Global Cultural Diversity Conference Proceedings, Sydney
Opening address
The Hon. P. J. Keating MP
Prime Minister of Australia
Your excellency, Dr Boutros Boutros-Ghali, distinguished speakers, ladies and gentlemen. It is my pleasure to welcome you to Australia, to Sydney and the 1995 Global Cultural Diversity Conference.
On behalf of Bob Carr, the Premier of New South Wales, and Sir James Gobbo, Chairman of the Australian Multicultural Foundation, who are co-hosting this conference with the Australian Government, we welcome your participation in discussions of great importance and we hope, in time, of great consequence.
We are very privileged to have with us so many eminent speakers from all over the world. I thank you most sincerely for coming.
Mr Secretary-General, it is a particular pleasure and an honour to welcome you on your first visit to Australia, especially in this year in which we are commemorating the 50th anniversary of the founding of the United Nations. 1995 has also been designated as the International Year for Tolerance and the first Decade for the World's Indigenous People.
We are also pleased to welcome Dr Federico Mayor, Director-General of UNESCO, which celebrates its 50th anniversary in 1995 as well, and the Deputy President of South Africa, Mr Thabo Mbeki.
The conference has brought together knowledgeable and concerned individuals to consider the ways by which we might make cultural diversity less of an impediment to human progress and more of a means to it. Less of a source of conflict, and more of a means by which the benefits of tolerance can be learned or re-learned. Less of a violent and destructive force, less of a vehicle for xenophobia and prejudice, and more of a means to creating a more peaceful, creative and secure post-Cold War world.
In short we see it as a contribution to the effort to make the 21st century a better one than this. This conference was conceived as a means of marking all these milestones. And, I might say, Australia is an appropriate place to mark them. We are a country looking forward to the next century. We believe we have a constructive role to play in those issues which concern the United Nations. We have always believed that we were present and active at its inception in San Francisco but we have never believed it more than now. And we are nothing if not culturally diverse more than 220 nationalities are represented in our population. Forty two per cent of our people were born overseas or have one parent born overseas.
Australian society is rich in linguistic, racial, religious and cultural diversity. We have consciously devised policies to encourage and preserve this diversity and gain in return benefits to the nation and community. We count the creation of this rich, pluralistic and peaceful society we think one of the most successful multicultural societies in the world as one of our great national achievements. That is why I say that Sydney is an appropriate environment for this Global Cultural Diversity Conference.
Not because we presume to think that Australia can be a model for the rest of the world; the world is itself too diverse for that. But we have learned some useful things about living together, we have a deep interest in these questions and we think we can make a contribution in a world which desperately needs answers to them.
Fifty years ago in San Francisco, a group of delegates, including Dr H. V. Evatt from Australia, met to design the United Nations. They hoped that the institution they were creating would ensure that the wars which had already ravaged the world twice in just thirty years would never be repeated. They wanted to construct a framework for a world in which international stability was based on common values of justice, development and peace. But in 1945 the lessons of the failed League of Nations were still fresh in everyone's minds and the consequences of that failure appallingly real. So there was a strong streak of realism as well as idealism in the blueprint the delegates drew up in San Francisco. They knew the United Nations needed to take into account the realities of global power. And they understood the importance of the nation-state.
The role of the nation-state was already cemented at the centre of international affairs, and its importance was to grow even larger as the great process of decolonisation got under way. Not surprisingly, therefore, the framework the architects of the United Nations developed had at its core the need to settle, or at least contain, conflicts between nation-states.
In the event, as we know, the post-war reality fell short of the high hopes of San Francisco. The emergence of the Cold War and a bipolar international system imposed a very different dynamic on United Nations operations. Still, despite the complications and set-backs of the following half century, the United Nations managed to notch up substantial achievements. Not enough of them, no doubt, but many more than some of its critics allow.
But fifty years on, the Cold War is over and there has never been a better time to ask ourselves if the United Nations we now have is what we now need. And what we will need in the 21st century. Given the scale of change in the world since the organisation was formed, it would be astonishing if the answer was yes.
Many distinguished figures, not least yourself, Secretary-General, have been engaged in just this task of renewal. Australia, through Gareth Evans especially, has been playing a role in this debate, as we did in San Francisco half a century ago.
I do not want to explore these important structural questions this morning. There are many other forums at which that will be done. But I do want to draw the link between what we are talking about at this conference and these wider United Nations issues. Because cultural diversity, which we in Australia value as a source of strength and pride, has an external dimension, too. And the manifestations of cultural diversity we see on the television news more often seem to take the form of tragic and intractable conflicts. We have been reminded horribly of this by the suffering we have seen just this week in Rwanda.
I want to pay tribute here to the role of the Australian peacekeepers in UNAMIR, who were instrumental in providing medical assistance to the victims of the terrible massacre at Kibeho. They have shown the finest traditions of the Australian Defence Force, and richly deserve the Anzac Peace Prize they have been awarded.
Ironically, the end of the Cold War which was otherwise so welcome made possible many of these new outbreaks of conflict around the world by releasing the political iron bonds which had contained them.
So, in the former Yugoslavia, in the former Soviet Union, in Burundi, in Somalia, we see tragedies unfold large-scale horror and appalling inhumanity, stemming from ingrained, small-scale hatreds. And these conflicts are shaping the international system, and challenging the United Nations, just as profoundly as traditional disputes between states have done. They are the reflection of a world in which very often the nation and the state are no longer the same thing.
The nation-state, as it existed when the United Nations was founded, is going through a period of profound transition, and the international community has to respond. We see this most obviously in the economic area, where the global market place is already a reality.
The engagement of the developing world in the international economy is one of the most far-reaching and beneficial developments of our age but, as Australians know, it is part of a process which challenges our former ideas of economic sovereignty.
Similarly, responses to the degradation of the environment cannot possibly come from one country alone, because both the causes and the effects are transnational. And the information revolution poses huge problems for laws of national copyright, and makes the national regulation of what our citizens see and hear almost impossible.
In short, one of the mantras of modern international relations non-interference in the internal affairs of other countries these days has a greatly modified and much reduced meaning.
In this very different world, how should the international community respond to the ethnic and communal conflicts which so mar international peace, and properly disturb our consciences? I do not mean by this How should we go about the important tasks of peacekeeping and peacemaking, or the immediate human responses of providing food, shelter and medicine to those who are suffering? Those, again, are issues which require separate consideration.
Instead, at a different level, I think that responses lie, in some cases, in redefining our idea of the state. In other cases, we need to rethink our view of the nation. Sometimes, the best response to intractable tensions may be the old fashioned remedy of redefining the borders of the state. That is what happened, peacefully, when the Czech Republic and Slovakia split, and it is the answer that many of the component parts of the former Soviet Union found. Part of the answer may lie in a radical redefinition of what constitutes a state.
In Europe, the very homeland of the nation-state, and the source of much of the national conflict which has so scarred our century, the European Union is dramatically changing our ideas about what a state is, and how sovereignty is distributed. And after 1997, when Hong Kong reverts to China's control, China will comprise one state but with two distinct economic systems.
A third response, and one I think that is important, is to build up the role of regional institutions and identities. Because the gap between individual states and multilateral organisations like the United Nations can sometimes be too great for quick and effective responses to humanitarian or security problems. And the cultural and historical background necessary to resolve problems will often lie more readily in the local region.
In addition, an important factor in democracies like Australia is that our people will often more readily support commitments in our own region Cambodia, for example than outside it, because they can understand more easily how events there can affect them.
When the government of Papua New Guinea was searching for a solution to the problems it faced on the island of Bougainville, for example, it found the idea of a regional peacekeeping force useful. Similarly, the United Nations operation in Haiti had a large regional element.
And I think the problem of conflicting claims in the South China Sea a key security question in Asia is probably more amenable to a regional than an international settlement.
The greatest contribution of regional organisations, however, has so far been seen in economic frameworks like the European Union, NAFTA and in this part of the world APEC. APEC brings together eighteen very different economies and cultures united in the common purpose of sustaining prosperity and growth in the Asia Pacific. It is a practical example of what used to be called North-South cooperation. And I have no doubt that here, as in Europe, the act of working together on practical economic issues will have beneficial political and security consequences as well.
So regionalism is central to the broader United Nations efforts to promote peace and prosperity not an alternative, but an addition.
Finally, however, the answer to what we can do about troubling humanitarian and security problems may lie not so much in rethinking the state, as in redefining the nation.
The challenge in many cases is how we can create societies rich in cultural, racial and religious diversity but do so in ways which encourage rather than compromise a sense of national identity. It is too glib to say that the answer lies simply in better understanding. The problems in the Balkans or in central Africa do not stem from a lack of familiarity with the culture of the antagonists.
This means that the redefinition of the nation is a complex task. It involves economic and social development, justice, human rights, good governance, inclusive institution building, tolerance, respect for difference, the strengthening of civil society. So it is not an easy job or a quick one. And I do not pretend that the Australian experience is readily transferable to other parts of the world.
Next: Global Cultural Diversity Conference proceedings - opening address 2
Previous: Global Cultural Diversity Conference proceedings - introduction