Huffington Post Blog
In a landmark speech in January 1999, the former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan warned that the spread of markets was outpacing the ability of societies to adjust to them, that globalization is fragile and vulnerable to backlash from all the “isms” of our post-cold-war world: protectionism, populism, nationalism, ethnic chauvinism and terrorism. What these “isms” have in common is a fundamental exploitation of the misery and insecurity of those people who feel left behind. To counter this threat, he proposed a “Global Compact of shared values” and asked businesses to take the lead.