Peru

At the outset, I would like to join those who preceded me in congratulating you on your appointment as President of this last General Assembly of the twentieth century. Peru is pleased that a representative of Finland, a country everyone knows is committed to the objectives of the Organization, is steering the work of the fifty-fifth session of the General Assembly. I am convinced that, under your leadership we will achieve the mandates that are necessary to begin to pursue the vision developed by our Heads of State and Government at the recent Millennium Summit. I should also like to welcome and congratulate Tuvalu for its incorporation into the United Nations. This will undoubtedly represent an important contribution to the different spheres of work of the Organization. The Millennium Summit has revealed the enormous challenges that lie ahead and the overwhelming need to forge a new form of international order that will allow future generations to enjoy a world free from the threats of war, poverty, injustice and environmental deterioration and, at the same time, one built on freedom with the participation of each of the great cultures that are part of mankind, without preference or prejudice. It is extremely important that when we are about to conclude not just a century but also a millennium on 31 December, we stop for a moment along the way to reflect on the future of international relations. Peru is certainly not a decisive country in the development of global relations. Nevertheless it would seem that one of the characteristics that appear at the end of the twentieth century and that will certainly be emphasized in the twenty-first century is the basic role that all countries of the world, whether large or small, have to play in shaping the international order. And, in this sense, the perspective of a country, such as Peru that fully shares Western civilization and yet at the same has its own characteristics that are the legacy of ancient times, may be of interest in carrying out the healthy exercise of approaching the subject from a different angles. 24 Peru emphatically reiterates that the global order that must shape the conduct of the different international actors within the century beginning on l January, must be based on the essential principles of the Charter which, contrary to certain beliefs that we believe to be mistaken, have not only not lost relevance, but are increasingly important for peaceful coexistence, collective security and also for a real possibility for the development of all the specific groups that form part of the abstract element that we call mankind. May I emphasize, in particular, the rights that refer to the sovereignty of States, to non-intervention in their domestic affairs and to the legal equality between States. These basic principles, which were incorporated in the Charter in San Francisco, have allowed the development of effective mechanisms of self-control and the stabilization of the international system. That is why we must renew our commitment to these rules of international public law, restoring the functionality that is theirs. Only thus can we ensure that the democratic values that prevail in contemporary society will apply and be enforced within an international system whose emerging features appear to seek new forms of exclusion. The world today is not the same as the world of 50 years ago. Change and globalization are constantly reshaping reality at a rapid rate and are attempting to impose upon us a new sense of commonality, new morals and a new political ethic that dogmatically and in a partisan manner define what is proper and improper. Full respect for the international legal order therefore acquires enormous significance since it is the only element that can illuminate the common path, reducing arbitrariness and subjectivity. This is also the best way and the most effective mechanism for the full protection of human rights and human freedom, which are undoubtedly requirements that no member of the international community may evade. But this new reality also imposes on us a need for commitment to the principle of shared responsibility. The profound interdependence posed by globalization also assumes a collective determination by all the members of the United Nations community to combine their efforts and resources for the resolution of problems that have systemic effects or effects of an international nature. I refer in particular to the achievement of lasting economic growth within the developing countries; poverty elimination; confronting the real threats to peace of an international scope; public health problems and endemic illnesses that are mainly linked to poverty; finding sufficient financing for development; the digital divide; migration and the free movement of labour; environmental protection and conservation; the world drug problem, beyond a purely military perspective; the scourge of terrorism and the various forms of international crime, including money laundering, arms trafficking and international trafficking in people. It is highly important for Peru that each of these common problems be tackled within the framework of the United Nations and that common, coherent and comprehensive answers be found. We must be capable of finding effective solutions with sufficient political and financial support. In this context, let me express our particular satisfaction over the commitments made by the heads of State and Government to focus the international community's attention in the coming years on poverty reduction, so that by the year 2015 nearly 600 million people will have overcome their state of chronic poverty. Similarly, I wish to emphasize the imaginative and constructive proposal presented by the President of Peru, Mr. Alberto Fujimori, at the Millennium Summit, to use the money illegally earned by captured drug traffickers to alleviate the foreign debt of the poorest countries and, in general, to utilize those funds to contribute to the fight against poverty in the world. There are undoubtedly many and very difficult challenges that we must face during the next century. This is the time of wealth and technological development, but also the time of struggle against poverty. This is the time of globalization, but also the time of the respectful recognition of cultural diversity, which is an asset as important as, or more important than, biological diversity. This is the time of the greatest use of natural resources by man, but also the time of environmental conservation. This is the time of the universal spread of democracy, but also the time of democratic respect for the different ways in which democracy is lived. Mankind has reached some basic consensuses at this stage of its development. All the peoples of the world share certain values and certain goals, such as freedom, democracy, equality before the law, respect 25 for human rights, the need to eliminate poverty, the development of creativity and the need for man to always surpass itself. This has been the contribution of modernity, the contribution of the latest centuries consolidated in the twentieth century. But it is also true that humanity is not made up, fortunately, of a single culture. It is also true that these values should find concrete forms of their realization through different mentalities, in different latitudes, at different periods in the history of each people. That is why post-modernity, that world of the next century, must know how to conserve and deepen the values that are the legacy of modernity and carry forward its goals as much as possible. But it must also acknowledge diversity; it must know how to resolve dynamically the dilemma between unity and multiplicity. Perhaps the most complex of all these challenges, the most difficult of all the coincidentiae oppositorum that the twenty-first century will demand is to build an international system based on a genuine democracy. And by this I mean a democracy that does not consist of imposing a political form in the image of and similar to a specific system that is promoted as a model, a democracy that is not built on the basis of a mere check-list of institutions that have been taken from a specific democratic experience and turned into mandatory universal guidelines. Democracy is the practice of diversity and tolerance. It is a recognition that with regard to each subject, including the idea of democracy itself, there can be different interpretations, and none of them is entitled to ban the others. The task that awaits us, then, during the next century is to spread and promote democracy but, above all, to further examine its own meaning to avoid contradictions which would lead to its destruction. How can we spread democracy without endangering democracy itself? On the other hand, how do we save diversity and particularity without ending up with outdated nationalism? These are the major problems of our time. They are the major dilemmas that will have to be resolved in the twenty-first century. Any idea of a crusade, even in the name of democracy, is undemocratic, because it is intolerant. And I would almost dare to say that any principle of social organization that seeks to impose itself universally has an undemocratic base. Thus, paradoxically, the missionary enthusiasm for democracy ends up affecting the nature of democracy itself. Democracy, in fact, implies a delicate and fragile balance between the universal and the singular. Singularity should not be sacrificed on the deified altar of universality. Singularity should not be dissolved within a claimed universality, and the singular should even less be confused with the universal, assigning an absolute value to what is no more than the historic expression of a culture and of a time. The attempts to apply on an international scale domestic policies and local interpretations of values have always failed. In the second half of the twentieth century, we witnessed the spectacular collapse of Soviet communism, which claimed to be the political doctrine of the future, with which, following Hegel, we would see the end of politics and therefore of history and enter into a sort of rebuilt earthly paradise. The claimed communist universality saw the birth within itself of particularities and differences. Afterwards it had to face other doctrines and world visions that were alien to its principles and values; and contrary to what communism expected, those different perspectives did not vanish when faced with the presumed Marxist truth. Rather, they won the ideological battle and made communism and Soviet Russia disappear. I am convinced that the same will happen with any doctrine, whatever its perspective and the values that support it, that claims to lead the world to the end of history. This forces us to rethink certain ideas that are too hastily — and, to my mind, inconsistently — becoming commonplace. There is a certain scorn towards the idea of sovereignty and towards the idea of the cultural identity of peoples, under the pretext of building a universal society. Nevertheless, I believe that, even though they will need to be transformed and adapted to a new globalizing outlook, those ideas will continue to prevail in the world of the future if we favour a genuinely democratic way of thinking, in which freedom can also exist under cultural and ideological differences. There is no doubt that there is a crisis in the nation-State, because the seemingly essential identification between the State as the political and juridical organization of society and the nation as a cultural organization is false: multinational States do exist. The solution in these cases of disparity between the political and cultural organization is not to abandon the concept of State and sovereignty, letting them be absorbed within one of the supranational, globalizing constructs; rather, it lies in achieving within the State 26 an acknowledgement and complex integration of multiculturality. It is necessary to articulate diversity at both the State and international levels instead of imposing some sort of homogeneity that will always feel like a strait-jacket. The new international order cannot be built by a single nation, culture or ideology, but by the interaction of the different attitudes that make up humanity. From a genuinely democratic and liberal point of view, we must avoid the temptation of the new dogmatism, perversely subtle and with a powerful imperialist vocation: the myth of “political correctness”. In this regard, building a new international order for the twenty-first century does not mean solving a mathematical equation or scientifically designing a model to be applied generically to all the countries of the world in a vain attempt to create a universal international society. Reality sweeps away all abstractions with the wealth of its multiple points of view. Moreover, reality is always dynamic and effervescent. It is always in a permanent state of transformation, thanks to freedom, the defining element of the human being. Therefore, politics, whether domestic or international, is an art, not a science. A domestic or international order must be the result of a complex interaction between different, and even opposing, elements, just like a work of art. Creating the work of art that will be the new international order implies not destroying what is counter to it, but, rather, combining it; combining unity with diversity and freedom with order. To put it in Nietzschean terms, we have to unite the Apollonian with the Dionysian. To build a purely Apollonian society is to fall into a new form of dogmatism and cultural dictatorship, even though, paradoxically, the intention is to establish democracy. Building a purely Dionysian society means slipping into chaos and therefore destroying the social contract. The society of the future must be capable of living with diversity and expressing different points of view, world visions and interpretations of democracy itself in order to establish an organization of humankind that creates not a single and homogenous international society, but an embodiment of the wealth of social and cultural diversity in search of peaceful coexistence and reciprocal cooperation without burdens or conditions.