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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