Speech by The Hon Bertie Ahern, Co-Chair of the InterAction Council
38th Annual Plenary Meeting of the InterAction Council
Beijing, China
8 October 2024
Your Excellencies, honored guests: I want to begin by thanking our hosts, The Chinese People’s Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries, for inviting the InterAction Council to China. We look forward to the dialogue and warm relations with Chinese leaders that I am sure will be the hallmark of the next few days.
This is the fourth plenary of the InterAction Council that has taken place in China and, as such, China is one of the most welcoming partners of the Council, with our members always expressing keen interest in visiting and learning more about the Chinese perspective on world events.
As we all know, China has been the longest continuing force in world civilization. When the pyramids were being built in Egypt four thousand years ago, the Xia dynasty, the earliest in Chinese history, had already begun developing the rituals and casting the bronze vessels that would be adopted by later dynasties like the Shang. By 200 BCE, as Rome conquered Italy and began its march to dominate the Mediterranean, China already had an empire, and the Han dynasty brought a golden age to the region with Confucianism providing moral wisdom to the world.
And so it goes - whether it be the Mayan Civilization in Central America in 1000 CE, the Mughal period in India under Babur in the 16th century, or the rise of Europe in the eighteenth century - China has always been there with the Song, Tang and Ming dynasties still revered for their innovations in art, technology and urbanization.
Knowing the importance of China historically and appreciating the transformation of China in the 1980s and early 1990s, leaders of the InterAction Council like Helmut Schmidt, former Chancellor of West Germany; Takeo Fukuda, former Prime Minister of Japan; and President Obasanjo of Nigeria, now co-Chair of IAC; along with Henry Kissinger, former American Secretary of State, as a key advisor, organized the 11th plenary in Shanghai in May 1993.
Thirty years after that first plenary in China I have gone back and reviewed the reports and read the communique of that meeting and, in my remarks today, I would like to contrast where the world was then and the State of the World as we meet today. In some areas we have progressed, in many stood still, and regretfully in some regressed badly.
In 1993, the leaders of the Council welcomed “the emergence of China as a major political, strategic, and economic power on the world scene,” and today it is not emergence we are witnessing but leadership in a host of domains. China has the second largest economy and a world class military. It is a leading player in contributing to global institutions like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. It leads the world in wind and solar energy with twice as much capacity under construction as the rest of the world combined.
In 1993, InterAction Council leaders thought China was “poised to play a major role.” We can say with much more certainty today that there is not an important global problem anywhere in the world where China is not central to an eventual solution.
China, of course, is part of Asia and it is not just China that has emerged in the past generation but so have its Asian neighbours such as India and Vietnam. The World Economic Forum has declared, “We’ve entered the Asian century.” Half of the world’s population lives in Asia, and in the generation since the Council first met in Shanghai, the region has climbed from low to middle income status. A third of world trade in goods originates in Asia which contributes to Asia being home to 21 of the world’s 30 largest cities. The World Economic Forum estimates that by 2040 Asia will generate more than 50 per cent of world GNP. Going forward, understanding and partnering with Asia is not a choice, it is a necessity.
In 1993, the InterAction Council deplored “the international community’s inability to prevent the spiral of deadly violence” in the Balkans, but, alas, in 2024 conflict is wider and deeper. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 has resulted in hundreds of thousands of casualties. Violence escalates in the Middle East with almost daily reports of new fighting in the West Bank, along the Lebanon Border as well as the ongoing war in Gaza since Hamas initiated terrible and tragic atrocities with its attack on Israel in October 2023. The civil war in Sudan has displaced millions of people with more than two million fleeing the country as refugees.
Amidst these horrors we cannot fall prey to despair. Our co-chair President Obasanjo, on behalf of the African Union, is working night and day to prevent Ethiopia and Somalia from going to war over Somaliland. I know, from personal experience, that few had any hope that negotiations might end the Troubles in Northern Ireland, but we achieved the Good Friday Agreement in 1998.
China, the InterAction Council hoped in 1993, would use its new strengths to work for peace and prevent conflict. Never have we needed China more in this regard: China has already been using its good offices to broker an agreement between Russia and Ukraine, it is a major economic force in Africa, and it has strong trade relations with the Middle East. The InterAction Council implores China and every other great power to urgently do what they can to bring peace to a scarred world.
No doubt influenced by my colleague President Obasanjo who was there, in 1993 the InterAction Council highlighted the priority of “Bringing Africa Back to the Mainstream,” and we should applaud this prescience. Africa has rich natural resources, a market of over a billion people and over the next few decades will experience the fastest increase in working age population. Yet the continent still needs debt sustainability and infrastructure development. Here China has really stepped up: China is sub-Saharan Africa’s largest bilateral trading partner, thousands of Chinese firms are active in the continent, and Chinese Overseas Foreign Direct Investment in Africa has been increasing steadily since the early 2000s and now surpasses the United States. Just last month in Beijing, the Summit Forum on China-African Development met, jointly calling “for an equal and orderly multipolar world” to “firmly safeguard the international system with the UN at its core.” Those are sentiments that the InterAction Council enthusiastically endorses.
There is one priority, however, that the InterAction Council leaders meeting in 1993 did not address but which is central to our Beijing plenary in 2024 - the primacy of meeting the challenges of global pandemics. Beginning with the outbreak of the Ebola virus in 2016, the InterAction Council has made the prevention and management of international health crises a priority. In 2017 in Dublin the Council endorsed a “One Health for People and Planet Charter.” The Covid crisis of 2020 sadly demonstrated that viruses know no international boundaries and that all of us are at risk. This reality was demonstrated again in August 2024, when the World Health Director declared the Mpox outbreak a public health emergency. At this Beijing plenary we will continue our work on world health by suggesting further reforms.
I began this talk by discussing the great impact China has made on world history. My country of Ireland can make no such claim. But there is one domain where Ireland is second to none and that is in the realm of letters, art and literature. In comparing the Council’s agenda in 1993 with today’s list of problems and emergencies, there are areas in which the world has clearly regressed such as in violence and conflict, but there are bright spots, too, such as the emergence of Asia and the rise of living standards.
I remain positive that we can address our difficulties, and that faith is reinforced by one of Ireland’s greatest poets, Seamus Heaney, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995. He said: “hope is not optimism, which expects things to turn out well, but something rooted in the conviction that there is good worth working for.”
The leaders of the InterAction Council in 1993 thought there was good worth working for and so do the Council leaders of today.
Thank you very much.