Changing Trends in Global Power and Conflict Resolution
Wednesday, September 24, 2008 at 15:09 
International Institute for Strategic Studies
6th Global Strategic Review Conference
Changing Trends in Global Power and Conflict Resolution
Friday 12th September
Keynote Speech by Robert B. Zoellick
President, The World Bank Group
As Prepared for Delivery
Introduction
You might be asking, “Now why did John Chipman invite the President of the World Bank Group to speak to the International Institute for Strategic Studies?
In addition to the pleasure of seeing many friends, there is a particular reason why I wanted to speak to this audience. So let me explain.
In 1944, delegates from forty five countries gathered at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, to consider the economic causes that had led to the World War that was then raging. Their vision was not only to achieve military victory, but also to secure the peace, unlike their predecessors in Paris in 1919.
That generation – like any other – had its parochial attitudes, differences in perspectives, and inability to foresee what was to come. But it perceived one big idea: the nexus among economics, governance, and security.
Those who gathered at Bretton Woods agreed to create the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, the original institution of what has become the World Bank Group. As the delegates noted, “Programs of reconstruction and development will speed economic progress everywhere, will aid political stability and foster peace.” The IBRD approved its first loan to France in 1947. That $250 million investment remains, in real terms, the Bank’s largest loan to date.
Over sixty years later, the “R” in IBRD has a new meaning: reconstructing Afghanistan, Cambodia, Côte d’Ivoire, Haiti, Iraq, Kosovo, Liberia, the Palestinian territories, the Solomon Islands, Southern Sudan, Timor-Leste, and other lands of conflict or broken states. In Fiscal Year 2008, the World Bank Group committed over $3 billion in development assistance to countries affected by fragility and conflict.
When states are breaking down or overcome by conflict, they pose waves of danger. The first surge threatens the people living there: with death and disease, economic stagnation, and environmental degradation. One billion people, including about 340 million of the world’s extreme poor, are estimated to live in fragile states. These countries lag behind in meeting all the Millennium Development Goals. They account for about a third of the deaths in poor countries from HIV/AIDS, a third of those who lack access to clean water, and a third of children who do not complete primary school. Half of all the children who do not live to the age of five are born in fragile states. And fragile states have poverty rates averaging 54 percent, compared to 22 percent in other low income countries.
The next perilous wave undermines their neighbors with refugees; warring groups; contagious diseases; and transnational criminal networks that traffic in drugs, arms, and people. As we have seen most recently in South Asia and Africa, fragile states can create fragile regions. It is much harder for economies to prosper if they cannot sell to, buy from, invest with, and even transit their neighbors. Landlocked countries with failed or failing neighbors can lose access to the world economy.
And as the world witnessed seven years ago yesterday, broken states can be the weak link in the global security chain if they are infiltrated by terrorists who recruit, train, and prosper amidst devastation.
The trauma of fragile states and the interconnections of globalization require our generation to recognize anew the nexus among economics, governance, and security. Most wars are now conflicts within states, and fragile states account for most of them. But our knowledge about how best to respond remains thin.
We maintain this ignorance at our peril. The diseases, outflows of desperate people, criminality, and terrorism that can spawn in the vacuum of fragile states can quickly become global threats. Moreover, just reflect for a moment about the loss to the world – the waste of human energy, creativity, invention, and possibility – of leaving one billion people in destitute circumstances.
Fragile states are the toughest development challenge of our era.
Those who have struggled with this problem on the ground are no doubt correct when they caution that “no one size fits all.” As one expert told me, the worst thing the development community could do is develop a step-by-step handbook for dealing with fragile states.
Yet that warning is true for any security, diplomatic, political, or economic problem. Without being formulaic, we can and need to do better, learning from experience. As Mark Twain prudently cautioned, “History may not repeat itself, but sometimes it rhymes.”
Too often, the development community has treated states affected by fragility and conflict simply as harder cases of development. No doubt new aspects of globalization, such as climate change, rapid urbanization, and greater levels of inequality within countries can become entwined with fragility and violence.
