10-Year Anniversary 2010 - 2020

LETTER FROM THE FOUNDERS

Dear Members, Colleagues, and Friends,

Nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come. That is what we have learned in the decade since we founded the Berggruen Institute (BI). The challenges we identified already then on the horizon are now on the urgent agenda: the crisis of democratic governance; the growing inequality and gaps in wealth and power arriving with the digital age; the return of China to center stage in world affairs; the overarching planetary imperative of battling climate change; and what it means to be human in an age transformed by frontier sciences and technologies.

As we enter a new decade and reflect on the last, we take stock of what we’ve been able to accomplish over recent years by striving to grapple imaginatively with these concerns, stepping outside the usual lanes to reach beyond academic disciplines, social silos, partisan dispositions, and cultural boundaries. This cross-fertilization conjoined with a nimble capacity to connect and convene a diverse, global network of long-standing relationships has proven uniquely valuable in today’s fragmenting world.

Following this approach, we have crystallized some core ideas that are the pillars of our thinking and programmatic activity:

• “Planetary realism” that envisions a “partnership of rivals” between the West and China, the largest carbon emitters on the planet, to join together in climate action despite conflicts in other realms.
• “Pre-distribution of wealth through universal basic capital.” The innovations of digital capitalism are divorcing employment and income from productivity growth and wealth creation. The growing inequality that results from this dynamic is best addressed by fostering an ownership stake by all in the wealth generated by intelligent machines that are displacing gainful employment.
• Empowering “participation without populism” by integrating social networks and more direct democracy into governance through new mediating institutions that complement representative democracy.

In the more philosophical space, the Institute has also sought to fathom “what it means to be human” when artificial intelligence (AI) can be smarter than we are, when we can read and rewrite our own genome, and when we have learned anew through the COVID-19 pandemic that we must coexist with the microbial universe.

Think and Action Tank
As a “think and action tank,” we have not only thought, spoken, and published widely on all these issues, but engaged in practical action as well.

Our physical plant consists of a building we are restoring on the grounds of Peking University, a campus established in Beijing during the Qing Dynasty; the Casa dei Tre Oci building in Venice, Italy; and Monteverdi, the forthcoming “secular monastery” in the Santa Monica Mountains in Los Angeles designed by the Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron.

Over the years, the Institute has garnered an influential, global audience through our publications—The WorldPost, first in partnership with HuffPost (formerly The Huffington Post) and later The Washington Post, succeeded now by our own independent magazine, Noema. We also publish a book series under the imprint “Great Transformations” with the University of California Press, which has included among others our own recent book Renovating Democracy: Governing in the Age of Globalization and Digital Capitalism.

In the past decade, our Fellowship Program, hosted at universities across the world, has sponsored scores of academics as well as practitioners each year to pursue research and offer original insights in all of our programmatic areas. Our university partners have included Peking University and Tsinghua University in Beijing, University of Oxford, Harvard University, Stanford University, and the University of Southern California.

The $1 million Berggruen Prize for Philosophy and Culture, which we initiated in 2016, has taken its place among the more prestigious annual awards that have become markers of the zeitgeist. Laureates so far have included Charles Taylor, Onora O’Neill, Martha C. Nussbaum, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Paul Farmer.

In 2019, we brought together top thinkers from around the West to produce the seminal report, “Renewing Democracy in the Digital Age,” which published the findings of a commission co-chaired by Anthony Giddens, former Director of the London School of Economics, and Helle Thorning-Schmidt, former Prime Minister of Denmark. On the action front, our non-partisan Think Long Committee for California has worked with successive governors and legislators since 2011 to pass legislation bringing transparency, mediation, and deliberation to the state’s direct democracy system in which citizens make policy at the ballot box.

In Europe, the Institute funds a consultancy of the best practitioners who designed and ran the most consequential citizens’ assemblies of recent years in Ireland on abortion and in France on climate change. They are on call when governments or parliaments seek citizen input to inform their decisions. We also support the Florence-based European University Institute in monitoring the novel experiment of citizens’ panels taking place across the continent this year to guide the Conference on the Future of Europe.

Our present focus on closing the “democracy gap” through greater citizen engagement in the European Union follows upon the early activities of the Institute’s Council for the Future of Europe which sought to further enhance the legitimacy of integration across the continent. Its members included various leaders from France’s Jacques Delors to Sweden’s Carl Bildt.

With respect to universal basic capital, we have gathered some of Silicon Valley’s most creative entrepreneurs from Snap Inc. to LinkedIn to work with California’s governor and legislature to forge a path to capital income for all citizens through a fund that would provide a share in the wealth generated by the state’s dynamic economy. We are further promoting the similar idea of a “Common Prosperity Fund” in China’s “socialist market economy” with key influencers there, publishing the compelling case for it in Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post, the Chinese-language edition of the Financial Times, and The Straits Times of Singapore.

To advance planetary realism and a “partnership of rivals” with China, we are building on relationships established in a series of high-level meetings over the last decade of our 21st Century Council with President Xi Jinping and others in the leadership.

Practically, we support the California-China Climate Institute, co-chaired by former California Governor Jerry Brown and China’s top climate official, Xie Zhenhua, in its endeavor to integrate their respective cap and trade carbon markets. In yet another effort, we have joined the Brookings Institution and Australia’s Minderoo Foundation in a crucial “track-two” dialogue with Tsinghua University’s Center for International Security and Strategy on a code of conduct for the use of AI autonomous weapons in warfare. Beyond this project, we are also promoting an international program, Youth Environment Service (YES), to engage young people in climate action across borders.

In partnership with Peking University, we established the China Center in 2018. This reflects our conviction that East and West need to explore diverse, intellectual resources for a better understanding of planetary challenges and responses. To that end, the Center has brought AI scientists together with philosophers well-versed in Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism to examine how human societies should adapt and adjust to the rapid advance of frontier sciences and technologies. It also has sponsored cross-civilizational dialogues to explore non-Western perspectives on global governance.

For years now, BI's Transformations of the Human program has collaborated with artists, AI engineers, and others in such companies as Google and Facebook to integrate critical reflection into their images and designs that will frame the times to come. The inspiration for this program springs from the realization that the contemporary arts, technology, and natural and environmental sciences are flowing together to prefigure new modes of being human, and in so doing, forcing us to reconsider the boundaries between the human body, machines, and nature.

Advances in sensors, robotics, and machine learning generate autonomous systems that rival or exceed human capabilities. At the same time, concepts of historical agency and power are being steadily expanded beyond the human—to the forests, the microbes, and the atmosphere. The Transformations of the Human program, as well as the Future Humans program, our newest research area, aim to uncover the implications of these transformations for philosophy, technological development, and governance.

The Test Ahead
Fresh ideas gain traction when the circumstances of a changing world demand new solutions beyond old thinking. If positioned at this nexus with considered thought and ready capacity for action, institutes such as ours can have a demonstrable impact.

A decade of experience under our belt has taught us what it takes to be effective. We will surely need to build on what we have learned as the great transformations we are living through accelerate and even further test our will and imagination as the future unfolds.

Nicolas Berggruen
Chairman and Founder, Berggruen Institute

Nathan Gardels
Co-Founder, Berggruen Institute;
Editor-in-Chief, Noema Magazine