MISSIO PERMANENT
DEL PRINCIPAT D'ANDORRA
SESSION OF THE GENERAL
ASSEMBLY OF THE NATIONS
STATEMENT BY H.E. MR JULI MINOVES-TRIQUELL
AMBASSADOR EXTRAORDINARYAND PLENIPOTENTIARY
and
Statement by
The Head of Delegation of Andorra
to the 55th session of the
General Assembly of the
United Nations
H.E. Mr. Juli Minoves-Triquell
Ambassador Extraordinary and
Plenipotentiary of the Principality of Andorra
Mr. President,
Mr. Secretary General,
Excellencies,
Ladies and Gentlemen,
Andorra will become, through the WEOG rotation scheme,
a member of the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations at the beginning
of 2001 for a period of three years. This is a great responsibility and a
particular challenge for a small country that has only been a member of the
organization since 1993. My Minister of External Relations, Albert PINTAT,
would have loved to be here today to express to you Andorra's commitment to
the goals of the United Nations and specially our obligations in ECOSOC. He
would have praised the Brahiml report and its new thoughts on peace-keeping
operations that my country supports. When he learnt that he would be unable
to lead this year's delegation to the United Nations due to unavoidable official
functions in Europe, he asked me, in the light of our forthcoming membership
in ECOSOC, to contribute to this General Debate of the year 2000 with some
free reflections-if possible innovative -on what globalization might mean
for a small state. This is a daunting task since everything seems to have
been said about the subject, but I shall try to dutifully carry out my minister's
instructions. First however, let me convey to you, President Hard HOLKERI,
Albert PINTAT's congratulations for your election as President of the 55th
General Assembly while thanking your predecessor, Theo Ben GURIRAB, for a
difficult job well done.
Excellencies,
Ladies and Gentlemen,
When I was a student here in the United States, many
years ago, I took a course in photography. I had taken from my family's house
in Andorra a negatives-it was one of the older glass negatives-and there in
the University photographic lab I set it up for developing. I remember that
moment when I peered into the developing pan and saw slowly forming on the
white photographic paper an image, the image of my great‑grandmother.
It was a shock, there in New Haven, to see this face from a long distant past,
from long before I was born, come slowly into clarity. A lost image from a
lost past.
If I had the time, and you the inclination, I could
tell you about my great-grandmother, a formidable woman who never left the
Valley of Andorra, high up in the mountains of the Pyrenees. I could tell
you what her face, strong and hard as the stone of the mountains, says about
the history of my country. In the photograph, she is dressed all in black,
and looks away from the camera, down at the rocky ground. Behind her, you
can see the stones of the family farm, high up in the mountains above Saint
Julia, one of the seven parishes that make up the Principality of Andorra.
Her Andorra is very different from the country today.
Dirt paths have become asphalt roads, stone strewn fields are now covered
with shops, houses and hotels. The remarkable Romanesque churches that are
the pride of my country-churches that date back to the foundation of the Principality
in the late thirteenth century, and that loomed over the villages for almost
a millennium, are now hemmed in by concrete buildings-stores, apartments,
houses the same buildings you might find in parts of Rio de Janeiro, Beijing
or New York.
Yes, so much has changed since my grandfather's hand
snapped this picture. My great grandmother would recognize only the church
towers, and the stones of the mountains. And what was so specific about her
world, the stories, the cooking, the fabric of daily life, well, that has
disappeared.
In the space of seventy years, Andorra has changed
from being a poor and remote place, to a prosperous country, with over ten
million tourists a year-who come for skiing in the winter and hiking in the
summer. We are now a commercial hub. If you look for a country transformed
by globalization, you might look to Andorra.
Andorra is a country that has survived, independent
and uninvaded, since 1278. It is one of the oldest, and one of the smallest,
democracies in the world. A historian might argue this remarkable fact is
due to its isolation and poverty, or because for centuries the outside world
was neatly balanced by its co-Princes-the Bishop of Urgell to the South, and
to the North the Count of Foix, later the French King and since 1805 the Head
of the French State. Unsurprisingly, I might attribute the remarkable record
of peace to the cautious character of the Andorran people. Or rather-and less
partially-I think that because it is a small country, where parishes could
readily communicate with one another at the Casa de la Vail, the House of
the Valleys, communication never broke down.
The Millennium Summit of the United Nations had as
its theme Globalization. As a summit, it was aptly named, since I would say
that globalization is the story of the second millennium-indeed perhaps it
is the story of human culture. I am a politician, not a historian, but we
all know the effect on both Europe and the Middle East wrought by the Crusades
of the 11th and 1e centuries, or the transformation of indigenous and European
cultures brought about by the "discovery" of the New World, or the
effect of the slave trade of the 17th and 18th centuries on both Africa and
the Americas. These violent encounters formed the world even as they brought
death and destruction. They also sparked our imaginations: the Globe was the
name of Shakespeare's playhouse in sixteenth century London, a joke he liked
to work into many of his plays. I like to think of the United Nations as the
new Globe, a theater in which we are the players or-if we have the imagination-the
dramatists-for the story of our fragile planet.
But the globalization we are now facing is of a different
nature. In the words of Kofi Annan from the opening introduction to the Millennium
conference: "The starting point for this manifesto for the millennium
can be summed up in one word: globalization-the melting away of national boundaries
as the world becomes one economy, one common space, one village."
It is an idyllic view, the view of the world as a
village. Of course, the Secretary General is all too aware of the negative
effects of the process. In the same introduction, he cautions that
"Globalization offers great opportunities, but at present its benefits are
very unevenly distributed while its costs are born by all. Thus a central
challenge we face today is that globalization becomes a positive force for all
the worlds peoples..."
We all know too well the protests that have taken
place, and will take place, against this same word, globalization. Let us
listen, for instance, to one of the interested groups, chosen at random, the
International Forum on Globalization, who understand the term as referring to a
"globalized economic system dominated by supranational corporate trade and
banking institutions that are not accountable to democratic processes or
national governments.' The IFG accuses "the GATT, WTO, Maastricht, NAFTA,
combined with structural adjustment policies of the IMF and World Bank, to be
direct stimulants to the processes that weaken democracy, create a world order
that is under the control of transnational corporations, and that devastate the
natural world."
According to the IFG, globalization brings the diminishment
of powers of local and indigenous communities, states and even nations, destroys
both small-scale agriculture and the earth's remaining wildernesses, and brings
a worldwide homogenization of diverse, local and indigenous cultures. To counter
its effects, the IFG advocates the revitalization of local communities by
promoting maximum self-reliance, the recognition of rights of indigenous peoples,
and the abandonment of paradigm of unlimited economic growth.
When I listen to these words, I cannot help but here
a lament, a lament for a lost and simpler world: the world of my great-grandmother:
And I am reminded of that greatest of all laments for lost culture, the work
that indeed informs the thinking behind the activists who struggle against
the forces of globalization-Claude Levi-Strauss, and his masterpiece, Tristes
Tropiques, his elegy for the people of the Amazon Basin, which even as
he caught it was disappearing into our modem world.
I understand the sadness for the lost world, the
world of the past that is always slipping away from us, that exists in the
black and white negative of our memory. And so here I elegize, before you, all
that has disappeared, not simply in Andorra but in the world, all that has been
forgotten, paved over, by the forces of travel, of tourism, of telephone,
television, cinema, and the Internet.
These technologies link the world together, they narrow
its distances, and threaten to dilute the cultures of the globe into a flat
mono-Culture. And I ask you, now: what new discoveries await us? We cannot
imagine them, but they will come, and sooner than we think, in this terrifying
and beautiful globe of ours.
And yet, and yet... the IFG manifesto was not posted
on a church door in Wittenberg, printed in a new technology that sparked
another revolution, the Reformation of the 1e Century. No, it was downloaded
from a Web site on the Intenet. This Web, in which ideas, images, voices travel
across our globe in a flash, is a remarkable invention that collapses both time
and space.
In the same way, I now realize that my image of my
great grandmother came from a negative, from a camera, a technology that
perhaps more than any other except the computer has transformed and quickened
our world.
This is to make a very simple point-not simply that
this manifesto is presented in the very technology of globalization-but that
nostalgia for a local economy might be a product of globalization itself.
My great-grandmother had a good life, but a hand one,
with terrible cold in the winter, and constant work. Would she have chosen
this life, if she could have had another? If she had known another? And more
to the point, would she have been allowed to choose?
We need to remember that people themselves have embraced
change. Real people who are not content to live-physically or imaginatively-in
their places of birth but, filled with a desire to better their lives, or
to see the world, they reach out and try to grasp change, if only to know
what they have lost.
Levi Strauss could not bring himself to recognize
that people he observed, deep in the Amazon rain forests, might want to leave
their paradise. Not because they were driven out by modernity, the modernity
emblematized by Strauss himself, but because they wanted to better their lives,
to embrace the world, to feel for themselves the painful pulse of gain and
loss.
We need only leave this chamber and walk through any
street in the City to recognize this. People from all across the world, people
of all races, walking up and down, alone or in conversation, happy or unhappy,
homesick or embracing the dreams this City seems to proffer. In the streets,
restaurants with wonderful meals from all around the world, and fusion restaurants,
French-Senegalese, American-Thai. Or fusion‑-children. -In the streets
of New York, or Paris, or Hong Kong, or Andorra la Vella, the people are changing,
colors are shifting. What brave new world is being born around us?
In saying this, I do not want to contradict the concerns
of the anti‑-globalists, to in any way deny their recognition of the
dangers of change. We ignore at our peril practical questions that turn around
international finance, international corporations, the widening gulf between
have and have-not countries, the dangers to the Environment.
These are practical matters to be seen to. To
paraphrase Annan, we need mechanisms to equalize the benefits of globalization,
to make life a positive thing for all peoples. By this I do not mean the quest
for superfluous material goods, but shelter, and health, and protection from
disease. And I would add, simply, that before and during my tenure here as
ambassador, the United Nations has hosted a series of summits or conferences
designed to address these very problems. Rio, Istanbul, Copenhaguen, Beijing,
Rome, just to name a few. The World Conference against racism, racial
discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance, the World Summit for
children, Rio10, are to come. There is a substantial body of work in place to
address the stresses of globalization. What we need to do now is continue to
work towards our goals.
In conclusion, I would like to consider a presupposition
made by both global optimists and pessimists, the notion that globalization
has replaced nationalism. Again, to quote Kofi Annan: "globalization-
the melting away of national boundaries as the world becomes one economy,
one common space, one village." Or in the report published in the New
York Times concerning the protests against globalization: "speakers
do not oppose globalization per se because, in their view, the era of nation-states
is coming to its inevitable end."
Are globalization and nationalism opposed? On the surface,
they would appear to be. So much of globalization-economies that transcend
borders, communication networks that shrink the world -seems to render an
earlier model of the nation-state obsolete.
And yet, whether it be the ethnic conflict in
Rwanda, or in the Balkans, issues of immigration in the developed world, or
conflict in East Timor, we know that the question of the border, of the
passport, remains increasingly important. Despite our interconnectedness,
nationalism has not withered away.
I fear the rise of a nationalism no longer linked to
true patriotism, that is, to the love of a place. I pray that the world does
not succumb to an unthinking nationalism, a vulgar nationalism that would exist
simply to exclude or feed the ambitions of unscrupulous politicians. We need a
democratic nationalism forged out a concern for the rights of individuals.
This is not nationalism as it is worked out from the
18th to the 20th centuries- a nationalism
linked to the struggle to control markets, to the scramble for loot - but
a new nationalism that is not predicated on identity, on cultural sameness.
A nationalism that is linked to a world economy that is no longer restricted
by national borders. A democratic or civic nationalism. A global nationalism.
A new nationalism, I must add, in which Andorra and
other small countries are not historical anachronisms, but emblematic of this
civic nationalism, predicated as it must be on the democratic will of the
people. In this sense, Andorra's quiet nationalism, its seven hundred years of
peace and communication, can modestly serve as a kind of historical mode
Countries need to rethink what it means to be a
nation, in order to participate effectively in the life of this our globe, in
order to become what we must be and to a certain extent already are,
"united nations." In its very name, in its very mission, the United
Nations anticipated the globalization that is so rapidly occurring. Born out of
a global threat posed by war and later nuclear war, forged from the most terrible
of national struggles, the United Nations is an activist forum for issues that
are global, not in the sense that they transcend any individual nation, but in
the sense that they are of concern for all nations.
The International Criminal Court,-whose statute will
soon be ratified by Andorra, a country which had the honor to contribute to
it by composing the first paragraphs of the preamble- , is a good example
of an entity that respects borders but places human rights above all. Crimes
against humanity must be punished, and shall be.
This new nationalism, while it recognizes borders,
asserts that the rights of its citizens to liberty and peace are primary.
Hence the United Nations, even as it respects national borders, needs to recognize
that it can and should become pro-active in the protection of these rights
in the case of civil conflict. So too the great global threat of AIDS and
other infectious diseases demands a response from each nation and a recognition
that these threats can never be adequately dealt with alone, but only by working
globally through the United Nations. In short, we need not only the United
Nations, but we need united nations.
I began this speech with the image of my great grandmother,
looking down, at the stony ground of her country. I would end it- symbolically
at least -with another image: our image. Someday, our great-grandchildren
may discover our image, perhaps even our image here, in this place. Perhaps
they will reproduce it through a technology so strange, so remarkable, we
cannot even imagine it. But let us hope that they live in the brave new world
I've spoken of today. And let us hope they see us as an image of positive
change. We who have lived through such change cannot turn away from it. With
our feet on the ground of this great globe of ours, we need to look forward.
We need to grasp change. We need to reach out.
Thank you.