There are so many possibilities of meaning in this photograph by Lyubov “Luba” Ginzburg of our UN Chronicle team; the sky grazing towers of ambition and accomplishment being reduced, through pandemic or disaster, to wooden stumps clawing the ocean floor, the ‘each for herself’ image of individual geese perched upon individual stumps rather than gathering in collective solidarity on a not distant shore, the rising of the waters that have already engulfed the smaller and more vulnerable of the stumps and now edge their relentless way to the supposedly sturdier and more secure. And the anger and restlessness evident in those waters emblematic of what Antonio Guterres called the “tsunami of hate and xenophobia, scapegoating and scare-mongering” that has become a pandemic of its own.
But, even more than each of these, there is the sense of separateness the photograph compels, the careful distance between the birds and between their places of rest, the isolation of each building in the distance, aloof from its neighbour, the sunset fragmented by stationary clouds. A sense worth reflection as the United Nations Department of Global Communications launches this week with Purpose its #OnlyTogether campaign. “People everywhere,” it states, “want to get back to their lives as soon as possible -- to see family and friends, celebrate, learn and work alongside one another. But if different countries move at different speeds then there is no guarantee that life will ever be the same."
So many of those countries are represented in the macrocosm that is New York City , home to the United Nations, an affirmation we will see on Monday when we join the city of New York at an event to mark a COVID-19 Day of Remembrance, a one year memorial, a year whose first weeks saw the United Nations cherish its capacity to support its immediate neighbours by providing 250,000 surgical masks to New York City. Monday’s observance is led by Penny Abeywardena New York City's Commissioner for International Affairs, whose graceful tweet we've referenced, and curated by Aissata M.B. Camara Deputy Commissioner for Operations and Strategic Partnerships in the Mayor’s Office for International Affairs—the Mayor, Bill de Blasio, who so unequivocally said “we are all in this together; we all connect with each other.”
Yes, only together. As of this Monday, 78% of vaccine doses worldwide have been administered in just ten countries; of the 29 countries listed as “low income economies,” vaccination has started in just three. "If the world’s scientists were able to develop safe and effective vaccines in just seven months, the aims of world’s leaders must be equally record-breaking — to provide enough funding and to ramp up manufacturing to enable everyone on earth to be vaccinated,” as UN Under-Secretary-General for Global Communications Melissa Fleming, who is speaking at the Monday memorial, says about the campaign which invites people around the world to post a picture, image, or text about what they would like to do again once fair access to vaccines compels the pandemic to end - and post with the hashtag #OnlyTogether, a world society where the academic and research community is given political muscle by governments, and governments ,in their turn, are offered the wondrous made possible by a science, crafting, innovating and realizing even when perched on precarious precipice.
Looking at the ever friendly website of The Yearbook of the United Nations for the first reference to “together”, I came across this mention, so relevant to the Academic Impact, about UNESCO’s encouragement of “teaching about the United Nations and its specialized agencies since, together, these form the greatest contemporary effort, on an international, governmental scale, to move towards a world society. A booklet including some suggestions for teaching programmes on the United Nations in the schools of Member States…was considered…at the UNESCO seminar at Adelphi College, New York.”
“World society” is an elegant phrase that has not acquired the reiteration it deserves; I was reminded of it when reading an article by Robert A. Scott, President Emeritus of Adelphi, where he writes “One of the most important goals of education is to learn how to reflect, how to learn from our experiences. An early experience that has stayed with me was finding small wooden signs along the paths of the camp I attended when nine years old. The signs were about three inches by seven inches and had the word "Others" carved into the wood. They were intended to inspire those walking the paths to be considerate of others, welcome others, and listen to others, no matter what their station in life. Others. Respect others. Listen to others, no matter what their station. Reflect on what they say. It may help solve a problem you never thought about.”
Bob Scott makes an important point about “others”, that they may remain distinct and it is not necessary they be assimilated, much as the “Only Together” campaign speaks of unity and not the merging of identity, the “world society” that commands both the diversity of the planet and its commonness of purpose. That, and Bob’s reflection on reflection, came to mind as we marked today the anniversary of the publication of The Daily Courant, on 11 March 1702, the first British daily newspaper, a single page which comprised only foreign news - a “world society” - deliberately without editorial comment since, in the view of its editor, readers should have "sense enough to make reflections for themselves.”
That editor was a woman, Elizabeth Mallet, her home at Fleet Bridge in London the precursor to the Fleet Street we know today. More than three centuries ago, her world was not very different from that experienced by many women today; as Secretary-General Guterres remarked at a virtual dialogue with the “Group of Friends of Gender Parity“ on International Women’s Day this Monday, “gender equality is a question of power. We live in a male-dominated world with a male-dominated culture and male-dominated power structures.” Power was also referenced the same morning, when UNAI organized with the Permanent Mission of India to the United Nations the Hansa Mehta Memorial Dialogue; the keynote speaker, Gita Gopinath, Chief Economist of the International Monetary Fund, spoke of “the empowerment of women (as) an important channel by which we can obtain stronger, more inclusive, and more resilient growth,” she said, noting that women globally account for less than 20 percent of board seats in banks and banking supervision agencies, and account for fewer than 2 percent of bank CEOs. “This suggests tremendous room to achieve greater financial sector resilience while also increasing banking sector profitability.”
Later that afternoon, I listened to the “International Horizons” podcast from UNAI member, the Graduate Center of the City University of New York where Ralph Bunche Institute research scholar Ellen Chesler interviewed Rachel Vogelstein, the Douglas Dillon Senior Fellow and director of the Women and Foreign Policy Program at the Council on Foreign Relations (which marks its centenary this year) who made the compelling point that “there’s still a lot of work to do, but in the early 1990s, we know there were only three countries that had laws on the books outlawing violence against women; today there are over 150 countries that have those laws.” Another instance of only togetherness - the solidarity that brought women’s groups in “world society” together and then the solidarity they created with governments and parliaments with a conscience.
The “world society “ image came to mind also at a conference hosted by the Kristu Jayanti College in India, UNAI’s hub for the “no poverty” SDG, which brought together all our SDG hubs to reflect upon the power of higher educational institutions in translating the sustainable development goals into action; as Reverend Dr. Augustine George, the college principal put it, was to “contextualise” the experience of hubs within their own immediate geographies to those of hubs elsewhere, recognizing that the truths which higher education can communicate and implement are not limited by location and are, to cite a word I only learned today, intermestic. Indeed, in the biblical phrase which the Principal includes in his online message to the college community, truth is liberating.
To return to “intermestic”, which the Oxford Dictionary scolded me is a “term used to denote the interconnectedness and relevance between domestic policy and international policy”, I came upon it in an engaging reference by Dr. W. Andy Knight of the University of Alberta in Canada to a recent publication The Future of Global Affairs which he describes as “an exciting and balanced contribution to the debate about the potential trajectory of a world in flux. Tinged more with concern than utopian optimism, this volume captures a panoramic view of our cacophonous and disorderly world that is on the verge of disequilibrium and potential destruction unless key political actors, institutions, and processes can find a way to adapt global affairs to an increasingly plurilateral and intermestic era.” The book is authored by the faculty of UNAI’s long-time friend, the Center for Global Affairs at UNAI member New York University which will host a discussion on it next week
Reading Dr. Knight’s comment brought to mind both an interview with him and an incident in his hometown, Edmonton, I had read about some months ago. The second first. In December 1991, Canada ratified the still young Convention on the Rights of the Child, but one of her provinces - Alberta - withheld consent. That stalemate persisted for seven years until, at an international conference in Edmonton, a diminutive participant from South Africa walked up to the province’s premier, Ralph Klein, and said: “My name is Desmond Tutu. Why would you not want to join the Convention? Would it not be better to work for the changes you want together than apart?” And Mr Klein was persuaded to sign on.
And the interview with Andy Knight, its closing words as vital as they were the first afternoon, I read them. “Try to understand why individuals are feeling marginalized from their society, community, family. Why do they feel that violence is the only means to an end? Where is the hate coming from? Where is the anger originating? What can we do to mitigate this problem? How can we help the young to have hope, to be good citizens, to choose love over hate?”
In those choices, in joining rather than opting out, in the more difficult crafting of hope over the easy insularity of despair, lies what a bruised world realized in 1945 and a bruised world may yet again in 2021. As Nana Mouskouri reminded us, if each of us is a part of that world society, that society, that world, in its turn, is each, and all, of us. Only love. And only together.
Ramu Damodaran
Chief, United Nations Academic Impact
