 الصباح الخير إنه رحيبو بكم هل تعلمون أنكم يأتيون إلى هذه الأسئلة؟ ما نحاول أن نحاول أن نضع بك as much important discussion into as short a time as possible نأخذ الأشياء and matters of great importance ونحن نأخذ أشياء أفضل من الناس في المجتمع ونحاول أن نضع بك as quickly as possible They're very brief in terms of time They're 30 minutes, we have a lot of ground to cover I encourage as much dynamism amongst you all for a Friday morning as possible We also have an audience watching us live online and via Facebook Live as well So we'll have questions coming in from here We're a true meritocracy here at the World Economic Forum So if you want your question answered stick your hand up quickly because you're competing with several million people out there in the great wide world This session is possibly one of the most important ones and something we're all passionate about trying to develop further in terms of our knowledge Tolerance at the tipping point Globalisation and multiculturalism used to be regarded as two sides of the same coin But now we're witnessing a growing backlash against minorities, migrants and refugees and has humanity reached a peak tolerance Now I mention this because we had a series of articles and essays on our own website earlier in the year discussing this and it was recognized and accepted with such a huge degree of interaction engagement from our audience that we felt we really had to discuss this in more detail with some really leading thinkers in this subject here in Davos That's my talking out of the way And I'm going to hand over to my panel I'm going to ask them a brief question each and then we'll hopefully get into the question and answer round Brendan, I'd like to start with you, if I may Brendan Cox, you're the director of More in Common You've been an activist and looking into issues around intolerance and opposition to hatred and populism for several years now Are we at peak tolerance or have we reached it already? I think what we're definitely witnessing and I think what's apparent is there is a backlash I think that backlash is being fed by a range of factors I don't think there's any one individual factor which is causing all of this but I think there is a sense talking mainly about Europe and North America but there is a sense of insecurity and that's partly physical insecurity it's partly economic insecurity it's partly cultural insecurity and I think those are combining in a very worrying manner which means that people who previously may have when you sort of dug in to a level of detail had concerns about diversity concerns about other groups those concerns are coming much to the fore so we're activating that group of people and I think the question is can we deactivate that instinct can we maintain that central view of open and tolerant societies my view is that we absolutely can but we will only do that if we can bring together the forces that already on the side of liberalism and diversity currently they're very fractured and secondly if we get much better speaking to and engaging with people who have those insecurities we can't dismiss them they are real, they are felt and we need to engage in a way that responds to those concerns that reassures people about the societies in which they live but also I think one of the critical things we need to get much better at celebrating what binds us together rather than just talking about what divides us why is there, why are we losing why is this backlash happening in the first place so as I say I think it is that range of facts I think there is this sort of it's the economics it's the cultural threat that people feel but I think we also need to be careful not to get too depressed in terms of I don't think we have lost this I don't think we're at a stage where the centre of society in most European countries still generally is not in the camp of extremism or hatred people remain committed and supportive of communities with diversity in them but as I say what we I think have been very bad at is we spend a lot of time celebrating diversity not enough talking about what binds us together and what that's meant is that we've ceded patriotism which is a very powerful instinct in people's identity we've ceded that to the extremes and now to take that back to define patriotism in an inclusive way rather than an exclusive way and I'd love to know some of the tactics you intend to employ and I will come to that later for sure Senator Ratna Omidvar you're a Canadian national you've been in government for a while you've just passed a bill through parliament and what are the greatest challenges you encountered in that process so I think Canada has no challenges in this conversation and that's not entirely true but I want to start off by talking a little bit about the use of the word tolerance in this context so in my lexicon and to a large extent in the Canadian lexicon tolerance is a word of yesterday tolerance means to endure with to put up with as opposed to engaging with and being curious about other people and I think we've moved in Canada to be a post-tolerant society and our challenge is now inclusion so having said that I will admit that there are societies and jurisdictions that are not there yet and maybe it is a trajectory and a narrative that builds over time and certainly in Canada too we are seeing sort of louder forces I would say not as loud as those in the United States but a certain social license seems to have been granted to talk about things a certain way to express racist statements and misogynist statements and that too finds itself into our discourse but I want to get back to the question of has tolerance reached its tipping point I think human beings have the DNA of compassion and empathy and love and if we say we've reached our tipping point on tolerance I think we're putting limitations around humanity so I can't accept that I do accept that we have to do better and I think one of our mistakes the big global our mistake is that we have been prone to a certain kind of political correctness a certain kind of baffle gap and we do a lot of telling and we don't do enough showing so I'm talk I would like all of us who are in this discussion to show not to show the evidence show the success show when diversity results in shared prosperity as it has in Canada the wonderful work and the visualization work at the world congress center about how people are moving and where they're going there's lots and lots of evidence from the United States from Great Britain from Nordic countries from Canada that every euro invested in a refugee multiplies itself many times over 5 years beyond there's a lot of evidence from immigrants and so on and so forth but we seem to have rested more on the aspirational benefits of diversity as opposed to the real tangible benefits I'm just reminded of a session we had on Tuesday I believe it was but it was on forecasting failures and we're trying to explore the difficulty experts have in predicting so we talked about economics we're also in terms of psychological perspective and I believe it was Molly Crockett from Oxford University who was talking about the the difficulty of the bias that forecasts have when it comes to economic self-interest rather than powerful emotional drivers and I'm just wondering maybe it's more of a comment that all this evidence based statistics on the benefits of migration sometimes it doesn't work and it's not hitting home at the moment but connecting the heart and the mind I think issues of national identity are incredibly important I think a certain amount of social engineering is required I read a blog on the World Economic Forum which spoke to me by Naira Woods and the easiest part the easiest way of helping people understand each other is to learn another language now if all of us in schools and colleges started to learn another language opens up a whole different world so I would say there are things we can do but it is it is making that connection between the heart and the mind and we often miss that and it's fantastic having you here as somebody who has helped push through this this citizenship but I want to move now to our third panelist who's also created a huge amount of progress in his part of the world Shaykh Abdullah Bayer for promoting peace in Muslim societies and I have here the Marrakesh Declaration which is the on the rights of religious minorities in predominantly Muslim majority communities and my question to you sir is how difficult was this process and what is it achieving now now that it's in operation thank you to the moderator and also to my fellow participants and the audience the difficulty always in this life and the challenges they're always there several years ago we thought that the value of tolerance was something firmly rooted in people and thought that it was really axiomatic and an accepted principle especially in America in the Islamic world to a large degree but in these last years we've seen humanity really falling back and seeing them just regressing in these values that had been beginning to practice because they're absolutely necessary there has to be really a select group of people that think deeply about these things and in the rest of the world in America and Europe they have to really think about the benefit of these virtues because these are the most important virtues for human society if you have a society you have to have the toleration of others without toleration of others wars are the result sometimes tolerance can lead to a recognition of the other recognition of the other it's a higher it's a higher virtue the Quran says we made you nations and peoples in order to know one another so this idea of knowing each other of engaging the other this is a mutual thing it engages the other tolerance it's something that you bear the other but this idea of acknowledging the other it's something higher because you have to know the other and if you know the other then you'll see that he's equal to you as a human being and then these difficulties begin to dissipate when we saw a lot of these protests and the Arab Spring in 2011 I got together a group of scholars to really think deeply about this problem of conviviality in the Muslim world because we saw this problem with the minorities minorities that they weren't with because they weren't part of the majority of the religious community of Muslims they were persecuted and so we wanted to think how can we treat this but we needed to do it from within the religion itself because the problem was a misunderstanding of the religion so we looked how could we do this from within the religion itself so we began to study this deeply and I got a group of scholars together to do this and in the end what we came to the conclusion that this idea of equal citizenship this also the social contract this contractual citizenship that this is the most appropriate way to work in the time that we're living in and we have from 1400 years ago a covenant from the prophet that actually established equality of the different religions in the city of Medina and so we brought Christians we brought Jews we brought Yazidis we brought Hindus we brought all of these different groups came and and so we brought them together to really present this covenant and it's similar to Helsinki's declaration and so this took a lot of time we really worked hard on it and we had to first convince the others that this is actually sound and it's from the matrix of our own religion and it's appropriate for this time and it's a very high level of tolerance it's not the low level of tolerance it's not the indifference where you don't think about just going against the other but it's looking at the other as equal to you and the other person doesn't need to be acknowledged by you because God created him equal to you already but you have to acknowledge that so this is what we did and thank you for the opportunity equal citizenship social contract is tolerance universal and uniform across the world or are there regional differences that we need to bear in mind you talked about the trajectory where do you view that trajectory going and how much gap is there between societies around the world I think the gaps are significant in different parts of the world for different reasons societies where education is more generally available the gaps may well be closer but I think I want to make the point that there is no end to this journey because the minute you think you've arrived at Nirvana you're actually in a box and tolerance if I may use the word continues to reinvent itself because so for instance in Canada 20 years ago we never talked about the rights of transgendered people we now have legislation before our houses of parliament and the senate in Canada that will deal with the rights of transgendered people so I think it continues to reinvent itself and the core lessons are openness and engagement and curiosity about each other as opposed to a passive acceptance of existence I have one from facebook from why did capitalism fail to end poverty slightly off subject any of these on capitalism and economic growth and living standards in terms of tolerance maybe we'll leave that one I'm not an expert in capitalism if we say capitalism if we talk about humanity as opposed to capitalism it's not capitalism or Marxism but rather justice social justice if we talk about justice then we won't fail but if we just talk about capitalism there's always going to be losers by its nature it's just by the nature of the system Adam Smith even recognizes this that people benefit from others and there's going to be losers by a zero sum game so this is my opinion there's so I apologize but I just want to say so if we look at the difference between Smith and Kant for instance then you'll see that Kant was more concerned with social justice but there is even though there is more prosperity in societies there's also greater inequality and we know that when societies are unequal they are less tolerant of each other so I think A does equal B and economic prosperity that is shared by all that's not in the hands of a certain elite whichever way you describe it but it's spread across through either tax redistributive measures or legislation that is where you create a sort of foundation for equality and justice and tolerance we have to be careful here to not cast Kant as a complete nirvana because we have a tendency to lord and like a lot of the a lot of the policies that Kant has right now but we're talking about tolerance and openness and inclusion being fairly well advanced compared to other countries including across your border in fact is it economic inclusion, is that the key or are there any other factors? I think it goes to something much more amorphous than intangible and that is identity Brendan talked about patriotism as a key part of national identity Canada is a new country, we're protected because we're on top of the world we share a border the safest secure border with a very wealthy country so we have to have we've found ways of defining ourselves differently multiculturalism is one of our symbols it ranks up there with maple syrup and the RCMP and this is important, there's no proof but when Canadians feel proud of themselves and they stand up tall it's normally long a vision of Canada being multicultural, open and inclusive and that's hard for me to back up with evidence and science, it's more emotion and I think that's where we have connected the heart and the mind together somewhat accidentally but still Brendan, maple syrup marmite and multiculturalism how can we elevate tolerance and openness as part of the British national identity and what are the tools you're talking about because this is what you're focused on right now yeah, I'd firstly put on the record I really don't like marmite but I do like maple syrup so I might have to move move country at some stage so there's probably very obscure cultural references to the people watching so I think that one of the reasons to be optimistic is that I do think there's a huge pent-up desire for people to celebrate what binds us together in the UK when we have opportunities to do that whether it's in response to a natural disaster a birth of a new member of the royal family the Olympics, the country comes together and celebrates what binds us together what we're very bad at is finding opportunities to do that and again as we were saying earlier actually during on the work of Jonathan Hayes here what we tend to do much more on the sort of liberal side of the spectrum is to talk about the difference we celebrate diversity and there's definitely a role for that but it's just as importantly we need to be talking about the different bits of our culture that bind us together what it is to be British what it is to be Canadian and part of that should absolutely be an openness, a tolerance and ideals of countries that is hardwired in it's true in the case of Canada true in the case of the US in terms of its nation of immigrants it's true in the case of the UK this outward looking country it's true in the case of France and the ideas of the Republic so there's a lot in that patriotism that can move us in that direction but I also think that we need to think about this from a frame which isn't just economics but the economy is going to solve this problem this is as much about culture and identity as it is about economics I think we have a question here can we have a microphone? thank you, this is a fascinating discussion and I certainly echo Brendan's sentiments about the importance of looking at what binds people together as well a question for Senator Omidvar speaking as an American Canada certainly seems to be more successful in its immigration policies in multiculturalism and so much of that is because you have what seems to be an intelligent and thoughtful immigration policy and you have much more high skilled immigrants probably much easier to assimilate than in the United States do you think it is wise for countries in Europe and North America to be looking at the immigrant flow and deciding that this group these people, these individuals yes we'll take them and they'll be easier to assimilate but those no that's a very good question but the recipe for success is I think made up of a number of really powerful ingredients one of course is the lack of boundaries we put around our national identity and how we think of ourselves but the second is a very carefully managed migration policy we pick, we select every immigrant, every refugee every parent, every spouse everyone who deserves our compassion so it's a very high touch system now our geography lends itself to that but what we do and so I can't lend you my geography in Europe but what I can lend you is an aggressive integration strategy we back up our investment in selection with a highly articulated investment in integration close to 900 million dollars a year now we're a small country so that's a big figure and that's only the federal figure it does not take into account what provincial levels of government will invest in migrant education, immigrant labor market integration does not take into account what local governments have done in terms of re-engineering their police forces to look more like the people who they are supposed to police so this I think it's been a trickle down investment that is hard for me to put a figure value to but I think that is the secret we can't export and if I can just build on that I think it is, it's definitely partly the who but it's also the how as you're saying and that how the thing which is most disconcerting to the public about migration when it feels there isn't process there isn't order, it's out of control it's that that particularly resonates and scares people and where you can show process, fairness and order you tend to have much higher levels of confidence in migration and you also then tend to have much higher levels of confidence in integration it's such a shame we've run out of time so quickly in these sessions because we could go on for a long time I'm just going to sum up I've been keeping an eye on Facebook Live it's Hewney and Ali saying respect each other's culture that's my point of view and I'd say 99% of the comments have been around that particular line for the next couple of minutes I just want to look ahead 5 years from now and think about what kind of society we'll be living in whether it's more inclusive, more open, more tolerant or less so maybe shake, perhaps you could give your view of how you view society in your part of the world as far as the future goes it's difficult now to talk about the future we say only God knows what's coming but we can say the future it will it will be good if we can stop these wars are these wars going to stop this is an important question I think if we spread a culture of peace especially amongst the youth things are going to change but let me say one thing in the 1950's he's a French intellectual I'm not a French speaker I apologize it's not important that you're optimistic or pessimistic but what's important is determination and we're determined to spread peace and so we should be optimistic if we're determined to spread peace 5 years time how will there more in common have changed the world I think the thing that I'd say is that there is no predetermined path on which we are there are a whole series of forces which are being unleashed but our reaction to them is as important to that there are a few elections in the US it was a few thousand votes in a few states if you look at the election in Austria the first election there was incredibly close so it depends on how we organize ourselves and our agency so if we sit back and wait for the next 5 years to unfold I think we have a lot of reasons for pessimism I think a lot of the trends that we've talked about whether that's migration whether that's economic insecurity whether that's the fourth industrial revolution will create huge challenges but I also think there's a lot of reasons to be optimistic I think we do that younger people tend to be more progressive and tend to be more tolerant as you become more educated and more diverse as a country you tend to become more tolerant so it's big demographic things on our side I also think that we're nowhere near tapping into the strength of the political center that sort of sense of open societies at the moment the structures are very diffuse and very disorganized what you've got on the populace right is a resurgence of organization and activism and we need to create that equivalent in the political center to reassert that and if we do that I'm very confident that in 5 years time we can be living in a world where we look back on 2016 not as the beginning of a decline but as a wake-up call that pushed us back together Senator you passed your bill in September this year I believe it's still before the Senate it's still being contested and that's why even in a country like Canada we cannot take support for multiculturalism for granted all the indicators tell us in Canada 30% of Canadians are fully in support of immigration and diversity inclusion that whole basket of public goods 30% absolutely are not that's big and 30% are what we would call conditional multiculturalists which means people who are inclined to be pro-multicultural but need evidence need more pushing and nudging I'm not in the business of making predictions if I were I'd be richer than I am but I can see some trends and the trends I think one of the most hopeful trends in Canada is the slow but steady increase in interracial marriages especially in urban Canada you see couples and friendships that span races and religion and ethnicity etc but I am also somewhat pessimistic especially after listening to everything at Davos about the huge displacement that seems to be coming our way through artificial intelligence where more people will lose their jobs and it seems to me that no one has the answer to how those who will be displaced by technology yet again will be re-trained, will be redeployed I do worry about inequality fraying at the edges of all our societies Canada or not well it's been the main theme of this year this year's meeting how do we move to a model which is inclusive and sustainable thank you very much for joining I know you will have important meetings to go to thank you for joining us over here of course I just want to say one word I want to take this opportunity this meeting I want to just call all the people of good intentions that we have to organize we have to join together to fight this hatred and this war I don't say like Mark said workers of the world unite I say good people of the world unite thank you very much indeed all of you for joining us