ウィスパリング同時通訳研究会コミュの2021 SIPRI Lecture by HE Dr Madeleine Albright

SIPRI Lecture
Monday, May 24, 2021
Your majesty, Prime Minister Löfven, Foreign Minister Linde, distinguished
guests, ladies and gentlemen joining us virtually: I am so pleased to be able deliver
the 2021 SIPRI lecture and want to thank my dear friend Ambassador Jan Eliasson
for arranging this honor.
I also want to commend Ambassador Eliasson on his lifelong commitment to
international cooperation and peace, a cause he continues to advance through his
chairmanship of SIPRI’s governing board.
I regret that I cannot travel to Stockholm to deliver this speech in person and be
with so many of my good friends who I know are watching today.
I consider Sweden to be a country that has always met the very highest standard of
global citizenship – in support of peace, in defense of law, on behalf of human
development, in service to the environment, and in respect for human rights.
We see the difference Sweden is making today through its chairpersonship of the
OSCE, its many contributions to the European Union, its work to revitalize the
United Nations, its engagement in the Arctic Council, and its efforts on behalf of
women, peace, security and democracy.
It is no accident that Sweden has given the world so many accomplished
diplomats, many of whom I have worked with personally.
I am privileged to count both Jan Eliasson and Margot Wallström as members of a
group of former foreign ministers which I founded in 2003. The group, which
remains quite active, is officially known as the Aspen Ministers Forum. But its
unofficial name is Madeleine and her exes.
The past year has been one of testing for Sweden, the United States and the world.
But I think I speak for all of us in hoping that we are on a path to recovery and that
we will soon return not simply to normalcy but to a renewed sense of optimism and
justice worldwide.
In that spirit, the title of my speech today is “Democracy in a Post-Covid World.”
I would begin by observing that even though we are far from defeating this virus,
we are already living in a world transformed by the pandemic and its aftershocks.
2
Twice before in my lifetime, the world has experienced periods of transition
similar to what we are seeing today.
The first, when I was a child, occurred after World War II when world leaders
strove to establish regional and global mechanisms to spur development, prevent
war, promote health, regulate trade, and prosecute crimes against humanity.
The institutions they created helped us resolve dangerous conflicts and make
unprecedented gains in, among other missions, alleviating poverty, expanding
literacy, and containing the ravages of communicable diseases.
The next transition got underway when the Cold War ended and the Soviet Union
disappeared.
During my years in government, a reinvigorated Trans-Atlantic partnership came
together to shape a new world.
Our goal was to bring even more nations together based on core principles of
democracy and free enterprise, human rights and the rule of law.
To that end, we took bold strides toward the creation of a Europe whole and free,
and forged partnerships with Russia and Ukraine.
We worked to strengthen our NATO alliance by expanding partnerships, adding
new members and accepting new and broader responsibilities.
In the Balkans, NATO and its partners were twice tested and twice successful, first
ending the war in Bosnia, then acting to halt ethnic cleansing in Kosovo.
Together, Europe and America developed a common agenda to strengthen the
international system through the pursuit of Middle East peace, nonproliferation,
debt relief and creation of the WTO.
Working through the UN, we authorized scores of international peacekeeping
missions to help resolve conflicts that had become unfrozen in the aftermath of the
Cold War.
We laid the groundwork for advances in international law through the Kyoto
Protocol, the establishment of war crimes tribunals and negotiations to establish an
International Criminal Court.
And in Warsaw, in 2000, we convened the first-ever conference of the Community
of Democracies.
3
When I left office twenty years ago, I was not naïve about the uncertain state of
global affairs. But I was confident that the world would continue to move toward a
stronger and more cooperative international system.
It now appears I may have been too upbeat.
Because, in the short history of this century, we have seen a multiplication of
international divisions and the rise of new threats to security and prosperity – from
terrorism and cyber-attacks to climate change and pandemics.
The risk of conflict between the world’s major powers has returned.
The Middle East remains a viper’s nest, with the horrific violence in Israel, the
West Bank, and Gaza only underscoring why many of us see no alternative to a
two-state solution.
And more than thirty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the historic rivalry
between democracy and autocracy has been renewed.
The question I have been thinking about is: what went wrong?
There are a variety of answers, but the most basic explanation I can give is that in
recent decades, people have been assaulted by forces seemingly beyond their
control.
These forces include the impact of technology and globalization, the movement of
immigrants and refugees, the rise of social media, and now the dislocation and
suffering caused by the virus and, increasingly, by climate change.
Many people have no trouble adapting to these changes, but others are uneasy and
yearn to go back in time, whether for economic reasons, or to preserve cultural
identity, or to safeguard what they perceive as traditional values.
All this has fueled the unwelcome rise of hyper-nationalism, which has in turn
caused many heads of government to abandon the idea of global cooperation and
instead insist on going it alone.
They argue that interdependence is but an illusion, a theory cooked up by foreign
policy think tanks to undermine national sovereignty and cause citizens to betray
their own countries and identities.
A former U.S. president even declared that people everywhere must choose
between globalism and patriotism.
4
The thesis is baloney but some politicians still find it appetizing – because there is
no easier way to earn cheers from a crowd than to tell the angry what they want to
hear.
So rather than explain the world’s complexities, they insist that everything is
simple, and that greatness can be found by boasting about ourselves and ignoring
the rights of others.
Many of these leaders pretend to be democrats, but they are really autocrats eager
to stretch their time in power by rigging elections, weakening parliaments,
smearing minority groups, trashing journalists, and inciting extremist backers to
violence.
They are so busy trying to silence opposition at home that they have little interest
in joining with others to address wider problems.
Instead, they do all they can to weaken multilateral institutions and to foster the
idea that might makes right.
Whether their words are in Chinese, Russian, Arabic, Farsi, Hebrew, Hungarian,
English, Spanish, Turkish, Urdu or Burmese the meaning is the same: the rule of
law is for suckers; the world we want has no rules at all.
The consequences are both painful and plain.
In many places, democracy is in decline, diplomacy is considered obsolete, and
military spending is through the roof – as SIPRI has documented so methodically.
Slowly but surely, we have begun to lose faith in the ability of free people to make
progress together.
This is not the first time such a cynical attitude has taken hold.
It was also the case in the 1930s, the decade I was born.
Back then, hyper-nationalism enjoyed its golden age as the League of Nations fell
apart, Japan invaded Manchuria, Italy overran Ethiopia, and Germany annexed
Austria, attacked Czechoslovakia, and joined the Soviet Union in carving up
Poland.
The ensuing slaughter continued until 1945, when World War II ended, and the
horrors of the Holocaust were finally and fully exposed.
We must not let that happen again.
5
Fortunately, there is an alternative. If there is a silver lining to the very dark cloud
that the coronavirus pandemic has cast, it has reminded us that the interdependence
of people is not a fiction. What happens to any of us can affect all of us.
It has also revealed the folly of the authoritarian mindset, for it is not a coincidence
that the pandemic started in a country where the government suppresses
information and prevents its officials from speaking the truth.
So with the lessons of the pandemic fresh on our minds, we need to return to the
planet known as reality.
We need to recognize that there is scarcely a peril we face that cannot be eased
through effective joint action involving the world’s democracies and countries
willing to partner with them.
To thrive in this new era, we will need to defend freedom and build bridges among
nations. The question is how best to do that. Here I would stress three points.
First, the United States and Europe must lead. Many countries can and do help, but
no other group of nations has both the historic identification with liberty and the
geographic reach to inspire and strengthen democratic institutions in every region.
If the United States and the Europe are not out front, others will take our place:
either despots who rule with an iron fist or extremists who acknowledge no rules at
all.
This would leave the world with a choice between repression and chaos; we owe
our children a better alternative than that.
That means we must defend essential freedoms and assist one another in delivering
on the social contract.
We must honor our commitment to friends and partners in places such as
Afghanistan, where the gains made by women and girls are under threat.
We must act together boldly to achieve a lasting victory over the pandemic and
make new investments in global health, recognizing that so long as anyone is
threatened by the virus, everyone is at risk.
We must work together to prevent environmental catastrophe, for mother nature is
demanding a bolder approach to climate change.