does not have a strong leader or control tower like the United States in the Americas.

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Shotaro Oshima

Mr. Abe has put forward the case to the people that we should not have to be bogged down in deflationary mind-set and that we can change the economic environment and the outlook for the future by inflation target setting.

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Mayankote Kelath Narayanan

There exist two Asias today – both competing for space and attention. Economically, we have a dynamic, and to an extent, integrated Asia. In security terms, there is another Asia that appears dysfunctional, buffeted by powerful nationalisms and prone to irredentism.

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Anatoly Torkunov

Any diplomatic process is therefore only a tool to hedge risks by stopping North Korea from improving its nuclear arsenal and preventing nuclear proliferation. The basic underlying theory of the Russian policy of maintenance is the need for peaceful coexistence in the Korean Peninsula.

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Yang Jiemian

Strength lies in the open regionalism. Looking around the world it is only in Asia where regionalism is open.

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Debate

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09:45 – 11:15 | Plenary session 5

“The challenges of the cyberspace”

Paul Hermelin

The main challenge of the infosphere is the discontinuity between the majesty of international governance and the way technical innovation blossoms.

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Chang Dae-Whan

Interactions will be machine to machine. Society might prevail. We must be prepared for an end-to-end and machine-to-machine society.

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Meir Sheetrit

Having technology is not enough. There are many, many things that can cause damage in a surprising way if somebody decides to attack you. It is not enough therefore to have technology. You need to have the right warriors.

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Carl Bildt

A big battle ahead is going to be over whether we keep a global Internet and an open governance system or whether the Internet becomes balkanised. We will either have an open, transparent and dynamic Internet in the future or a closed, controlled and static one.

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Debate

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11:15 – 11:45 | Coffee-break

11:45 – 13:00 | Plenary session 6

“Whither the ‘European social model’?”

Introduction by Jim Hoagland

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Joaquín Almunia

We need to improve our tax systems to be consistent with both growth and the need to fund the welfare state, our social policies and the social model.

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Yves Leterme

Europe also has to be especially aware that, as the recent PISA report made clear, skills are the currency of the 21st Century and investments in social resiliency are therefore more important for Europe than investments in security.

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Jean Pisani-Ferry

Instead of having to bet on the future growth rate and to tell people a definite figure which they will expect to get, it should be recognised that the ability to provide pensions is linked to the performance of the economy.

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Didier Reynders

I think one-third of the next European Parliament could be comprised of Eurosceptics and populists who are against the European Union. If we do not take care of these issues at the European level we will have more and more difficulties. We need to politicise the European debate.

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Debate

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13:15 – 14:45 | Lunch debate

“The future of diplomacy”

Introduction by Jim Hoagland

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Hubert Védrine – Part 1

To me, the real question of diplomacy tomorrow and the day after tomorrow is, how can diplomacy be conducted in age that believes in transparency?

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Carl Bildt – Part 1

We feel the pulse of the world much more clearly and we can impact the pulse of the world more effectively with the new technologies.

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Hubert Védrine – Part 2

I think there needs to be an almost philosophical shift in civilisation by saying, “There are some cases when secrets, or the length of time a secret is kept, or conditions of secrecy, are justified.”

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Carl Bildt – Part 2

There now needs to be a kind of congruence between public diplomacy and the public image and the secret details and secret mechanics.

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Debate

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15:00 – 16:15 | Plenary session 7

“Destruction or metamorphosis of the legal order?”

Mireille Delmas-Marty

‘Coordinated sovereignism’ means that the separation of national orders would be gradually broken down by the circulation of norms and dialogue between judges, which would replace separation with coordination.

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Stephen Breyer

There must be a common rule that every country can follow. There’s a concept in law called comity that requires harmony. Easier said than done.

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Lord Mance

I have no sense at all that the United Kingdom’s legal system or we, its common lawyers, judges and courts, are about to be over-whelmed or lose our identity in the face of any outside threat.

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Jean-Marc Sauvé

I do not give much credence to the destruction theory in the sense of a collapse in juridical orders. Globalisation lays claim to just as many juridical rules as it seeks to topple, if not the reverse, and these rules must be able to find expression in juridical systems.

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16:30 – 19:30 | Parallel workshops

Workshop #1 – Energy and environment

Introduction by Christophe de Margerie

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Cécile Maisonneuve

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Maria van der Hoeven

At the global level we can see that the industrial sector is responsible for 37% of all energy savings in one of our new policy scenarios relative to the current policy scenarios, followed by transport at 31% and buildings at 26%.

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André Caillé

Any energy industry has to satisfy what we called then our “four As” criteria. First, energy has to be available; second, accessible; third, never forget that, affordable; and, fourth, it also has to be acceptable.

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William Ramsay

The US is on its way to energy, oil and gas self-sufficiency. I advisedly do not use the term ‘energy independence’.

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Debate

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Jun Arima

We need a smarter approach to do so, as well as a broader scope that features not only domestic but also global mitigation and a longer-term horizon with innovation.

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Kevin Sara

We are talking to our first clients in Europe and I can tell you that our biggest challenge is not technical. It is political and regulatory. The regulations are just not set up to transport electricity over long distances.

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Debate

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Conclusion by Christophe de Margerie

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Workshop #2 – The health and emerging risks

Introduction by James D. Wolfensohn

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Christian Bréchot

We must understand that we will never have an end of infectious disease. We have a reservoir of disease that is endless. The point is not to dream of suppressing infectious disease; the point is to adjust the follow-up and global governance of this problem.

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Richard Cooper

With modern technology and information and trade in weapons, we see increasingly that conflicts which historically would have been localised take on international significance.

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Daniel Dāianu

It is good for citizens to be stimulated, even assisted to become more self-reliant. However, the optimal solution cannot be by resorting to social Darwinism.

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Thomas Kirkwood

There is an enormous resource of mental capital in older people that simply goes to waste. It goes to waste because policies do not recognise how important it is to keep this mental capital engaged in society.

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James D. Wolfensohn

The issues of healthcare, which comes up with this, and of paying pensions to the aged just distorts the systems that we have had up to now. Nowhere is this more critical than in the USA at this time, but it will be a global issue.

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Debate

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Workshop #3 – Food security

Introduction by Jean-Yves Carfantan

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José Graziano Da Silva

Today, an estimated 840 million people suffer from chronic hunger and another 2 billion people suffer from micronutrient deficiencies. 26% of the world’s children are stunted. Malnutrition costs around 5% of the value of global growth domestic product.

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Christopher Delgado

There should be increased attention to risk management and greater resilience, and the policy incentives we have should be shifted to promoting triple wins, that is, more productivity, better resilience and mitigation all at the same time.

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Marcos Jank

Good policies for me are related to land property rights – which are extremely important in many countries – technology, productivity, gains in scale, and integration into food chains.

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Debate

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Mahama Zoungrana

The State alone, with all the good will in the world, cannot guarantee food security. In addition, civil society, which has a key role to play, but also and above all the private sector, must become increasingly involved.

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Debate

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Jane Karuku

African governments are not investing enough in African agriculture.

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Brent Habig

There are a lot of ways to do agriculture and have agricultural growth but not necessarily benefit smallholders or drive improvements in food security. That is our agenda, to try to find the opportunity to work with businesses when there is overlap with social goals and objectives.

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Debate

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Workshop #4 – Finance

Introduction by Jean-Claude Trichet

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John Lipsky

After all, one of the key problems highlighted by the crisis was not so much the details of regulation, but that many systemically-important institutions lay outside the regulatory framework.

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Jeffry Frieden

We need something that could be called governance; that is for something above the level of the nation state, for some attempt to either cooperate among national authorities or to create a supra-national entity that could try to deal with some of these cross-border externalities.

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Debate

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Benoît Cœuré

We need to make the single supervisory mechanism work in a way which is genuinely European, so we want the supervisory board not to be a committee of national supervisors but to become a European institution as part of the ECB.

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Marek Belka

We know from our own experience that if there is to be a real banking union the banks should be European, not national, but this is not easy.

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Debate

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Jacob Frenkel

Since the Central Bank must have the capabilities to respond very promptly to new developments, and since it must have timely and reliable information about the banking sector, it stands to reason that the responsibility for bank supervision should rest within the Central Bank.

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Il SaKong

The imminent US Fed’s tapering QE should be brought to the G20 process, more specifically, the G20’s MAP.

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Debate

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19:30 | Cocktail

20:30 | Gala dinner

Introduction by Thierry de Montbrial

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Laurent Fabius

Minister of Foreign Affairs of France

I personally do not think that China is becoming a warmonger. But it is a major power and a string of tensions could arise in the region in 2014. France will always work toward peace and security.

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Debate

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08:00 – 09:00 | Reports from parallel workshops

Cécile Maisonneuve

The world energy mix was made of 82% of fossil fuels thirty years ago; this figure remains the same today, and will decrease only to 75% in 2035. The real revolution will be to reach a truly different energy mix.

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Richard Cooper

Democratic political systems these days have great difficulty making forward-looking decisions that would head off serious risks in the future, so we are likely to be confronted with shocks which we are not well-situated to handle, especially in the financial area.

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Jean-Yves Carfantan

We need a climate smart agriculture that improves crop yields and livestock management to increase production, increases climate resilience of farming systems, reduces carbon emissions and increases soil carbon storage.

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Jeffrey Frieden

There is now a clearly greater role for the emerging markets in dealing with these global macroeconomic and financial problems, and there is more global recognition of the need for further cooperation.

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09:00 – 10:00 | Plenary session 8

“Towards a European Banking Union”

Introduction by Alessandro Merli

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Benoît Coeuré – Part 1

We need supervisors to have a European mandate instead of a national mandate, and that is why we have a single supervisory mechanism; we also need European banks to be in the hands of a European resolution authority when they are wound up, and that is also why we need a single resolution mechanism.

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Philipp Hildebrand – Part 1

It seems that something separate is going on, namely a fundamental reassessment of the risks in the European banking system,

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Constantin von Oesterreich – Part 1

Many important milestones have been reached on the way to the banking union, but implementation and execution are now the name of the game, and we are very much looking forward to getting a lot of engagement.

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Benoît Coeuré – Part 2

The asset quality review and the comprehensive assessment are the occasion for bringing them together, so it not only serves a stabilisation function, but also a macroeconomic function, in a sense, which is to recreate trust in the European banking system.

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Philipp Hildebrand – Part 2

Transparency will be a key part of this and will entail clear explanations of what monetary, stabilisation, regulatory and liquidity policies are, and we must try to separate these policies to the extent we can.

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Benoît Coeuré – Part 3

Banking supervisors should be accountable to parliaments and the general public. That is why we will have this supervisory board and the chair of the board.

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Constantin von Oesterreich – Part 2

Banks which are large enough to be in it cannot get out, and smaller banks are in it for specific reasons, so there is a level playing field

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Philipp Hildebrand – Part 3

Make sure the banks have sufficient capital so the uncertainties can be removed from the marketplace and they can start lending again. That will clearly be the key element from the macroeconomic perspective.

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Benoît Coeuré – Part 4

The single supervisory mechanism will aim to avoid the kind of negative feedback through banks we have seen in banks in some countries and that ultimately led to a need for financial assistance. Therefore, good single supervision is a protection for taxpayers.

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Debate

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Remarks from the panelists

10:00 – 10:45 | Plenary session 9

H.R.H. Prince Turki Al Faisal

Chairman of the King Faisal Center for Research and Islamic Studies (KFCRIS)

The problem in Syria today is not only a tragedy, but is an act of negligence on the part of the world, which continues to watch the suffering of the Syrian people without taking steps to stop that suffering. It almost reaches the level of being criminal negligence on the part of the world community.

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Debate

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10:45 – 11:15 | Coffee-break

11:15 – 12:00 | Plenary session 10

Itamar Rabinovich

President of the Israel Institute, Distinguished Global Professor at New York University (NYU), Distinguished Fellow at the Brookings Institution and Professor Emeritus, Tel Aviv University

Demographically speaking, we are risking the future of the state as a Jewish state, and in terms of Israel’s international standing, we see a creeping delegitimisation, and these are two very dangerous developments for us.

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Debate

12h00 – 13h30 | Plenary session 11

“Africa”

Introduction by Jean-Michel Severino

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Jean-David Levitte

The African Union is willing to take responsibility for its own security issues, a job that is incumbent upon Africans. Europe needs to help Africa fulfil this desire.

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Mo Ibrahim

Some fragmentation is taking place in this new world, though I do not know why it has expressed itself in a more civilised and peaceful way through the ballot box in Europe, while sometimes it takes on a violent aspect in Africa.

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Titus Naikuni

As far as Somalia is concerned, Ethiopia and Kenya not only need to go into Somalia militarily, but also to do as much as they can to help to develop the human capacity to govern that country, because if you do not have a stable Somalia you will not have a stable Kenya or Ethiopia.

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Qu Xing

China’s noninterference policy does not mean indifference, that China needs the stability of Africa and that China is proceeding to improve the stability in promoting social and economic development instead of imposing its social model.

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Mostafa Terrab

Too many policies and too many business strategies disconnect the north of Africa from sub-Saharan Africa. Let us keep in mind that ten out of 22 Arab countries are in Africa, and some geopoliticians do not take that very much into consideration.

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Tidjane Thiam

I am arguing for the normalisation of Africa, so that people start treating it like any other place in the world, and if we get that we will be absolutely fine.

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Lionel Zinsou

Rates of return on capital are higher in Africa than on all the other continents. This means the misperception is not thinking that Africa is below average, it’s not knowing that Africa is above average.

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Conclusion by Jean-Michel Severino

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13:30 – 15:15 | Lunch debate

Introduction by Thierry de Montbrial

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Pauline Marois

Prime Minister of Quebec

In its political expression of Francophone expression in America, the State of Quebec is attempting to come to terms with the challenges as well as the advantages that arise from its status as a nation.

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Debate

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15:30 – 16:45 | Plenary session 12

“Politics and religions”

Introduction by Pierre Morel

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Bartholomew 1st

Contrary to what some may think, the politics of the 21st century are not determined by religion. On the contrary, politics has the upper hand over religion, transforming it into an instrument for its own use.

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Mircea Geoanā

And for the first time in centuries, we will have not only geoeconomic, geopolitical, technological and military competitors, we will have a formidable competitor whom we must treat with respect, because these are cultures and traditions which are so ancient that they deserve our respect

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Mohammed Sammak

We learned, and are still learning to oppose a notion of diversity that becomes a substitute for neighborhood and community. Diversity without a spirit of community leads to tribalism. Community without a spirit of diversity leads to alienation for all minorities.

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David Rosen

Religious leaders are in positions that represent the identities of the peoples, the belonging of the peoples, and if you do not address this issue of identity and belonging, it will come back to haunt you.

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Faisal Bin Muaammar

Religious leaders need to be careful how they relate to politics, but political leaders also need to be careful how they relate to religion.

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Marcelo Sanchez Sorondo

God created Man in the image of God, and so Man must live in a society. It is not only an individual image, it is also a social image.

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Debate

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16:45 – 18:45 | Plenary session 13

“General debate”

Introduction by Dominique Moïsi

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Titus Corlātean

Comparing the Balkan region to only 25 years ago, it is almost predictable, which is a fundamental qualitative step forward, because for all we know, tomorrow the region will be part of the European family.

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Igor Yurgens

So, we have two Russias at the moment: 20% of the population who want to move forward, to be contemporary and silent majority which is afraid to move forward and to open up.

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Jim Hoagland

The American administration has certainly reached out far more toward its adversaries than to some key allies, and that has consequences. It fails to build up a reserve of personal relationships that can be called on in moments of crisis and difficulties.

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Karl Kaiser

The Libyan crisis has shown, and it was a wake-up call, how insufficiently Europe was prepared to deal with a world in which America is no longer exactly as available as it was before.

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Yusuf Ziya Irbec

We have a very multidimensional culture in Turkey, and politicians should be prepared to understand all the dimensions of Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and all other religious groups. This is the basis for being an efficient leader in Turkey.

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Donald Johnston

Corruption has to be attacked on many fronts, but I just want to leave you with the fact that corruption is much more serious than we acknowledge.

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Carlos Pérez Verdía

Just as in the case of North America, Latin America has a lot of other issues and challenges, and the positive thing there with regard to drugs, security and human rights is that we are discussing these at a regional level.

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Steven Erlanger

I really worry that France, which already has a problem with its own self-image in the world in a Europe where Germany seems big and powerful, is slipping out of the second tier into the third, and that is the problem.

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Conclusion by Dominique Moïsi

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18:45 | Closing

19:30 | Informal dinner