arch/ive/ief (2000 - 2005)

UNICE has been informed that some organisations have expressed criticism against this event. The goal of the EBS is to set up a direct dialogue between the business and political community in the EU on the theme of innovation. UNICE – being not only the business representative in Europe, but also social partner at EU level – is committed to raising employment and raising the standard of living. We believe that stimulating innovation, creativity and entrepreneurial spirit is one way of achieving this. It is the main conclusion of our 2000 Benchmarking Report on Innovation and Creativity. This view has also been expressed by the Heads of EU States at the Lisbon Summit in March. The Lisbon conclusions foresee a role for enterprise in this process and UNICE wants to play a positive role, not by forcing its opinions on others but by partnership and dialogue with all European actors. This is what the European Business Summit is about.

The UNICE Benchmarking Report on innovation shows that the public attitudes to innovation in Europe are not as supportive as in the USA or Japan. Advances in for instance, health care, medicines, the quality of the environment, all depends on technical progress. We urge all authorities to raise public awareness to the importance of creativity and innovation for the economic and social well being of Europe. Starting a debate, organising dialogues and events – like the European Business Summit – which is open to everyone, on issues on which Europe's employment, economic growth and social strength depend, is a constructive and responsible contribution.



Yours faithfully

Georges Jacobs

Mister president,

You have sent an open letter to the belgian section of the Independent Media Center,which is only one of the Independent Media Centers created in the wake of the Seattle failure (see Mike Moore's interview with DeMorgen: http://archive.indymedia.be ) You have omitted to inform them. You also have omitted to have this open letter published in UNICE's "for or against?" discussion page. Why?


This open letter, - and your general info pages on http://www.ebsummit.org - , do deserve closer scrutiny.


Focusing on innovation and creativity, some readers may miss the fundamental goals underlying not only the EU-business community, but equally US-business,- we recall that "The US business is business" Monroe (?) Harding (?)-, and equally the Japanese, the Korean, the Chilean, and soon the Chinese and the Russian neo-liberal exponents of planetary business domination. They may miss the point that the first and foremost purpose of business is to make profit , to be lucrative. Innovation and creativity are subordinate to profit taking. (It would be interesting but too lengthy to expose here how innovation and creativity have been channeled through patent and copyright regulations, dating back to the 18th century, rather to the advantage of businesses, than for the benefit of science and art. How many inventions have not had to wait the exhaustion of profit taking before replacing unadequate or outdated applications !)


Reading your letter line by line, a second shock hits the reader when you declare unequivocally that UNICE is not only the business representative in Europe, but also a social partner at the EU level, giving the misleading impression that, - through your sectorial bargaining bouts with exclusively officially recognized trade unions – you would favour social well being , above your business profit taking imperatives. In the last decades, planetary business has decimated employment in unqualified, labour intensive sectors, leaving them open for more lucrative, although more risky, black market regionalisms, depending on the slackness of governments,depending in turn on the lobbying power of … businesses.


It is interesting to browse in the 2000 Benchmaking Report.

This report leaves the wrong impression that you are the initiators not only of the innovation-creativity theme, but more generally, of the dialogue between business and political communities. This is untrue.


Well before you came up, after Seattle, as a lifebelt for the WTO failure, tens of strictly private, or mixed, regional, multinational encounters, led to the constitution of organizations similar to yours: f.e. the Bilderberg Group, (at http://www.parascope.com ) from Dutch origin, or from Switzerland the Commission of Global Governance (at: http://www.cgg.ch ).Looking up those sites one inevitably gets links to far more outspoken capitalist defenders like http://www.postindustrial.com or the http://www.capitalism.org Internet reveals the existence of strange bedfellows.


Two more remarks: you declare 1) that UNICE will not force its opinions on others and 2) that the UNICE summit is open to everyone.


Due to the fact that you have global business control over the vast media sector in general (press agencies, publishers, radio & television stations, internet, communication hard- and software), active within the competitive free market you are able to mentally manipulate the unsuspecting, uninformed public, as has been the case since the parallel development of advertising and propaganda at the turn of XXth century: (KODAK's "You push the button,we'll do the rest" 1893, and the London call to levvy soldiers from Australia - 1912)


Your general registration fee (+ 2.000 € for participants and 300€ for escorts) negates your affirmation.


Most amazing is how utterly self-destructive your uncritical business domination tends to be: the competitive profit taking, leading to planetary monopoly formations, the relinquishing of social public help to medieval charity type NGO's is leading humanity to the brink of the unbearable. (But the first World War did already prove to what extent human beings could endure dehumanization. They did it for an unexpectedly long four years And peace was finally declared between the dominators, tired from warmongering the conditions were set for the next peaceful winner/loser competition.)

But, Mister president, beware. Business has no more continents to colonize, no more profits to reap in farwest virgin territories. So,how are you going to recycle sustainable profit taking ? Are you now to make profit out of innovative and creative ways to fight natural disasters ? Are you now to make profit from re-humanizing the Balkans, Africa, Latin-America, the Middle-East, the Far-East ? Or are you waiting for Starwars ?

I beg you, Mister president, to exert the overdue need of self criticism, to which my letter respectfully invites you, so as to stand, here in Brussels, as a beacon of light, inaugurating a dynamic of a new balance








Walter VAN DE MAELE

Generaal Bernheimlaan,22

B-1040 Brussels


VDM23@chello.be