"In Larger Freedom": Decision Time at the UN

Kofi Annan

From Foreign Affairs, May/June 2005

Summary:  Dealing with today's threats requires broad, deep, and sustained global cooperation. Thus the states of the world must create a collective security system to prevent terrorism, strengthen nonproliferation, and bring peace to war-torn areas, while also promoting human rights, democracy, and development. And the UN must go through its most radical overhaul yet.

Kofi Annan is Secretary-General of the United Nations.

OUR SHARED VULNERABILITY

Ask a New York investment banker who walks past Ground Zero every day on her way to work what today's biggest threat is. Then ask an illiterate 12-year-old orphan in Malawi who lost his parents to AIDS. You will get two very different answers. Invite an Indonesian fisherman mourning the loss of his entire family and the destruction of his village from the recent, devastating tsunami to tell you what he fears most. Then ask a villager in Darfur, stalked by murderous militias and fearful of bombing raids. Their answers, too, are likely to diverge.

Different perceptions of what is a threat are often the biggest obstacles to international cooperation. But I believe that in the twenty-first century they should not be allowed to lead the world's governments to pursue very different priorities or to work at cross-purposes. Today's threats are deeply interconnected, and they feed off of one another. The misery of people caught in unresolved civil conflicts or of populations mired in extreme poverty, for example, may increase their attraction to terrorism. The mass rape of women that occurs too often in today's conflicts makes the spread of HIV and AIDS all the more likely.

In fact, all of us are vulnerable to what we think of as dangers that threaten only other people. Millions more of sub-Saharan Africa's inhabitants would plunge below the poverty line if a nuclear terrorist attack against a financial center in the United States caused a massive downturn in the global economy. By the same token, millions of Americans could quickly become infected if, naturally or through malicious intent, a new disease were to break out in a country with poor health care and be carried across the world by unwitting air travelers before it was identified.

No nation can defend itself against these threats entirely on its own. Dealing with today's challenges -- from ensuring that deadly weapons do not fall into dangerous hands to combating global climate change, from preventing the trafficking of sex slaves by organized criminal gangs to holding war criminals to account before competent courts -- requires broad, deep, and sustained global cooperation. States working together can achieve things that are beyond what even the most powerful state can accomplish by itself.

Those who drew up the charter of the United Nations in 1945 saw these realities very clearly. In the aftermath of World War II, which claimed the lives of 50 million people, they established at the San Francisco conference in 1945 an organization (in the words of the charter) to "save succeeding generations from the scourge of war." Their purpose was not to usurp the role of sovereign states but to enable states to serve their peoples better by working together. The UN's founders knew that this enterprise could not be narrowly conceived because security, development, and human rights are inextricably linked. Thus they endowed the new world organization with broad ambitions: to ensure respect for fundamental human rights, to establish conditions under which justice and the rule of law can be maintained, and, as the charter says, "to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom."

When the UN Charter speaks of "larger freedom," it includes the basic political freedoms to which all human beings are entitled. But it also goes beyond them, encompassing what President Franklin Roosevelt called "freedom from want" and "freedom from fear." Both our security and our principles have long demanded that we push forward all these frontiers of freedom, conscious that progress on one depends on and reinforces progress on the others. In the last 60 years, rapid technological advances, increasing economic interdependence, globalization, and dramatic geopolitical change have made this imperative only more urgent. And since the attacks of September 11, 2001, people everywhere have come to realize this. A new insecurity has entered every mind, regardless of wealth or status. More clearly than ever before, we understand that our safety, our prosperity -- indeed, our freedom -- is indivisible.

A NEW SAN FRANCISCO MOMENT

Yet precisely when these challenges have become so stark, and when collective action has become so plainly required, we see deep discord among states. Such dissonance discredits our global institutions. It allows the gap between the haves and the have-nots, the strong and the weak, to grow. It sows the seeds of a backlash against the very principles that the UN was set up to advance. And by inviting states to pursue their own solutions, it calls into question some of the fundamental principles that have, however imperfectly, buttressed the international order since 1945.