Other Features
A Global Conscience is Awakening
Douglas Roche, Edmonton, AB
Volume 39 Issue 4, 5 & 6 | Posted: July 16, 2024
When the Cold War ended, the U.N. Security Council met, in 1992, for the first time at the summit level and pledged to strengthen the organization’s peacemaking role, the principles of collective security, and new disarmament measures to stop the spread of weapons of mass destruction. This attempt at world cooperation was hailed as the birth of a new international order.
The moment of hope did not last long. Regional wars broke out, the terrorist attacks of 9/11 struck, and a resurgence of militarism swept across the world. Conflict, not cooperation, became the dominant note of international relations. Now, as the two wars in Ukraine and Gaza rage, the world staggers from crisis to crisis. The planet is heating to intolerable levels, nuclear weapons are being modernized, famines spread, refugees multiply, and the political systems are in chaos.
The world mood is no longer hopeful but despondent. It desperately needs to return to the principles of the U.N. Charter, which emphasize a determination “to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war.” To bring the Charter back into international discourse, we need to unleash the conscience that lies within us all. A global conscience is awakening. This global conscience crosses all boundaries and now cries out for action to make the planet our common home.
There, in a nutshell, is my view of the discord and turbulence in the world and a path forward at this time of great discontent. We cannot go on living in despondency. It is not worthy of the creative powers that humans possess. Cooperation, conflict, chaos, Charter, conscience — the “five Cs” — of our time must be examined to lay the groundwork for the hope for peace with social justice that I dare to offer today.
Cooperation Seeds Planted
The first meeting of the U.N. Security Council at the summit level, which I attended as a journalist, stands out in my mind as a dazzling moment in world affairs. A fresh beginning of linking hands after the long and dangerous Cold War was palpable. “Russia considers the United States and the West not as mere partners but rather as allies,” Boris Yeltsin, the Russian president, told the gathering, adding, “This is a basic prerequisite for, I would say, a revolution in peaceful cooperation between progressive nations.” U.S. President George H.W. Bush responded, “For perhaps the first time since that hopeful moment in San Francisco, we can look at our Charter as a living, breathing document….May God bless the United Nations as it pursues its noble goal.”
The summit commissioned then-Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali to develop proposals for preventive diplomacy, peacemaking and peacekeeping in order to strengthen U.N. ability to identify potential crises. His report, An Agenda for Peace, was a major step forward in promoting effective machinery to resolve conflicts without war. The major powers balked at the cost of effectively maintaining international security; nonetheless, a re-examination of the structures needed for global peace was started.
That same year, 1992, saw a huge global conference in Rio de Janeiro, the Earth Summit, which brought together political leaders, diplomats, scientists, and civil society from 179 countries for a massive effort to produce a broad blueprint for action on environmental and development issues to guide international cooperation and development policy in the 21st century. This prepared the way for the Millennium Development Goals, a broad U.N. program to eradicate poverty and boost health and education measures. The Guardian newspaper estimated that at least 21 million extra lives were saved due to accelerated progress in developing countries.
During this period, the outline of a culture of peace began to take shape. A team of scholars developed “a new vision of peace” based on universal values of life, liberty, justice, solidarity, tolerance, human rights and equality between men and women. UNESCO took up the cause and formulated a culture of peace as a set of ethical values, habits and customs, attitudes toward others, and forms of behaviour revolving around respect for life and rejection of violence. The Declaration on a Culture of Peace was adopted by the U.N. General Assembly in 1999 and the year 2000 designated as the International Year for the Culture of Peace. Also in 2000, all 189 states parties to the Non-Proliferation Treaty made an “unequivocal undertaking” to negotiate the elimination of nuclear weapons.
The post-Cold War years were, indeed, a heady time for international cooperation, or at least a semblance of it.
Conflict Spreads
The terrorist attacks on the Twin Towers in New York Sept. 11, 2001 quickly shifted the world back into a combat mentality. Weeks later, President George W. Bush ordered an invasion of Afghanistan as the “war on terror” took hold. The Afghanistan war went on for 20 years. Militarism spread in the Middle East when the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003 on the grounds, later proven false, that Iraq was developing nuclear weapons. Wars in Africa — Sudan, Somalia, Mali — became commonplace.
Military expenditures, which had fallen to about $900 billion a year after the Berlin Wall came down (creating what was called a “peace dividend”), shot up again to today’s astounding figure of $2.4 trillion. NATO, which started as a Cold War force of 12 nations, found a new life after the Cold War and expanded to 32 nations, virtually surrounding Russia. Humiliated, Russia dreamed of imperial expansion and invaded Ukraine, first in 2014 then again in 2022, setting off a war that no one today can see the end of. The decades-long Israel-Arab confrontation, never really resolved despite various peace plans over the years, erupted into an inferno when Hamas struck at Israel Oct. 7, 2023 and Israel responded with brutal warfare in Gaza.
The human suffering in post-Cold War conflicts is unbearable, yet it goes on because political leaders of all stripes have adopted the stance of confrontation as their default position. They turn their back on, or at least delay, negotiations to resolve conflict. They endlessly spend huge sums on warfare while starving the processes of peace.
These twisted values are nowhere more apparent than in the new nuclear arms race. The U.S. intends to spend $756 billion over the next decade on nuclear weapons upgrades. Both the U.S. and Russia are developing new versions of land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles, submarine-launched missiles, long-range bombers, and cruise missiles. Estimates project a tripling of nuclear warheads by China over the next decade. India, Israel, North Korea and Pakistan all maintain nuclear weapons in their respective regions of conflict. As a result of this new nuclear resurgence,, the global nuclear arms control and disarmament machinery is in s deep crisis.
Chaos on the International Scene
The path toward peace opened up by the end of the Cold War has turned into chaos. The political aspiration to build peace, which raised hopes in the 1990s, has corroded today. Governments cannot manage the entangled crises of warfare, global warming, famines, the forced migration of peoples. The cooperation they pledged in 1992 has given way to confrontation. The dominant characteristic of the international scene today is chaos.
Of course, diplomacy of a sort is still carried on, meetings are held and pro-forma photo ops are staged. But militarism, not peace-making, dominates political discussion today. It is as if 1992 has been turned upside down. Instead of building the agenda for peace, the political order delivers an enlarged agenda for war. It is a supreme irony that the current U.N. Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres, has presented a “New Agenda for Peace” only to see it pushed to the sidelines over the political fights about how much more to spend on funding the wars in Ukraine and Gaza.
The political order is caught up in contradictions of its own making. What about the violent conflicts continuing to take a heavy toll on human life while peace-building machinery goes unused? What about the starvation affecting millions at a time when properly maintained agriculture can feed the entire planet? What about global warming threatening to make huge areas of the planet uninhabitable when the fossil fuel industry slow walks cleanup programs? What about the continued modernization of nuclear weapons leading us to the edge of Armageddon when a humanitarian movement has shown the catastrophic consequences of any use of a nuclear weapon?
All these questions lead to one central question: How can we escape the chaos that engulfs humanity today and find our way to a culture of peace?
U.N. Charter Is a Compass
My guide through this wilderness continues to be the Charter of the United Nations. Forty years ago, then-Secretary-General Javier Perez de Cuellar gave me an embossed copy of the Charter in the U.N.’s six official languages. I used to read from it during my classes at the University of Alberta so that my students could absorb the power of the challenges it presents: to maintain peace and security; to develop friendly relations among nations, to achieve international cooperation in solving economic, social, cultural and human rights problems, to be a centre for harmonizing the actions of nations. The Charter is a compass for humanity. It shows us where we must go in the development of public policy to achieve sustainable peace. It has enabled the United Nations to embody humanity’s hopes for peace, security, social justice, human rights,, equality for women, and a voice for all.
But the essential message of the Charter — cooperation by all for mutual survival — is cast aside because the U.N. itself cannot stop wars. The vetos exercised by the five permanent members of the Security Council have severely weakened the Council’s edicts. Reform of the Security Council is desperately needed. But to write off the life-saving humanitarian work of the U.N. because the major powers selfishly maintain a culture of war is to close the door on our best hope to build public policies that are in the best interests of all.
To ignore the compass we hold in our hands in a time of turbulent storm is to concede defeat to the autocrats and cynics who would let the world flounder in misery. With all its limitations, the United Nations has contributed enormously over eight decades to making the world a more human place. The Sustainable Development Goals, even though crippled by the war demands of the military-industrial complex, are raising the standard of life for millions of people.
“We the peoples of the United Nations” need to take the Charter in our own hands. It is our human security the U.N. is trying to protect.
Global Conscience
Despite the wars and suffering of our time, it is indisputable that humanity is acquiring a new view of the wholeness of itself. Our human relationships are growing. Our caring for the planet is under way. The struggle to adopt policies that cross national frontiers is apparent. Inter-governmental cooperation in health and economic matters is starting. This is the stirring of a global conscience.
Many people are calling for a new global ethic to raise the standards of world conduct. My point is that a new ethic is actually being formulated. This new ethic has many fathers, not least Gandhi, Mandela, Gorbachev, King and their myriads of followers who have started groups and associations to develop arms control, economic and social development, environmental protection, and the extension of human rights. These activists take action because they know it is the right thing to do.
How do they know this? Surely not from political speeches. Rather, they know it because their personal conscience, which everyone uses in the daily acts of life, has expanded in a globalized world where our “neighbour” has become not just the person living next door but the impoverished man or woman living half a world away.
Religion certainly plays a role in the development of conscience, or at least the best of religion does, as in the work of the Second Vatican Council and the growing inter-faith movements. But the global conscience of which I speak comes from the assertion of our humanity in rejecting injustice and violence. It is the U.N. Universal Declaration on Human Rights, calling all people to rise above their differences, that shows the beauty and power and effects of a global conscience.
Recognizing that global conscience is a reality, even a phenomenon, of the new age in which the planet has become our common home animates us. This panoramic view of our world, still being developed by knowing and caring people, is the basis of hope. Hope is how we survive.
Douglas Roche was a Senator, Member of Parliament, Canadian Ambassador for Disarmament, and Visiting Professor at the University of Alberta, His latest book is Keep Hope Alive: Essays for a War-free World.
Douglas Roche, Edmonton, AB