Andorra, 2002

First of all, may I congratulate President Jan

Kavan, well known for his expertise in human rights,

on his election to preside over this General Assembly.

My congratulations also go to the outgoing President,

Mr. Han Seung-soo, for his hard work, and I commend

the United Nations Secretary-General, Kofi Annan,

whose stewardship of the Organization in these trying

times is particularly admirable. I also congratulate

Switzerland on its admission to membership in the

Organization.

This session of the General Assembly, more than

in recent years, seems caught between the past and the

future — a tragic past, an uncertain future. In New

York, and in the world, the catastrophe of the attacks of

11 September seems so present with us that we feel its

imprint still upon us, as if our souls were marked by

the fall of the towers and the cruel loss of life. We feel

this past as a tangible, palpable weight, and we also

sense the future pressing in upon us.

This past year, we have witnessed the war in

Afghanistan, the fall of the Taliban and the

establishment of a new Government in Kabul. Will

there be intervention in Iraq, will there be more attacks

in America, in Europe, or elsewhere? What will the

future bring?

I ask these questions as Foreign Minister of the

Principality of Andorra. Andorra is a small and

peaceful country nestled in the protected valleys of the

Pyrenees. We have lived in peace for nearly a thousand

years. And yet we are not safe from the storms that

buffet the world. Because of our small size, our

reliance on trade and our relations with our neighbours

and the world — our diplomacy, if you will — are of

the greatest importance to our well-being. As we turn

to the world, so, too, the world turns to us in the tens of

millions of tourists that visit us every year.

Our industries, our citizens and our lives are as

intimately linked to the world as to the mountains that

surround us. This link was clear in the profound

sadness of our people over the loss of life in New York,

Washington and Pennsylvania. We felt it as a visceral

blow, a spontaneous expression of true sympathy.

The world surrounds us, although we often feel

we can do little to influence the course of events. And

yet what we do know is how actively to seek peace,

and thereby ensure our future. It is about the future, the

idea of the future, that I wish to speak today.

The future. In order to understand it, we must

look not only to those events that are determining it,

that are forming it even as we speak, but also to its own

history as an idea. What is the history of the future?

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Here I will only invoke, in passing, two earlier

models that 500 years ago embodied our understanding

of the future: God's providence and the wheel of

Fortune. In the providential model of the future, God

looks down on the full history of the world from “the

high citadel of eternity” in the words of Thomas

Aquinas. He sees everything, every grain of sand,

every sparrow that falls. “There is a special providence

in the fall of a sparrow” Hamlet tells Laertes in

Shakespeare's great play. But alongside this Christian

understanding of God's providence is another figure,

the pagan figure of Fortuna, who holds her wheel on

which all men, king and commoner, rise and fall.

Hamlet is also aware of her power; he is buffeted by

the slings and arrows of outrageous Fortune, and he

longs to end his life, but he fears God's prohibition

against suicide. This very prohibition, shared by all

three of the great religions of the West, was broken by

the suicide attacks of 11 September. So, too, the

prohibition that “thou shall not kill”. Life is precious: it

is given to us, and we cannot take it away.

In these two models of the future, humanity is

passive. We are puppets — God or Fortune pulls our

strings. But gradually we drew away from this passive

enslavement to our fate, our destiny, and we struggled

to master the future. The change in the future is first

heard in the writings of that first theorist of diplomacy,

the cunning Machiavelli. In The Prince, he wrote that a

ruler must learn to profit from chance, or rather turn

chance to his favour. In a typically violent metaphor, he

tells the Prince that Fortune must be beaten.

Machiavelli counsels him to wrestle with fortune and

thereby create the future.

Although Machiavelli was advising an absolute

monarch, and indeed his thought presaged a long

period of monarchical absolutism, he understood that

the rulers and the administrators could no longer afford

to be passive objects of history. They had to consider,

to think, to attack fortune; to hurl the slings and shoot

the arrows back at her, if you will. In this shift, from

passive object to active agent, the idea of the future

begins its transformation. In this future, Machievelli's

heirs — diplomats gathered here today — advise the

modern princes, the democratically elected rulers of the

world, for the general good of the people.

The future becomes an idea that we build through

strategy, thought and action, through laws and treaties

we enter into and must obey. That is the very purpose

of the United Nations, the great parliament of the

world's Governments, or in a less poetic but more apt

image, a great, international factory, in that it builds the

future: a future, not for the wealthy or the powerful,

not for some nations, but for the world and its peoples.

Out of the ruins of the Second World War, the

nations of the world joined to create a better future for

all humanity. The belief that binds us together is the

belief that together, only together, we can build a better

world for all: a glorious city on the hill; a new

Jerusalem; a Jerusalem of all religions, all beliefs; a

city of tolerance; a city very much like New York.

That is why, I think, the terrorist attacks were so

painful, for New York City is very much an expression

of the United Nations, a place for all of the citizens of

the world, all religions and all beliefs — the city of

tolerance; a city that resolutely looks forward to the

future; New York: city of dreams, city of the future.

Strangely, even as New York was profoundly

wounded by these attacks, no other city, I think, has

been so resolute in looking forward. The city was not,

nor is it, spoiled by revenge. New York always looks to

the future. While others may reproach the city for its

indifference to its past, its forward-looking optimism is

perhaps its greatest gift to the world.

So when we all saw in Andorra and elsewhere the

attacks on the World Trade Center, my first response

was that the suicide hijackers did not know New York.

They did not know that this city has brought people

from all countries together. They did not know the

people who would die in the collapse of the towers:

people from many of the religions and countries of the

world.

But then I realized that perhaps they did know,

that perhaps New York was their target, and that their

target was the future. Or rather, their target was a

future of tolerance: religious, cultural, personal.

Indeed, it seems that the terrorists longed for purity, for

a pure vision of the future in which the tolerance — the

impurities — of New York would have no place.

They believed, but not in the uncertain future of

New York, the restless striving for the new. They

believed that with their deaths they would enter

paradise of the afterlife. They believed, sacrilegiously,

that they were the means of God's providence.

When the terrorists attacked America, they also

attacked the future. They attacked the future of

tolerance, a future controlled not by fate, but by

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mankind. We cannot let our notion of the future fall

with the towers, for the future is as fragile as the

towers proved to be, perhaps more so. The future is

built not of steel and stone, but of law and human

sympathy.

In a way, I think, at least for the moment and

perhaps necessarily, the terrorist attack on the future

has damaged it. It demanded a strong response: the

mission in Afghanistan, the continued destruction of Al

Qaeda. That is the kind of response that the

perpetrators of that violence would understand; a

response that cannot be seen as a sign of weakness or

vulnerability. It is a logical, and therefore necessary,

response that the terrorists themselves unleashed.

But violence breeds violence, and the future of

violence is simple destruction: nothing — and nothing

will come of nothing. We run the risk of entering an

endless war against a shadowy enemy; a war that,

given the nature of the enemy, might prove very hard to

win completely. And yet it must be won.

Our first and strongest line of defence against

violence is the rule of law, with diplomacy to enact it.

The United States, founded on the rule of law and on

rights for all, understands that. Andorra understands

that, because without law we would not have survived

as a country for nearly a millennium.

That is why Andorra believes in and supports

international law and trusts the United Nations,

particularly its democratic members, to lead the world

from its history of violence towards its common future.

In relation to Iraq, Andorra supports the role of the

United Nations, and we shall follow carefully the

debates in the Security Council.

Terrorism is not a conventional war: there can be

no treaties, no compacts, with terrorists. Law is vital

for all countries, but terrorists do not care about laws.

They are without a country and pose a particular

danger and challenge. In that sense, we must embark

on an aggressive reaching out to all people, an

aggressive assertion of our common humanity. That

might well be a media campaign, although it needs to

come directly from all elected politicians and ministers.

We are not trying to abstract issues or win a war of

words. We need to pull everybody into the human

compact. We need to recognize our individual

vulnerability.

It was America's belief in its invulnerability that

was so profoundly shaken by the terrorist attack. Yet if

the sudden collapse of the towers and the fear and

chaos of that day revealed a weakness, it also revealed

strength: the strength of its citizens' resolve and the

profound sympathy of all the peoples of the world.

In the wake of 11 September we recognize both

the need for the rule of law and the cause of that need:

the vulnerability of all people to malevolent attack. The

motto of Andorra is Virtus Unita Fortior, which can be

loosely translated as “United We Stand”. That is not

simply an appeal to patriotism or for a common front

against the enemy. It is a recognition that together

people are stronger, because alone we are weak and

vulnerable.

Nothing can justify the attack of 11 September

2001. It is nevertheless important, here in the General

Assembly, to consider the roots of violence. The

terrorists turned their anger and alienation — political,

cultural, economic and personal — into an abstract act

of inhuman cruelty whose “solution” was the attack on

the towers. Only in the cold world of abstraction does

that attack symbolize anything beyond untold

suffering. We need to pull violence back from

abstraction into the world of human conversation.

If people feel excluded from the future, their

alienation gives them a mad and violent certainty. We

must get to work to rebuild an inclusive and tolerant

idea of the future, an idea that is all too easily forgotten

in war, an idea of the future in which everybody is

protected from those who would destroy it, an idea of

the future so strong that it includes those people who

might otherwise be tempted by the madness of playing

God.

That future is premised on awareness, not of the

strength of the nuclear nations or of powerful

economies, but of the vulnerability of this compact and

of individual nations large and small. We must

recognize the power of our vulnerability, for in this

recognition, we recover our strength, our vision of a

common future and the will to act together. It is

together that we will win the war against terrorism.