By Ricardo Lagos, President of Chile. April 24, 2003. Source: El País

Fifteen centuries ago, Imru’al-Qays, probably the most famous poet in Arabic, asked himself the following question: what is left to be believed when the trail has been lost? The times we are living in appear to raise the same question. Where is the road, and how can we find it again?

The crisis in recent weeks has taught everyone lessons. The first one is that the 15 members — five permanent and 10 elected — on the UN Security Council were unable to reach an agreement to avoid a conflict. We must all assume a share of the responsibility for this failure, because the consequences of it are damaging. But at the same time, we must all be clear about the reasons for the effort made by those of us who were convinced that we still had room before the resort to arms.

Historians have always judged the results of war by the success of the peace that follows. What peace are we going to build now? How can we ensure that it is solid and lasting?

The international stage offers more than enough reasons for unease. Today we can see that terrorism is an international force; that thousands of millions of people live in daily hunger; that the role of multilateral organizations is unknown; that we are unable to reach agreement within the UN Security Council to prevent conflict; that the protectionism of the few is blocking the liberalization of world trade; that dictatorial regimes continue to violate the human rights of entire populations; and that intolerance is creating conflicts within our own societies, within our own cultures.

Faced with adversity, however, humanity is wiser, and clears the way to routes whose features are sometimes unknown. The most important thing is to have a clear sense of our search. If we look back to the 20th century, that short century of which Eric Hobsbawn has spoken, running from the outbreak of World War I in 1914 to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, we can see it as an era of catastrophes, genocides and conflicts. But at the same time, a history was constructed in which humanity began to create institutions that opened the way to a multilateral, global world.

If we accept the positive inheritance of the 20th century and the bases that were laid to create new forms of international coexistence, the United Nations must play a predominant role in the process of reconstructing Iraq. The Iraqi people must decide its political future, and use and control its natural resources. As one European statesman has recently said, it is crucial that we work with the diplomatic implications of recent events so that the future is peaceful, and the peace can last.

Amid the uncertainties, we must push for a global integration that is in people’s interests, for a plan of world political life in which the human being stands at the center. The modernization of politics will be such so long as within both the internal dimensions of countries as in the strategies of foreign policy, the governing principle of the living conditions of men and women in different parts of the planet is adopted and applied.

If we are to capture the best of the 20th century, there are concrete tasks that we must confront. The Charter of the United Nations belongs to the world and the political reality of 1945, a world that had emerged from a global conflict. How can we update this charter, and how do we make it suit the demands of a different world, with different social and political realities? This is not just a question of giving governments a presence in the multilateral system, but also of including non-governmental organizations representing civil society.

How should we go about dealing with the issue of an international economic, financial and commercial architecture that is absolutely distinct to the one associated with the institutions created by the Bretton Woods accords. The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund emerged from those, with the aim of resolving the issues and debates of 1944, but nowadays the issues are wider than merely deciding what to do with currency exchange rates and trade flows. We face a reality in which a simple touch on a computer keyboard can move billion or trillions of dollars in financial flows from one part of the world to another.

Are we in the right conditions to take on these questions, or will we have a world without rules? Globalization without rules could without doubt be globalization dominated by the strongest.

People hope to live, in Iraq or elsewhere, with more social protection, and with more certainty about their work, health, education and access to living accommodation, through supportive, efficient and com-prehensive systems. Those are the tasks for the start of the 21st century, at a time when the market seems to be the great dynamic force of economies and social interactions, even though we also must be clear about the limits of the market, since this is the natural space for consumer, yet not the natural space for citizens. Consumers are worth only the size of their resources; citizens are worth the votes they make.

We made great progress in the 20th century because we learnt, as Norberto Bobbio has said, that heads are counted and not chopped. New politically maturity shows us that we must now combine democracy with social cohesion. Societies in which imbalances and lack of opportunities become constants are societies that risk strong convulsions, above and beyond the democratic practices that are carried out from time to time.

Iraq is the starting point, a place in which crisis can be transformed into opportunity. Globalization will be efficient is it is able to continue the march toward fairer, more open, more democratic and more tolerant societies. Now the challenge is to build a multilateral logic that suits the 21st century, in which people are equal in dignity and in their rights.