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ADDRESS BY THE PRESIDENT OF IRELAND MARY ROBINSON, IRISH TIMES/HARVARD COLLOQUIUM

ADDRESS BY THE PRESIDENT OF IRELAND MARY ROBINSON, IRISH TIMES/HARVARD COLLOQUIUM, JOHN F. KENNEDY SCHOOL OF GOVERNMENT, BOSTON

"WE THE PEOPLES OF THE UNITED NATIONS..."

RENEWING THAT DETERMINATION

The preamble to the United Nations Charter, written in 1945, is an eloquent statement of its fundamental aims.  It begins with these words: "We the peoples of the United Nations, determined to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war".  And it then sets out those aims.  I want to reflect on that preamble today, but with an emphasis on its opening words.  Even as I prepare to do so, I am fully aware that I cannot claim a specialist wisdom on the United Nations.  On the other hand, I am also aware that I have the true privilege of holding an elected office which is removed from day-to-day policy issues.  This in turn has allowed me the advantage and responsibility of a different time-scale, with all the opportunities for reflection that brings.

The phrase "We the peoples" was so powerful in its time because it made an assertion about common human purpose following on an episode of terrible human suffering.  It looked boldly to the future.  Now that future is our past.  As we  look back to it today, we can see more clearly the exceptional dangers of that past.  We can also see clearly those times in this century when the sense of crisis - widely felt and widely shared - was sufficient to generate analysis and institutions to avert further danger.  I want to ask today - in the light of those exceptional and powerful words - whether we can find our way again, as a community who share a planet, to a sense of crisis which is sufficient to the present danger.

Fifty years ago today the world was at war.  Millions had died; millions had yet to die.  As well as the tragedy of death and suffering, there was an additional and terrible spectacle. Some of the most creative aspects of human intelligence - including its outcome in technology - had been mobilized for the purposes of human destruction.  Against that background, and even while the outcome was still uncertain, plans were already under way for a better world.  The US,  British, Soviet and Chinese governments had agreed that they would seek to establish "a general international organisation, based on the principle of the sovereign equality of peace-loving states".  So began the process of discussion which culminated with the signature of the Charter of the United Nations, by fifty-one nations, at San Francisco in June 1945.

Now, half a century later, the United Nations has grown and developed.  Its membership has more than trebled.  We are preparing to celebrate its 50th anniversary.  I know that Governments are already at work, in New York and elsewhere, debating possible change and reform in the institutions and structures of the United Nations so that it can better achieve its stated aim - the maintenance of international peace and security.  I do not propose here to enter that debate, but I wish it every success.  In fact I do not intend to put forward proposals here as such, but to evoke possibilities.  Our world has changed; our institutions have changed.  In fifty years we have come a long way and brought those institutions with us.  And yet as Dag Hammarskjold says in Markings:  "The longest journey is the journey inwards."  It is that inward journey, of reflection and questioning and re-evaluation, which concerns me this evening.

But even an inward journey is affected by outward events.  There are three such events which seem to me to have shaped our century and our world.  The first was the cataclysm of the First World war. 

The shift of consciousness wrought by that war was enormous.  You only have to look at a poet like Francis Ledwidge, who came from County Meath in my own country to see an instance of its sheer waste. In one of his summer poems he writes "soon the swallows will be flying south".  He had hardly finished that poem before he died in France, at the front, still in his twenties.

Ledwidge is just one example.  The loss of a whole generation of young Europeans in that war had a huge effect.  The effort to re-structure the world after that war - an effort led by Woodrow Wilson - saw two ideas begin to find general acceptance in international life.  One was a concept noted in the American Declaration of Independence - that peoples everywhere should be free to determine their own future, to form independent States if they so wished - in the general recognition of the principle of self-determination.  This in turn brought to an end the world of Empire and colony, and led to the emergence everywhere of the independent, sovereign, territorial state as the unit of social and political organisation.  We now live in a world of such states, and it seems humanity is likely to organise itself that way for some time to come.

But the second idea which followed on that first one is also important:  the idea that a new order of independent states needed to generate an institutional structure, so as to avoid conflict and promote co-operation.  For this purpose, the League of Nations was set up.  It was open to all States and was based on a covenant, which for the first time in history, set out a written constitution or code for relations between States.  But its flawed and weak structures were finally swept away in the Second World War.

The ferocity and scope of this war exceeded any other.  Much of the land surface of the planet,  of its industrial power, and of its technology was mobilised for the purposes of destruction. Nazism, which had grown like a malignity out of Western civilization, created a system more uniquely and objectively evil than any seen before.

The extent of human cruelty and degradation involved in the concentration camps, and the process of revelation followed by a horrified international realisation of what had happened, marks the second defining event of our century.  When Immanuel Kant described the imperative of treating each human being as an end and not a means, he proposed a standard of humanity which was reversed in the terrible logic of the death camps, which reduced each victim of the system to the status and powerlessness of an object and a means.

The camps forced new understandings on the world.  Above all, they showed the need for an accepted and internationally validated code of human rights which all States subscribed to, and which would set limits on what any State may do internally.

There was some symmetry to what happened after the First and Second World Wars.  Once again international society was reconstituted, once again the family of more specialised international organizations was grouped around it.  The new system, like the League of Nations, was based on the sovereignty and equality of States - though the Charter did accord a special role and responsibility to the five permanent members of the Security Council.  Indeed the Charter contained an explicit provision precluding the organisation from intervening in matters which were essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of a State. It was a document with careful provisions towards a balance between independence and responsibility.

I have put before you so far two of the major developments which have affected the organisation of international life in this century.  One is the adoption world wide of the sovereign territorial State, based on the principle of self-determination of peoples.  The other is the growing acceptance, following the horror of genocide, that State sovereignty cannot be an absolute.

These shifts of consciousness are hard to pinpoint, yet deeply formative.  I now come to another one which I can best summarise in two conflicting pictures which most of us hold in our minds and our memory.  One of these pictures is of the mushroom cloud -that terrible potential image of human destruction which so many of us grew up with.  The other is of the marvellous and poignant picture of the planet earth, photographed by the astronauts who landed on the moon - an image saying as much about human creativity as the other said about the human capacity for self-destruction.

That first picture, of a cloud of death, became a symbol of the Cold War.  That time of competition - with its policy of mutually assured destruction -is now over.  But the risks are still there and may be greater than before.  The big powers who held those weapons and were ready to destroy each other were at least disciplined in the holding of their arsenals.  Now as they dismantle those arsenals other dangers present themselves, the more ominous for being more diffuse.  If this century tells us anything it is that knowledge once acquired cannot be suppressed. More and more nations have laid their hands on the secrets of death.  And a world where small and medium-sized nuclear powers multiply will be exceptionally dangerous.

And dangerous, it must be said, not just to us, but to that other image: of a globe, enamelled with blue oceans and suspended in a black sky above its moon, a globe which is hostage to our vision and our greed.  While the photograph itself may be  an image of beauty and fragility, it is also a warning to us of the limitations of our own environment, and the vulnerability of our planet Earth.  But emotive reactions are not enough. We need  a careful and painstaking consciousness to suit the intense need this planet has for our care and caution.

Almost everything I have been speaking about so far reaches back into the events of the past and yet is relevant too, to the resources of the present - whether those resources are the physical ones of the planet, or the attitudes with which we meet the moment we find ourselves in. We look back through the century, whether through the photographs of the astronauts, or the pages of a history book, and we recognise our world.  The millennium lies ahead.  What world will our children look back on, and their children?  Some patterns have already been established, but it is our response to them and the agenda we set which will determine our children's prospects.

To start with, there is a world population at present of 5pbn.  It took thousands of years, until the 19th century, for there to be one billion.  Then the process accelerated.  Even at the lowest projections it will have increased to 7pbn by about the year 2025.  The world will then have five times as many people as at the beginning of this century.

When you consider that 95% of that growth in the next thirty years will take place in developing countries, and that it will increasingly be an urban population, you can see the effect of this on one of the other shaping factors of our world which is its economy. 

It has become possible now to talk about a global economy because the world's individual economies are increasingly linked.  The linkages are not just economic.  With the growth of information technology has come the phenomenon of financial and stock markets operating in a unified fashion around the world on a 24 hour basis.  When New York closes, Tokyo is already opening with all of the complex and delicate reactions of one market to another. And with this extraordinary theatre of action and information has come the sobering fact that governments can no longer withstand -even in concert - the collective force of individual investors.

This increase in information is mirrored in the revolution in communications.  We live in a world where perceptions are powerfully affected by television images and sometimes disturbingly distanced by them.  Satellite has made us all one:  it is a pitiless light showing us both our disasters and our self-protection from them at one and the same time.  But the truth is that to make a complex present visible requires an increase, not a decrease in our attention, however difficult this is:  I may say that in Ireland one of the ways we pay attention is by our own strong and loyal memories of images from our past:  whether of our own Frederick Boland at the UN breaking his gavel, or Frank Aiken urging the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons, long before that was an easy argument to make, or by the sight of the difficult and courageous contribution that Irish soldiers make to peace-keeping.

These factors - of population and economy and the images which bring them to us - lead directly to a point which I think is central:  of how the world's resources - greater now than ever before - are to be shared.  As President of Ireland, a country with rich agricultural land, and at the same time an historic memory of famine, I stood in the camps in Somalia and saw the real effect of poverty.  And yet Somalia is a local crisis which focuses an even more dreadful truth: that 1pbn people - the same population which inhabited the planet at the turn of the century - now live in that absolute poverty.  If there is one emphasis more than any other I want to place in this speech it is this: that if we, as human beings, accept - whether by non-engagement or indifference or an evasion of information - the situation of those people, then in my view we fail in our responsibility to our humanity in a way which cannot be justified or redeemed by any other action.

Finally all these questions - of population, of economy and of distribution - lead to the question of the planet itself.  That beautiful image, seen from space, is a more flawed and ambiguous one if you look closely.  And we should look closely.  We are losing our forests, our topsoil, our animals, our habitats.  We have polluted our air, our oceans, our rivers.  We have run through an ecological fortune even in a single generation, and like many profligate heirs we hardly know what we have spent and what we have left.  But we can be sure that one of the things we are squandering is our children's futures.

All the factors I have put before you lead to a single question. How are we to manage this new world?  The question may be urgent and fresh to this generation.  But it is in effect the same question which in 1945, as the Second World War was ending, confronted the leaders of the victorious countries.  They understood the dangers which another conflict between States would present.  Their answer to that question was a new and better international organisation of States - the United Nations - which has now become universal, and which needs to be strengthened and developed further.

I am now right back to where I began tonight with those opening words of the UN charter:  "We the peoples of the United Nations, determined to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war".  The choice of words, with its implication that it was peoples rather than governments which drafted the charter, was hardly more than a rhetorical device at the time.  I think it is vital that we take that phrase now and refresh its meaning and give it a new vitality if we are to answer that question about managing our world.

Those two ideas of self-determination and individual responsibility which were highlighted in the aftermath of two world conflicts are once again undergoing a process of change. Humanity may continue to organise itself into sovereign states, but the factors I mentioned - including limited resources and ever growing population - mean that sovereignty is being increasingly eroded by global developments.  The complex inter-relationship of the world structure demands that people everywhere are brought increasingly into participation in decision-making.

I want to suggest four ideas which I see as fundamental to the way we should now organise and structure our relations in this changing world.  I can summarise them as follows:  connectedness, listening, sharing and participation.

First connectedness:  I put it to you that we need to see this world as a single whole.  We need to understand the connectedness of its fate and our actions.  Can we find a way to achieve what has come to be called "sustainable development" so that the larger human population of the next century may be able to achieve a decent human life in ways that are in harmony with the Earth, and which respect and rely on its marvellous capacity for renewal?  If we are to do that, we need a vision of the whole that does not divide the science of ecology from the social consequences of famine;  that does not protect some of us from an acceptance of crisis simply because we are fortunate enough to be exempt from its immediate consequences.  The development of a sense of connectedness is an intellectual responsibility which requires that we understand the relationship of political, social and environmental factors.

The second fundamental idea is the ability to listen, and it is a more complex task than it sounds.  A distinguished political scientist, Samuel Huntington, wrote recently of the possibility that "a clash of civilisations" could be a basis for future wars.  We cannot allow this to happen.  We need to listen to the narrative of each other's diversities, so that we can draw strength and not weakness from our differences.

But respect for diversity should not make us abandon the idea that there are universal values which ought to be upheld as part of what it is to be human.  We must hold on to what has been achieved in human rights over the last fifty years.  We must continue to insist that certain rights, which are grounded in human nature, as it has developed and grown through history, are of universal validity.

At the same time, only by listening to each other's diversities, can we be sure that what we call universal is not in fact culture-bound.  Our listening to the different stories which emphasise our diversity is the surest way to inform and strengthen our view of what is universal.

The third fundamental idea which I put to you is that of sharing.  Abraham Lincoln asked if the Government of the American nation could survive "half slave and half free".  Our world cannot and will not survive without conflict if one fifth is prosperous and four-fifths subsists in various degrees of misery.

It may be that the idea of sharing is too simple.  It suggests an old model of development aid, given in benevolence from one part of the world to the other, less prosperous, part.  It may not adequately reflect the fact that there is a need for radical re-thinking leading to fundamental structural change.

In your part of the world and in mine - in Europe North America and parts of the Asia Pacific  - we have developed consumer societies which are more prosperous than any in human history. And more wasteful.  Are the developing countries to take this as a model?  It is estimated that by the year 2000 half the growth in the world's gross product will come from East Asia and half the world's population will live there.   As things stand, these countries cannot deny their peoples a share in the consumption for which we have been the chief role model.  Why should they?  But if they take our way of life as exemplary, how is our planet to sustain the consequences?

The answer to this question can only come with a fundamental and unswerving re-thinking of the society which we have been creating, with its increasing transformation of raw material into luxuries rather than necessities, its heedless output of waste, its profligate use of resources.

Another re-think may be imposed on developed societies such as yours and mine in regard to the nature of work.  Since the industrial revolution work in our societies has been a basis for income distribution and self-esteem.  Now, however, it seems societies such as ours face chronic unemployment - or at the least a casualisation of work - as industry becomes more automated and technology advances.  At the same time there is a growing tendency for industry to be highly mobile - to move from West to East, North to South, in pursuit of lower wages. 

How do our societies handle these developments without being disfigured by them?  Must we resign ourselves to a growing restlessness as social benefits in the West are steadily cut and social protections are removed in an ultimately futile effort to compete with lower wage rates elsewhere?  Or can we meet the challenge of re-thinking the nature of work itself, and the role it plays in a developed society where production is increasingly automated?

In the world of the 21st century information, more than ever, will be power.  The setting up of information super-highways marks a new Industrial Revolution.  I put it to you strongly that the idea of sharing has a particular meaning in this context.  In the new information revolution education, capital, technology and knowledge are powerful partners.  These resources, once linked together, will have an enormous impact on how we live.  But what of the developing world? Now is the moment to make sure that the information highway does not stretch laterally around the world from North America to Europe and Japan but with no junction route to the South.  This is where the connectedness of our vision, as I suggested earlier, comes into its own.  This is where the idea of listening becomes real.  We must ensure that the developing world does not watch at the window, envious of what it can see, but unable to benefit from the communications revolution.

The fourth idea is fundamental to the way we live.  It is that of participation.  The concept of doing things to and for people is no longer a viable one. 

As you can appreciate, I have a particular interest in this idea, because it opens the whole question of women in society.  I have just come from addressing a Woman's Forum and speaking to the Commission on the Status of Women at the UN in New York.  I consider myself a witness to this matter, because as President of Ireland  I have seen the powerful effect of women's groups and the dimension which women can bring to the social and political life around them.  In many ways, these groups are the best text I know of the benefits of developing a parity of participation by men and women.

The broader arena for participation is, of course, democracy and political freedom.  Over the past decade there has been a remarkable growth in the process of democratisation around the world.  This process must continue so that people are drawn more and more to participate in, and make their voices heard, in the systems of government.  The model will not everywhere be the same.

Indeed it would be wrong to think a certain kind of Western democracy is always the most suitable model.  But it is important that the trend towards participation by people everywhere in the system of government under which they live should be encouraged.

There is another way in which participation can thrive.  There has been a remarkable growth in recent years in non-governmental associations and groups, both within countries and internationally.  And even more remarkable are the links and networking between such organisations.  This is a welcome development which has paralleled the development of the UN itself.  Forty-one NGOs participated in the San Francisco Conference.  Now there are nearly a thousand with consultative status.  The importance of these organizations lies in their ability to speak for individual concerns.  I think we see this clearly in major international conferences.  What is so interesting - apart from the main agenda of these conferences - is the vivid and persuasive role played in them by these non-governmental organisations.  Even where their advice may not be accepted, their voices are heard.  The Rio Conference on the Environment in 1992, the Vienna Conference on Human Rights in 1993, and the Cairo conference on population which will happen this Autumn and the Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995 offer a rare theatre, with a world wide audience, for the exchange of views.  And the non-governmental organisations have made full use of that stage.

But we need to move from spectacle to action.  So far our main focus has been on the very fact that these conferences have occurred and are occurring;  that the arguments have been made; that the coverage has happened.  But neither the conferences, nor the arguments, nor the coverage are enough in themselves.  They need to be taken into the very heart of the decision-making processes of all those international organisations which are part of the UN family.  Once they are and only then - can the consequences of so much discussion and debate be felt.  Finally this concept of participation in decision-making has little meaning unless it can reach into one of the most vital areas of all - where the resources of a developing country can be almost crippled by the burden of debt.  And so there is a real need for the organisations of financial governance such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund to be true partners in these processes of consultation and revision.

I am aware - in everything I have said tonight - of how fragile are the words we speak compared with the meanings we want to convey.  I particularly feel this in that  gap which opens up between information and urgency whenever the subject is our future and the future of this planet.  I want to convey a sense of crisis; and yet to do that - and I am like many others in this - I have to provide those statistics, those arguments, those rational paragraphs which can actually defer our sense of danger and immediacy.  But there is a crisis.  I feel it.  We need to feel it.     

Perhaps the real question is how are we to catch the attention of this area of the world, which is still partly sheltered from the crisis?   When I had small children - and I think many people in this room will have known the feeling - I remember exactly how I felt if one of them strayed near anything dangerous.  I wanted to call out something which would make them turn their heads, walk back and avoid the danger.  Thinking about this later it seems to me that no parent, in that situation, ever finds exactly the right words.  But no parent ever fails to find the right tone.  It is the tone - the right and exact tone which expresses danger - which we need now.

In 1945 the framers of the UN Charter found that tone.  The world turned its head to those opening words.  But at that time the sense of danger had been shared.  The world had come through a major disaster and was determined it must not be allowed to happen again.  Now we live in a time when so many methods of expression - even the images of disaster which come to us over television - encourage us not to pay attention.  They allow us that crucial distance from our own sense of danger and engagement which may just be an inch too much for what is happening to our planet and our future and the futures of our children.

In a way, a great deal of what I have been speaking about today is language itself: its uses and its excuses, its inadequacy, as we have come to use it, in conveying a true picture of reality which will move us to action.  We need a new, exact and agreed language if we are to continue the spirit of the 1945 charter, with its powerful address to feeling and intent. We need to listen to warnings so as to avoid the consequences of neglecting them.  There is a beautiful warning, written by the poet, Robert Lowell, in his poem "Waking Early Sunday Morning" - a poet who is so associated with this city and this University. We need not accept the darkness of his elegy, nor the depth of his pessimism.  But we must be deeply moved and stirred by the vision which he evokes.

Pity the planet, all joy gone

From this sweet volcanic cone;

peace to our children when they fall

in small war on the heels of small

war -until the end of time

to police the earth, a ghost

orbiting forever lost

in our monotonous sublime.

With the tone of that warning in our ears, let us turn our heads once again and re-dedicate ourselves:

"We the peoples of the United Nations, determined to take responsibility for our world . . ."