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What happens when the whole world votes? | Simon Anholt | TEDxFrankfurt

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    As many of you know, the results of
    the recent election were as follows:
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    Hillary Clinton, Democratic Candidate
    went a lenghts loud victory,
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    with 52% of the overall vote.
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    Jill Stein, the Green Candidate,
    came a distant second with 19%.
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    Donald J. Trump, the Republican Candidate
    was caught up on our hills with 14%.
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    And their remainder of the vote was shared
    between abstainers and Gary Jonhson,
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    the Libertarian Candidate.
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    (Astonishing silence and then
    laughters in the audience)
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    What parallel Universe
    do you suppose I'm living?
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    I don't live in a parallel
    Universe, I live in the world.
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    And that is outer world verdict.
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    Let me take you back and
    explain what I mean by that.
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    In June this year, I loaned
    something called 'The Global Vote.'
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    And the Global Vote, does
    exactly what it says on the tin.
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    For the first time in history, elects
    anybody, anywhere in the world
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    vote in the elections of
    other people's countries.
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    Why would you do that?
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    What's the point?
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    Let me show you what it looks like.
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    You go to a website, rated beautiful
    website and then you select an election
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    here's a bunch of what
    we've already covered,
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    we do about it one a month or there about
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    so you can see by gallery
    the United States of America,
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    Secretary General of the United Nations,
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    the Brexit Referendum at the end head.
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    You select the election that you're
    interested in and you pick the candidate.
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    These are the candidates for the recent
    Presidential elections in the tiny
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    Island Nation in São Tomé and Prìncipe,
    under 99 of thousand inhabitants,
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    off the coast of West Africa.
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    And then you can look at the brief
    summary of each of those candidates,
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    which I dearly hope it's very neutral,
    very informative and very succinct.
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    And when you find the
    one you like, you vote.
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    These were the candidates in the
    recent Islandic Presidential election.
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    And that's the way it goes.
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    Why not would you do want to vote
    in another country's election?
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    The reason you wouldn't want
    to do it, let me reassure you,
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    is in order to interfere in the
    democratic process of another country.
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    That's not the purpose at all.
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    Infact you can't, because usually
    what I do is I release the results after
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    the elector in each individual
    country has already voted,
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    so there's not way that we
    can interfere in that process.
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    But more importantly, I'm
    not particularly interested
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    in the domestic issues
    of individual countries,
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    that's not what we are voting on.
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    What Donald J. Trump or Hillary Clinton
    propose to do for the Americans,
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    it's frankly none of our business.
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    That's something that only
    the Americans can vote on.
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    Now, In the Global Vote you are
    only considering one aspect of it
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    which is: "What of those leaders
    are going to do for the rest of us?"
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    And that's so very important,
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    because we live, as nonart of
    your seeker people tell you,
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    in a globalized, hyperconnected,
    massively interdependent world,
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    where the political decisions
    of people in other countries
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    can unwill have an impact on our lives,
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    no matter who we are,
    no matter where we live.
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    Like the wings of the butterfly,
    beating on one side of the Pacific,
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    that can apparently create
    a hurricane on the other side,
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    so it is with the world
    we are living today.
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    And the world of politics.
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    There is no longer a dividing line between
    domestic and international effect.
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    Any country, no matter how small,
    even if it's São Tomé and Prìncipe,
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    could produce the next Nelson
    Mandela, or the next Stalin.
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    They could pollute the atmosphere in
    the oceans which belong to all of us.
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    Or they could be responsible
    and they can help all of us.
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    And yet, the system is so strange
    because the system hasn't caught up
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    with this globalized reality.
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    Only a small number of people are
    allowed to vote for those leaders,
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    even though their impact is
    gigantic and almost universal.
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    What number was it? A hundred and
    forty million of Americans voted for the
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    next President of The United States
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    and yet, as all of us know,
    in a few weeks time,
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    somebody is going handle over the
    Nuclear Launch Code to Donald J. Trump.
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    Now if that isn't having a
    potential impact on all of us,
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    I don't know what it is.
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    Similarly the election for the
    Referendum on the Brexit Vote
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    a small number of millions of
    British people voted on that
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    but the outcome of the vote,
    which every way it went
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    would define a significant impact
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    on the lives of tens, hundreds of
    millions people around the world
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    and that the only tiny
    number that could vote.
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    What kind of democracy is that?
    Huge decisions that affects all of us,
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    being decided by relatively
    very small numbers of people
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    and I don't know about you, but
    I don't think that sounds very democratic.
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    So I'm trying to clear it up.
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    But as I say, we don't ask
    about domestic questions.
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    Infact, I have only ever asked two
    questions of all of the candidates.
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    I'm sending the same two
    questions every single time.
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    I say: 1. If you got elected, what are
    you going to do for the rest of us,
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    for the remainder of the 7
    billion who live on this planet?
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    Second question: What is your vision
    for your country's future in the world?
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    What role do you see it playing?
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    Every candidate, I send the most
    questions and all of that answers,
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    don't get me wrong, I reckon
    if you're standing to become
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    the next President of the United States,
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    you' re probably pretty
    tied up most of the time,
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    so I'm not altogether surprised that
    they don't answer us, but many do.
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    More every time. And some of
    them do much more than answer.
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    Some of them answer
    in the most enthusiastic
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    and most exciting way you could imagine,
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    I just wanna say a word of
    it for Saviour Chishimba,
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    which was one of the Candidates in the
    recent Zambian Presidential election.
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    His answers to those two questions
    were basically an 18 page dissertation
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    on his view of Zambia's
    potential role in the world
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    and in the International Community.
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    I posted it on the website
    so anybody could read it.
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    Now Saviour, won the global vote,
    but he didn't win the Zambian election.
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    So I found myself wondering,
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    what am I going to do with this
    extraordinary group of people,
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    I brought some wonderful people
    here who want the global vote,
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    we always are getting wrong, by the way.
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    The one that we elect is never the person
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    who is elected by the
    domestic electorate
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    - maybe Palin because we
    went to see to go for a women -
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    but I think it may also be a sign
    that the domestic electors
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    are still thinking very nationally,
    they're still thinking very inwardly,
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    they're still asking themselves:
    "what's in it for me?"
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    instead of what they should be asking
    today, which is: "what's in it for we?"
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    But there you go, so suggestions please,
    not right now but send me an e-mail
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    if you got an idea about we can do with
    this amazing team of glorious losers.
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    We've got Saviour Chishimba
    who I mentioned before,
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    we got up at Tómasdóttir
    who was running up
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    in the Islandic Presidential elections,
    many of you may have seen her in
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    an amazing talk at TED women
    just a few weeks ago,
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    where she spoke by the need for
    more women to get into politics.
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    We got Maria das Neves
    from São Tomé and Prìncipe.
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    We got Hillary Clinton,
    I don't know if she's available.
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    We got Jill Stein, and we
    covered also the election
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    for the next General Secretary
    of the United Nations
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    and we called the ex
    Prime Minister of New Zealand
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    who'll be a wonderful member of the team.
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    I think maybe those
    people, the glorious losers,
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    would like to travel around the
    world, wherever there's an election,
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    and remind people of the
    necessity in our modern age,
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    of thinking a little bit outwards
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    and thinking of the
    international consequences.
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    What comes next to the global vote?
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    Obviously the Donald and Hillary show
    is a bit of a difficult one to follow,
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    but there's another really important
    election that's coming up.
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    Infact they seemed to be multiplied,
    there's something going on,
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    I'm sure you've noticed in the world
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    and the next roll of elections
    are all critically important.
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    And just a few days time we got the reveal
    of the Australian Presidential election
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    with the prospect of nobody offer
    becoming commonly described
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    as the fast far right outer station
    europe since the Second Worlds War.
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    Next year we got Germany, we got France,
    we got Presidential election in Iran,
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    and a dozen of others.
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    It doesn't get less important.
    It gets more and more important.
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    Clearly, the global vote is
    not a stand alone project.
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    It's not just there on its own.
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    It has some background. It's part of the
    project which I've launched back in 2014
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    which I called 'The Good Country.'
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    The idea as a good country
    is basically very simple.
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    It's my simple diagnosis of
    what it's wrong with the world
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    and how we can fix it.
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    What's wrong with the world
    I've already went into that.
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    Basically we face an enourmous
    and growing number of gigantic
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    existential global challenges: climate
    change, human rights abuses,
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    mass migration, terrorism, economic
    chaos, weapons proliferation,
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    all of these problems is
    threatened to wipe us out
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    all by the very nature
    of globalized problems
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    no individual country has the
    capability of tackling them on its own.
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    And so very obviously, we have to
    cooperate and we have to collaborate
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    as nations if we're going
    to solve these problems.
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    It's so obvious.
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    And yet we don't-
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    We don't do it nearly after enough.
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    Most of the time countries
    still persist in behaving
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    as they were worring selfish tribes.
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    Battling against each other,
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    much as they have done since the Nation
    State was invented hundred of years ago.
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    And this is got to change. This is
    not a change in political systems
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    or a change in ideology.
    This is a change in culture.
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    We, all of us, have to understand,
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    that thinking inwoods is not the
    solution to the world's problems
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    we have to learn how to cooperate
    and collaborate a great deal more
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    and compete just a tiny bit less.
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    Otherwise things we are
    carrying on are getting bad,
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    and are going to get much worse
    much sooner that we anticipate.
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    This change will only happen if we,
    ordinary people, tell our politicians
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    of things to change. We have to tell
    them that the culture is changed.
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    We have to tell them
    they got a new mandate.
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    The old mandate was
    very simple and very single.
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    If you're in a position of power
    or authority you're responsible
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    for your own people and your
    tiny slice of territory, and that's it.
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    And if, in order to do the best
    thing for your own people,
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    you screw over everybody else
    on the planet, that's even better,
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    that's considered to be a big macho.
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    Today, I think everybody in a
    position of power and responsibility
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    has got a dual mandate,
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    which says if you are in a position
    of power and responsibility,
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    you're responsible for your own people and
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    for every single man, woman,
    child and animal on the planet.
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    You're responsible for your
    own slice of territory and
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    for every single square of mile of the
    outer service and the atmosphere above it
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    and if you don't like that responsibility,
    you should not be in power.
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    That for me, is the rule of the modern age
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    and that's the message that we're going
    to get across through our politicians
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    and show them that that's the
    way things are done these days
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    otherwise, we're all screwed.
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    I don't have a problem actually with
    Donald Trump's credo of America first.
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    It seems to me that this it's a pretty
    banale statement of what politicians
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    have always done and
    probably should always do.
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    Of course, they're elected to represent
    interests of their own people,
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    but what I find so boring
    and so old-fashioned,
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    and so unimaginative
    about his take on that,
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    is that America first
    means everyone else last.
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    The making America great again means
    making everybody else small again.
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    And it's just not true.
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    Images of all the policy advisor
    of the last twenty years or so,
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    I've seen so many hundreds of
    examples of policies that harmonize
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    the international and the domestic needs.
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    And they make better policy. I'm
    not asking nations to be altruistic
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    or self-sacrificing. That
    would be ridiculous!
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    No nation would ever do that.
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    I'm asking to wake up and understand
    that we need a new form of Government
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    which is possible and which
    harmonize those two needs
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    those good for our own people
    and those good for everybody else.
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    Since the US elections and since Brexit,
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    it's become more obvious to
    me that those old distinctions
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    of left wing and right wing
    no longer make sense anymore,
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    they really don't fit the pattern.
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    What does seem to matter, today, is very
    simple, whatever your view of the world
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    is if that you take comfort from
    looking inwoods and backwards
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    or rather, like me, you find hope
    in looking forwards and outwards.
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    That's the new politics. That's the new
    division that is splitting the world
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    right down the middle.
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    That may sound judgmental
    but it's not meant to be.
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    I don't a tall misunderstanding
    why so many people
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    find the comfort in looking
    inwoods and backwards.
  • 13:17 - 13:19
    When times are difficult,
    when you are short of money,
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    when you are feeling
    insecure and vulnerable,
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    it's almost a natural human tendency to
    turn inwoods to think of your own needs
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    and to discard everybody else's.
  • 13:28 - 13:33
    And perhaps to start to imagine that the
    past was somehow better than the present
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    or the future could ever be.
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    But I happen to believe
    that that's a dead end.
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    History shows us that is a dead end.
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    When people turn inwoods and turn
    backwoods human progress becomes reverse
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    and things get worse for
    everybody very quickly indeed.
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    If you align me, and you
    believe in forwards and outwards
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    and you believe that the best
    thing about humanity is its diversity,
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    and the best thing about globalization is
    the way that it starts up that diversity,
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    that culture will mix up, to make
    something more creative, more exciting,
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    more productive as ever been
    before in human history.
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    Then, my friends, we've
    got a job in our hands
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    because the inwoods and backwoods
    regained are uniting as never before
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    and that creed of inwoods and backwoods
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    that fear, that anxiety plained
    on the simplest instincts
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    is sweeping across the world.
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    Those of us who believe, as
    I believe in forwards and outwards
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    we have to get ourselves organized because
    time is running out very, very quickly.
  • 14:43 - 14:44
    Thank you.
  • 14:44 - 14:47
    (Applause)
Title:
What happens when the whole world votes? | Simon Anholt | TEDxFrankfurt
Description:

For more information on Simon Anholt, please visit our website www.tedxfrankfurt.de

“The only remaining superpower is international public opinion,” says Simon Anholt, an independent policy advisor who has helped more than 50 countries engage more productively with the rest of the world. He believes that public opinion cannot be shifted on the surface, but only moves when a government makes real changes in its values and behavior by rolling out enlightened policies, developing dynamic exchanges with other nations and committing to global betterment.

Twitter: @SimonAnholt

This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at http://ted.com/tedx

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Video Language:
English
Team:
closed TED
Project:
TEDxTalks
Duration:
14:49

English subtitles

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