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The OECD at 50
A message from
Nicolas Sarkozy President of the French Republic
F
or the past 50 years, France has hosted in its capital city the headquarters of the OECD. For half a century it has been an honour and a privilege for France to participate in the birth, development and opening up to new horizons of the OECD. I would like to pay tribute to the men and women who work in the Château de la Muette, the Organisation’s historical headquarters: they represent an unparalleled wealth of expertise that contributes to the intellectual stature of Paris. I would also like to pay tribute to the commitment and dynamism of the Secretary-General of the OECD, my friend Angel Gurría, in the service of the Organisation that he leads and of its member countries, who have recently reappointed him for a second term. The OECD can be proud of what it has achieved in the past 50 years. The crisis from which the world economy is gradually emerging gave a striking demonstration of the need for international co-operation in matters financial, economic and social. In so doing, it validated a concept that lies at the heart of the Organisation’s identity and that has driven its action over the past half-century. Let us not forget that it was in response to the need to get the countries of Europe working together after the Second World War, and so to speed up their reconstruction through the policies of co-operation backed by the Marshall Plan, that the OECD’s forerunner, the OEEC, was born in 1948. The Organisation underwent a name change at the start of the 1960s, but there was no change in what still today constitutes its institutional “genome”: the promotion of international co-operation through the championing of “best practices”. The OECD is in a class of its own in the “galaxy” of international organisations, successfully orchestrating lively and fruitful intergovernmental co-operation by means of an institutional mechanism that has the force of a precision tool – the exchange of best practices among its member countries and partners – all the while anchoring this co-operation in a robust and rigorous corpus of doctrines and analyses. To put it another way, the Organisation is that rare amalgam between an intergovernmental forum for co-operation and an outstandingly productive “think tank” in the service of better policies for better lives – its credo. Over the past 50 years the OECD has, nonetheless, radically transformed itself to take account of the emergence of new powers and, above all, new challenges. In 1989, following the fall of the Berlin Wall, the OECD forged new links with the countries recently liberated from the communist yoke. Today, the Organisation is opening its doors to the new economic powerhouses of Brazil, Russia, India, Indonesia, China and South Africa. France encourages this new openness, which will allow the OECD to find its place within a changing architecture of world governance. It will enable the Organisation, in particular, to obtain full recognition, including on the part of the emerging powers that are not (yet) among its members, of its principles, norms and standards, whose role is to provide a framework of rules of the game for a globalisation process that France wishes to be both harmonious and lasting. I am in no doubt that the OECD possesses all the qualities needed to accomplish this ‘metamorphosis’, as is shown by its front-line contribution to the work of the G20 and its steadfast, proactive and greatly appreciated participation in the efforts to build a new system of world governance that lie at the heart of the French Presidency of the G20.