High office: (from left) Former prime ministers Lee Hong-Koo and Kim Campbell, GIFT’s founder and chief executive, Chandran Nair, executive director, Carola Barton, and managing director, Thomas Tang.

The key here is the Club of Madrid, of which former Latvian Prime Minister Valdis Birkavs is a member. He is one of 68 democratic former heads of state and government with more than one thousand years of political leadership and experience who are giving their time to advise leaders in both transitional and mature democracies facing similar challenges as they did.

Two of its key members were in Hong Kong this month at the invitation of the Global Institute For Tomorrow, to bring the club’s work to light. Kim Campbell and Lee Hong-Koo spoke at a private dinner at the Grand Hyatt hotel on 7 December, attended by many leading members of the Hong Kong business community with an eye to philanthropy, describing how the unique membership works as a catalyst for change.

It was the first of what GIFT hopes will be many similar events to engage business leaders and people of interest and note.

Ms Campbell is Secretary-General of the club. She served as Prime Minister of Canada in 1993. Dr Lee is on the club’s executive committee. He led South Korea as Prime Minister in 1994-95.

Together, they drew a vigorous portrait of the club’s work to not only promote democracy around the world, but also – over and above the narrow political definition most give to democracy – to help develop and maintain democratic values.

“Democracy is more than just elections,” Ms Campbell said. More important was developing democratic values, without pushing an ideology or an agenda, and with openness and a willingness to listen, she said.

Together and individually, the club’s members have “an extraordinary convening power”, principally because of who they are and the merit and respect that they have earned. Those whom they bring together can affect the lives of nations. They are also unencumbered by the politics of office, a key to creating an atmosphere for frank and open dialogue.

Expertise in transition
The Club of Madrid is an independent organisation and has been carrying out its work since 2001. At the heart of its membership are former democratic national leaders, often described as being of exceptional merit. While some more well-known names on its list of members include Mikhail Gorbachev, Bill Clinton, Mary Robinson, Havel Vaclav, Javier Perez de Cuellar, and Fidel Ramos, the club requires that 80 per cent are from transitional democracies “to ensure an enormous expertise in difficulties in transition”. Private and public organisations and institutions, and a network of world-class experts support them in projects that are global, regional, and national in scope. All members volunteer their time; the club is provided with offices, facilities, and support from philanthropists to fund projects and pay it staff.

The club grew out of a conference that looked at the practical and theoretical problems of building democracy. The unprecedented meeting of 35 heads of state and government with more than 100 of the world’s top scholars and policy experts looked at eight core issues, including constitutional design, strengthening of political and social pluralism and political parties, and economic and social conditions.

In working towards “promoting democracy that delivers”, the club offers advice only when asked: Dr Lee said, “The club is motivated to help others only if they want to help themselves.”

There were as many problems and difficulties as there were countries, Dr Lee said, and democracy required diligence and key institutions for any hope of success. Not least of these being a free press: “A hallmark of the success or failure of democracy is how well freedom of the press is protected,” he said. “Good intentions are not good enough. Different countries have their own problems … You must work hard. There is a need for professional help. This is what the club is trying to offer.”

Ms Campbell explained that the vast bank of experience “provides an opportunity to combine the practical insights of those who have faced the complex challenges of leading for change with the more theoretical understanding of the changes that democratic development requires”.

Other strong themes came through as well as some vigorously made observations during the prime ministers’ talks and in answers they gave to dinner guests’ questions.

Idealistic realists
The members of the club recognised that “nothing’s perfect”, which lent a necessary flexibility in their approach: they combined idealism and realism. “We need to be realistic about the problems, remain idealistic in overcoming them; we need to believe in the capacity of people to make changes,” Ms Campbell said. “We must encourage them. The danger is that they feel that there is no solution: don’t let the problems convince you that you can’t do anything.”

There was no attempt to paint a false image of democracy: “[It’s] a blunt instrument; it’s not a precision tool,” Ms Campbell said. However, both speakers gave a strong sense of the importance of retaining the individual identity of societies, of designing almost a unique framework to encompass traditions and cultures. Often “outsiders may preach democracy, but they don’t know how to [apply it] without jeopardising local traditions and social values,” ensuring failure, Dr Lee said. He made specific reference to the Middle East, and said that the same was true for Asia. Here, Ms Campbell said, the club could “uniquely” convene experts to work on inter-cultural dialogue. “There are so many ways to make a democracy, but if you don’t feel you’re part of a state, forget it,” she said.

Dr Lee said most members “don’t think the United States is the model [democracy]”; the club itself had no one narrowly defined idea of democracy. As for Asia, it had “its own civil society, legacies and histories, all concerned with how to improve the lots of people in the region”.

Asia’s challenges
It was suggested that Asia was constantly dogged by corruption and setbacks to democracy in spite of economic globalisation helping to bring about democratic changes, such as in Thailand, where there was a coup d’etat in September. Dr Lee said, “It’s one thing to achieve democracy, but quite another to run a successful democracy.” Strong ethnic and religious divides made Asia “a really tough situation”, and the “influence of the military is quite substantial”. These stirred problems even in some mature democracies, such as the Philippines. On the other hand a homogenous society like Korea faced different challenges: these might be overcome with strong institutions, he said.

Moving towards democracy politically brought expectations but also cautions: “Once you open the gates of political democracy, people want things overnight – politicians find that they must promise something: the force of popularism that helped now becomes a destructive force,” he said.

Ms Campbell added that while there were great global pressures placed on societies today to live by international norms, “old democracies had the time to develop their democracies”, hundreds of years to develop and establish institutions, and checks and balances. Emerging democracies were required to compress this experience: “How do you accelerate the process? What sort of circumstances will help create these conditions? It’s very difficult to generalise: for example, what can bring social cohesion? At the end, countries must make the decision themselves.”

Dr Lee put great emphasis on the role that a strong, free press had to play in ensuring against corruption, underlining “a hallmark of the successful or failure of a democracy is how well the freedom of the press is protected”. Corruption, though, was also the product of “seemingly unrelated matters”, Ms Campbell added, such as economic conditions brought about by markets stressed by scarcity.

China opens up
More broadly, Ms Campbell advocated the importance of governments seeking outside viewpoints, without which they risk becoming insular: “Outside connections, talking, connecting gives people ideas,” she said. Openness, Dr Lee said, was critical: “A closed-off society will lose the chance for transition. Open as much as you can; engage in meaningful dialogue within society and friends outside to enable you to find solutions,” he said.

This was how Beijing was approaching some potentially divisive and destructive issues. Invited by former foreign minister Qian Qichen after he attended a club meeting, the club is helping China’s leaders to study income disparity, corruption, and pollution, among others: “They are concerned about how to bring decent welfare and livelihoods to the people, to the nation”, and were willing to listen to lessons that had been learnt elsewhere.

This reflected “a growing involvement of China in the world”. Asia’s growing prosperity of the past three decades was very much tied up with China’s economic reform and growth. “The market needs peace to operate, and this is very much integral with China’s development – it’s enabled Asians to enjoy peace,” Dr Lee said.

‘Consumable advice’
As for advice – who best to turn to among the club’s members? The club asks itself three questions when approached, Ms Campbell said: “Can we make a difference? Who in our membership can offer advice? And is there funding for a project?” How and by whom advice is given is crucial: “It must be advice that is consumable by a people,” Ms Campbell said.

Sometimes it comes from seemingly unrelated situations and countries. “Former Prime Minister of Latvia Valdis Birkavs’s work with East Timor [for example]. People ask just what do they have in common, what is the point? But the two countries have very similar dynamics,” she said.

Latvia emerged from decades of occupation with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the final withdrawal of the Russian military in 1994. More recently, East Timor reclaimed its independence from Indonesia in 2002 after more than 20 years of occupation.

“Here were all the same issues – invasion issues, language problems, exiles returning, those who stayed,” Ms Campbell said. “You need to trust the message from deep knowledge.”

* Ms Campbell steps down as secretary-general on 31 December, but remains on the club’s executive committee.