The Logic of Solidarity: A Revitalized Vision of the UN

Monrovia, Liberia. An International Women's Day march from the center of Monrovia to the Liberian Supreme Court. Photo: UN/Eric Kanalstein

I come before you today fully aware of the complexity of the responsibility I assumed in accepting the presidency of this sixty-third session of the General Assembly, which you have so generously entrusted to me. Despite the relative insignificance to which the General Assembly has been relegated in recent years, I firmly believe that the task of presiding over this Assembly is an important one.

It becomes even more significant when this post is used as an opportunity to transform the prevailing exclusionary logic of selfishness, one which has, at times, crippled the ability of this body to fulfill its mandate as enshrined in the United Nations Charter.

Left unchecked, this logic can only lead to the death and extinction of our species. The struggle for the full acceptance of the logic of solidarity in both our Organization and our Member States will be the principal endeavor of this presidency.

The Truth of Interdependence

All of us, without exception, share responsibility for the state of our world. While some are undoubtedly more responsible than others, there is no point in arguing over our varying degrees of responsibility. What is important now is that we look to the future, learning from our past mistakes, and together embark wholeheartedly on the task of building a new and better world, in the conviction that Another World Is Possible.

The situation in which our world finds itself is even more serious today than it was 63 years ago when the United Nations was founded. Nevertheless, we are not fatally condemned to continue sinking in the morass of mad suicidal selfishness.

To escape from this morass, we have only to recognize that we are all sisters and brothers, and to recognize, as well, that this truth demands that we change our way of thinking, behaving, and interacting with one another. At this point in the odyssey of our human existence, our interdependence and inherent mutuality remains the central truth.

Our acceptance of that truth and of its logical consequences will determine whether coming generations will have a decent future.

Love prompts us to take action in the construction of a more just and nonviolent world, with solidarity as its most important feature. We must do so without looking back or holding onto resentments. We need reconciliation with all those who might have caused us pain and suffering.

My call for us to embrace the supreme law of love, without exceptions or exclusions, for the sake of present and future generations, is made on the understanding that what gives meaning to human existence is the never-ending process of more and more dedication to the service of our sister and brother beings and to universal solidarity.

Facing the Food Crisis

Various crises of great scale - economic, financial, environmental, humanitarian, and legal - are converging in the present world food crisis. These crises express themselves in the current turbulence and distortions of credit markets, subsidized oil prices, the rise in world food prices, and rising prices in general, and are further aggravated by economic stagnation. Each one of these crises interacts with and upon the others, aggravating exponentially a deterioration of the world economy.

If we are to deal effectively with the problem of hunger, governments will need to undertake the courageous decisions this crisis requires of them, including reorienting their own national priorities, transcending local and national confines to take into account the greater good and the well-being of the world's poor.

We must demonstrate a readiness to tackle even the most sensitive and contentious of issues. This means addressing, for example, the market distortions caused by the agricultural subsidies of developed countries; the impact of speculation in futures markets on food production and food sovereignty; the impacts of climate change on food production and the environment; the multiple impacts of the production of biofuels on food availability and the environment; and lastly, but not least, the problematic development model pushed upon developing countries by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.

It is also imperative that we deal with the root causes that limit the institutional capacity of our own General Assembly, such as:

• non-observance of the principles and standards laid down in the United Nations Charter;
• the growing tendency to deprive this General Assembly of any real power;
• the reduction of the Economic and Social Council to a peripheral body;
• the transfer of ever more power to the Security Council and the Bretton Woods institutions, as well as other international finance and trade institutions in general.

In other words, it is precisely in the lack of democracy within our Organization where we find the most profound cause for the most serious problems in our world today.

Democratization of the United Nations

Without question, a United Nations enriched by genuine input from all its Members would make our Organization a forum for dealing effectively with the world's most pressing problems and to prevent a few from imposing upon the majority prescriptions that only make matters worse. For this reason, we have concluded that it has become imperative to hold a High-level Dialogue on the Democratization of the United Nations. At this sixty-third session of the General Assembly, we will hold this dialogue in three five-day sessions.

The first session will concern the indispensable coordination of the international finance and commerce institutions with the Economic and Social Council and the General Assembly.

Both the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank are basically controlled by the United States and Europe. Both institutions have been and continue to be used as instruments of domination. The world resents this and this situation must change. The necessary democratization of these international financial institutions requires a change in the share system and the system for electing the respective Boards of Directors.

The second session of this High-level Dialogue of the General Assembly will be devoted to a discussion of the revitalization and empowerment of the Assembly itself through the transfer to this body of the power wrongly accumulated in the Security Council, the Bretton Woods institutions and even, believe it or not, in the bureaucracy of our Organization.

At the United Nations, the word "democracy" is becoming increasingly empty, with no real meaning or substance. Take for instance, the 45-year-old United States embargo against Cuba. Even with a majority as overwhelming as 184 votes to 4, this patently unjust and universally repudiated embargo remains firmly in place. If the opinion of more than 95 per cent of the membership of the United Nations can be so casually ignored, of what use is this General Assembly? This is a question that deserves some thought. How can we be content to say that we have democracy simply because we have the "one nation, one vote" rule? What good are votes if they can be ignored or have no real consequence?

We will continue to stress that the democratization which the United Nations so urgently needs will entail decentralizing the power accumulated in a small group of States, and in the Organization's own bureaucracy, and transferring that power to the General Assembly, where it logically belongs. This is an urgent task; the world can not afford to wait another 15 years listening to speeches that lead nowhere.

It is all well and good to preach democracy, but it would be better still for us to put it into practice, right here, at the United Nations. It makes no sense to wage wars of aggression that kill hundreds of thousands of people with the purported aim of supporting democracy, while at the same time using every imaginable means and pretext to prevent a process to democratize the United Nations itself.

The third and final session of the High-level Dialogue on the Democratization of the United Nations will be devoted to a frank discussion of the Security Council. It is a sad but undeniable fact that serious breaches of the peace and threats to international peace and security are being perpetrated by some members of the Security Council that seem unable to break what appears like an addiction to war.

As difficult as it is, solving the problem of the Security Council is a challenge we have to take up. I am well aware that by saying this I am stirring up a hornets' nest. But even hornets can be managed successfully if due precautions are taken. I propose that at this sixty-third session of the General Assembly we seriously consider what those precautions should be.

The Assembly of Frankness

We hope that today, after all that has happened in the world since the United Nations was founded, our most powerful nations will be willing to give peace and democracy a chance. In any event, it should be borne in mind that privileges granted by law on the assumption that they are reasonable and for the common good remain valid only as long as that assumption holds true.

I think we all agree that merely increasing the number of members or the number of countries with the privileges of permanent membership or veto power in the Security Council would in no way address the core issue. Increasing the number of Security Council members, while necessary to ensure fairer and more geographically balanced representation, would do nothing to correct the anomalies that we should be trying to rectify.

In conclusion, today more than ever before, candor is indispensable in international relations. I would like for this sixty-third session of the General Assembly to go down in history as the "Assembly of Frankness" for the sake of world peace and the eradication of poverty and hunger from the Earth. Considering the seriousness of the global crises, diffident and ambiguous language will get us nowhere. The United Nations cannot effectively tackle the deep-rooted and urgent problems of the day without being clear, firm, and unequivocal. Sugar-coating, speaking euphemistically, or engaging in petty semantics so as not to call things by their name, under an erroneous concept of diplomacy, has never worked and will never work. The world crisis is too serious to allow for euphemisms or half measures.

All persons and nations, without exception, possess enormous reserves of human nobility. It is time for us to tap into the reserves of moral strength within each of us as persons and of all of us as nations. If we do so, our hearts and our capacity to love and serve will grow and we will find ourselves better able to bring our great human family to new levels of solidarity that guarantee for all of us, and generations to come, a future of enduring peace.

Let us give genuine democracy and peace a chance. Let us conduct ourselves as the people we are: all sisters and brothers, reconciled with one another and committed to living in nonviolence and SOLIDARITY.