1. Hulton Archive
Under the chairmanship of former West German Chancellor Willy Brandt, the Independent Commission on International Development Issues examined the problems facing the global economy in the early 1980s. Brandt's panel of former world leaders and other prominent figures found that developing nations were economically dependent on developed nations, which dominated the international rules and institutions for trade, money, and finance. This economic division resulted in political instability, not just in poor nations, but across the world. .
In North-South (1980) and Common Crisis (1983), the Brandt Commission made a set of bold recommendations to change all that. In a sweeping series of measures addressed to the global public, governments, and international agencies, the Brandt Reports called for a full-scale restructuring of the global economy, along with a new approach to the problems of development, including an emergency program to end poverty in developing nations.
Some of the results of the Brandt Commissions were:.
• Without new family planning programs to slow fertility and birth rates, world population has expanded by 1.7 billion people, more than 90% of whom were born in poor nations.
• the number of people suffering from hunger in developing nations has risen from 500-600 million to 1 billion people.
• the incidence of people living in poverty has multiplied from 800 million to 1.8 billion persons.
• Instead of promoting accessible, balanced exports of goods and resources between rich and poor nations to build cooperation and enlarge international markets, trade has been hampered by local subsidies and protectionist barriers, driving down the export prices of developing nations.
The Commission's purpose was to influence public opinion to help change government attitudes, as well as to make proposals for revitalizing North-South negotiations.
Do we really want a European Constitution? In science the award comes for the question - rather than for a seemingly certain answer. The same is true for teaching, especially for teaching democracy, and for education. It often strikes me how much education and democracy have in common: both, theories of education as well as theories of democracy, presume the autonomous individual from the very beginning, capable to question any authority and any wisdom by itself. However, at the same time in both theories there seems to exist the certainty that this autonomous individual still has to be...