Peru, 1996

At the outset, allow me,

Sir, to convey to you and to this Assembly the greetings

and congratulations of the Peruvian people, as well as

their best wishes and hopes for the future.

Peru is a country that has successfully dealt with its

domestic contradictions, and which is looking with vision

and determination towards the broad new horizons of

international activity. A careful review of what has been

achieved to date reveals that much remains to be done;

but it also shows that we are following the right course in

addressing the demands of our times.

However, it would be superficial to use this

Assembly, whose central theme is the reform of the

United Nations, to recapitulate the events of the past year.

We must wake up to the outcome of a long historical

process that has accelerated markedly over the last quarter

of a century and established around the world a network

of international organizations that today exceed the

number of States. We must also wake up to a fortunate

new development: the individual human being has

acquired a position of cardinal importance in the

international system.

The organizations established by States to satisfy

international, human and regional needs, have acquired a

permanent character and have created new systems of

international relations. When we speak today of reforming

the United Nations, no one fails to acknowledge that new

mechanisms are required to promote greater development

and economic and social stability in the world, and to

face current and future conflicts between and within

States.

There is discussion of the possibility of creating a

new economic council and a new social council, as well

as expanding and strengthening the Security Council. At

the same time, the need has emerged to transform and

rationalize the United Nations system, together with the

imperative of resolving the Organization’s financial crisis.

But in order to carry out those reforms, we need to have

a clear-sighted appreciation of the international scene and

to adapt the Organization to that reality, so that we can

achieve a fruitful and forward-looking perspective. It is

necessary for States, in the framework of the United

Nations system, to overcome their traditional activities

and jointly engage in tasks to deal with those new

realities so as to achieve broader representation and

functionality, with the possibility of future growth.

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When the United Nations was founded in 1945, at the

end of the Second World War, international relations were

different from today. The end of the cold war and the

realities of regional integration have made necessary a new

vision of the relationship between State sovereignty and the

supra-national realities of the international system. Huge

social and economic challenges make it necessary for us to

persevere in pursuing the purposes and principles of the

Charter, to strengthen diplomatic action, and not to

succumb to arbitrary interpretations of international legality,

which undermine the indispensable primacy of international

law.

Today the inadequacy of the nation State is more

evident than ever, and the appreciation of supranational

structures is more widespread than in the past. We discard

the simplistic visions of pure internationalism, but we

uphold the validity, of the entities that are active today

alongside or above State sovereignty. The vitality of the

Andean Common Market, the Southern Cone Common

Market (MERCOSUR) and the European Union shows us

a future of common and vigorous legal international

arrangements. We are facing the definitive crisis of

nationalism, if not of full legal competence of the nation

State. International law today appears as the only

framework of standards with which to face the new

realities.

There can be no doubt that the nuclear reality was one

of the factors that transformed the traditional concept of the

nation State. The ability to foresee its results has made the

decision to accept war more exceptional, and non-atomic

armies have adhered to broader, supranational military

organizations. Atomic weapons have abolished the

impermeability of the nation State.

We are likewise faced with a crisis of the very

concept of borders. Traditionally, empires thought of

themselves only in terms of being an extension of their

borders. Today borders are not an obstacle to integration.

However, this does not imply that we are building a

universal State, a global “cosmocracy”. There are natural

limits to the territorial applicability of laws, and it is true

that the concentration of power has unbreachable limits,

beyond which it cannot go. Accordingly, history has so far

not led us to a universal State, but rather to a freer

structure, a complex political pluralism with a common

general foundation of representative democracy, individual

liberties and economic freedom. We are facing new,

functionally limited supra-statal powers, with different

arrangements that differ in scope and intensity and that are

superimposed upon the system of State borders.

The modern theory of the State forged by

Machiavelli and Bodin, the concept of the State as an

absolute power that excludes any other power, is today

fading. For more than 20 years States have recognized

forces superior to themselves. The idea of the unlimited

sovereign State has broken down; the linchpin of the

whole theory of the modern State has broken down.

Today sovereignty continues to exist, but not as unlimited

political power, but rather as full constitutional legal

competence. That seventeenth-century concept that

inspired the Peace of Westphalia, cuius regio eius religio

— that each State should have a religion — has been left

behind. This is more apparent than ever at the end of the

cold war, when the secular beliefs that confronted the

world have been discarded. Today the cohesion of human

societies is governed by universal concepts.

The new reality leads us to assert that State

sovereignty has already been made subject to international

law — and, it can be said, to natural law — thus negating

the theoretical legitimacy of the State that was born with

the modern age. This in no way means that there is no

longer a need for patriotism, the concept of fatherland or

national histories. It means, instead, that the myth of the

nationalist State has collapsed.

In a truly human breakthrough and not a purely

technological one, all moral values today are reduced to

their personal roots. Today, neither Governments nor the

governed can shirk the ethical imperatives that rule

equally over their public and private conduct. This is due

both to the process just outlined and to a wholly new and

far-reaching technological revolution in mass

communications.

The law of nations was at first a principle of

commercial intercourse. It later came to apply to only one

kind of actor: the nation State. Today, an open functional

regionalism is bringing about far-reaching changes that

are swiftly altering the existing order, and the United

Nations would be ill-advised to disregard that new reality

in strengthening the Security Council and reforming its

institutions.

This is the cornerstone upon which the United

Nations should be re-founded, now that the circumstances

of power which governed its life at the close of the

Second World War and during the cold war have been

overcome. We should not lose sight of the fact that,

although the act of consent that forged this new, open,

functional regionalism was the work of the nation State,

today that regionalism is already a supranational reality

14

that has taken on a life of its own and is spreading around

the world. Inter-statal balances of power are giving way to

regional balances of power that are not concentrated in a

single focal point of power and that are more decentralized

and more rational.

The future will be one in which an international

system with freer and more flexible structures will be based

on the freedom of man as an individual, as a person. This

obliges States, within the framework of the United Nations

system, to go beyond their traditional activities and jointly

engage in management activities in the Organization based

on the new cultural, economic and geographical reality

made up of broad functional regional areas. I say once

again: this is the keystone of the foundation of the new

edifice of the United Nations.

I have come here to reiterate the commitment of Peru

and of the Peruvian people to the United Nations, but also

to warn that the new realities that must not be ignored.

Those realities have guided the policy of President Alberto

Fujimori and are the inspiration for his Government’s

far-reaching and successful reform. Peru, in its continental

relations, today bases its foreign policy upon the principles

of open functional regionalism and strives to link the

Pacific with the Atlantic through supranational

arrangements.

Rooted in its rich Latin-American heritage, my country

sees its future in continental terms, drawing upon Latin

America’s important contribution in the area of integration,

international law and mechanisms for peace and security.

Accordingly, we are convinced that organizational changes

in the United Nations should be based on those same

principles.