Aurelio Peccei

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Aurelio Peccei (July 4, 1908 - March 14, 1984) was an Italian scholar and industrialist, best known as the founder and first president of the Club of Rome.

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[edit] Early life

He was born on July 4, 1908 in Turin, the capital of the Piedmont region of Italy. He spent his youth there, eventually graduating from the University of Turin with a degree in economics in 1930. Soon thereafter he went to the Sorbonne with a scholarship and was awarded a free trip to the Soviet Union.

His knowledge of other languages brought him to Fiat. Although under continual suspicion as an anti-fascist in the early 1930s, in 1935 a successful mission for Fiat in China established his position in Fiat management.

During World War II, Peccei became involved in the anti-fascist movement and in the resistance, where he was a member of the "Giustizia e Libertà". Peccei's work with the anti-fascist underground during the war caught up with him in 1944, when he was arrested, imprisoned, tortured, came within an ace of execution and escaped to lie in hiding until the liberation.

[edit] Later life

After the war, Peccei was engaged in the rebuilding of Fiat. Furthermore he was engaged in various of the private and public efforts then underway to rebuild Italy, including the founding of Alitalia.

In 1949, he accepted to go to Latin America for Fiat, to restart their operations, as Fiat operations in Latin America had been halted during the war. He settled in Argentina, where he lived for nearly a decade with his family. He quickly realised that it would make sense to start manufacturing locally and set up the Argentine subsidiary, Fiat-Concord, which built cars and tractors. Fiat-Concord rapidly became one of the most successful automotive firms in Latin America.

In 1958, with the backing of Fiat, Peccei founded Italconsult (a para-public joint consultancy venture involving major Italian firms such as Fiat, Innocenti, Montecatini), and became its Chairman, a position he held until the 1970s, when he became Honorary President. Italconsult was an engineering and economic consulting group for developing countries. It operated under Peccei’s leadership, on the whole, more as a non-profit consortium. Italconsult was regarded by Peccei as a way of helping tackling the problems of the Third World, which he had come to know first-hand in Latin America.

In 1964, Peccei was asked to become President of Olivetti. Olvetti was facing significant difficulties at that time due to the profound changes occurring in the office machine sector. Peccei, with his foresight and his entrepreneurial vision, was able to turn the situation at Olivetti around.

But Peccei was not content merely with the substantial achievements of Italconsult, or his responsibilities as President of Olivetti, and threw his energies into other organisations as well, including ADELA, an international consortium of bankers aimed at supporting industrialisation in Latin America. He was asked to give the keynote speech in Spanish at the group's first meeting in 1965, which is where the series of coincidences leading to the creation of the Club of Rome began.

[edit] Club of Rome

Peccei's speech caught the attention of Dean Rusk, then American Secretary of State, who had it translated into English and distributed at various meetings in Washington. A Soviet representative at the annual meeting of ACAST (the United Nations Advisory Committee on Science and Technology), Jermen Gvishiani, Alexey Kosygin's son-in-law and vice-chairman of the State Committee on Science and Technology of the Soviet Union, read the speech and was so taken by it that he decided he should invite the author to come for private discussions, outside Moscow. Gvishiani therefore asked an American colleague on ACAST, Carroll Wilson, about Peccei. Wilson did not know Peccei, but he and Gvishiani both knew Alexander King, by then Director General for Scientific Affairs for the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in Paris, so Wilson appealed to him for information.

As it happened, King did not know Peccei, but he was equally impressed by the ADELA paper and tracked down its author via the Italian Embassy in Paris. King wrote to Peccei, passing on Gvishiani's address and wish to invite him to the Soviet Union, but also congratulating him on his paper and suggesting that they might meet some time as they obviously shared similar concerns.

While Peccei had been working as an industrial manager in the Third World, King had been pursuing his career as a national and international civil servant in the very different setting of the industrialised countries. He had studied chemistry at the universities of London and Munich, then taught and carried out some important research at the Imperial College London. The war took him to the United States, where he was science attaché at the British Embassy in Washington until 1947, concerned with "everything from penicillin to the bomb". His experience there and in his next jobs - with the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research in London and then the European Productivity Agency in Paris - gave him the interest in the interactions between science, industry and society as well as the expertise in science policy matters that he was to need in his work at the OECD.

King has described the OECD in the 1960s as "a kind of temple of growth for industrialised countries - growth for growth's sake was what mattered". This veneration of growth, with little concern for the long-term consequences, worried King and Thorkil Kristensen, the Secretary General of the OECD. They both felt that there ought to be some sort of independent body which could ask awkward questions and try to encourage governments to look further ahead than they normally did. As international civil servants, however, they felt limited in what they could do - at which point, Peccei telephoned King and they arranged to have lunch.

The two men got on extremely well from the very outset. They met several times in the latter part of 1967 and early 1968, and then decided that they had to do something constructive to encourage longer-range thinking among Western European governments.

Peccei accordingly persuaded the Agnelli Foundation to fund a two-day brainstorming meeting on April 7 - April 8, 1968 of around 30 European economists and scientists at the Accademia dei Lincei in Rome. The goal of the meeting was to discuss the ideas of Peccei and King of the globality of problems facing mankind and of the necessity of acting at the global level. The meeting at the Accademia dei Lincei was not a success, partly due to the difficulty of the participants to focus on a distant future.

After the meeting there was an informal gathering of a few people in Peccei’s home, which included Erich Jantsch (one of the great methodologists of planning studies), Alexander King, Hugo Thiemann, Lauro Gomes-Filho, Jean Saint-Geours and Max Kohnstamm. According to King, within an hour they had decided to call themselves the Club of Rome and had defined the three major concepts that have formed the Club's thinking ever since: a global perspective, the long term, and the cluster of intertwined problems they called "the problematique". Although the Rome meeting had been convened with just Western Europe in mind, the group realised that they were dealing with problems of much larger scale and complexity: in short, "the predicament of mankind". The notion of problematique excited some because it seemed applicable at a universal level, but worried others, who felt that the approach was valid only for smaller entities such as a city or community. Saint-Geours and Kohnstamm therefore soon dropped out, leaving the others to pursue their informal programme of learning and debate.

Thus started what Peccei called "the adventure of the spirit". He was fond to state that: “If the Club of Rome has any merit, it is that of having been the first to rebel against the suicidal ignorance of the human condition.”[citation needed] Another quote of Peccei, in this respect, is particularly telling: "It is not impossible to foster a human revolution capable of changing our present course."[citation needed]

At the time the Club of Rome was founded in April 1968, there was limited public knowledge or concern about the approaching human predicament. An early response to this general lack of awareness of humanity’s prospects was the establishment of an international team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to begin a study of the implications of continued growth of the five basic factors that determine, and ultimately limit, growth on this planet - population increase, agriculture production, non-renewable resource depletion, industrial output, and pollution generation. The MIT project originated from a concrete proposal made by Jay Forrester. For thirty years, he had been working on the problem of developing mathematical models that could be applied to complex, dynamic situations such as economic and urban growth. His offer to adapt his well-tried dynamic model to handle global issues was gratefully accepted by the Club of Rome, and the way ahead suddenly seemed less uncertain. A fortnight later, a group of Club members visited Forrester at MIT and were convinced that the model could be made to work for the kind of global problems which interested the Club. The publication in 1972 of the results of the study in the book "The Limits to Growth" received both world wide acclaim and strong criticism. The leadership of the Club of Rome, including Peccei, King and many others, remained undeterred by the completely inadequate response of governments at the time.

In 1972, Peccei was one of the principal artificers of the International Institute of Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), in Laxenburg (near Vienna) in Austria. This Institute was formed after considerable struggle, but then served as an important bridge between East and West, partly because its founders included the United States (through the National Academy of Sciences), the Soviet Union (through the Soviet Academy of Sciences), Italy (through the Comitato Nazionale di Ricerche) and various other countries in the then western and eastern sector of the world. IIASA became a meeting place for scholars and scientists of different countries and provided a bridging function for the scientific world, producing important studies in different fields, including climate change, energy and agriculture.

It was during this same period, that Peccei became involved in the World Wildlife Fund (now the World Wide Fund for Nature), becoming a member of its International Board and becoming a strong supporter of their mission, not only internationally but also locally in Italy.

In the early 1970s, several other studies were undertaken to improve upon "The Limits to Growth", with varying degrees of support from the Club of Rome. Reflecting general criticism from the Third World, a Latin American model was developed by the Bariloche Institute in Argentina. The Club of Rome helped to find funding for the project but did not give its imprimatur to the final report ("Catastrophe or New Society?", A.O. Herrera et al, 1976).

With the idea of giving greater stress to the human dimension, Peccei approached the Dutch economist and Nobel laureate Jan Tinbergen and proposed a study of the likely impact of a doubling of the population on the global community. Tinbergen and his colleague Hans Linnemann came to the conclusion, however, that the topic was unmanageably large and decided to focus on the problems of "Food for a Doubling World Population". When this was put to the Club of Rome, Peccei and others disagreed strongly, feeling that other aspects such as strains on housing, urban infrastructure, employment, etcetera should not be ignored. Ultimately Linnemann and his group pursued their research with funds they had already mobilised in The Netherlands and published their results independently (MOIRA - Model of International Relations in Agriculture, 1979), not as a Report to the Club of Rome.

The Club of Rome had come a long way from the disastrous Rome meeting of 1968. However, another event in the same month fundamentally altered everyone's awareness of problems of scarcity and of power relations: the OPEC meeting which heralded the first oil shock. The framework of discussion changed radically, at least for a while, and the Club was to become involved in the United Nations debate on the New International Economic Order (NIEO).

Peccei persuaded the Austrian Chancellor, Bruno Kreisky, to host a meeting on North-South problems in February 1974 in Salzburg, Austria. Besides Bruno Kreisky, the following heads of state of government were present in Salzburg: Leopold Senghor, President of Senegal; Luis Echeverría, President of Mexico; Joop den Uyl, Prime Minister of the Netherlands; Olof Palme, Prime Minister of Sweden; Pierre Trudeau, Prime Minister of Canada; as well as the representatives of the Prime Ministers of Algeria and Ireland. Peccei deliberately did not invite any of the major European powers, the United States of America or the Soviet Union so as to prevent the debate turning into a forum for national or ideological position statements. To encourage the participants to speak freely, they were asked to come without accompanying civil servants and assured that nothing they said would be attributed to them. The two-day private brainstorming meeting ended with a press conference for 300 journalists.

As a logical extension of the Salzburg meeting, Peccei asked Jan Tinbergen to produce a follow-up report on global food and development policies, exploring these aspects much more thoroughly than the coverage in "The Limits to Growth". It seemed a propitious moment to promote thinking on the global problematique and international co-operation as the oil crisis made people recognise how interdependent the world had become. Scholars from the First, Second and Third Worlds were invited to participate in the RIO project (Reshaping the International Order), but only Poland and Bulgaria accepted from the Communist bloc. The basic thesis was that the gap between rich and poor countries (with the wealthiest roughly 13 times richer than the poorest) was intolerable and the situation was inherently unstable. What would be required to reduce the gap to 6:1 over 15 to 30 years? (Though still large, this ratio seemed the lowest that could be realistically proposed.) Unlike "The Limits to Growth" the model allowed the developing countries 5% growth per annum, whereas the industrialised countries would have zero or negative growth; all, however, would benefit from more sensible use of energy and other resources and a more equitable distribution of global wealth. The main Report argued that people in the rich countries would have to change their patterns of consumption and accept lower profits, but a dissenting group saw consumption as a symptom rather than a cause of the problems, which stemmed rather from the fundamental power structure.

After numerous working sessions and presentations over an 18-month period, the final results of RIO were presented at a meeting in Algiers in October 1976 and accepted as a Report to the Club of Rome. Despite being stronger on policy than "The Limits to Growth", it did not have the hoped-for impact, perhaps because the worst effects of the oil shock were over and the First World was much less receptive to appeals for self-denial and greater co-operation.

The last meeting Peccei organized and participated in was in Bogotá, the capitol of Colombia, on December 15 - December 17, 1983, with the striking and brave title of "Development in a World of Peace". This title was particularly brave for a country in a semi-permanent guerilla status, with very serious political and economic divisions. Co-organizer of the meeting with Peccei, was the President of Colombia, Belisario Betancur.

Peccei died on March 14, 1984 in Rome.

[edit] Books

Peccei wrote several books, including:

[edit] References

  • Eleonora Barbieri Masini, The Legacy of Aurelio Peccei Twenty Years after his Passing and the Continuing Relevance of his Anticipatory Vision, 2004 Aurelio Peccei Lecture, Rome, November 23, 2004

[edit] External links