Speech at University of Bergen

A few years ago, a report emerged under the auspices of the Inter-American Development Bank called "Diverging Paths". It had a comparative analysis of development in some of the Latin American countries and Scandinavia over a period of more than a century.

Countries like Uruguay and Argentina where richer than Norway in most respects in 1850. Today, our per capita income in Norway is about three times as high as in Uruguay and Argentina. Why so profound changes? "Diverging Paths" says: education for all, investment in higher education, and expanding democracy.

By 1850, 90 per cent of Scandinavians were literate. And by 1900 illiteracy was practically non-existent. Higher education expanded around the turn of the century, with a strong emphasis on applied sciences, modeled after the German polytechnical universities. In Latin-America, however, technical education was neglected.

According to the latest Human Development report, published by the United Nations, Norway is ranked No 5 in the world in terms of quality of life and opportunity. Argentina and Uruguay are ranked 30 and 32. On the bottom of the list, ranked 172-4, we find Somalia, Sierra Leone and Niger.

No doubt we can conclude: There is a clear connection between the prosperity of countries and their people's education and the general level of democracy and human rights.

Our understanding of development has grown and matured in recent years. The global UN conferences, Rio, Cairo, Beijing, all point to the same conclusion:

• Not a single country has succeeded in sustaining economic growth and human development without first investing in human development.

It has often been said that economic growth is essential for human development. I think we must reverse that notion and put people first.

Fortunately, we have moved away from the trendy thoughts of the 1980s, when trickle-down thinking was so fashionable, not least in the US and the UK. Monetary policies, privatization and tax cuts where supposed to lift societies as a whole. But there is no such thing as trickle-down education or trickle-down democracy!

The Norwegian society became more equitable and prosperous than most because of the political decisions we made regarding taxation, redistribution, and democratic reform, because we invested in basic social services, such as health and equitable educational opportunities for all.

Nowhere will this happen as a result of the market forces. Everywhere it happens, it will happen because of political decisions. An educated population is not only able to harness natural resources. Education and knowledge enable us to get organized as a society and to manage the processes of production.

A strong and responsible public sector is a prerequisite for development. The market forces alone or monetary policies alone will never do this. They know this in developing countries. As the Prime Minister of India said in the UN; "No great industrialist is going to come and look after the primary health centers of my country. No multinational company is going to run our primary schools."

If we continue our reading of the Human Development Report of 1996, we also see that a dozen African countries reached their present per capita income in the 1960s or before. The poorest countries have the lowest literacy rates and the lowest school-enrollment. There are different reasons in different countries, including steep falls in commodity prices, debt, corruption and bad governance. But there is everywhere the question of priorities: Military expenditure, or primary schools, catering to the urban elite, or building rural health services.

And where population growth by far exceeds economic growth, countries investment in education will remain a mounting problem.

The outside world can help in many ways by means of financial and technical assistance, and by directing aid towards basic human needs, not least health and education. In Norway we have done this for several decades and will continue to do so. But regretfully, the levels of international aid are today in a shameful condition. As always, we Scandinavians and the Dutch are on top of the list, but the distance between us and the others is widening. The international redistributive system, what we have today as seeds of an international public sector which we so sorely need, is in a badly, neglected condition.

To blame is not only the lack of generosity from countries who like to assume the mantle of donorship. The recipient countries are responsible as well. Budgets for development aid have to carry democratic support, and that is also why the policies of recipient countries are so important, Not only the effectiveness of their public sectors, but the social profile of their policies will be in focus.

Through dialogue and cooperation, we must continue to discuss the link between our contributions and the recipient countries' levels of defense expenditure, their social, redistributive and educational policies, - and how they promote democracy and popular participation.

The need for knowledge is changing. Development, which needs to be sustainable, requires that knowledge must be shared across sectors. Providing non-necessary consumer goods for all people is probably a much easier task than providing food for a doubled world population sometime in the next century.

Grain yields in Asia, for example, is often close to the maximum obtained by agricultural institutes, while yields of other products are often at deplorably low rates.

Today, 50 per cent of the world's population live within 5 miles of the sea. The importance of marine sustainable development will increase exponentially as billions of people rely more heavily on our oceans for food and environmental security. So knowledge about the marine environment will become even more critical with time. This is an area where in Norway has much to contribute.

The need for knowledge is expanding all the time. The president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology wrote an interesting article in the Washington Post a year ago, called "A few things it is important to know that we don't know".

Among his points were: We know more than people ever have known, but we do not know how we learn, think, remember or communicate. We can predict climate change, but the weather forecast for next week is uncertain at best.

We don't know how we are going to feed a doubled world population, only that we will have to. We don't know how to provide the energy needed to meet the needs of that population, without upsetting the climate and pollute our lands. But we know that these are among the issues that will need to be solved in the first half of the 21st century. And your generation must do it.

Technology transfer is transfer of knowledge. Technology transfer has been part of the North-South Agenda for decades. Many efforts at state-to-state technology transfer have been less than successful. Why is that so? Maybe we have not taken seriously enough the need to engage the private sector in international development work?

Where do we find technology? Not in NORAD, SIDA or DANIDA. But in private enterprises, universities and research institutes. The ten largest companies in the US spend more on research and development than the entire Third World including China. Clearly, technology cooperation should become a natural part of forward-looking foreign policies.

This means that we must cooperate, government, business and universities. We made a serious effort last year as a part of the Governments new Asia strategy.

A lot will happen in East Asia that has never happened before. We have never experienced such economic growth, among a comparably large population as in Asia, living on land and depending on water resources which are already under strain. Few Asian countries are democracies in our European meaning of that word.

We believe, that although Norway is a small country, we can make a difference. We can help countries make wise decisions, to avoid environmental damage, to acquire the best available technology. And by doing so, we believe that at least some people in those countries will be exposed to our ideas, to our political culture, and that such knowledge is bound to inspire their political hopes and aspirations.

There is a Chinese proverb that says: "If you open a window, a fly may come in". In toady's non-democratic countries, this means that they cannot reap the benefits of our technology without exposing themselves to our ideas and thinking about development, democracy and human rights.

We keep telling leaders in developing countries that we cannot, and will not, isolate our economic relations from the wider mutual general curiosity, public interest and opinionated public debate. People in our democracies have opinions, and will express opinions.

Many Third World governments are uncomfortable with the political challenges that accompany increasing international engagement. Some would like to hold on to traditions, even isolate or roll back progress - or to confine it to certain areas and exempt others. But as wider segments of people interact, and as contacts multiply, political change will be fueled, also where democratic rule today is growing on thin soils.

During my travels to Indonesia and China last year, Norwegian business representing state-of-the-art technology were actively involved. They covered the fields of energy, environmental management and technology, not to speak of the whole maritime sector, from data-based sea-mapping to the most sophisticated means of sea transportation and oil exploration.

The government made it clear that we expected our business representatives to represent their country and our values in their dealings with workers, companies and government representatives.

We held advance meetings with all companies in our delegation check if their dealings with these countries would meet the test of sustainable development and that their attitudes towards workers rights, training and technology transfer was in line with our vision of positive change.

In China, cooperation agreements were concluded between the University of Oslo and the University of Beijing, and between Nordic universities and the Fudan University of Shanghai.

We do not know when and how and to what extent we will see the fruits of our endeavors. But we do know that we cannot influence change in these countries by staying away.

If I may digress momentarily, I would like to recall how conservatives argued against contacts with the communist countries in periods of the Cold War. But the whole CSCE was about contacts and the human dimension. Charta 77 would not have happened without such outside inspiration. And Havel is today President of the Czech Republic.

I remember when we started our work in the World Commission on Environment and Development. We decided to hold meetings in all regions of the world and learn by listening to people's concerns and their own views about their life situation.

We decided that we could not rely on government sources and insisted that part of our program was to hold public hearings. Our first such meeting took place in Indonesia in 1985.

At first the Government of Indonesia did not accept the need for public hearings. Our reaction was: In that case, the Commission can not come to Indonesia. Finally, it was agreed that we could hold such hearings. It had never happened before in Indonesia.

Those who took part in it cannot forget it. Such a meeting with democratic exchange of opinion cannot be untold.

Two years later, we held public hearings in the Soviet Union. It had never happened before in that country. Today, there is democracy where totalitarianism ruled.

We don't know today when Indonesia will become a democratic country. But I am convinced that we will live to see the day.

And when that happens, we will have a stake in that change - a small one - but a stake.

All history of liberation struggles tells us that life, freedom, equality and opportunity have never been given. They have always been taken. In 1814 it was the influx of European political thinking, in the wake of trade, that led to the adoption of a modern constitution in Norway.

In recent years information technology has helped peaceful revolutions in Central and Eastern Europe. Knowledge about our Western democracies and way of life could not be curtailed. The systems of Eastern Europe could not any longer meet the legitimate aspirations of their people.

We live in a knowledge-driven time. It is not natural resources in themselves that give us wealth, but the way we utilize them. If resources alone could make us wealthy, we could have reached our present standard of living a long time ago.

We live in a knowledge-driven time, but we are still in transition. We shall never be able to escape from the ultimate dilemma that all our knowledge is about the past - and all our decisions are about the future.

Looking back, we know what kind of knowledge that made great difference in the past, for development and for peace.

We know how the scientific community influenced the nuclear debate and the foreign and security policy debate. Pugwash was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize last year for their role.

We know how international law has been a foundation in international relations, and how a lawyer from Bergen has played an important role in the actions against war criminals in the former Yugoslavia.

We know how knowledge of environmental issues have come to stay and that resource management issues will have to be based on science and knowledge. In a culturally, politically and economically diverse world, science is the only factor on which to build.

We know how communications is growing around the world. If subscriptions to Internet increases at present rates, there will be more subscribers than there are people on earth by the year 2005. We know how to access almost all the information there is, but not how to sort the important from the unimportant and focus collectively on the former.

Knowledge is the ultimate resource. It is a democratic resource since there is enough for everybody, if we distribute access to knowledge in an equitable way.

Professor Samuel Huntington of Harvard, who wrote the widely noticed essay on clashes between the civilizations in Foreign Affairs, recently said that although authoritarian rule might provide good government for a decade and even a generation, it cannot provide - and throughout history has never provided - good government over a sustained period of time. Authoritarian rule lacks the institutions of self reform; public debate, a free press, protest movements, opposition, political parties and competitive elections - end of quote.

A tide is changing in favour of democracy. That change happened rapidly in Eastern Europe. Democratic reform is also clearly visible in a number of African and Latin-American countries. We don't know how quickly it will happen in Asia. But it will.

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