Slovenia, 2001

All our

admiration goes to the United States for making

possible the normal work of the United Nations and the

sessions of the General Assembly despite the recent

tragic events and all their global consequences. The

tragic crime, which affected the whole world, has

brutally confronted us with new, very serious and long-

term issues. This year’s general debate is thus an

opportunity and a new and great responsibility for us

all — a responsibility that must be accepted. Words of

condemnation and solidarity cannot be enough.

As we sympathize profoundly with the American

people, we must also tell the world in one voice that we

shall be deliberately and effectively allied in the future,

too, and that we will cooperate in the fight against

terrorism and in the eradication of the roots of that evil.

We will responsibly consider joint measures for a

world of more peace, greater freedom, solidarity and

security and more social justice for every person and

every nation, as well as ever less room for violence.

The idea of such a world requires us to avoid the

vortex of evil by undertaking a considered and resolute

response to the terrorist crime that was committed. The

immediate decisive military reaction of the United

States of America and other countries of the anti-

terrorist alliance was imperative.

We cannot simply rest at that, however. The

vortex of violence could threaten the democratic values

that humanity has set over its long development as the

measure of life in human society. That is why we are

ultimately obliged to avoid dividing cultures along the

principle of “us versus them”, dividing races, religions

and nations into the categories of civilized and

barbaric, and ascribing a priori fundamentalism to any

religion or civilization. The United Nations has

proclaimed this year the Year of Dialogue Among

Civilizations. We should seize this opportunity.

The contemporary world is diverse, but all

modern civilizations, cultures and major religions

respect human dignity and human life. Killing is an

aberration anywhere in the world. Sadly, human and

social pathology have made killing a lucrative business

and given international terrorism its own internal

dynamic. The instigators and perpetrators of these

despicable acts must be brought to justice, while it is

the responsibility of politics to remove the social and

political roots of this evil. It is the universal values of

all contemporary civilizations, such as the sanctity of

life and respect for human dignity, that enable the

creation of a global democracy based on a global ethos.

Resolute action and attention must focus on those

groups and individuals throughout the world who

brutally violate these principles and bring chaos,

murder and madness into our human world. Sadly,

there are enough such people in all cultures and

civilizations in all parts of the human world, including

the Christian world. They warn us that the global world

requires a different perception of the world and its

dilemmas, especially of the unequal distribution of

poverty and wealth, and that it raises questions to

which there are as yet no answers.

At the Millennium Summit last year, we came

very close to a realistic analysis of some of the major

economic, financial, social, cultural, political and

ecological effects of the global economy. We have

come closer to the important understanding that a

global world also requires global responsibility, and

that starts with the responsibility of each State.

States cannot arbitrarily do things that are in

complete conflict with the values of the democratic

world. In particular, cannot systematically violate basic

human rights and freedoms through State violence, nor

can they allow and encourage activities that threaten

the security of other countries and of the international

community, all in the name of their own sovereignty,

even within their own boundaries. Neither can they

ignore such activity by others and shut themselves

behind their own borders.

Last year’s position on humanitarian intervention

was the first step in this direction, yet, unfortunately,

not a sufficient one. The escalation of internationally

syndicated and organized terrorism demands that

further steps be taken. We cannot allow terrorism and

crime to abuse the opportunities offered by our

globalized world before the democratic world itself is

even in a position to put these opportunities to good

use in finding answers to completely new challenges.

I see these challenges in pronounced divisions

with global implications — divisions into owners of

capital, knowledge, ideas and information

technologies, on the one hand, and the billions

condemned to ignorance, a life of poverty and

vegetating without prospects at the margins of society,

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on the other hand, in the ever greater financial

weakness of many nation-States and whole continents

that are left without development potentials or

prospects. In its relentless growth in power and

authority, global capital has long since gone beyond

State borders. However, it assumes no responsibility

for people’s social position and prospects for freedom

and democracy, for development and the future, for

people’s security. This responsibility is left to State

administrations.

I also see challenges in all kinds of

fundamentalism, even in the perverted understanding

of competitiveness which leads to production and

services with an ever-shrinking labour force, without

caring about people and nature, about life on the planet

and its future in an economy whose only motive and

aim is profit.

I see them also in the very pragmatically oriented

national and international politics operating in a

framework of dramatic simplicity and simplification,

and so their euphoric haste does not match their effect.

These are politics that ignore the dimension of time

and the duration of phenomena, such as the ecological

effects of genetic or biomedical interventions that are

not apparent immediately, but perhaps only in decades,

only with the coming generations.

I see challenges in the neglect of a comprehensive

and interconnected perspective on phenomena and

processes and in the disregard for the way in which

they are interconnected. All modern political, social

and ecological dramas and conflicts, as well as the

global socio-pathological cancers, are a result of

the interaction of a range of social forces and

elements. These phenomena — including international

terrorism — which are like epidemics, cannot be

confined within the borders of one or more States. This

applies to a host of phenomena, not just terrorism, but

also ecology, food, genetics, finance, the information

society and violence.

I also see challenges in the lack of

communication between the authorities and

increasingly global civil movements. Protests from

Seattle to Genoa are a powerful warning of the danger

of a division into two worlds that are beginning to

communicate solely through protests and violence.

The world today is clearly different from what it

was before. It could be better, but only with an

awareness of and mechanisms for assuming global

responsibility. This will enable the search for a

dynamic balance leaving no room for the chaos that

uncontrolled developments and acts of terror lead to. In

order to achieve this, we will have to change many

things.

Therefore, adapting the United Nations to these

new circumstances is, in a way, a call of distress. It will

not be a simple task. All 189 Members and their

representatives are bound primarily to the sovereignty

of their own States. However, the world clearly also

needs global governance. More than ever, we need the

United Nations as a global entity common to all States,

an entity that will be able, with the full authority that

rests on the global responsibility of States, to take

measures to the benefit of dynamic development, a

development of balanced forces and effects of the

global economy and globalization in general.

Otherwise, we will have to state the alternative.

We must accept the recognition that every society,

including the global one, must subordinate itself to

specific rules, or else it will be subjected to the rule of

crude force. Our difficulty is that we have overlooked

that the world has become a single society full of

internal contrasts, which in real life, especially in

international relations, recognizes and respects few

rules. What we urgently need is the common political

will to provide legitimacy to a universal system of

institutions and bodies, to which together we have

entrusted the power to prescribe common rules.

We need common political will to subject

ourselves to these rules and to respect them. The actual

power to prescribe rules would not be only in the hands

of States. Could this also be the United Nations? What

reforms are needed to achieve this, in order for the

United Nations to become this? We cannot wait with

the answers.

I am also speaking from the experience of

Slovenia, which I represent. In gaining independence

10 years ago, we experienced brief but serious violence

on our own territory. In our immediate vicinity, South-

Eastern Europe, we were faced with one of the most

barbaric policies since the Second World War, a policy

responsible for genocide and other forms of widespread

violence. With independence, Slovenia stepped into a

world that is prepared to behave better than the self-

enclosed world that the former Yugoslavia had become

in the final years of its life, when the equality of rights

of people and nations was violated and when hope for a

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different future was denied. We have stepped onto the

path of freedom, and Slovenia has accepted its own

share of the responsibility for our global world.

I believe that this global world will tend toward a

dynamic balance, provided that States — large and

small, rich and poor, technologically developed and

marginalized — will together seek new solutions. The

venue can only be a fundamentally reformed United

Nations. It is within such a United Nations that both a

durable coalition against terrorism and a durable

coalition of common responsibility of all countries for

a world with more solidarity and social justice for all

humanity and all its parts can be achieved.