Sharing for Understanding, Building Trust for Managing Interdependence: a Few Thought for a Debate - 中欧社会论坛 - China Europa Forum

Sharing for Understanding, Building Trust for Managing Interdependence: a Few Thought for a Debate

Authors: Henri-Claude de BETTIGNIES

Date: septembre 2007

Published by The Aviva Chair Emeritus Professor of Leadership and Responsibility, INSEAD, Fontainebleau & Singapore

“The European Union has reached a difficult age. This year it turned 50, beset by nagging fears that the old way of doing things does not seem to work, the world is changing, and younger competitors are on the scene. As pessimism is almost a way of life in the European Union, this state of affairs is inevitably described as a crisis. Perhaps a mid-life crisis.”

Today, if old Europe is perceived as old, old China is perceived as young. Too slow to manage change, Europe is muddling through and historically unique process of creating a community of 27-member nations of 490 million people and many cultures. In a hurry to catch up, China is trying to keep together as a country its 1.35 billion people in 33 provinces (and/or administrative units) with over 50 cultures. Also a historically unique process. But our challenges, huge, are different and our institutional and governance mechanisms to handle them do not rely upon the same paradigms and values.

Our profound differences in our concepts of society, of economic system, our different resources endowment, philosophy and world vision are either over or under played to build scenarios for our future together. Whatever our mutual perception and our capacity to understand each other, the current globalization process weaves our future together, probably for ever. Whether our current short term concerns promotes an inward looking posture, whether our myopia prevents us – on both sides - to see medium and long term, our interdependence is bound to grow.

In order to be mutually beneficial, such interdependence will need to be managed responsibly.

This will be a challenge.

Asset, resource and competence differentials, differences in strategic orientations, in societal and governance models, in management practices, in culture and history, could open the door to misunderstandings, loss of synergies, tensions or even conflicts.

Leadership and responsibility, on both sides, will be the key ingredients to prevent or limit the emergence of these dysfunctions. We must find ways to enhance mutual learning for and from interdependence.

We are indeed together on the same boat on this small and finite planet, each one scrambling for limited resources and struggling to identify comparative advantages to find complementarities in each other market.

In Europe – and now throughout the world - the re-emergence of China as a leading global power dominates the headlines.

However, in spite of the world’s attention being focused on China’s exceptional economic achievements, we are presented — beyond the hype – with a very blurred view of the multi-causality behind the country’s performance (the “knowledge” may be there, but not the “understanding”). Furthermore, significantly different – if not contradictory – scenarios of the consequences of China’s growing power upon the rest of the world are being proposed.

This situation may induce European leaders to take inappropriate, short-sighted actions. In China, the effective management of this accelerated socio-economic transformation presents an extraordinary challenge, particularly given the heritage of the past, the size of the country and the complexity of the problems.

Hence the relevance of the China-Europa Forum

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