[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: WILLIAM J. CLINTON (1999, Book II)]
[November 20, 1999]
[Pages 2127-2131]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



Remarks at a Dinner for the Conference on Progressive Governance for the 
21st Century in Florence, Italy
November 20, 1999

    Thank you very much. Professor Dorsen, 
Dean Sexton, President Oliva, to my fellow leaders, and especially to our hosts, Prime 
Minister and Mrs. D'Alema. Let me say a special word of appreciation to my good 
friend Romano Prodi for the very good outline 
he has given us of the challenges facing not only the nations of Europe 
but the United States and all other economies more or less positioned as 
we are.
    The hour is late, and what I think I would like to do is to briefly 
comment on why we're here and what exactly are the elements of 
progressive governance in the 21st century--what do we have consensus 
on, and what are the outstanding challenges facing us?--without going 
into any detail, in the hopes that that's what will be discussed 
tomorrow.
    First of all, I think it's worth noting that it's entirely fitting 
that we're meeting here at this beautiful villa in this great city where 
the Italian Renaissance saw its greatest flowering, because we know 
instinctively that we now have a chance at the turn of the millennium to 
shape another extraordinary period of human progress and creativity.
    There are many parallels to the Renaissance era in this time. For at 
the dawn of the Renaissance, Italy was a place of great economic ferment 
and change, rapidly expanding trade, new forms of banking and finance, 
new technologies and new wealth, more education, vibrant culture, 
broader horizons. Today, we have the Internet, the global economy, 
exploding diversity within and across national lines, the simultaneous 
emergence of global cultural movements, breathtaking scientific advances 
in everything from the human genome to discoveries about black holes in 
the universe.
    We have, in addition, a much greater opportunity to spread the 
benefits of this renaissance more broadly than it could have been spread 
500 years ago. But there are also profound problems among and within 
nations. Making the most of our possibilities, giving all people a 
chance to seize them, minimizing the dangers to our dreams, requires us 
to go beyond the competing models of industrial age politics. That's why 
we're here. We think ideas matter. We think it's a great challenge to 
marry our conceptions of social justice and equal opportunity with our 
commitment to globalization. We think we will have to find what has 
often been called a Third Way, a way that requires governments to 
empower people with tools and conditions necessary for individuals, 
families, communities, and nations to make the most of their human 
potential.
    In the United States, we have proceeded for the last 7 years under a 
rubric of opportunity for all, responsibility from all, and a community 
of all Americans. We have also recognized something that I think is 
implicit in the whole concept of the European Union, which is that it is 
no longer possible, easily, to divide domestic from global political 
concerns. There is no longer a clear dividing line between foreign and 
domestic policy. And, therefore, it is important that every nation and 
that all like-minded people have a vision of the kind of world we're 
trying to build in the 21st century and what it will take to build that 
world.
    I think there is an emerging consensus which you heard in Romano 
Prodi's remarks about

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what works and what challenges remain. There is also a clearer consensus 
that no one has all the answers.
    So let me briefly give you an outline of what I hope we will discuss 
tomorrow and in the months and years ahead. First, I think there is an 
economic consensus that market economics, fiscal discipline, expanded 
trade, and investment in people and emerging technologies is good 
economics. In the United States, it has given us an unparalleled 
economic expansion, the lowest unemployment rate in 30 years, the lowest 
inflation rate in 30 years, the lowest welfare rolls in 30 years, the 
lowest unemployment among our women in the work force in 46 years, the 
lowest poverty rates in 20 years, and the first back-to-back surpluses 
in our budget in over 40 years. But there are problems. I will get to 
them.
    On social questions, I think there is an emerging consensus that we 
should favor equal opportunity, inclusion of all citizens in our 
community, and an insistence upon personal responsibility. In addition 
to low welfare rolls through welfare reform in the United States, it has 
given us the lowest crime rate in 25 years and unprecedented 
opportunities for women, racial minorities, and gays to serve in public 
life and to be a part of public discourse.
    We have also worked particularly hard to reconcile the competing 
religious concerns of our increasing diverse communities of faith in the 
United States. The challenges to this economic and social policy are, it 
seems to me, as follows, and this is where we have to close the gap.
    Number one--what Mr. Prodi talked about quite a lot--the aging of 
all of our societies. In the next 30 years, the number of people over 65 
in our county will double. I hope to be one of them. [Laughter] Now this 
is a high-class problem. In all the advanced economies, anyone who lives 
to be 65 today has a life expectancy of 82. Within a decade, the 
discoveries in the human genome project will lead every young mother--
including Mrs. Blair--[laughter]--within a 
matter of years, young mothers will go home from the hospital with their 
babies with a little genomic map. And it will tell these mothers and the 
fathers of the children what kinds of things they can do to maximize the 
health, the welfare, and the life expectancy of their children. Many of 
our best experts believe that within a decade, children born in advanced 
societies will have a life expectancy of 100 years. Now, this is a 
terrific thing; but in the short run, it means that within 30 years, 
more or less, all of our societies will have only two people working for 
every one person retired--challenge number one.
    Challenge number two, in spite of unprecedented economic prosperity 
in many places, there are still people and places that have been left 
behind. I'll give you the most stark example.
    In America, we have the lowest unemployment rate in 30 years, 4.1 
percent. On the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, the home 
of the Lakota Sioux, the unemployment rate is 73 percent. And in many of 
our inner cities, in many of our rural areas, this recovery simply has 
not reached because of the lack of educational level of the people or 
because of the digital divide or because of the absence of a conducive 
investment environment. But every advanced society that seeks social 
justice and equal opportunity cannot simply rest on economic success in 
the absence of giving all people the chance to succeed.
    Number three, there has, by and large, in all of our societies with 
heavy reliance on the market, been an increase in income inequality. I'm 
happy to say it is moderating in the United States. In countries that 
have chosen to make sure that did not happen, very often there have been 
quite high levels of unemployment, which people also find unacceptable 
and which is another form of social inequality.
    The next problem, with more and more people in the work force, both 
women and men, and more and more children being raised in homes that are 
either single-parent homes or two-parent homes where both the parents 
work, it is absolutely imperative that we strike the right balance 
between work and family. In this case, I think virtually every European 
country has done a better job than the United States in providing 
adequate family leave policies, adequate child care policies, adequate 
supports.
    But let me just put it in this way. If most parents are going to 
work, either because they have to or they want to, then every society 
must strive for the proper balance, because if you have to choose 
between succeeding at home and succeeding at work, then you are defeated 
before you begin. The most important job of any society is raising 
children; it dwarfs in significance any other work. [Applause] Yes, you 
may clap for that. I appreciate that. It does.

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    So if people at work are worried about the children at home or in 
child care, they're not going to be so productive at work. That means 
that either the economy or the social fabric will suffer. It is a 
profoundly important issue that will only grow more significant in the 
years ahead.
    The next big issue, I believe, is the balancing of economic growth 
and environmental protection. And because of the problem of global 
warming, we will have to prove not only that we can maintain the quality 
of the environment but that we can actually improve it while we grow the 
economy. I want to say a little more about that later, but it's a very 
important issue.
    Finally, I would like to put another issue on the table. There is a 
political problem with achieving this vision, and I'll give you just 
three examples involving all of us here. In order to pursue this 
economic and social vision, if you start from a position of economic 
difficulty and you believe that fiscal discipline is a part of your 
proposal that is necessary, then you're going to have upfront pain for 
long-term gain. And the question is, will we be able to develop a 
progressive governance that will be able to sustain enough support from 
the people to get to the gaining part? Because everybody likes to talk 
about sacrifice, but no one likes to experience it. Everyone likes to 
talk about change, but we always want someone else to go first. And I 
have seen it. In our country, I was elected in 1992, and in 1993 I 
implemented my economic program, and in 1994 the public had not felt the 
benefits of it, and that's one of the big reasons we got a Congress of 
the other party.
    Chancellor Schroeder is facing the 
same sort of challenges. President Cardoso is facing the same sort of challenges. So it's all 
very well for us to come here when--as in my case--that things are 
rocking along well in our country and the public is supporting us. But I 
think it's important that we acknowledge, if we believe in these ideas 
they will often have to be pursued when they are controversial in the 
knowledge that these difficult changes have to be made in order to have 
results over the long term.
    And so one of the things I hope we'll be able to frankly discuss is 
how we can develop and sustain political support for like-minded people 
in all countries who are determined to pursue this approach that we all 
know works and has to be pursued in order to create the kind of future 
we want for our children and grandchildren.
    Now let me just say a word about global politics. I believe there's 
an emerging consensus that it's good for the world to promote peace and 
prosperity and freedom and security through expanded trade; through debt 
relief for the poorest nations; through policies that advance human 
rights and democracies; through policies in the developing countries 
that expand the rights and opportunities of women and their daughters; 
through policies that stand against terrorism, against the proliferation 
of weapons of mass destruction, and against the spread of ethnic, 
racial, and religious hatred.
    What are the specific challenges to this consensus? I'll just 
mention a few. How do you place a human face on the global economy? 
We're going to have a WTO ministerial in Washington State in a few days. 
There will be 10 times as many people demonstrating outside the hall as 
there will be inside. And I understand more than half of them may not 
even be from the United States.
    I personally think this is a good thing. Why? Because the truth is 
that ordinary people all over the world are not so sure about the 
globalization of the economy. They're not so sure they're going to 
benefit from trade. They want to see if there can be a human face on the 
global economy, if we can raise labor standards for ordinary people, if 
we can continue to improve the quality of life, including the quality of 
the environment. And if we believe--we, who say we believe in social 
justice and the market economy, really want to push it, we have to prove 
that the globalization of the economy can really work for real people. 
And it's a huge challenge.
    Number two, we have to deal with the fact that about half the world 
still lives on less than $2 a day, so for most of them, most of this 
discussion tonight is entirely academic, which is why debt relief is so 
important. We have to deal with the fact that while we talk about having 
smaller, more entrepreneurial government, the truth is that in a lot of 
poor countries, they don't have any government at all with any real, 
fundamental capacity to do the things that have to be done. Even in a 
lot of more developed countries, they have found themselves blindsided 
by the financial crisis that struck in 1997.

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    So we have to acknowledge while we, who say we are developing a 
Third Way--and in our case, we've been able to do it with the smallest 
Federal Government in 37 years--we have to acknowledge the fact that 
some countries need more government. They need capacity. They need the 
ability to battle disease and run financial systems and solve problems, 
and that it is fanciful to talk about a lot of this until you can 
basically deal with malaria, deal with AIDS.
    You look at Africa, for example, AIDS consuming many African 
countries. But Uganda has had the biggest drop in the AIDS rates of any 
country in the world because of the capacity of the Government to deal 
with the problem. And I think we have to forthrightly deal with that.
    Let me just mention a couple of other issues a little closer to 
home. We're going to have to deal with the conflict between science and 
economics and social values. Example: the conflict between the United 
States and Europe over genetically modified seeds and the growing and 
selling of food; the conflict between Britain and France over the sale 
of beef.
    Listen, this is hot stuff now, but you can see that there's going to 
be a lot more of this. And we have to find a way to manage this if we're 
going to be in a global society with a global economy, where there are 
honest differences and real fears. We have to find a way to manage this 
that has integrity and that generates trust among ordinary people.
    Another problem that I think is quite important is, all of us will 
have to decide how we're going to cooperate and when we separate in an 
interdependent world. I think, for example, our Congress did a very good 
thing to finally pay our U.N. dues and to enable the United States to 
participate in the global debt relief movement. And I think they made a 
mistake to defeat the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty. But every 
one of us will have to deal with these kinds of questions, because there 
will always be domestic pressures operating against responsible 
interdependence and cooperation.
    And finally, I'll mention two other things. I believe that the 
biggest problems to our security in the 21st century and to this whole 
modern form of governance will probably come not from rogue states or 
from people with competing views of the world in governments, but from 
the enemies of the nation-state, from terrorists and drugrunners and 
organized criminals who, I predict, will increasingly work together and 
increasingly use the same things that are fueling our prosperity: open 
borders, the Internet, the miniaturization of all sophisticated 
technology, which will manifest itself in smaller and more powerful and 
more dangerous weapons. And we have to find ways to cooperate to deal 
with the enemies of the nation-state if we expect progressive 
governments to succeed.
    The last and most important point of all, I believe, is this. I 
think the supreme irony of our time, as we talk about a new 
renaissance--by the way, that would make New York University the 
successor of de'Medici--[laughter]--I think--consider this: The supreme 
irony of this time is that we are sitting around talking about finding 
out the secrets of the black holes in the universe, unlocking the 
mysteries of the human gene, having unprecedented growth, and dealing 
with what I consider to be very high-class problems: finding the right 
balance between unemployment and social justice, dealing with the aging 
of society. Isn't it interesting to you that, in this most modern of 
ages, the biggest problem of human societies is the most primitive of 
all social difficulties: the fear of people who are different from us? 
That, after all, is what is at the root of what Prime Minister 
Blair has struggled with in Northern Ireland, at 
the root of all the problems in the Balkans, at the root of the tribal 
wars in Africa, at the root of the still unresolved, though hopefully 
progressing problems in the Middle East.
    A few weeks ago, Hillary invited two men to the White House for a 
conversation about the new millennium. One was one of the founders of the Internet; the other was one of our 
principal scientists unlocking the mysteries of 
the human genome. And they talked together. It was fabulous, because 
these guys said, number one, we would not know anything about the gene 
if it were not for the computer revolution because we couldn't have done 
the complex sequencing. And then the scientist said, now that they had 
done all this complex sequencing, the most stunning conclusion they had 
drawn is that all human beings were 99.9 percent the same genetically, 
and that the differences of individuals in any given ethnic group, 
genetically, were greater than the genetic differences of one ethnic 
group to another.
    So if you had 100 west Africans and 100 Italians and 100 Mexicans 
and 100 Norwegians,

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the differences of the individuals within the groups would be greater 
than the composite genetic profile differences of one group to another.
    Now, this is in an age where 800,000 people were slaughtered by 
machetes in 90 days in Rwanda a few years ago, when a quarter of a 
million Bosnians lost their lives and 2\1/2\ million more were made 
refugees.
    So that's the last point I would like to make. We need a little 
humility here. What we really need to be struggling for is not all the 
answers, but a unifying vision that makes the most of all these wonders 
and relishes all this diversity which makes life more interesting, but 
proceeds on the fundamental fact that the most important thing is what 
it has always been: our common humanity, which imposes on us certain 
responsibilities about how we live, how we treat others who are less 
fortunate, how we empower everyone to have a chance to live up to his or 
her God-given potential.
    If you ask me one thing we could do, it would not be all the modern 
ideas. If I had to leave tonight and never have another thing to say 
about public life, I would say if we could find a way to enshrine a 
reverence for our common humanity, the rest would work out just fine.
    Thank you very much.

Note: The President spoke at 10:43 p.m. in an outdoor tent at the Villa 
La Pietra. In his remarks, he referred to Norman Dorsen, professor, and 
John Sexton, dean, New York University School of Law; Oliva L. Jay, 
president, New York University; Prime Minister Massimo D'Alema of Italy 
and his wife, Linda; European Commission President Romano Prodi; 
Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder of Germany; President Fernando Henrique 
Cardoso of Brazil; Prime Minister Tony Blair of the United Kingdom and 
his wife, Cherie; Vinton G. Cerf, senior vice president for Internet 
architecture and technology, MCI WorldCom; and Eric Lander, director, 
Whitehead Institute/MIT Center for Genome Research.