Uruguay

Uruguay comes to the Assembly today with happiness, pride and even excitement at seeing you, Sir, a countryman of ours, representing Uruguay, as President of the Assembly. Uruguay was a founding Member of the United Nations and has been one of the its most active participants ever since, in all its endeavours. It has even contributed its best soldiers, who put their lives on the line every day in the difficult peacekeeping operations of the United Nations. Our country came to this Organization at the time of its founding with the hopes and dreams of a world that was being rebuilt in order to usher in a time of peace, 19 prosperity and stability. It certainly did not come here with any dreams of power, which could have had no place in our country given its small land area and relatively small economy. But we did harbour the dream that has inspired all our great statesmen — that of being a small, model country which in the past century made secular education universal, free and compulsory and built a State of well- being with a solid middle class as the foundation of its political democracy. Thus did our country feel that it was a fundamental part of the democratic development of nations. Unfortunately, we were not exempt from the upheavals and consequences of the cold war. As the Assembly knows, the cold war was bloody and fierce in Latin America. The hemispheres were locked in a state of conflict over positions: here guerrilla wars and there coups d’état, both manifestations themselves as part of a hellish dialectic in which democracies were wounded and sometimes fell. The last few years have shown Uruguay to be a country which is making strides in its economy and prosperity and which, as the recently published United Nations Human Development Index states, is once again making progress. It ranks third among developing countries, and we can say that we have attained the best improvement in the hemisphere with regard to poverty indicators. However, we come to this session not only with the concerns about its institutions and peace which always permeate the spirit of the Assembly; we come here also having seen the spectre of a crisis which began as an Asian financial crisis and which today is a global economic crisis that touches all of us. This undoubtedly deserves particular concern. When we see stock markets carried away by a microclimate of psychosis, and when we see so many irrational phenomena spread, we feel like Anatole France, who saw life as a struggle among various forces, of which we are not always able to know which is the strongest. At times it seems that science and intelligence predominate. At other times it seems that lunacy and fear prevail. This is also part of this phenomenon that started as a financial crisis and then became a very peculiar psychological phenomenon. The point is that, both as Latin Americans and as a member State of the international community, we must once again face this situation. Shakespeare, who is often quoted in connection with major tragedies, said that fate dealt the cards but we were the players. That is our challenge today: how to play our cards in this crisis which could even affect not just finances and economies but also the democratic stability of our countries, our social peace and the fundamental values which inspire us. In the 1980s Latin America went through very difficult economic years. This is referred to — mistakenly in my judgement — as the lost decade, for those were also the years in which we consolidated the strongest process of democratization in our continent, which today allows it to have more democracies and freedoms than ever before. Countries which had never before known democracy are now building republics and institutions and developing their societies. The fact is that after that crisis our countries made enormous efforts at transformation. They lowered their rates of inflation, opened up their economies and began strong processes of integration — in the Andean area, in Mexico to the north and with us in the south, Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay, and now with Bolivia and Chile as associate partners, to the south. All of this meant that we had a Latin America which was growing again and which would once again be a place for investments; a Latin America which was able to harmonize the return of democracy and peace with economic growth. We now find ourselves faced with the new crisis. What should we do? In our view, the first thing to do is to consolidate and support the Organization and the international community. We should do that here, in this institution, which is a hymn to internationalism, as well as in the economic area. The International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank — which is the main source of financing for our hemisphere — are the tools we rely on today. We must strengthen them. Indeed, this crisis will leave behind consequences once it is over. Somehow the debate that took place between Lord Keynes and Harry White, at the time of the establishment of the International Monetary Fund at Bretton Woods, hangs over the world today. The British economist held the view that it was necessary to have a central bank of central banks. I shall not bring in that debate here today, but I think that it will nevertheless have to take place once the crucial moments of this crisis are over, because of the need for prevention and for a market economy which actually works. We must all feel and know that the origins of this crisis have been identified. First, there has been excessive speculation, which has been clearly reflected in stock markets. It also stems from macroeconomic imbalances in 20 many States, which have not been able to correct those imbalances, mainly their fiscal gaps, that have been fundamental causes of this situation. Fortunately, the North American economy and the European economy still appear to be solid. Japan is the country of which we are all hoping for a recovery so that the measures under way today will allow us to view much more calmly the future of this situation, which could very well continue for a long time. As the Brazilian Foreign Minister said today, the magnitude and the duration of this crisis are unpredictable, but what should not be unpredictable is the behaviour of States. Therefore, it is essential that we act to bring to an end those financial imbalances and avoid the mistakes and temptations related to such crises. First, we should not believe that by isolating ourselves in neo-protectionism we will find a way out of the crisis. In Latin America in the 1980s we had an external debt crisis. There were those who advocated not repaying the debt and returning in some way to more protected economies. There were those of us, on the other hand, who thought that the debt should be refinanced and that we should join the international community more actively and in that way grow again. Only by growing our economies could the external debt be made manageable in the future. The former, unfortunately, were not lucky and the latter, fortunately, were. In that way, we were able to refinance the external debt and return to investment, and growth enabled us to pay off the debt effectively and thus achieve better living conditions for our peoples. Turmoil and speculation are not what are most needed for the prosperity of needy peoples. To the contrary, profit- making opportunities for speculators come at the expense of the majority. That is the path that we see clearly defined today for this situation, and we must all redouble our efforts in that direction. We will also have to strengthen anew the international financial community so that there can exist a real international safety net that will allow us to work in peace. Of course, the leading economic countries have a great responsibility. President Clinton said last week that this was the most important economic and financial crisis of the second half of the century, and no doubt it is. That is all the more reason for the major economies to assume their responsibilities and for smaller economies, such as ours, which basically seeks more and more equitable living conditions, to try not to bring bad news to the world, even while lacking the capacity and opportunity to be those who can offer the world good news. We should thus protect ourselves from a dangerous neo-protectionism and continue to fight for increasingly open and transparent markets, from which the persistent subsidies in the large States disappear — subsidies in the United States and the European Community, agricultural subsidies which undoubtedly are a troublesome factor in international economic activities and must be left behind. If the crisis teaches us anything, it is that we must find balance, and balance will not be found on the basis of subsidies which continue to promote opportunity for artificial economic sectors. We must also protect ourselves from messianic demagoguery, which is the political dimension of this crisis. For that reason, warding off and resolving the crisis through international cooperation and concrete measures are also very important in a democratic context. When such instabilities occur, messianic demagogues appear, all those pyrotechnists of prosperity who have always led peoples to misfortune and to whom we should not offer, through instability, another opportunity. This is therefore a financial and economic crisis, and ultimately a crisis in political democracy. It is the fundamental chapter through which we must continue to work here. Our world is living in disconcerting times. In 1989, it seemed, with the market economy triumphant over the socialist economy and liberal democracy triumphant over the Communist world, that we were entering an era of peace and stability in which the old Hegelian dialectics would yield to a world of synthesis — what was termed the end of history, what others called the pensée unique. Undoubtedly, that was an oversimplification. Today it would also be an oversimplification to believe that we have once again entered the crisis of capitalism. In my long political career, I have been invited many times to the funeral of capitalism. Times have definitely shown that the market economy, with its dynamics and its spirit of initiative, once again recovered, and this will happen again now because no one is pointing to a better alternative. Therefore, we must not fall into another oversimplification. At one point we believed that the 21 simple freeing of markets would bring about the miraculous result of achieving growth and equity; we cannot now return to the past and believe that through closed economies, through stronger protectionist measures or even through authoritarianism we will be able to resolve a situation that, now more than ever, must be addressed with the guidance of democratic principles. No one has a clear road map. Thus, there is all the more reason to reaffirm the basic principles, the first one being political democracy, which calls on us, as President Clinton said earlier, to fight against terrorism, which through violence attacks democracy, in all its forms, from the outside; and to fight against the enemies which democracy generates from within. At times we have suffered from excessive political passion, which sometimes leads to divisions within countries, intolerance, racial hatred, abuse of economic power and abuse of the media; all of these factors are part of a democracy, but when used without ethical limits they may weaken it. We also have a right to ask the citizen to participate. It is not through an alienated or indifferent citizenry that democracy will be strengthened. Democracy will be closely related to an efficient State, for only an efficient State can stand united if the objective is to improve the lives of our people, only a State which is not a mechanism for waste, but rather a strong instrument to promote the forces of society; to a market economy and increasingly open trade based on standards that protect us from unfair competition; and to a process of integration such as those being carried out in the Latin American countries to enable us to join the world with suitable economies to improve our production. We must also think of the basic values of our societies, such as the family, which is the historic nucleus of our civilization. The weakening of the family has come at a high price. Today, the drug trade reflects the spiritual scourge of societies which, in their economic development, have lost sight of spiritual values. Such societies have weakened the family in a world where images, emptiness and passing trends have caused a vacuum that in turn causes the phenomenon of the search for artificial paradises that aim to replace a meaningful life. We must enhance spiritual factors to give democracies genuine content. We must, of course, be pragmatical in economic matters, but pragmatism alone will not keep alive the hopes of peoples. We must strengthen family values, human dignity and the universality of human rights, as our friend President Mandela has said. We must all respect ethnic individuality; in the final analysis we are all the same. We must all fight against racial discrimination; we must all respect and be very mindful of cultural diversity. But no ethnic or cultural diversity can sanction the enslavement of women or the killing of men: we are speaking here of universal values that are essential to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and that we must not only proclaim but must also practice. As Toynbee said, “Civilization is a movement and not a condition, a voyage and not a harbour” (Readers Digest, October 1958). We must therefore clearly identify the stars that will guide us on that voyage. It is in those stars that Uruguay believes.