Speech by Georges BERTHOIN

For people of my generation, your presence here is an extraordinary encouragement, a source of hope, and I would like to congratulate you for coming. Bravo to all!

When I was twenty years old, World War II was raging: 55 million people died, millions were deported, imprisoned, and turned into roaming refugees, in Europe, in Asia, and in part of Africa. What everyone sees on television today, multiplied by at least one thousand. Everything was destroyed, even, within us, the meaning of the future. At that time, like today, especially since last September, we were asking ourselves fundamental questions regarding the individual as well as collectivities. Was the one side's victory and the other's defeat going to lead us again into a cycle of war and hatred? Would we be able to stop, forever, the curse of history passed on by human memory from generation to generation? As for ourselves, could we believe in the Utopia of the United States of Europe? For centuries, we had been told that the future would be glorious, we were supposed to bear the present situation because tomorrow would be better, and yet the tragedies continued. Old dreams were dead, we had to do something, to free our spirits, to awaken our souls in order to rehabilitate the real meaning of words, to change realities, and to recover what we had lost. Thus, in May 1950, Jean Monnet launched a concrete action. He was approved by a number of statesmen in Luxembourg, in Holland, in Italy, in Germany, and in France. Together, thanks to their determination and skills, they led their respective countries into a creative process, which transformed Europe from a continent doomed to war into a community of united, plural, and responsible peoples. These men were neither cynical, nor naive, nor superficial. They knew that by acting in fact, they could put an end to the unceasing cycle of war and peace that plagued this continent. It was the beginning of a quiet, peaceful revolution, which continues today on a world scale. At the time, the teams that gathered around Jean Monnet surprised the traditional European élite, who considered us with an ironic smile: we served Europe, and did not use it for our interest. Our action was discrete, humble, and efficient, as could only be allowed by a disinterested alliance of men and women of good will. That's how the European Community was born.

First of all, the European Community made it possible to transform the industries that used to feed the war process—coal and steel—into instruments of peace; audacity was nourished by experience. A new pragmatic and natural approach was gradually implemented: a common market and an economic and monetary unity with an extra-national institutional system—unprecedented in human history. This system has never ceased to submit the technical requirements of the transformation of our societies to the principles of democratic legitimacy. All this was accomplished concretely by respecting the dignity and the diversity of each citizen; so, within a few years, ancestral mistrust and old prejudices had disappeared

The real victory of the European Community has been to find an effective way of getting rid of the very concept of "enemies" in the minds of people. In a few days, over 300 million European citizens will have euros in their pockets—a new material and daily symbol of their unity. Then they will discover the advantage and urgency of a European constitution, something we had understood as early as 1953. Its constitutional principles may serve as an example to the increasing number of people who are searching for structures to unite the world. Jean Monnet, who was aware of the far-reaching impact of the change he initiated in the history of our continent, wrote in the last sentence of his memoirs: "The European Community itself is only a stage on the way to the organized world of tomorrow."

As a witness to the success of the European adventure, let me tell you this, in the name of our common faith in the progress of man that has enabled us to be together here today: from the current apparent chaos in the world, you will also—instructed or inspired by this example—give birth to a new universal harmony. 

Speech by Valentina Melnikova

I thank the organizers who have given me the floor. I am representing here a large Russian organization, the union of Soldiers' Mothers Committees of Russia. In the name of hundreds of organizations, in the name of thousands of soldiers' mothers of Russia working in a huge area, from Petrozavodsk in the northwest to Sakhalin in the East, I would like to wish for all the persons present here that they preserve and strengthen a rich and various world, united in tolerance and mutual understanding, in respect for individual rights and for the safety of all, and of every man in particular. 

Since 1989, our organization's activity is to safeguard rights and to maintain peace. We were the first to begin, with about five hundred women, in the Soviet era, when military actions were taking place in Upper Karabakh, when war was raging in Tadzhikistan in 1992. We, women, mothers, whose sons were drafted by force into the army, understood that only our personal efforts could rid the country of the excessive militarization that reigned in the Soviet Union, try to decrease the number of armed conflicts, stop the government's arbitrariness, stop the violation of human rights, and back democracy in the country.

In twelve years, we became the largest women's organization for the defense of human rights. Our organization received international prizes for its defense of human rights. The war in Chechnya, which began in 1994, were the first to upset the soldiers' mothers. We were the first in 1994 to rise against the war in Chechnya. We stated that it was not necessary to fight on one's own land, to kill fellow countrymen. We fought against the violations of human rights, the rights of peaceful populations, and the rights of drafted soldiers. Our soldier sons were sent to Chechnya against their will and they became victims like the population of Chechnya. Young men became invalids, their mental balance was destroyed. 

The soldiers' mothers organization maintained constant working relationships with Chechen civil organizations. Together we have tried to compel the Russian government to stop its military actions and to begin negotiations. The government has to heed our demands. Every day thousands of people go to the soldiers' mothers committees. They are young people, soldiers, and their parents. Very often they come for matters of life and death, the soldiers' mothers try to help all those who come to us for help. 

We have achieved a lot. Thanks to the efforts of the soldiers' mothers, the Parliament of the Russian Federation has been forced to modify the military laws by bringing more democratic principles into the military draft and protecting human rights within the army. 

I have to say that these women obtained, in ten years, that military reform should henceforth be one of the most important points on the government's agenda. All of Russia knows that the soldiers' mothers can truly oppose violations of human rights.

Of course now, after the crimes perpetrated by the terrorists in New York on September 11, a difficult situation has come up. But all together, we must not allow the governments, united in the fight against terrorism, to use it to limit human rights, to limit democracy, to limit or even completely to suppress our rights, the rights of citizens to influence decision making.

We, the soldiers' women, consider that this especially concerns women, who will need a long time to obtain equality with men. In the name of the Soldiers' Mothers Committee, I wish success to our World Assembly. We are persuaded, that the unification of citizens' efforts will bear fruit and our children will live in a world, in which non violence, tolerance, peace, and mutual understanding will reign. 

Thank you.

Speech by Amiral Ramdas and Lalita Ramdas

Greetings from South Asia, a region which might feature in the lowest segment of the Human Development Report, but which is rich in its ancient past and its energetic present and in the wealth of tapestry represented by our peoples and our bewildering diversity, which is indeed our strength. We ask that the few of us who are privileged to be here today remember, each moment, that we speak on behalf of all those voiceless and faceless people who could not be here.

When the organizers did us the honor of inviting us to speak at this plenary, they suggested that we should decide which one of us should speak. This posed us with an interesting and challenging situation. We have tried to resolve this by drawing upon the concept of ardhanariswara, the notion developed in Indian philosophic tradition, that human beings carry within themselves in equal measure the characteristics of male and female, similar to the concept of yin and yang. We hope this joint statement will be a symbol of the collective power and strength of working and creating together as men and women, old or young, in ensuring that we follow a path of inclusion and not exclusion. 

The spirit of togetherness is above all the need of the hour, today, and there’s hundreds of us from around the world gathered here today in search of answers to our common quest. It is surely in the belief that the world is essentially one family. Again, an idea expressed centuries ago in Sanskrit, as vasudeva kutumbakam... The world’s greatest spiritual teachers from all religions have, throughout the ages, propagated that message of love, of tolerance, of respect for each other’s differences, and yet despite their precepts and examples, we continue to witness the struggle for equality, for justice, for sustainability, with cataclysmic events such as the tragedy of September 11th, and the subsequent bombing of thousands of innocents in Afghanistan, often blocking the realization of this goal of a peaceful global order. We, in this Assembly, urgently need to address and identify the root causes of such phenomena, most of which spring from a deep sense of insecurity experienced by human beings. 

The key today lies perhaps in defining the relationship of human security to the commonly accepted notion of global security, as expressed in military terms. We believe that human security constitutes national and international security. So long as inequality and injustice prevail and the gap between the haves and the have-nots continues to widen, international security will always be under threat. In closing, a quick word about the inbuilt contradictions brought about by the technological and information revolution, both of which combine to modify human transactions, through the 24-hour electronic casinos, of transnational transfers of unimaginable sums of money. This results in distorted accumulation of wealth and power in a few hands, while at the same time diminishing the ethical and humanitarian dimension of international and national discourse. Our search during these dialogues must be for enduring ways in which to revive and rekindle the humanity within human beings. 

And perhaps we can do no better than to quote Gandhi, who summed it up best in words that he wrote over half a century ago with respect to democracy, ethics, and needs.  “The world has enough for every man’s need,” he said, “but not for every man’s greed.” And again, in a prophetic statement: “Democracy must in essence mean the art and the science of mobilizing the entire physical, economic, and spiritual resource of all the various sections of the people in the service of the common good of all.”

Can we leave Lille with a call for launching a new Satyagraha, campaign to find the truth through non violence and peace?

And can we leave Lille with our last message, which is that words are as important as song and music. And we would like for all of you, very quickly, to join us in our conviction that yes, we will overcome. Sing in your own language, and all of you from South Asia, sign with us, “hum honge kamiyab.”

Speech by Brigalia Bam

The preparation and the logistics needed for getting us here must have been quite a lot of work. Thank you for getting us here. 

I’ll speak very briefly on behalf of South Africa, but the few things I will say I am sure will apply to other countries of the continent. We are South Africans, and we are that country that is at the very bottom of the continent of Africa. We have become very famous because one individual person, by the name of Nelson Mandela, has made a commitment. And he made that commitment for all of us, not only the commitment for the people of South Africa, to reconcile, to try and live together, but he has also committed that this should happen to the people of the continent of Africa and to people of the world. And I think his concept of reconciliation becomes more and more important as we talk about globalization because all of us have become a small village in the world. In South Africa, we are a nation that is going through transformation, we are a nation that is trying to build its democracy, coming from the real cloud of Apartheid. A cloud that had enforced us to hate one another, a cloud that had divided us, a cloud that made sure that the wealth of South Africa could not be shared by all the people of South Africa. 

And now we talk about reconciliation. How do we begin to live with each other in peace? But we discover, also, that it is important, yes, to tell the truth of what happened in those long years of repression. It is important that people should apologize. But it is more important that there should be justice. And without justice, there is no reconciliation. 

And for us in South Africa, that means we have to share the wealth of that country. Because South Africa is a country that God gave many, many, many gifts to: the mineral resources of our country. We have a beautiful country, a beautiful land. But what is also important in our country is that we see ourselves in some ways, on very many levels, as part of a country that has diversity, that we want to enhance, that it can be a pride to us. As we looked at people who have come up here from many nations of the world, I couldn’t help but think of the many nations that really have formed what is now called South Africa. We are a very diverse group of people that speak twelve languages. There are many, many dialects. We are a people who have cultures that have come from all of you in this room, but we call ourselves a rainbow nation because we have embraced in our thinking a concept of Ubuntu. This concept of Ubuntu is in some ways a little bit difficult to put in other languages. I will not try and put it in Xhosa because none of you will understand. The concept of Ubuntu means the concept of “humanness,”  the being of the person. It is the concept of tolerance and it embraces all those important values in life that are important, that people should begin to discover each other, to respect each other’s dignity. 

We realize that as a country that inherited, unfortunately, the worse form of violation of a person’s dignity, the concept of Ubuntu is the one that will bind us, and we hope that concept of Ubuntu can also bind the people of the world. And I think that it is wise that we are here. We are here because we believe we are one nation of the world, a nation that has to learn to live together since we are part of this global world. 

And my final word, that comes from us as the people of Africa is to say that as people of Africa we want to make an important contribution to the world, a contribution that says that behind all the statistics of poverty, behind the statistics of refugees, behind the statistics of the HIV AIDS, we must always remember that there is a human face behind all those statistics. Thank you. 

Speech by Francisco de Roux

What a pleasure to be able to be with you during these few days. I was asked to present to you the experience that we have lived in Columbia, in a territory called Magdalena Medio, in the center of the country, which is going through a deep social crisis and where 29,000 homicides are committed yearly. 
What I am reporting cannot be considered as an exemplary and replicable model, for we are not sure that we shall achieve our goals. The men and women of this territory, in the midst of war and intimidation, have decided to build a human development, to protect the forests and the animals of the woods, to develop sustainable tropical products, to participate in a form of governance including a regional system of participatory planning. This has entailed a tremendous cost, we have had to bury many people, in this territory, assassinated by violence. We have lost eight comrades; three women—Alma Rosa, Betty and Alicia—and five men. The words I wish to share with you I share in their name, on behalf of my assassinated comrades.
Now, if I were to sum up in three words what we are trying to do, I would make a single statement: We propose dignity.

First, who are "we"?  The family farmers of Magdalena Medio taught us that we had to build a collective "we"; they taught us that we had to build this territory together or else this territory would disappear for everyone. A territory that we will have to build through collective trust, by believing in each other, through our faith, which we had to recover after the terrible events of September 11 evoked by my colleagues who have spoken previously. What should we do after suffering the barbarianism and the violence of those who killed a person like Alma Rosa, who was our comrade and our lawyer? She was assassinated in order to try to break us. They cut off her arms, her legs, and her head, as paramilitary forces usually do in Colombia. We should respond as did the women in Vuaranca Vermija, our comrades of the capital town of Magdalena Medio, when they had to face a massacre in which 36 young persons were killed. They created a slogan : turn fear into love.

"We". But we understand that, for this "we" to be possible, we all have to change, and that's what we have been trying to do over there. And we don't mean a change of governments, a change of international peace bureaucrats. We must change ourselves to open up to differences, to walk together, farmers and workers, business leaders and companies, all together. We would also like to share this approach with all the people in the world who should change, so that "we" may all become possible.
"We propose". We have tried to formulate our approach as a "proposal". This is our proposal. We propose that within twenty years, thanks to our unceasing work, there must be no more violence and extreme poverty in Magdalena Medio. We are not just proposing this, we are going to do it, if other people help us; and if no one helps us, we'll do it anyway, since we have no alternative. Other people have contributed to our effort, we have met with multinational companies, which have learned to hold talks with the guerilla and to search for a new development within a new globality. The World Bank has had to learn that it is the communities who free themselves by risking their lives. The change we want to bring about is in our territories. The United Nations have also learned this fact with us, as well as Europe, which has accepted this territory as the first European peace laboratory in Colombia.
Over there, in the midst of the suffering and fighting, we understood that development is people, people who offer their dreams and implement them, people with their dignity. And we would also like to share this proposal with you.

Last, "dignity". Three months ago, 3,000 family farmers of the Cordillera de San Lucas invited us to a meeting where they had written on their posters: "No to coca, Yes to dignity." They were trying to tell us something we already knew, that the small farmers of our land have produced coca paste because they had no alternative, because they were excluded. They understood that coca has put them at the very heart of the war to finance the arms of the guerilla and of the paramilitary groups, at the heart of the arms market, with all those weapons produced in Europe and in the United States. And they invited us, with their determination, to create a different type of development, generating less money than coca but much more human dignity and grandeur.  You know, we all know, that dignity is born in men and grows in men and women, it is found in men and women who understand that there is an inner force in them. This inner force, which we believers call God, impels us to offer to other people the best we have inside. You know that dignity is an absolute, no one can give dignity to another person; you cannot offer dignity or cultivate it. We have dignity, not because we are French or American or European or doctors or rich. A woman farmer from Magdalena Medio has as much dignity as the catholic Pope in Rome, or a fishworker from any tropical river, as people from the Tropics who are here, has as much dignity as the President of the United States.
With this determination, we wish to join this collective effort.
I do not know if I have been able to convey to you the experience of these men and women who, like Sara, the wife of Eduardo who was assassinated two months ago in the village of San Pablo, maintained with great dignity the family business and reopened the family restaurant because she knew she had to carry on the role of her family, that it was essential for the unity of the village. I don't know if I can explain to you what it means for these men to meet this week with the guerilla and the paramilitaries to tell them that they want to stop producing coca.
But, yes, from the bottom of my heart I would like to tell you how grateful I am to all those who have made this meeting of all of us possible. For we also need to feel, as you all do, that there are millions of us all over the world, trying to build an alternative, that we are going to follow this path together and that we will feel, thanks to this great brotherhood, that we are all going to become "possible" in a different humankind. Thank you.

Speech by Michel Rocard

Our planet hosts six billion human beings.  We are only a few hundred here. Nonetheless, this first World Citizens Assembly is a considerable event, by what it announces.
War is devastating many nations, underdevelopment keeps billions of men on the verge of survival, solidarity is losing ground, inequality is growing swiftly: the present world governance is bad. We need a growing pressure from citizens' movements to bring about a global awareness, a global voice, and thereby a democratic and peaceful world governance.

First we must eradicate war. There is neither development nor solidarity without peace.
My experience, as a European child raised in occupied France during the world war, as a political activist fighting against colonial wars (in particular, the war in Algeria), as a Prime Minister negotiating the end of a civil war in New Caledonia; my experience tells me that it is always easier to choose war than to choose peace.

This may seem surprising, as there is no place in the world where we can seriously say that the use of arms has improved the situation. Nowhere.

And yet, when a conflict breaks out, whether it is social, commercial, territorial, linguistic, ethnic, or religious, the first, the easiest, the most communicative attitudes are always: to refuse to negotiate,  to show your strength, to proclaim that you will fight to the end. But what does fighting to the end mean other than generalized violence? That's how you create communicative enthusiasm where people keep warm together. In violent situations, you know where the good side is: it's the one you are on. You know where the bad side is: it's the other one. War is only difficult physically. But intellectually, it's easy. To choose peace is always more difficult.

So it is wisdom that the world must learn, for the wise man knows that violence does not solve anything. Thus he can only want peace.

But to want peace, you have to recognize the other person as your equal, whatever his faith, his language, whatever the color of his skin.

To negotiate peace you have to know the other person, his history, his culture, his suffering, his symbols, his aspirations, to share equitably the sacrifices which are necessary for peace, because peace always requires that each side sacrifice certain interests or symbols. 

And to establish peace firmly, you need to live together, work together, and love each other.

My Friends, almost all nations have schools where they teach war. But I know few schools of peace. Perhaps this Assembly could vow to contribute to the creation of such a school: for, indeed, to discover the other person, to work together, to accept other values and cultures, you must learn the art of negotiation, of mediation, you must learn to rebuild, to reconcile; and these are techniques.

In  my country, when King Henri IV, four hundred years ago, negotiated the end of the religious wars, he reformed justice to ensure that trials between the two communities would be fair. When the genocide ended in Rwanda, the first initiative taken by a courageous NGO, supported by the United Nations, was to create a radio to promote mutual cooperation. This radio broadcast reconciliation dialogues among the people. At the end of the second world war, France and Germany set up commissions with historians in charge of writing together their past conflictive history. In South Africa and in Cambodia, when everyone was so tired of violence that peace was settled, constitutions were written to process conflicts. When, eventually, the peace process between Israel and Palestine is resumed, for it will be resumed some day, everybody knows that the first step will be to set up a shared and common management of water resources.

Your Assembly could also declare that today in Rwanda, in Cambodia, in Serbia, in Bosnia, in Northern Ireland, tomorrow in Sri Lanka, in India and Pakistan, in the Middle East, and in many other areas, we should plan how both sides can write schoolbooks together so that the children of these countries do not learn hatred when they discover history.

However, Citizens of the World, never forget that, when a conflict begins, when tensions grow, the peace-seeker always appears at first as a traitor to his people and a traitor to his cause. You must recognize and assert the nobleness of compromise. Peace demands even more courage than war.

On the contrary, when trust prevails among peoples, and first between their leaders, everything becomes possible. Frederick de Klerk and Nelson Mandela in South Africa, John Hume in Northern Ireland, King Sihanouk in Cambodia, showed that this is true. Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres, and Yasser Arafat began the same process in the Middle East. Our main challenges require, above all, trust. To prevent a catastrophic climate change provoked by humans, the Community of Nations is currently working on the basis of a call signed in The Hague in 1989. Twenty-four Heads of States or of Governments signed this call, without waiting for the agreement of their bureaucracies (since they would not have obtained it), and they signed it because they trusted each other.

My friends, our main task is to act in such a way that, in each of our countries, our leaders will be, everywhere, men of peace.

Speech by Kimon Valaskakis

Ladies and Gentlemen: It’s a pleasure to be with you. I am a Canadian of Greek descent, I’ve been a professor of economics, a strategic planner, and more recently, Canada’s Ambassador to the OECD. I’ve learnt, at the OECD, a message that I’m going to give to you, and which is the basis of the new initiative that I’m leading, which is called the Club of Athens. The message that I want to give to you is that we must civilize globalization or face chaos. And this message comes in three parts. 

The first part, Ladies and Gentlemen, is that globalization is something that, whether we like it or not, is with us. It is a form of global integration and, as one author has put it, “we are becoming one world, whether we are ready or not.”  The planet is becoming much smaller, and I think the example of this meeting of citizens from the world is an example of globalization in the more positive sense of the term. So globalization is here to stay and isolationism in any form, whether it’s the isolationism of the right or whether it’s the isolationism of the left, is, to my view, impossible because, among other things, we have mounting global interdependence, so that events that take place in one part of the globe will immediately have impacts on the other. We are one planet, we are one world, and we have to face it. This is point number one. 

Point number two, Ladies and Gentlemen, is that the present form of globalization is completely unsatisfactory, because although the integration of markets, the integration of the world has generated a considerable amount of wealth, this wealth has not been distributed in a proper way. Of the six billion people in the world today, probably not more than one and a half to two billion, in even the most extreme and generous way have benefited from globalization. So we have inequality, we have asymmetrical shocks, we have a situation where everybody is not invited to the table, and that obviously has to change. 

The other thing that has happened as a result of the kind of globalization we have, is that the world without borders that has been created by economic integration, has also become a world without rules, without law, without any kind of governance. Hence, Ladies and Gentlemen, the third point, which is the initiative that I’m leading and which is completely converging with this conference, is to put together a new form of globalization, a much better form of globalization.

As a good Canadian, Ladies and Gentlemen, I have to speak in both official languages, so I’ll give the final part of my speech in French, so switch your machines if necessary. 

(What follows is a translation from French)

Dear Friends, globalization must be civilized and the initiative that I have the honor to be steering in collaboration with about forty colleges, goes in the direction of proposing the establishment of much more balanced globalization.

The present globalization is technological and economic. We must add to it a social globalization, but also and above all a political globalization; and when I say "political," I am referring to the noble sense of the term, rooted in the Greek word "polis," referring to the 5th-century-B.C. idea of Athenian democracy, and political globalization is a much more democratic governance.

My compatriot, the late Machenacloon, the great Canadian sociologist, had said that we were moving toward a "global village." I would prefer to propose to you, Dear Friends, the image of a world city, a global city if you wish, a Global Athens, which would be more ethical, more democratic, more congenial, where prosperity could be distributed among all, and governance, this governance, that is, the organizational aspect of the city, will be both much more efficient and much more legitimate.

If we look at the present international organizations, including, I think, the United Nations, they have flaws: some are not efficient and some are not legitimate. So there are efficiency and legitimacy issues, and reform of international organizations, reform of intergovernmental organizations, is one of the tasks that we are going to address and for which we are going to propose solutions.

So I would like to end, Dear Friends, by congratulating the organizers of this symposium for having taken the first step toward this global democracy by gathering this Citizens Assembly. Thank you, and I hope that during this week in which we shall be working together, we shall move this cause forward in the right direction. Thank you.

Speech by Edgar MORIN

Dear Friends, I am four times twenty, which means I'm much younger than my friend Stéphane Hessel, here with us today. 

When I was twenty years old, France was occupied by an army that had invaded the country. I joined the Resistance movement, which did not only involve a personal risk, but also a historical risk: our future destiny was not clear, this was before the great Battle of Stalingrad and the landing of the Allies en North Africa. This is to say that to resist means to resist within uncertainty and danger. When you're a resistant, you are not only opposed to an enemy. The values you are fighting for take on their full meaning and strength. Thus, wherever people enjoy freedom of expression, freedom to criticize, freedom becomes as common as the air you breathe—it's like bread, you forget how valuable it is. When you are deprived of freedom, freedom becomes luminous, demanding, and vital. In other words, to resist is always a positive attitude.

After the end of the war, I saw that the hopes of seeing the Soviet Union loosen up were vain. I resisted Stalinist communism and the implosion of the Soviet Union was for me the end of a great lie and of a grand illusion. I thought there was no longer any need to resist. But we still had to resist and in new ways. We had to resist a new upsurge of barbarian behavior coming from the timeless origins of history: destruction, slaughter, contempt, and torture. Not only did we have to resist these abominations, but we also had to resist a form of barbarianism that has developed in our own so called "economically developed" civilization—which, alas, is psychologically and ethically underdeveloped. We must resist a vision of the world based on selfish motives, technology, and profit. We must struggle against the alliance of these two barbarian trends. And particularly against a mental barbarianism that ignores that the recently decolonized world is still suffering from the consequences of colonization and suffers a terrible inequality that you can measure in dollars, but also in human pain, in numbers of physically disabled people, in infectious diseases, in AIDS patients, in humiliation. 

We should indeed resist a certain form of globalization, yes! But in the name of universal global values, we must fight for a different globalization. And further yet, I believe that what has happened these past twelve years, is the emergence of a world society, or its will to emerge but its failure to be born. For there to be a society, there has to be a territory. The territory is there, it's the planet. We need communication networks. We have the most immediate, most diversified communication networks that any society has ever had. We need an economy and we have one: the global economy. Unfortunately, not only does it have no regulations, no control, it does not even have any guidance. A society has law, but we have no more than just embryonic law. In a society, there are bodies to protect the life of a society—and the U.N. is extremely weak. To prevent ourselves from the threat weighing on the biosphere, the meetings that have been held, such as Kyoto recently, have not acquired decision-making power. We are lacking, for a world society, law and institutions, but even more so, we are lacking the awareness of a common destiny without which a society cannot live. And yet we have a common destiny. We are all facing the same threats—nuclear, bacteriological, ecological. We all even have the same fundamental problems, which consist in regulating and guiding the economy. But this awareness is not yet manifest. We need an awareness of solidarity, but it only comes to us in brief flashes, only occasionally. And in a way, the word "patrie" ("fatherland") tells us the meaning of a community. The word "patrie" begins paternal, with a "pa" and ends up feminine and maternal when we say "mère Patrie" ("motherland"). In fact, we are the children of this Earth, despite and above, and including all of our legitimate fatherlands. We are lacking the awareness of our "terre-patrie" ("Earth-land").

So, dear Friends of this planet, rich with thousands of cultures, we are gathered here in fact to contribute through our efforts and our determination to the emergence of a world society with a human face, to make the Earth-land a reality.