This year we are once again discussing the challenging phenomenon of globalisation. After a workshop in 2000, a plenary session in 2001, and a colloquium in 2002, we will seek this year to complete the first round of our discussions on this subject. Our next step will be to decide how to produce from these deliberations a specific message of the Academy that will be of relevance to the Social Teaching of the Church. Our specific topic is now ‘the governance of globalisation’. The ultimate goal of such governance is the ‘universal common good’. After a number of consultations, our colleague Professor Louis Sabourin, who has organised all our exchanges on globalisation, reached the conclusion that the best way to deal with the topic of governance in our interdisciplinary Academy was to adopt different perspectives one after the other: those provided, respectively, by philosophy, political science, law, sociology and economics. This gives a natural structure to the programme followed this year, in which we deal with a number of difficult issues. For instance: what could be the proper nature of a global legal order and a world authority, given the contemporaneous application by sovereign States of differing forms of government? How should the globalisation of knowledge – a factor that varies so much between and within societies – be governed? How can migrants be integrated into the societies they join? What are the right institutions and policies for the governance of international trade and international finance?
Edmond Malinvaud