Election Series, No. 2
This article continues our online series of election-year commentaries by American and international writers. Some articles will evaluate or compare the presidential candidates; others will examine issues that seem most important for voters to consider. We welcome your response to any of the articles, and, with your permission, we will post some of them as commentaries in their own right. The series will run until shortly before Election Day.
No. 2—July 24, 2008
The Need for Responsive Leadership
by Bob Goudzwaard, professor emeritus, Free University of Amsterdam
The new president of the United States will no doubt have to be a strong leader. Leadership is highly valued by most US citizens and is also the main point of reference for most European peoples and governments, as it should be. But what is not much debated is the kind of presidential leadership that is needed right now in the US. That is a very important question.
There are at least two types of strong leadership worth distinguishing. The first is what I would call path-breaking or innovative leadership. It is especially valuable in times of deep national or international insecurity. This kind of leadership demonstrates courage to break through the walls of apathy and/or suspicion. Such a leader not only has the will but also the persuasive power to motivate the nation to follow new avenues toward a better, healthier, and more secure future for all.
The second type of leadership is characterized primarily by responsiveness. Such a leader shows profound awareness of existing problems and anticipates problems that are still emerging. At its best, responsive leadership exhibits the strength to prepare a nation in all honesty for a period of burdens and sacrifices. Think, for example, of Winston Churchill, who foresaw a possible Nazi occupation of Great Britain and challenged British citizens to prepare themselves for “sweat and tears.” Through Churchill’s honest challenge and the people’s sacrificial determination, Britain achieved victory.
While the first type of leadership is linked with progress and usually meets with popular approval, the second type has to challenge people with an unpopular call to duty, a call that can sometimes be heard as confrontational and objectionable.
Throughout the world, we live in a time when people are most charmed by the first type of leadership but may find the second type more helpful and desirable in the long run. My defense for this seemingly paradoxical statement arises from the circumstances of our rapidly changing world. The world in which we live is characterized increasingly by a growing interconnectedness and interdependency. All problems and opportunities appear to be connected worldwide. If the right political decisions are not made, we can anticipate negative boomerang effects on even the richest and most stable societies.
Consider, for example, the currently high food and energy prices. These rising prices are an indication of a growing structural discrepancy between global supply of, and global demand for, those goods. I say this is structural because on the demand side, economic pressures are coming from a still-growing world population and rising per capita income (in China and India, for example) while on the supply side, limitations are increasingly visible in the shrinking available stock of resources and cultivated land.
Responding to the signals
Having said only this much, the growing international interconnectedness becomes clear. For the rising price of food is directly connected to deepening of world poverty, especially in Africa. And the race between the rich nations, in particular, to reserve the last stocks of fossil fuel for themselves is directly related to national and international insecurity and growing military tensions. (A year ago, Alan Greenspan made the comment that of course Iraq is about oil.) And then you can factor in the increasing production and consumption of food at the expense of forestland and the growing demand for fossil energy as a cause of rising global temperatures and climate change.
In face of these dramatic developments, a great deal of innovation is needed, to be sure. We urgently need energy-saving innovations in industry and increased agricultural productivity. And for these innovations to pick up speed, better pricing systems and regulations might be established by the world’s bankers and governments. But are these the “innovation cards” that most need to be played at this time? Is this the most important challenge facing the new American president?
There are serious reasons to answer those questions negatively. Look at the signals flashing at us from the walls of creation. Prompted by the worldwide cumulative expansion of industrial and agricultural demand and the unavoidable price effects, we can’t ignore the signals of rising global temperatures, of increasing intercultural and military tensions, of an accelerated decline of species, of increasing financial speculation in so-called “new scarcities,” and finally of intensifying poverty. It is as if all the flashing signals are changing simultaneously from green to orange to red. In these circumstances, it is an illusion to think there is a quick escape route—some kind of innovative leap forward—into the future that will overcome the problems without requiring any change in our patterns of behavior.
This is why I believe that what is needed most urgently now—in the US as well as in Europe and elsewhere—is responsive leadership of a wise and careful kind. We need leaders who will warn citizens that because of their extraordinary levels of economic demand, the time has come for a reorientation of national economies toward sufficiency rather than excess, toward ecological sustainability and social balance rather than more growth, more trade, and more consumption, regardless of the cost.
I believe that if the United States would take the lead in moving toward sufficiency, sustainability, and social balance in a careful, responsive way, Europe would follow. Even if this entails burdens for all, including a leveling or even decline of most income and consumption levels, it could lead gradually to a lowering of the pressures that are pushing us to growing poverty, environmental degradation, and social instability. Whether we choose this path or not, such a transition looks increasingly unavoidable. For there is no real future for economies like that of the US to continue on the course they have been following. And one can hardly expect China, for example, to continue to export capital to the US to sustain its far-too-high consumption level and growing indebtedness.
Innovative changes are undoubtedly needed, but right now it seems to me that responsible leadership must be responsive leadership that speaks in all honesty about unavoidable burden sharing and necessary limitations on consumption. Accepting the challenge of burden sharing and sacrifice now may mean not needing to face too much sweat and too many tears for too long a period of time.
Dr. Bob Goudzwaard is a former professor of economics at the Free University of Amsterdam. He has also been active in Dutch politics and in international church work on social, environmental, and economic affairs. His most recent book (with Mark Vander Vennen and David Van Heemst) is Hope in Troubled Times (Baker Books, 2007).
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