THE PRESIDENT OF THE REPUBLIC, MR. MARTTI AHTISAARI
AT AN OPENING SESSION OF INTER PRESS SERVICE
IN HELSINKI ON 24 SEPTEMBER 1998

I would like to thank the Council of the Inter Press Service for holding this meeting in Helsinki, and for inviting me to open it. I have very fond memories of an evening I spent with some of you in New York almost four year ago, when IPS presented to me its International Achievement Award. I accepted it as a tribute not so much to me personally, as to the United Nations for the operation that led to the independence of Namibia which was one of the most successful ever undertaken by the UN. Accordingly, that process was not big news for the media. It may seem paradoxical to some that a news organization honors somebody who basically prevented big - and bad - news from happening, but then, IPS is not an ordinary news organization, as we all know.

When IPS was founded in 1964, the world was very different from what it is today. A great number of new independent countries had appeared on the map. What became known as the South was an object of genuine interest and certain optimism, but also of cold war rivalries. There was great demand for news from the South, and IPS, along with some other institutions, stepped in to fill the gap.

Today, the South rarely gets into the newspapers or the television evening news, except for peak periods of conflict and calamity. For an ordinary viewer or reader, these scourges seem to appear all of a sudden from nowhere, then to disappear again after a few days of disturbing presence on the front pages and TV screens. For those who want to know what happened before and after, IPS is an invaluable source. It takes a longer view and provides background and context for fragmentary dispatches from the hot spots of the world.

Many of the news organizations that were set up thirty-odd years ago to present the case of the South to the world are long gone. In fact, as far as I know, only IPS is still there, and I want to congratulate it for surviving, for adapting to change, and most recently, for successfully meeting the new challenges of the post-Cold War era. I know this has involved restructuring and readjustment, which are never easy. But I am convinced that in years to come, IPS will continue to provide an essential service to the media, NGO’s and all who want to know and need to know not only what and where and when, but also why.

The theme of your gathering is "Sustainable Development and the Information Society". Coming to Finland to discuss these topics, you certainly have selected a venue that fits the subject matter. As you probably know, Finland has the highest number of Internet-connected PC’s relative to population in the world, and more than 50% of Finns carry cellular phones. I don’t mention those figures in order to boast about them, or to promote any particular Finnish businesses. In themselves, the figures don’t even mean anything. But they indicate that we have infrastructure in place that will enable us to go forward to greater things. What is important, is to what kind of use we can put this unique concentration of hardware and software, so that they will produce real benefits for us and the world.

Finland, as you know , is a country without significant natural resources except timber, so we have to rely on people. The key to our sustainable development, indeed our economic survival, is to become a genuine information society and to be among the very first on the planet which can justifiably call itself by that name.

What is an information society? Every one of you, I am sure, can offer a good definition. Many will be proposed and discussed during your deliberations. We have been giving a lot of thought to this concept lately, through an entire network of forums and working groups, and what has emerged is a focus on people rather than technology. Accordingly, we see the information society as a network of interaction between people and information systems, created by the people, for the people and on their terms.

The emphasis has to be on helping people to cope with an environment that is rapidly changing. This is not a defensive strategy. Instead of just protecting ourselves from new threats, we want to be able to rapidly identify new opportunities and to take advantage of them. And here "we" means everybody, not just a small elite. The biggest challenge of the information society is to ensure that society as a whole does not split into those who can and those who cannot obtain its benefits. The information society, however wonderful and advanced otherwise, will miserably fail as a society if it promotes inequality and polarization, if it tends to exclude rather than include, and if it deepens the division of society into winners and losers, instead of equalizing opportunities and levelling the playing field for all.

How do we plan to achieve this in Finland? In the process of updating our national strategy, we aim to ensure that user-friendly electronic services will cover everyone’s needs and will be within everyone’s reach. We want to make sure that the public sector will adapt to and serve the needs of the information society, and take advantage of the opportunities it offers. We must see to it that networking replaces antiquated organizational models throughout society. And although we talk about the information society we really have to go deeper, from information to knowledge, and learn how to manage knowledge better.

The overall aim is to increase our social cohesion, strengthen our democracy and civil society, enrich our culture and support sustainable development, both in Finland, in our immediate neighborhood, and in the world at large.

The work of turning these lofty aims into practice has already begun. Take, for example, the question of electronic services. Earlier this year, the government made a decision in principle on electronic transactions, development of services and cutting down the gathering of data. It was decided that by 2001, (two thousand and one) citizens must have the opportunity to carry out a significant share of all their dealings with government entities electronically. A number of more specific targets follow from this: there needs to be, for example, a reliable system of electronic identification in place. To this end, a citizen’s ID card will be brought into use next year.

Easier access to services, be they public or commercial, must not just mean that one will be able to fill in forms and applications electronically. It must also enable people to talk back, to empower them, to give them an instrument for making their influence felt as it should be in a democracy. The Internet is a powerful political tool: it frees political organizations from the constraints of geography, and it serves the aggregation and articulation of political interests in a very effective way. It does away with the advantages of having a centralized, hierarchical organization. In other words, it is an ideal tool for strengthening the civil society.

In the sub-title of his recent book called "The Wealth and Poverty of Nations", Harvard emeritus professor Davis Landes poses the question "why some are so rich and some so poor". Briefly, his answer is that some nations were better able than others to take advantage of qualitative jumps in technology. Most recently, the Industrial Revolution made the chips fall the way they did, and that decided who was poor and who was rich for the following 200 years. This could be the starting point of a lively debate on what actually happened and why, and who is at fault, but the purpose of the book is rather to use lessons of the past as a guide to success in the future.

We are now, once again, crossing a technological threshold that is being compared to the Industrial Revolution, if not to the invention of movable type by Gutenberg. In the United States, one-third of the real growth of the economy has been driven by the information technology industry, and more specifically, almost entirely by the development of the Internet. In four years, Internet usage has grown from about four million to 100 million users, and some American predictions speak about a billion people on-line by the year 2005 (two thousand and five).

It is easy to dismiss such predictions and to point out that the United States and Northern Europe are exceptions, and that their experiences do not apply elsewhere. Maybe. But not so long ago, television was seen a luxury of the affluent North that would never take root in the South. And who would have foreseen a few years ago that Finland, of all places, with its long distances and sparse population, would be known as the most wired nation on earth?

A look at your agenda convinces me that the tide has now turned. The information revolution and its primary tool and backbone, the Internet, are no longer dismissed as belonging just to the affluent few in the North. You are now going to discuss the Internet as a factor in both the global and the village economy, as a tool for development and democracy. This is a wonderful new beginning. Because if we really are going through a paradigm shift, if we really are at a turning point comparable to the Industrial Revolution, that means - going back to professor Landes’ book - that at least some of the cards are going to be redistributed.

The information revolution opens up opportunities that are not necessarily best understood and exploited by those who won the last round. The winners this time will be those who are quickest to grasp the new realities and take advantage of the levelling effect of new technologies.

I wish you wisdom and success in your deliberations. I hope they will contribute to an awareness that a unique window of opportunity may now be open for the South. Let us hope that 200 years from now, somebody at Harvard, writing the economic history of the world, will be able to note the remarkable boost to the development of the South that took place at the beginning of the new millennium, when it began to take advantage of the information revolution.