Andorra, 2000

Andorra will

become, through the Western European and Others

Group (WEOG) rotation scheme, a member of the

Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) of the United

Nations at the beginning of 2001, for a period of three

years. This is a great responsibility and a particular

challenge for a small country that has only been a

Member of the United Nations since 1993.

My Minister of External Relations, Mr. Albert

Pintat, would have loved to have been here today to

express to Members Andorra's commitment to the

goals of the United Nations and specially our

obligations in ECOSOC. He would have praised the

Brahimi report and its new thoughts on peacekeeping

operations, which my country supports. When he

learned that he would be unable to lead this year's

delegation to the United Nations, owing to unavoidable

official functions in Europe, he asked me, in the light

of our forthcoming membership in ECOSOC, to

contribute to this general debate of the year 2000 with

some free reflections — if possible innovative ones —

on what globalization might mean for a small State.

This is a daunting task since everything seems to have

been said about the subject, but I shall try to dutifully

carry out my Minister's instructions.

First, however, let me convey to President Harri

Holkeri Albert Pintat's congratulations for his election

as President of the fifty-fifth session of the General

Assembly, while thanking his predecessor, Theo-Ben

Gurirab, for a difficult job well done.

When I was a student here in the United States

many years ago, I took a course in photography. I had

taken from my family's house in Andorra a negative —

it was one of the older glass negatives — and there in

the university photography lab I set it up for

developing. I remember that moment when I peered

into the developer tray and saw, slowly forming on the

white photographic paper, an image, the image of my

great grandmother. It was a shock, there in New Haven,

to see this face from a long distant past, from long

before I was born, come slowly into clarity. A lost

image from a lost past.

If I had the time, and Members the inclination, I

could tell them about my great-grandmother, a

formidable woman who never left the Valley of

Andorra, high up in the mountains of the Pyrenees. I

could tell them what her face, strong and hard as the

stone of the mountains, says about the history of my

country. In the photograph, she is dressed all in black,

and looks away from the camera, down at the rocky

ground. Behind her, one can see the stones of the

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family farm, high up in the mountains above Saint

Julia, one of the seven parishes that make up the

Principality of Andorra.

Her Andorra is very different from the country

today. Dirt paths have become asphalt roads and stone-

strewn fields are now covered with shops, houses and

hotels. The remarkable Romanesque churches that are

the pride of my country, churches that date back to the

foundation of the Principality in the late thirteenth

century and that loomed over the villages for almost a

millennium, are now hemmed in by concrete

buildings — stores, apartments, houses, the same

buildings you might find in parts of Rio de Janeiro,

Beijing or New York.

Yes, so much has changed since my grandfather's

hand snapped this picture. My great-grandmother

would recognize only the church towers and the stones

of the mountains. And what was so specific about her

world — the stories, the cooking, the fabric of daily

life — well, that has disappeared.

In the space of 70 years, Andorra has changed

from being a poor and remote place to a prosperous

country, with over 10 million tourists a year, who come

for skiing in the winter and hiking in the summer. We

are now a commercial hub. If you look for a country

transformed by globalization, you might look to

Andorra.

Andorra is a country that has survived,

independent and uninvaded, since 1278. It is one of the

oldest and one of the smallest democracies in the

world. A historian might argue that this remarkable fact

is due to its isolation and poverty, or because for

centuries the outside world was neatly balanced by its

co-Princes — the Bishop of Urgell to the south, and to

the north the Count of Foix, later the French King and

since 1805 the head of the French State.

Unsurprisingly, I might attribute the remarkable record

of peace to the cautious character of the Andorran

people. Or rather — and less partially — I think that

because it is a small country, where parishes have been

able to readily communicate with one another at the

Casa de la Vall, the House of the Valleys,

communication never broke down.

The Millennium Summit of the United Nations

had as its theme globalization. As a summit, it was

aptly named, since I would say that globalization is the

story of the second millennium — indeed perhaps it is

the story of human culture. I am a politician, not a

historian, but we all know the effect on both Europe

and the Middle East wrought by the Crusades of the

eleventh and twelfth centuries, or the transformation of

indigenous and European cultures brought about by the

“discovery” of the New World, or the effect of the

slave trade of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries

on both Africa and the Americas. These violent

encounters formed the world even as they brought

death and destruction. They also sparked our

imaginations. The Globe was the name of

Shakespeare's playhouse in sixteenth-century London,

a joke he liked to work into many of his plays. I like to

think of the United Nations as the new Globe, a theatre

in which we are the players or — if we have the

imagination — the dramatists for the story of our

fragile planet.

But the globalization we are now facing is of a

different nature. As Kofi Annan suggested in his

opening introduction to the Millennium conference, the

starting point for this millennium can be summed up in

one word: “globalization” — the melting away of

national boundaries as the world becomes one

economy, one common space, one village.

It is an idyllic view, the view of the world as a

village. Of course, the Secretary-General is all too

aware of the negative effects of the process. In the

same introduction, he cautions:

“Globalization offers great opportunities, but at

present its benefits are very unevenly distributed

while its costs are borne by all.

“Thus the central challenge we face today is

to ensure that globalization becomes a positive

force for all the world's people.” (A/54/2000,

paras. 13 and 14)

We all know the protests that have taken place,

and will take place, against this same word,

“globalization”. Let us listen, for instance, to one of the

interested groups, chosen at random, the International

Forum on Globalization (IFG), which understands the

term as referring to a “globalized economic system

dominated by supranational corporate trade and

banking institutions that are not accountable to

democratic processes or national Governments”. The

IFG accuses

“the GATT, WTO, Maastricht, NAFTA, combined

with structural adjustment policies of the IMF

and the World Bank, to be direct stimulants to the

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processes that weaken democracy, create a world

order that is under the control of transnational

corporations, and that devastate the natural

world”.

According to the IFG, globalization brings the

diminishment of powers of local and indigenous

communities, States and even nations, destroys both

small-scale agriculture and the earth's remaining

wilderness, and brings a worldwide homogenization of

diverse local and indigenous cultures. To counter its

effects, the IFG advocates the revitalization of local

communities by promoting maximum self-reliance, the

recognition of rights of indigenous peoples and the

abandonment of the paradigm of unlimited economic

growth.

When I listen to these words, I cannot help but

hear a lament, a lament for a lost and simpler world:

the world of my great-grandmother. And I am reminded

of that greatest of all laments for lost culture, the work

that indeed informs the thinking behind the activists

who struggle against the forces of globalization —

Claude Lévi-Strauss and his masterpiece, Tristes

Tropiques, his elegy for the people of the Amazon

basin, which even as he captured it on paper was

disappearing into our modern world.

I understand the sadness for the lost world, the

world of the past that is always slipping away from us,

that exists in the black-and-white negative of our

memory. And so here I elegize, before this Assembly,

all that has disappeared, not simply in Andorra but in

the world, all that has been forgotten, paved over by

the forces of travel, of tourism, of telephone,

television, cinema and the Internet.

These technologies link the world; they narrow

its distances and threaten to dilute the cultures of the

globe into a flat monoculture. And I ask my listeners

now: what new discoveries await us? We cannot

imagine them, but they will come, and sooner than we

think, in this terrifying and beautiful globe of ours.

And yet, and yet ... The IFG manifesto was not

posted on a church door in Wittenburg, printed in a

new technology that sparked another revolution, the

Reformation of the sixteenth century. No, it was

downloaded from a web site on the Internet. This

Web — in which ideas, images, voices travel across our

globe in a flash — is a remarkable invention that

collapses both time and space.

In the same way, I now realize that my image of

my great-grandmother came from a negative, from a

camera — a technology that perhaps more than any

other, besides the computer, has transformed and

quickened the pace of our world.

This is to make a very simple point: not simply

that this manifesto is presented in the very technology

of globalization, but that nostalgia for a local economy

might be a product of globalization itself.

My great-grandmother had a good life, but a hard

one, with terrible cold in the winter and constant work.

Would she have chosen this life, if she could have had

another? If she had known another? And more to the

point, would she have been allowed to choose?

We need to remember that people themselves

have embraced change. Real people who are not

content to live — physically or imaginatively — in

their places of birth, but, filled with a desire to better

their lives or to see the world, they reach out and try to

grasp change, if only to know what they have lost.

Lévi-Strauss could not bring himself to recognize

that people he observed, deep in the Amazon rain

forests, might want to leave their paradise — not

because they were driven out by modernity, the

modernity that Lévi-Strauss himself made so much of,

but because they wanted to better their lives, to

embrace the world, to feel for themselves the painful

pulse of gain and loss.

We need only leave this Hall and walk through

any street in the city to recognize this. People from all

across the world, people of all races, walking up and

down, alone or in conversation, happy or unhappy,

homesick or embracing the dreams this city seems to

proffer. In the streets, we see restaurants that offer

wonderful meals from all around the world, and fusion

restaurants: French-Senegalese, American-Thai. Or

fusion children. In the streets of New York or Paris or

Hong Kong or Andorra la Vella, the people are

changing, colours are shifting. What brave new world

is being born around us?

In saying this, I do not want to contradict the

concerns of the anti-globalists, to in any way deny their

recognition of the dangers of change. We ignore at our

peril practical questions that turn around international

finance, international corporations, the widening gulf

between have and have-not countries, the dangers to

the environment.

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These are practical matters to be seen to. To

paraphrase Annan, we need mechanisms to equalize the

benefits of globalization, to make life a positive thing

for all peoples. By this I do not mean the quest for

superfluous material goods, but shelter and health and

protection from disease. And I would add, simply, that

before and during my tenure here as Ambassador, the

United Nations hosted a series of summits or

conferences designed to address these very

problems — Rio, Istanbul, Copenhagen, Beijing,

Rome, just to name a few. The world conference

against racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and

related intolerance, the world summit for children and

Rio + 10 are to come. There is a substantial body of

work in place to address the stresses of globalization.

What we need to do now is continue to work towards

our goals.

In conclusion, I would like to consider a

presupposition of both global optimists and pessimists:

the notion that globalization has replaced nationalism.

Again, to quote Kofi Annan, globalization means “the

melting away of national boundaries as the world

becomes one economy, one common space, one

village”.

Similarly, the report published in The New York

Times concerning the protests against globalization

stated that “speakers do not oppose globalization per

se, because, in their view, the era of nation-States is

coming to its inevitable end”.

Are globalization and nationalism opposed? On

the surface, they would appear to be. So much of

globalization — economies that transcend borders,

communication networks that shrink the world —

seems to render an earlier model of the nation-State

obsolete.

And yet, whether it be the ethnic conflicts in

Rwanda or in the Balkans, issues of immigration in the

developed world or conflict in East Timor, we know

that the question of the border, of the passport, remains

increasingly important. Despite our interconnectedness,

nationalism has not withered away. I fear the rise of a

nationalism no longer linked to true patriotism, that is

to the love of a place. I pray that the world does not

succumb to an unthinking nationalism that would exist

simply to exclude or to feed the ambitions of

unscrupulous politicians. We need a democratic

nationalism forged out of a concern for the rights of

individuals. That is not nationalism as it worked out

from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries — a

nationalism linked to the struggle to control markets, to

the scramble for loot — but a new nationalism that is

not predicated on identity, on cultural sameness, a

nationalism that is linked to a world economy that is no

longer restricted by national borders, a democratic or

civic nationalism, a global nationalism.

This would be a new nationalism, I must add, in

which Andorra and other small countries are not

historical anachronisms, but are emblematic of this

civic nationalism, predicated as it must be on the

democratic will of the people. In this sense, Andorra's

quiet patriotism, its 700 years of peace and

communication, can modestly serve as a kind of

historical model.

Countries need to rethink what it means to be a

nation in order to participate effectively in the life of

this our globe, in order to become what we must be and

to a certain extent already are: united nations. In its

very name, in its very mission, the United Nations

anticipated the globalization that is so rapidly

occurring. Born out of a global threat posed by war and

later by nuclear war, forged from the most terrible of

national struggles, the United Nations is an activist

forum for issues that are global, not in the sense that

they transcend any individual nation, but in the sense

that they are of concern to all nations.

The International Criminal Court, whose statute

will soon be ratified by Andorra, a country which had

the honour of contributing to it by composing the first

paragraphs of the preamble, is a good example of an

entity that respects borders but that places human

rights above all. Crimes against humanity must be

punished, and shall be.

This new nationalism, while it recognizes

borders, asserts that the rights of citizens to liberty and

peace are primary. Hence, the United Nations, even as

it respects national borders, needs to recognize that it

can and should become proactive in the protection of

those rights in the case of civil conflict. So too, the

great global threat of AIDS and other infectious

diseases demands a response from each nation and a

recognition that these threats can never be adequately

dealt with alone, but only by working globally through

the United Nations. In short, we need not only the

United Nations, but, as many have said, we need united

nations.

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I began this speech with the image of my great-

grandmother looking down at the stony ground of her

country. I would end it, symbolically at least, with

another image: our image. Someday, our great-

grandchildren may discover our image, perhaps even

our image here in this place. Perhaps they will

reproduce it through a technology so strange, so

remarkable, we cannot even imagine it. But let us hope

that they live in the brave new world I have spoken of

today. And let us hope that they see us as an image of

positive change. We who have lived through such

change cannot turn away from it. With our feet on the

ground of this great globe of ours, we need to look

forward. We need to grasp change. We need to reach

out.