Alfred Herrhausen Gesellschaft - Das internationale Forum der Deutschen Bank - Foresight

The Alfred Herrhausen Society, the International Forum of Deutsche Bank, has brought to life a programme to examine the prospects of whether there can be a shared design for the future in a multi-polar world.

For this programme, it has entered into a partnership with Britain’s Policy Network. Additional international think-tanks will be contributing at each of the conferences, for example, the Brookings Institution in Washington D.C., the Indian Council of World Affairs in New Delhi and the Council on Foreign and Defense Policy in Moscow.

The first decade of the twenty-first century has been marked by the rise of China and India, the regained strength of Russia, a new dynamic environment in Latin America and a shift of global economic strength towards the energy and commodities producing countries.

Furthermore, awareness has clearly risen for the real global interdependencies in problems such as climate change, development, financial markets, religious conflicts and terrorism, even if there is no consensus on how these problems should be solved.

Individual countries are working on the basis of a different set of values and assumptions, and they have various diverging plans for the future.

The starting point for this programme is the recognition that it would be unrealistic to speak about a “common future” without having previously understood the cultural preconditions and various ways of thinking that have led to its creation. All too frequently, there is a lack of knowledge in global politics about how influential states envisage their own futures, about how they implement their national and regional interests and about how they are seen by others.

The programme comprises a series of roundtable discussions, for example, in Russia, Latin America, the USA, Europe, India, China and Japan.

This series of events is intended to raise the awareness that individual states can only be successful if they agree to create one common future, instead of conjuring up a “clash of futures”.

More Information
www.foresightproject.net
www.policy-network.net