How Good Should a Country Be? at L19 Cube – The Village

Here’s a new question: instead of asking how well your country is doing, trying asking how much it is doing? Enter independent policy advisor Simon Anholt, delivering one of four in a series of talks, curated by Leeds Beckett University for the Leeds International Festival, asking: what does it mean to be human?

We believe that world leaders aren’t just responsible for their own people and their own slice of territory: today, their responsibility extends to the whole of humanity and the whole of the planet.

We live in an age of Grand Challenges: climate change, violent conflict, pandemics, nuclear proliferation, organised crime, human trafficking, mass migration, racism and intolerance, human rights abuses, and natural disasters, to name just a few. Each of these problems has been made more dangerous and pervasive by globalisation, and each of them is now too big and too complex for any individual nation to resolve on its own.

For millennia, people in positions of power and authority have been held responsible for their own people and their own territory, but in our interconnected and interdependent modern world this is no longer a sufficient principle: in the longer term, it’s disastrous. The next goal for humanity is simple: to change the culture of governance from one that is fundamentally competitive to one that is fundamentally collaborative.

Find out more about the other talks here.