Seoul, Korea, February 3-8, 2020
Thank you for inviting me to this Summit to reflect about interdependence and working to achieve peace in this turbulent world that we have to live in. But I would like to start off on a positive note: Despite the situation of humanity, it is better than one century ago, the end of the First World War; it is better than 75 years ago, the liberation of the concentration camps in Germany. Therefore, even though the situation has become more complex, we can’t say it’s worse than before.
Our duty should be to determine upon which pillars we can settle our future of peace, as conditions necessary but sufficient for development. We have to find out which are the threats that weigh on that future. Three months ago, I was with French President Emmanuel Macron in the 70th anniversary of the founding of the Council of Europe. The first step of the venture toward European integration, of the Council of Europe, gathered from the Treaty of London three fundamental pillars, so that we can be aware upon which bases we can start to overcome conflicts that were on a worldwide scale. These conflicts still left an open wound very near where we are speaking here, on the border between South and North Korea.
According to what [former French Prime Minister] Dominique de Villepin said earlier in his reflection, which reminded me of his address at the United Nations [Security Council in 2003] when that “preventive war” broke out, a concept that was introduced in the international human rights law which was disrespectful to human rights. After that address, somebody reminded me what happened on the Korean Peninsula. Look, he said, the truth is that what characterizes this division is that South Korea supports democracy, human rights and progress, with amazing results, and that North Korea supports totalitarianism, subjugating its people, and an incredible misery, a people who are silenced, and on top [of that] being a nuclear threat.
That is the difference, but if we want to march forward in the process of reconciliation—which is difficult to know when it will happen, apart from the reflection we just heard from Dominique de Villepin—I would like to remind everybody that we can’t achieve anything serious if we don’t count with Beijing. It’s impossible to imagine that North Korea will bilaterally put at risk its businesses with Trump, a very special diplomacy with daily surprises. Therefore, this open wound that remains from the two World Wars will come, without a doubt, to an end.
We have, nevertheless, on the one hand a model that embraces its people, that competes technologically, that respects freedom, human rights and democracy, and on the other hand another model that oppresses its people, excludes them and threatens them. I think that this is a mirror for the world, an open wound that is experienced here and is suffered along in its environment.
Second, as if what I’ve said isn't enough, let’s imagine which pillars we can use to actually advance toward the path to peace. The interdependence that the technological revolution has created is an irreversible process. In the same way that those who shouted against the first Industrial Revolution, which developed infinitely slower, others now are shouting out with new nationalistic speeches against multilateralism, against this process that we call “globalization” in English and mondialisation in French. But to fight against this process is denying the evolution of history.
What are the symptoms that endanger our democratic experiences? I say this based on my life experience, of which almost half was lived under a dictatorship after the Civil War in Spain. What are the symptoms we see? The loss of respect for international norms; nuclear agreements are ended unilaterally, when the passion expressed by the president of the Marshall Islands they tried to denuclearize; nuclear agreements are unknown; commercial agreements are not known about; two judges are left from a court of nine; all commercial connections are unilaterally broken; bases upon which a knitting of fundamental relationships such as respecting international norms and, on top, all agreements to fight against climate change are cut off.
Therefore, on an international level we are in a state of anomie, of isolation. Instead of multilateralism we have a multi-polarization with nationalistic and irrational interests that damage others for one’s own benefit. This has never brought about any good result historically. To conclude this first point, we have to regain the norms. Here the role of Europe is essential—now weakened by Brexit, which is but another rebirth of nationalism in Europe, which in the 20th century destroyed us two times, and which seems to be forgotten.
So, we should recompose those international norms so that we know that there are game rules that are foreseeable and that we can adapt to. It is truth that those of the free democratic countries who will be most affected negatively, that see how a wave of nationalism or simplistic populism is putting our democratic institutions in crises.
Second, to understand the problems of our world, we have to recognize the growing lack of equal distribution of income. This doesn’t mean that there is more poverty than before; the distribution of poverty is compatible with the increase of inequality. The inequality of the distribution of income, of course, is a problem of social injustice, but also of sustainability. For a model to be sustainable, the distribution of income should be fairer. In Latin America I’ve seen a big wave of protests where—beside regimes that are absolutely reproachable, that disqualify themselves, like Venezuela—the bottom line is the unfair distribution of income. On top of that, there is another phenomenon, the desperation for the technological revolution, I repeat again, irreversible, that puts in danger the usual jobs, changing systematically and at a high speed the way people are employed, that will give insecurity, fewer jobs, surely, in the future. This lack of tranquility will be accelerated, and that is accompanied by the lack of distribution of incomes.
In the same package there is climate change. We keep underestimating climate change. I have investigated—and with this I want to conclude—what's happening with the wildfires. Now we talk about Australia, but we forgot about Siberia. Until now, we still don’t know if under the snowy Siberia the tundra is still there and there still will be springtime. The magnitude, the dimension of the destruction caused by wildfires isn’t related to different socio-economic causes from place to place; it responds to climate change. Nature in the past, it has a better memory than us, and nature itself tries to adapt itself to climate change, so that wildfires and many other phenomena, if we see the world map beside Australia, there are great wildfires in the African Sahara and more places around the world. But they exist in a magnitude unknown until today, which means that the increase of 1 degree of temperature can suppose the drop of 15 percent to 20 percent in the degree of humidity, fiercer than the extent of the fire. Just to mention one example, up to 7 million hectares of Bolivia, near the Amazon, the great reservoir of the world.
We are dealing with this kind of phenomenon, a world that is losing its norms and rules, that is withdrawing to nationalism against multilateralism. As I heard in a recent meeting in Athens, we are facing big challenges in the world, big in dimension and in different areas, and sometimes with a leadership in important areas of the world, whose mental size is smaller than those challenges. Therefore, we have a problem, and to face that problem we have to activate all the resources of civil society.
Do we have universal values? Yes, human rights. Should we share more than just the plurality of ideas? Yes, we have to share the cultural diversity, the diversity of the sense of belonging. We should lose the arrogance of a certain type of tolerance that considers some cultures to be inferior to others. That is what provoked two World Wars.
This morning I heard about education and peace, I think it’s education and culture of peace. Some cultural levels in the world have demonstrated that they don’t lean toward peace; sometimes they lean toward feeling superior or supremacy, considering others to be inferior. Please, just remember one idea: We accept more and more the biodiversity of nature that we can and should share. Why is it so difficult for us to accept the biodiversity of cultures and the sense of belonging of human beings as a shared richness that we should know, from which we should learn and with which we should live in harmony?
Thank you.