Past Program

The eighth Palliser Lecture will be delivered by Pascal Lamy, coordinator of the Jacques Delors Institutes (Paris, Berlin, Brussels), vice-chairman of the Paris Peace Forum, and former director-general of the World Trade Organisation.

The system of global governance from 1945 onwards, always subject to challenge, has become increasingly fragile, perhaps heading to disintegration, given the shifts in global power balances over recent decades, now brought into stark relief by the invasion of Ukraine. But the need for global governance and collaboration has been intensifying as the planet also becomes increasingly fragile, as have the foundations of human health and sustainable, open economies.

Common interests demand global collaboration, but they are in tension not only with particular national interests but also clashing value systems - along a spectrum from liberal democracy to authoritarianism, with a further dimension of populism undermining liberal democratic norms in the West – along with the rivalries, shifting in line with whatever is in contention, between status quo and revisionist powers.

Given these complexities, what will global governance look like in the future? Who will make and enforce the rules? There is likely to be a variable geometry, given great power alliances and competition, with variations along ideological and geographic axes. How can global governance adapt to this geometry and remain effective amidst the shifting distribution of power? Would a more regionalized approach strengthen or weaken the pursuit of global goals? The system is likely to be messy and develop in unanticipated directions, but what principles might help to reshape a system resilient to present and future stresses?