Peru, 2000

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.

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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

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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

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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.