Andorra, 2001

Allow me at the outset to congratulate Mr.

Han Seung-soo on his election to the presidency of the

Assembly and to express our thanks to his predecessor,

Mr. Harri Holkeri.

I would also like to congratulate the Secretary-

General, Kofi Annan, and the United Nations on their

well-deserved Nobel Peace Prize.

We are compelled to take up the events of 11

September and the actions initiated by our

Organization, starting with Security Council resolution

1373 (2001), at our discussions here today. I have

chosen to make my statement in a language not of my

country — English, the language of our host country

and city — in tribute to the United States, to the

American people and Government and to New York

City, which were harmed by the recent terrorist attacks.

We meet today almost two months after the

terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in New York

City. The horror of this attack, the thousands dead: so

many terrible images have been seared into our

collective memory. And we remember also the

remarkable acts of courage and determination that

followed in the wake of this shameful crime.

That the attack took place here, in New York, the

seat of the United Nations, is both painful and sad. For

New York is an immigrant’s city that welcomes with

open arms all races and all creeds from our world. The

list of the victims of the attack, from so many different

countries, attests to the remarkable and joyous

diversity that makes New York. She is truly the capital

of the world, and the right place, the only place, for its

United Nations.

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We know that this very building might have been

a target for the terrorists, and that in an earlier terrorist

attack of 1993, the United Nations was on the list. This

seems to me proof, if any is needed, that the United

States of America is not the only object of terrorism.

Rather, it is the idea of tolerance and religious and

cultural diversity, symbolized both by New York City

and by the United Nations, that is the object of the rage

of a small group of men — men who live and die by

terror and who have turned away from political debate

to violence and death.

And so all of us here must play our part in the

battle against mindless killing, and debate both the

reasons for and the responses to terrorism. If there are

disagreements and disputes, we should never forget

that the very act of debate — the very idea of this

forum — is anathema to those whose modus operandi

is silence. What is telling, in my opinion, is not the

identity of the perpetrator — we are quite certain who

is responsible, although we have only begun to

consider why — but the fact that the perpetrators, dead

and alive, never admitted responsibility for their

actions.

I would thus like to express the views of my

country, the Principality of Andorra, in this debate.

Andorra is a small country created in 1278 by a pact of

peace, and is blessed with seven centuries of peace and

a parliamentary system that started in 1419. We

Andorrans like to think of our country as an example of

tolerance and coexistence of different creeds and

nationalities. Through the centuries, we have welcomed

scores of refugees from European wars persecuted in

their homelands for their ideas. Our Constitution,

which enshrines the secularity of the State, includes a

far-reaching bill of rights that highlights democracy

and the rule of law. Let me therefore reaffirm, as our

President, Marc Forné, stated immediately after the

attacks, Andorra’s condemnation of these crimes.

My country has taken appropriate measures to

combat terrorism in all its forms, and I will be signing

the United Nations Convention for the Suppression of

the Financing of Terrorism, the United Nations

Convention against Transnational Organized Crime and

the Conventions of the Council of Europe against

terrorism and corruption.

Let me assert Andorra’s belief in the role of

debate rather than violence as a necessary response to

violence — its belief that the United Nations is a vital

forum for world conversation, a forum whose

principles, and indeed whose buildings, need to be

celebrated and protected.

Let us therefore ask ourselves what it is these

terrorists want. In the videotape he released the day the

American bombing began, their leader announced the

following goals: first, the removal of American troops

from Saudi Arabia; secondly, an end to the bombing of

Iraq; and, finally, a resolution of the Palestinian

problem.

It is worthwhile to note that both the presence of

American troops in Saudi Arabia and the bombing of

Iraq are the direct result of prior aggression. The

international community has for decades sought a

resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian crisis, but a

solution, if one is to be found, must come first and

foremost from within Israel and Palestine. Their peace,

if it is to be reached, cannot be imposed from without.

While these are the proclaimed reasons for the

hostility of the terrorist networks to the United States,

one might come to the conclusion that these stated

objectives are a screen, and that the attacks were made

in order to bring about religious wars in the twenty-

first century.

For the United States and its allies, it is a war

against terrorism. But the terrorist networks claim it is

a religious war, pitting Christianity against Islam. The

old rhetoric of the Crusades, such as the loss of

Al-Andalus — Andalusia — in 1492 and other battles

from history are being invoked by the terrorists to

inflame the feelings of Muslims throughout the world

and to bring about a fundamentalist pan-Islamic entity.

This is a delicate issue but we must face it head-on.

This crisis can be contained only if we speak bluntly

and rationally.

The terrorist networks invoke history — the

history of religious war — to inflame sentiment. Their

invocation of history, however, may be a tactical error.

For history can be our ally in the battle against

terrorism and violence.

I beg your pardon, but let us return to an earlier

point in history, a bloody time of religious crisis in

Europe — and I am speaking about the wars of religion

that decimated sixteenth and seventeenth century

Europe. Out of these wars of religion and out of the

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bloody struggles of the Reformation came a powerful

antidote to religious violence that we call humanism.

The great French humanist Michel de Montaigne was a

sceptic. He wrote about the limits to human knowledge

in his remarkable Essays. In one of them, entitled “Of

Practice,” he observed that, although we can practice

for many things in life, there is one thing for which we

cannot practice, one thing we cannot know, and that is

our own death. He went on to describe the closest he

came to knowing death, an accident that happened

when he fell from his horse. He had been out riding in

a militia and was nearly crushed to death. He had a

brief sensation of his soul hovering over his body, and,

later, after being taken home, terrible pain continued to

plague him.

At a time of religious extremism, when Catholics

and Protestants were fighting over the keys to

heaven — just as the 11 September terrorists died

believing they would enter paradise — Montaigne

wrote about the limits of knowledge. And he wrote

about a personal experience, this accident, with which

everybody, even now, can empathize. This is why he is

called a humanist, because of his genuine interest in

human experience.

There is no revealed truth in Montaigne, no

dogmatism, only human scepticism that appears as an

antidote — the only antidote — to the certainty of

madmen who would kill for belief. This evolution in

human thought was accomplished without sacrificing

the freedom to believe, to have faith in God and to

practice a religion. To think and write as Montaigne

did — that is, to insist on the limits of knowledge, and

to speak not in a universal but in a personal voice —

was a great step forward for humankind. In turning

knowledge away from religious certainty, the

humanists allowed for a new field of understanding

that we now call the sciences.

While inquisitions would carry on for a

century — Galileo was a boy when Montaigne was

writing — the scepticism that Montaigne advanced

against religious violence in 1580 is the same as that

which Boyle, Newton, or Lavoisier would apply to the

universal truths of natural theology in order to create a

way of understanding that we now recognize as

scientific. Modern scientific understanding ushered in

the industrial revolutions, the astonishing explosion of

the middle class, of print culture and of the

establishment of modern democracies. It introduced all

of these “world-historical” events, to use Hegel’s term

that we call, rather sloppily, “modernity.”

I conclude my intervention on the subject of

modernity, because many commentators on the current

war in Afghanistan see the war framed as a war

between the Taliban, as Islamic extremists, and

modernity. They cite the way in which the Taliban have

banned all forms of mass media culture and have

insisted on a literal application of sharia law. They

argue that the Taliban are anti-modern and that their

regime is trying to return its people to an earlier, pre-

modern way of life. Yet, when we examine the lives of

the 11 September terrorists, we realize first that they

were not Afghans, and second, that they were not the

wretched of the earth. They were from the middle

class. Most were students, some with advanced

degrees. They never even had to work hard for a living,

like most members of the middle class. These men

were privileged murderers. Or let me put it another

way: they were fully modern.

The struggle between modernity and the anti-

modern is not anachronistic. To be a terrorist demands

that you enter, systematically and rationally, into the

modern world and to turn its apparatus, such as

transportation and communication, against it. The

struggle against modernity is one of the most romantic

myths generated by modernity itself. So, too, is the

misrepresentation of the poor by certain writers and

intellectuals — I need not name names — who claim to

speak for them. The suffering sown in Afghanistan by

decades of invasion and civil war, they argue, has

brought terrorism as its terrible harvest. In fact, these

poor want most of all to live, and to live well. They

embrace modernity and its comforts. But violence, the

ability to treat other people as objects, as things to be

crushed and destroyed: this is a gift bestowed by

education.

The struggle is therefore ideological. This is why

education, the greatest gift, was a passport to terrorism

for these men. The risk of education in this context is

that the pressure of knowledge, or more precisely a

recognition of uncertainties and of the limits of

knowledge, will tempt the student into dogmatic belief.

The danger always exists that education can harden

from humanistic scepticism into the rock of dogma.

What is to be done? Today I propose an urgent

return to a new humanism on two fronts: first, within

Islam, a humanism among Muslims — politicians,

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writers, readers — that can dampen sectarian violence

and that can reach out to religious extremism to find

common ground. This can only come from within the

Islamic world. It does not have to be secular in nature,

although secularism has an important yet increasingly

threatened status within certain nations.

Correspondingly, there must be recognition within

political regimes everywhere that antipathy to political

dissent politicizes religion and creates more problems

for these regimes than it solves. Modernity’s belief in

democracy as a means to popular expression has never

proved more vital.

Secondly, outside of Islam, a return to humanism

lies at the heart of the modernity in which we are

living. To recognize modernity and its great

contribution, a secular and universal culture — mass

culture — is something that needs to be protected and

fought for. It is a modernity that insists on the rights of

men, women and children.

We all know that words often do not lead to

action. But we forget that words, the expression of

ideas and of criticism, are a vital form of action. We

cannot be simplistic in our desire for a direct

relationship between debate and resolution.

What I am proposing is certainly not propaganda;

rather, it is a worldwide debate on the importance of

debate, in which human scepticism, a recognition of

the limits of belief, is very much at stake. Whether this

argument can be made in an urgent and anti-elitist way

is very much the point. But unless we are able to

recognize modernity as a liberating experience,

independent of its accumulation of goods and services,

creature comforts, and the like, I have little hope for a

positive resolution to the crisis we now face.

Modernity is a work in process. One name for

modernity, as it exists for us today, is globalization.

This is the creation of a “world culture”, the entry of

technology into every aspect of our lives, the

omnipresence of the media and the increasing speed by

which culture and information are communicated. It

seems to me that there is tragic confusion between

globalization and abstract and oppressive technology. It

is this notion of modernity that seems to be at the heart

of the recent protests against globalization, protests

that would have been the focus of our debates before

11 September. While the protesters have many valid

points to make, and they need to be listened to,

globalization and modernity are not the problem.

Whether cooperation between nations is economic,

political or cultural, it is not a threat. Leaders and

intellectuals need to reach out and embrace the limits

of knowledge. They must speak out against dogmatism

to unravel facile notions of monolithic governments or

global compacts.

An eye for an eye, that harsh principle from the

Old Testament, will soon leave us blind. Blindness,

rather than insight, is the curse of the ideologue, of

people who do not want to see outside their own skins,

their ideas or their place. It is the curse of people who

do not want to see the world in its marvellous diversity,

its uncertainty and its possibilities. To see this world,

we have only to look around us here, now. We have

only to wander through the streets of this miraculous

city of New York.