Senator PERCY. Should you want to expand on that with any greater specificity, we would be very happy to have your afterthoughts for the record. [The following additional comments were subsequently submitted for the record:] Hon. JOHN SPARKMAN, U.S. Senate, Washington, D.C. BROOKINGS INSTITUTION, Washington, D.C., May 28, 1975. DEAR SENATOR SPARKMAN: I would like to submit for the record a more considered response to two questions posed to me by Senator Percy during the hearings on May 21. The inserts are as follows: First, possibilities for revising the weighted voting in the World Bank. I do not think all weighted voting should be eliminated; but I do not believe it is essential for the United States to maintain a weighted vote amounting to a veto either for soft or hard loans. For the hard loan window, a formula will have to be negotiated that does not discourage the private sector from purchasing the bonds; I doubt, however, that this means we have to stick to our existing percentage. For the soft loan window, where contributions are provided by governments, the Congress itself will have to make up its mind about how much decision power it wants to share with potential recipients. In neither case are we talking of the U.S. giving up its influence. We are talking of putting the loans on a more truly multinational basis. The precise formulas can be negotiated with other members of the IBRD, including the potential loan recipients, who surely understand their own self-interest in keeping the donors assured that the institution will continue to function responsibly. Second, on the United States position on the Charter of Economic Rights and Duties, voted on in the U.N. last December, I have now had the opportunity to read Senator Percy's report to this Committee on his attempts to get more qualified language in the Charter, and on his strategy for having separate votes to proposed amendments to the Charter in order that the United States and other governments might clearly pinpoint their areas of agreement and disagreement. Senator Percy is to be commended, I believe, for acting in a patient and understanding spirit, and on his tireless efforts at compromise, in response to the populist demands in this Charter. I can see why our U.N. delegation could not finally vote in favor of the Charter. But I do wish we could have seen fit to abstain along with Austria, Canada, France, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Norway, and Spain, instead of voting against the resolution. Again my thanks to you, Senator Percy, and other members of the Committee for the opportunity to participate in these important hearings. Sincerely yours, SEYOM BROWN. WORLD ORDER AND JUSTICE DEPEND ON LAW Mr. COUSINS. Just a very brief comment on Coffin's observation. You are quite right, you cannot have world order without justice, but neither can you have justice without law. Therefore, it would seem clear that the basis of both justice and order has to be the codification of responsibility, which is what we mean by law, and this is the next big job it seems to me for the United Nations. What does law consist of? How do you make it? What do we mean by defined responsibility? What do we mean by due process in the world scales? You do not expect to enforce the peace unless you know what is being enforced. So both justice and order in the end, it seems to me, requires law. Mr. TOFFLER. Law without some power to back it up is paper. Mr. COUSIN. That is what we are talking about. Lawmaking, law enforcement, and law interpretation. "ADHOCRACY" Senator PERCY. Dr. Toffler, in "Future Shock," you express the view that "adhocracy" will be the organizational system of the future. Would you expand on that? What do you mean by adhocracy, and how does the concept apply to international organization matters? Mr. TOFFLER. That is what I alluded to in a very, very sketchy fashion. During the period of industrial society, we have learned to create very large, very powerful, and very seemingly efficient organizational structures that are essentially designed in the shape of pyramids, with a hierarchy of command, with the orders flowing from the top down, with the people down below taking orders, with functional divisions, so that you have, in a company, for example a marketing department, a manufacturing department, a research development department, and some other departments. These are permanent structures with people frozen into positions that are also regarded as more or less permanent. Any large civil service bureaucracy including the U.N. civil service bureaucracy, reflects that kind of organizational structure. Now, that type of organization is highly efficient in an environment which is predictable, because, in effect, the bureaucracy is a kind of machine. It is a factory for producing repetitive decisions. That is what a bureaucracy really is. It is designed to produce a relatively narrow range of decisions and to produce those in as routine and repetitive and standardized a fashion as possible. Senator PERCY. Could it also be looked on as a machine for grinding up and disintegrating new ideas? Mr. TOFFLER. Clearly. At this point I would like to throw in a fourline poem that Kenneth Boulding once wrote while attending a boring conference. He said: In every corporation Are lines of communication, Along which, from root to crown, Ideas flow up and vetoes down. So yes, of course. But the reason we have built bureaucracies is that they make a certain kind of sense where the organization has to deal with a predictable environment. If it knows that very week it is going to get a fixed number of orders for a certain product, and it will receive a fixed amount of supplies, that is fine. But as organizations move into less predictable environments, as the rate of change becomes more rapid, the "efficiency" of bureaucracy breaks down. What is required are organizational forms that permit ideas, permit inventive responses, permit resourceful responses to totally new situations. Bureaucracies are no good at that. The U.N., it seems to me, is still organized in this anachronistic pyramidal fashion. One alternative to that is the structure which is now beginning to emerge in many advanced industries, but which also has analogs outside the corporate world. For example, both ITT and the Vietcong share certain organizational characteristics. Thus neither of them is really a classical bureaucracy. Both of them rely on temporary units that are missionoriented, that are created and then folded down after their mission is accomplished. And both of them undobutedly require a great deal of movement of the people back and forth. Neither of them is a civil service kind of organization. The U.N. is. That's why I think it is going to be forced to restructure itself along more ad-hocratic lineswhich also implies a downward movement of the decisionmaking within the structure. And this is what I was trying to suggest, that our policy could encourage that kind of internal renovation. HOW TO CREATE A COHERENT INTERNATIONAL NETWORK OF Senator PERCY. You are a sharp critic of the concept of world government, feeling that you really distrust the centralization of power, as I understand it, and you would much prefer to see created an international network of institutions and arrangements. I am troubled by how you would organize that and yet I saw in Bucharest where we had the bureaucracy represented by all of the governments there, and all of the private agencies that dealt with population planning formed an organization that they called a tribune. You could actually meet with all of them, address them all. They had a newspaper, they put out daily bulletins, they really proved an effective force and found a way to work with the governments of the bureaucracy. The effort is really rather remarkable. Would you care to expand on how you would envision groups of people representing across-the-board industry, labor, women, ethnic and religious groups, organized students and so forth, coming from various geographic units? How would you organize them into some sort of a coherent network and what issues would such assemblies take up? Mr. TOFFLER. The question raises extreme difficulties. When you say I mistrust world government, what I mistrust is centralization of power, and I think we should not find ourselves in a position of opposing the notion of world order based on decentralized power or pluralistic power. We have got to find an alternative structure which deals with both these questions. The ready assumption that if we can centralize power we will be able to solve our problems, is a traditional assumption that grows out of our industrial-era experience. I think it applies less and less. One of the reasons I argue the case for much more attention to the NGO's is that the NGO's form the potential for any number of temporary, mission-oriented consortia that could be brought together, whether they are environmental organizations or scientific organizations or organizations concerned with community development of food or whatever the issues are. It is possible to put together temporary consortia to deal with specific problems. Now, in order for that to work you have to have some coordination or management. But what I am describing need not be a pyramid. Now, here is one way to verbalize the alternative organizational structure. Think of the pyramid. Then think of a thin frame, a very thin frame which is essentially coordinative, which is a thin layer of management and direction, with a whole series of essentially temporary organizational clusters of modules that have relatively short life spans, and among which people float quite freely. They move from one module to another rather than being frozen in a single bureaucratic niche. If we pump some funds into the nongovernmental sector, we might help to create precisely this thin coordinative system at the top. We would then have a basis for a very large, very diverse, very flexible, ad-hocratic organization that could operate in the international field. If we simultaneously help the U.N. destructure itself and then restructure itself along these lines, we would be ahead of the game that much further. Then if we connected these two networks, we would be light years ahead of where we are now. Senator PERCY. Thank you very much. Dr. Brown, can developing countries contribute to international decisionmaking? I understand from your testimony that you believe that the reaction of the United States will be extremely important to determine whether or not a transition from a world dominated by the industrialized countries to a more interdependent world can come about or whether we go into a series of confrontations and conflict. Is that a correct assumption? Mr. BROWN. That is a correct assumption on two counts. One, it is a correct assumption that is the message of the paper; and I think it is also a correct assumption about what the U.S. policy should be. Senator PERCY. Do you have any hope, considering the political climate which creates a climate of hostility toward the developed world, that the developing nations are in a position to make a constructive contribution to international decisionmaking and play the role that you would advocate for them? Mr. BROWN. Yes, I feel that they are; and I feel that they are very sad that the United States is not playing these days the innovative role that they have come to expect from the United States. At the time of the creation of the U.N., the United States put itself on the side of the newly emerging countries. We have not played that role. Most of the diplomats representing these countries, even the countries that are very small, tend to be very sophisticated men and are looking for the opportunities to cooperate with the United States, if only they could do so in a way that would not force these people to go back home embarrassed by their cooperation. This means that on matters such as resolutions, possibly we have to identify with symbols of change rather than symbols of conservatism and the status quo more than we have; whereas on precise organizational arrangements it appears to me that we can work with most of these diplomats to work out very practical institutions. The Law of the Sea Conference, it appears to me, is a main laboratory for that kind of constructive working together and I do believe that there is a good prospect of some arrangements being made that will not alienate the less-developed countries as long as we do not force them by our rhetoric, by our public posturing, into opposition to us. There are many, many instances of very constructive collaboration. The Outer Space Committee of the U.N. has a great deal of constructive cooperation between the United States and the developing countries although not at the level of rhetoric; there is a grand confrontation in words but not when it comes to working out very practical designs. Senator PERCY. On behalf of the Senate and the committee I would like to thank you, each of you, for your contribution this morning. The hearing record will be kept open until June 10 in the event that any of you would like to supplement your comments here. I think we all realize what we are leaving just as we are really getting started. The committee will stand in recess until tomorrow morning at 10 o'clock when we have the final hearing on the U.N. Mr. COUSINS. I thank you not for the privilege of coming here but the general principle of these open hearings and your leadership throughout. Senator PERCY. I thank you and I would be happy to have any last. comments any of you would like to make. SELF-FINANCING PROPOSALS Mr. TOFFLER. I have one last thought, just an idea for a way perhaps we might show some initiative and begin to shift our relationship advisory to the U.N. I am sure there have been many proposals before. I do not know what the history of this has been; I do not know what the U.S. position has been on this. But I wonder whether we might not take one step toward regaining our balance in the United Nations, so to speak, if we were to come forward with a set of concrete proposals for ways in which the U.N. system itself might become self-financing. There are many proposals available, many imaginative ideas. The proposals for a slight tax on international postal. Mr. BROWN. Or shipping. Mr. TOFFLER. If we took that position, I think that might give proof of the fact that we are not going into a blind isolationism, and that we, indeed, are serious about the problems of the planet. Mr. COUSINS. The point Dr. Coffin makes about the seabed fits beautifully; you are talking about hundreds of millions of dollars; this is why you have to stake the claim immediately. But on the point_ Mr. Toffler made, government is the basis of justice and you cannot have justice without it. The question is how do you make government responsible. I sense virtual anarchy in the present world situation between anarchy and government. You have no bridge. You have got, it seems to me, to create government and make it work. The problem of abuse of power in government has always been with us and will always be with us. The answer to that is not eliminate government but the answer is to apply history as much to consensus as you can to make government responsible. Senator PERCY. Right of reply. Mr. BROWN. Endorsement. Mr. COFFIN. Thank you very much. Senator PERCY. These hearings are now recessed. [Whereupon at 1:03 p.m. the committee recessed to reconvene at 10 a.m., May 22, 1975, the following day.] |