EDITORIAL

Müfit SEKERCI

MITAGED - Chairman, Executive Board

The world’s future and the mayors

Disputes continue to emerge all over the world as much as new friendships. In fact we could say that the disputes are indeed exacerbating the currently fragile nature of international relations.

World history tells us that the real reason for most of the wars have been related to competition for control of resources. And that holds true without regard to apparent reasons, such as wars over religion, or over any thing else. Regardless of real reasons, such as the motivation for taking over control of natural resources, or markets, it is always easy to find an excuse for war. It is always easy to mobilize the society in a pre-determined direction by provoking sensitive feelings and matters. One can always organize the society with an orientation for an offensive, or for defense.

As energy requirements quickly increase in parallel to continued process of industrialization, energy has become a strategic weapon. The world is now living in the shadow of the concerns of superpowers over securing energy supply and control of energy sources and supply routes. Powerful energy companies are leaning in the direction of weakening the social structures in energy production areas, worsening the disputes there, and rendering those societies less resistant to outside forces. Sects in divided societies now have come to resorting to terror more than ever in struggling with each other.

Such circumstances cause peoples to inadvertently develop negative feelings against one another and turn to enemies of one another. But we have only one world. None of us has another world to go to and or another planet on which to raise our children; there is not another heaven in which we could all live in happiness and prosperity...

Humanity prepares for great wars sometimes knowingly and sometimes unknowingly. One could see that, in today’s world as well, masses of people are preparing for war unknowingly. The point to which the state of relations between US, Russia, EU, and China could come in the medium run does not appear to be very positive or desirable. Exchange of provocative, accusing comments between Russia and US in recent weeks hinted at policies that the two sides would be likely to implement in the future: Russia has finally gave signals indicating intention to use the energy weapon. United States on its part whispered its intention to continue turning the world to American empire...

There will be other actors emerging in international relations in the future. Some of these actors could be, outside of EU, China, India, Kazakhstan, Japan, and other states, also, the terrorist organizations fed by anger about different issues, and themselves feeding such anger.

Preventing expansion of terror, from now on, will not be as easy as it used be in the past... technology is now much easier to share. We now live in a world in which even children can build at home very sophisticated weapons and explosives. As the populations of the cities expand through high paced urbanization processes, new criminal organizations and new crimes are emerging in the cities. The non-secure environments that such factors might bring about could prove to be, for any society, more dangerous circumstances than an openly declared war.

Central administrations are weakening and local administrations and local administrators are becoming more effective, they will become even more effective in the future, and they must, any way...

If the world is preparing for a self-destructing war because of the whims of a few insane adventurers, the only power to stop that would be the networks of local administrations and local administrators. But such networks and such relations cannot develop on the basis of some twining approach, which really does not appear to have any substantial content, while its purposes and benefits appear to be mysterious. The relations could become more functional through trade relations that the local administrations could develop among themselves, and through joint investments and other joint projects.

It would not be easy, at the outset, for the local administrations and the local administrators to initiate such relationships on their own. During early stages, however, the gap here could be filled by NGOs that have activities pertaining to local administrations.  NGO’s could open the way, an avenue, in a sense, by contributing to formation of a common awareness in this matter. This avenue would subsequently become easier to travel, and thus functional partnerships may develop. And such networks of relations could in time become the foundation of better relations between the nation-states.

WE, MITAGED, therefore, place great emphasis on developing cooperation with local administrations and other relevant institutions around the world. We make an effort to build bridges between local administrations that wish to engage in cooperation with others. From supporting comments we receive in connection with our work in this area, we derive the conclusion that we are doing the right kind of work. In order to help further expand such cooperation, we shall soon start organizing international trips with local administrations and local administrators in different countries. We shall be evaluating the various organization proposals in this area, as we might receive them from any organization from any where in the world.

We don’t have another world to go to... we all have no choice but to live on this very earth. And this world could become, with our joint efforts and contributions, a place indeed worth living, of course, first and foremost, with efforts and contributions of local administrators...