[Congressional Record Volume 140, Number 33 (Tuesday, March 22, 1994)]
[Senate]
[Page S]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Printing Office [www.gpo.gov]
[Congressional Record: March 22, 1994]
From the Congressional Record Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov]
PRESIDENT MARY ROBINSON OF IRELAND ON THE FUTURE OF THE WORLD COMMUNITY
Mr. KENNEDY. Mr. President, during her visit to Boston earlier this
month, Ireland's President, Mary Robinson, delivered a major address at
Harvard on the future of the world community and the need for more
effective international cooperation to deal with the challenges we
face.
In her address on March 11, she emphasized the opening words of the
preamble of the U.N. Charter--``We the peoples of the United Nations,
determined to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war.''
She urged the western industrial nations of the world to renew and
update that commitment today, by dealing more effectively with the
opportunities and responsibilities of being part of the larger global
community. She reminded us all of the importance of this aspect of our
leadership. As she stated,
We need a vision of the whole * * * 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.
She urged nations to learn to respect one another's diversity, so
that we can draw strength and not weakness from our differences. She
urged us to explore and share new approaches to economic development,
alleviation of poverty, and protection of the environment.
I believe that President Robinson's thoughtful and stimulating
address will be of interest to all of us concerned with these issues
and with the future of relations among nations, and I ask unanimous
consent that it may be printed in the Record.
There being no objection, the address was ordered to be printed in
the Record, as follows:
[Irish Times/Harvard Colloquium, John F. Kennedy School of Government,
Boston, Mar. 11, 1994]
Address by the President of Ireland Mary Robinson
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
scourage 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 tragegy 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
organization, 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 effect to restructure 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 organization. We now live in a world of such
states, and it seems humanity is likely to organize 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 cooperation. 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 mobilized 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 recognize
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
5\1/2\ billion. 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 7\1/2\ billion 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 percent 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
peacekeeping.
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
1\1/2\ billion 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 organization
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 U.N. 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 organize 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 organize 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 marvelous 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 civilizations'' 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
ideas 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 emphasize 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 is 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 of 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 organizations.
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 organizations. 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 organizations 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 the 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 * * *''
____________________