Douglass Cassel:

¶ 1         I now have the honor of introducing our keynote speaker. Before I do, however, I would like to note that we have been joined by Ambassador Rich Williamson, who is the United States Ambassador to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights and Former Deputy Permanent Representative to the United Nations, among many other posts.

¶ 2         This is, as I mentioned before, the Fourth Transatlantic Dialogue organized by the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium, one of the finest and oldest universities in Europe, and by Northwestern University School of Law. It has been a personal pleasure for me over these last four years to work together with two of our colleagues from Leuven who are here with us today and will be speaking later on, Professor Jan Wouters and Professor Paul Lemmens, both from the law faculty at Leuven. They have been instrumental in putting together and participating in all of these transatlantic dialogues.

¶ 3         From the beginning, the idea has been that the multiple perspectives on the European side of the Atlantic and the multiple perspectives on this side of the Atlantic - not only from north to south, Canada, the US and Mexico, but also within the US - would all benefit from a dialogue that would include voices and points of view that are not often heard from across the Atlantic as a way of enriching the public debate.

¶ 4         We do not expect to come up with unified policy descriptions from these dialogues, but we do hope to come up with better understanding, from our diverse points of view, on issues of great public importance.

¶ 5         Today, as Consul General Seaton and the other consuls have just remarked, few issues on the public agenda are of greater importance than the question of the United Nations and what ought to be its role in the world and in the use of force.

¶ 6         We have diverse points of view that will be heard during the course of this conference ranging from Ambassador Bill Luers, who is the President of the United Nations Association of the United States - obviously a very strong supporter of the United Nations - to one of our speakers, Joshua Muravchik, whose most recent article on the United Nations is entitled The Case Against The United Nations.

¶ 7         And that is exactly the kind of dialogue that we look forward to having on these important issues.

¶ 8         I would like to suggest for us three issues that I think will be coming up time and again during this conference.

¶ 9         One is: In a world where there is such a disproportionate imbalance of power, where one country has so much military, economic and diplomatic power as the United States has, to what extent is it really feasible to expect a global multilateral organization to exercise as much power as the Charter of the United Nations purports to confer on the UN?

¶ 10         From the point of view of Americans, to what extent does it serve American national interests to submit to the discipline of international law and a multilateral institution like the United Nations, and to what extent would American national interests, given the immense power of this country, be better served by acting in some cases unilaterally and other cases with ad hoc coalitions?

¶ 11         Whatever the answer to that question might be at this moment in time in the year 2005, what will the answer be in the year 2025 or the year 2055? How should the United States of America, in its moment of perhaps maximum power vis-a-vis the rest of the globe, take into the account that no power disproportion such as the one we currently experience has ever lasted permanently, and this one will likewise be no exception?

¶ 12         So what ought to be the relationship between a multilateral institution and a superpower?

¶ 13         A second cross-cutting question is: When should force be used to deal with threats to national and global security and how should the decision be made to use force and by whom? That is very much a central issue in the recommendations of the High-Level Panel.

¶ 14         It is an issue which has been very much on the minds of people on both sides of the Atlantic, ever since the United States went into Iraq without clear authorization from the United Nations Security Council. We will hear different points of view on that question during these days.

¶ 15         Third, when and by whom and by what process should decisions be made to use force to prevent mass atrocities and the commission of genocide and other widespread affronts to human rights?

¶ 16         Tomorrow, we will be hearing panels both on the situation in Rwanda a decade ago, which is a sobering reminder to all of us of the danger of inaction, and on the current situation in Darfur, which in some ways raises disturbing echoes of what took place, not on the same scale perhaps as Rwanda a decade ago, but engenders the same feeling that people are dying while the United Nations is fiddling and so are the other majors powers in the world.

¶ 17         What should we be doing? Who should decide and by what process with respect to Darfur?

¶ 18         In that regard, this conference is extremely timely because the International Commission of Inquiry with regard to war crimes and crimes against humanity in Darfur is scheduled to deliver its report to the Security Council tomorrow. The issue of what action to take in response to that report will be on the agenda of the Security Council in the coming days. It is widely expected that the commission will recommend that the Security Council refer the Darfur situation to the International Criminal Court.

¶ 19         The United States Government has had a consistent record now under this administration of opposing the International Criminal Court. Will it choose to allow the Security Council to make such a referral if the Council is so inclined?

¶ 20         Now, to address these important questions and many subsidiary questions that arise in that context, we are truly honored to have with us an impressive array of diplomatic and academic speakers who will be taking different points of view.

¶ 21         To begin, our keynote speaker has been one of the sixteen members of the High-Level Panel appointed over a year ago by Secretary-General Kofi Annan to make recommendations on how the United Nations ought to deal with the kinds of questions that I have just laid out, among others.

¶ 22         By fortuitous timing, the High-Level Panel delivered its report, a one hundred-page document with over a hundred recommendations, just over a month ago.¹ We have excerpts of some of the key points of the report in the brochure for this conference. I encourage all of you who are interested in issues relating to the United Nations to read the full report.

¶ 23         But, we could have no better person to introduce us both to the report and the issues it raises than the former Permanent Representative of the United Kingdom to the United Nations, among many other posts in his distinguished diplomatic career. We are delighted that he has managed to hop across the pond from London to join us. Sir David Hannay.

Sir David Hannay:

¶ 24         Well, thank you very much for that introduction and thank you for inviting me here.

¶ 25         I have thus managed to fill a gap in my experience, in that I have never actually taken in Chicago before, but that is not the only reason I am pleased to be here today.

¶ 26         I am even more pleased to be here because, as several of the previous speakers have said, it really is important to subject the High-Level Panel Report, which has been introduced to you, to critical analysis and discussion.

¶ 27         It is not much good thinking that these sixteen so-called wise men and women were like Moses going off to the mountain and when they came down, they were bringing the tablets with them. It is not quite as simple as that, as you know.

¶ 28         And it is important that a proper understanding of what we proposed and a rigorous analysis of the ideas we proposed is undertaken now in this two- or three-month period before serious negotiation begins at the United Nations.

¶ 29         I will address mainly this morning the thrust of this conference, which is the use of force, so I will spare you a full presentation of the whole Panel Report.

¶ 30         When the founding fathers of the UN signed the UN Charter in San Francisco in June 1945 and committed themselves to "save succeeding generations from the scourge of war," they certainly knew what they were talking about.

¶ 31         Two massively destructive world wars had wrought unprecedented human and economic damage. The apotheosis of national rivalries and wars of aggression between states had just occurred. What is perhaps surprising, given the miserable failure of the League of Nations in the period between the two wars, is that world leaders turned back again to the remedy of collective security. Perhaps even more surprisingly, they gave to the UN's newly established Security Council the right to authorize the use of force by a majority vote, admittedly tempered by the power of veto given to its five permanent members.

¶ 32         Another less remarked feature of the international scene in 1945 was that the predominance of one state, the United States, was even greater then in terms of military might and economic weight than it is now. That predominance is now often pointed to as something that renders any collective approach to security inoperable.

¶ 33         In 1945, the United States economy represented close to half of the world's economic activity. Its forces were deployed in every corner of the globe, and it alone, although at the time others did not know this, was on the point of possessing deliverable nuclear weapons.

¶ 34         And yet it was the United States which was the driving force behind the establishment of the United Nations. It was the president of the United States, Harry Truman, who said at the time "we all have to recognize, no matter how great our strength, that we must deny ourselves the license to do always as we please."

¶ 35         Now, that dawn of hope did not last long, and for the next forty-five years the United Nations was paralyzed by the Cold War.

¶ 36         Such successes as it had, for example in reversing North Korea's Soviet-inspired aggression against the south, were more often a matter of good luck than judgment.

¶ 37         Admittedly, the two superpowers never came to blows, but that owed quite a lot more to the doctrine of mutually assured destruction than it did to the activities of the United Nations.

¶ 38         Proxy wars between the allies of those superpowers raged unchecked, and disputes such as those over Palestine and Kashmir continued to fester. The ability of the UN to conduct peacekeeping operations did gradually emerge. One hundred forty new countries came to independence, though many of them achieved neither stability nor sustainable prosperity.

¶ 39         The UN remained a forum for debate, a receptacle for mankind's aspirations, but not a basis for effective action.

¶ 40         All that changed, or at least had the potential to change, when the Cold War ended so suddenly and unexpectedly at the end of the 1980s. At first, it looked as if the UN really had changed, as Iraq's aggression against Kuwait was reversed on the UN's authority and the organization was launched into a whole mass of peacekeeping operations in Namibia, Cambodia, El Salvador, Somalia, Mozambique, Bosnia and Rwanda.

¶ 41         But soon things began to go wrong, and it gradually became clear that three elements were missing.

¶ 42         The first element, and the one that it took the longest before the penny dropped, was the failure to undertake any fundamental analysis of the threats which faced the post-cold war world and the ways in which the UN needed to be adapted to counter them.

¶ 43         For a brief moment in 1992 when the Security Council met at summit level and when Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali at the summit's request produced his Agenda for Peace,² it looked like such an audience might be underway.

¶ 44         The Security Council did, after all, in its declaration adopted at that meeting, recognize that both international terrorism and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction were threats to international peace and security,³ and these are key words that trigger the potential responsibility of the United Nations Security Council.

¶ 45         But the moment passed. No fundamental review took place. Short-term expedients and a preference for papering over the cracks ruled the day.

¶ 46         The second missing element was effectiveness. Much heady new wine was poured into some pretty cracked old bottles. For every peacekeeping operation that went well, for example, in Namibia, El Salvador, and Mozambique, there was one or more that went terribly wrong, for example in Somalia, Bosnia, Rwanda, and Angola. It became clear that the UN could not itself undertake full enforcement operations, even if its authorization of such operations by others remained of crucial significance.

¶ 47         And it also became clear that the organization was ill-equipped to deal with the sort of complex, multifaceted peacekeeping operations in failed or failing states which were to become the paradigm of the post-Cold War world.

¶ 48         Even the Brahimi report on peacekeeping in 2001,⁴ which contained much excellent advice and many good recommendations, was only partially implemented. Many states were ready to will the ends but not the means to achieve them. We are seeing that again now in Darfur.

¶ 49         And then, third, cracks soon widened into chasms between the members of the Security Council over the authorization of the use of force. In Kosovo and then in Iraq, it proved impossible to bridge those gaps even when Security Council resolutions were being floated. Both wars took place without Security Council authorization.

¶ 50         That was the background against which Kofi Annan finally blew the whistle at the General Assembly in 2003 and stated that the UN was at a fork in the road, with the threat of increasing marginalization staring it in the face.

¶ 51         I have heard no one since then challenge that judgment nor his decision to set up a panel, on which I was honored to serve, to examine the threats and challenges that face the international community at the beginning of the twenty-first century and to recommend the changes that will be needed if the UN is to find adequate responses to them.

¶ 52         The Secretary-General made it clear at the outset that he did not consider the job of the Panel to analyze in detail any of the individual disputes which continue to fester nor to propose solutions to them. What he wanted was an overall analysis and ideas for making the UN more effective, more efficient, and more equitable. That was surely wise. Our work would soon have foundered if we had also had to address all those contentious issues and disputes; but we did consider it necessary when we transmitted our report to say that no amount of systemic change at the UN would serve much purpose if renewed and sustained efforts were not made to resolve some of the most long-standing disputes, prominent among them those over Palestine, Kashmir, and the Korean peninsula. There are some modest signs that that view is now more generally shared.

¶ 53         The Panel's work then had to begin with a realistic and comprehensive threat assessment; and that turned out to be a more complex and more potentially contentious matter than might have at first been supposed.

¶ 54         There were those who pressed us to recognize that international terrorism and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction were the existential threats of our times and that we should give them absolute priority. There were others who saw poverty, disease, malnutrition, environmental damage, and the instability of states as issues which needed to be addressed before any others.

¶ 55         Our conclusion was that neither of these narrow, prioritized approaches was either convincing or viable, nor were parallel attempts to divide threats into those characterized as hard and those characterized as soft. They were not convincing because it became clear that all these threats menaced peace and security, and even more so because it also became clear that they were closely interconnected.

¶ 56         The incidence of state failure among the poorest states was much higher than among the more prosperous: a pandemic disease like AIDS threatened the stability of many African states; states that failed provided a haven for terrorists in Afghanistan or for genocide in Rwanda; I could go on.

¶ 57         A narrow approach was also not viable because every one of these threats needed a worldwide collective response if it was to be successfully combated. And yet perceptions of the priorities were so very different in different countries and different parts of the world that there was no way that an effective consensus could be put together on the basis of a narrow agenda.

¶ 58         In reaching this conclusion, we were not so utopian as to imagine that there should be no prioritization at all. But such prioritization, in our view, needed to be within the plans for handling each threat, not between the threats themselves.

¶ 59         Moving on from analysis to prescription, we quickly came to the conclusion that there was an unhealthy and disproportionate focus in many people's minds on military solutions and the use of force.

¶ 60         The recent experience of the hostilities both in Afghanistan and Iraq is a sufficient explanation if not a full justification for that preoccupation. The use of force is at the heart of our conference here, and I will come to that in due course. But, it is important to remember that the use of force must always be a last resort; and that the international community has proved itself just as defective in recent years at taking preventive non-military action to deal with the threats to peace as it has been at achieving support in the Security Council for the use of force.

¶ 61         In any case, if you stop to think about it, many of the threats we identified are not of a nature that can be combated by military action alone, if at all. That certainly goes for the social, economic, and environmental threats, but also in the case of international terrorism, such as the example of Afghanistan where military force was required, it is quite likely to be the exception that proves the rule. What state is likely now to defy the international community, as the Taliban did, and openly give shelter and comfort to a terrorist organization? What will defeat international terrorism is an overall counter-terrorism strategy which addresses the causes of terrorism as well as its symptoms; and then a lot of good intelligence and police work denying the terrorists the ability to move themselves, their weapons and their money freely. All this needs to be applied effectively worldwide if it is to work. And we have proposed, in addition, that all should agree that targeting innocent civilians and noncombatants must be outlawed wherever it occurs and in the name of whatever cause.

¶ 62         Then there is the matter of the proliferation of the weapons of mass destruction. There too, prevention surely has to take pride and place. One piece of positive news that did come out of Iraq is that international inspection regimes, if vigorously applied and backed up by the eventual threat of the use of force, can produce far better results than their detractors are prepared to admit.

¶ 63         So we need a multi-layered preventive strategy based on the universal application of the International Atomic Energy Agency's Additional Protocol, which provides for snap inspections; on the further development of the Proliferation Security Initiative; on an international scheme providing a guarantee for bona fide and nuclear uses of uranium enrichment and reprocessing services balanced by a moratorium on the construction of new facilities; and on an intrusive inspection regime for the prevention of biological weapons.

¶ 64         In the case of states under stress, we need to be concentrating on early warning systems that actively trigger preventive action; and on preventive action which avoids in most cases the need ever to contemplate the issue of military intervention. That is one of the main objectives of the establishment of a Peacebuilding Commission which the Panel has proposed.

¶ 65         One other blind alley on which we declined to head is that which juxtaposes starkly multilateral and unilateral actions as if they were two totally separate and do-all alternatives. That is certainly not how it looks to practitioners and decision-makers, although it is often how it is presented by commentators and analysts. There is, of course, a tension between the two types of approach in the handling of specific cases; and this can lead to paralysis and discord as it did over Iraq. But I know of no practitioner who seriously believes that any individual country can, acting alone, find fully effective responses to all these threats and challenges, nor do I know of any practitioner who thinks that every one of them can be handled by multilateral action alone. So this is not a titanic struggle between the supporters of world government on the one hand and of the nation state on the other.

¶ 66         What is needed are the joint efforts of states and of multilateral organizations so that they are mutually reinforcing; and a consensus on how to decide collectively what should be done when a state steps over the limits of acceptable behavior as defined by its international obligations, particularly when it fails egregiously to fulfill its responsibility to protect all of its own citizens.

¶ 67         And that brings us to the use of force and to the heart of the matters this conference is striving to address.

¶ 68         Fifteen years after the end of the Cold War, we now know for certain that, while the threat of global annihilation as a result of dispute or a miscalculation of the superpowers has lifted, we have not emerged into a war-free world; nor are we living in a world regulated by the so-called new world order. Rather, we are faced with the elements of a new world disorder which could threaten our security and prosperity less directly but more insidiously than the Cold War threats and no less surely. That disorder has not only led to extensive recourse to the use of force in every corner of the world, sometimes now by non-state actors as well as by states, often too by states against their own citizens; but it also leads to the need to contemplate at least the threat to use force against such actions; and ultimately the use of force if they are to be countered.

¶ 69         The Panel began by considering very carefully the arguments that have arisen over the use of the inherent, not conferred, right of self-defense set out in Article 51 of the Charter.

¶ 70         Some pressed us to make those provisions more restrictive, others to make them more expansive. We noted that under customary international law, Article 51 encompasses the taking of preemptive action in self-defense if a threat is clear and imminent. We did not consider, however, that it extended to cases where the object of the action was preventive and against a threat which was not clear and imminent.

¶ 71         We concluded that any rewriting of Article 51 was not necessary, desirable, or practical.

¶ 72         We were clear, however, that the terms of Chapter VII of the Charter did not preclude a collective action to deal preventively with a non-imminent threat. The wording of the Charter which talks of determining the existence of a threat to international peace or security, not a breach, has the potential for considerable flexibility in its operation.

¶ 73         Action could well be, in the first instance, a nonmilitary kind. That is why we devoted some thought in a number of our recommendations as to how best to make nonmilitary sanctions better targeted and more effective. When the issue of the use of force can no longer be avoided, we have recommended to the Security Council, the General Assembly, and individual member states that they undertake to operate within a set of guidelines dealing with the five points, which I imagine you are familiar with in your consideration of just war theory: seriousness of a threat, proper purpose, last resort, proportional means, and the balance of consequences.

¶ 74         Such an approach will not provide push-button certainty nor is it intended to do so.

¶ 75         Every individual instance of authorizing the use of force will still need to be debated and decided on its merits in the Security Council. But adoption of the guidelines could provide greater clarity and predictability and it could have a serious deterrent effect too.

¶ 76         Still basing ourselves within these guidelines, we look also at the implications for human security and for the need to ensure that states really do fulfill their responsibility to protect all their citizens and to avoid abuses of international humanitarian law against them.

¶ 77         Here, we realized that we were treading on very sensitive ground but also on ground which in recent years had all too often been trampled by acts of genocide and ethnic cleansing.

¶ 78         The responsibility to protect clearly falls, in the first instance, on the state in question, and an increasing majority of states do, in fact, fulfill that obligation. But where a state is either unwilling or unable to fulfill it, we consider that the responsibility shifts to the international community as a whole.

¶ 79         This is not a completely novel thought. It is one that inspired the Genocide Convention. It also underpins the jurisprudence of the international tribunals on the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda and of the newly established International Criminal Court.

¶ 80         We were under no illusion that it will prove easy or straightforward to apply the responsibility to protect, but we do believe that it represents the direction in which the international community will need to move collectively if it is not to lose credibility and support for its activity.

¶ 81         From the very outset of our work, the Panel was determined that its recommendations would be policy-driven. We would look first at the policy options, at what needed to be done, then at how to do it, and then, lastly, at what changes would need to be made to the working of the UN's institutions. Far too often in the past, the phrase "UN reform" has been taken to mean some marginal tinkering with the institutions in the absence of any clear thinking about the policy prescriptions that were required.

¶ 82         In truth, the issues of policies and institutions are the two sides of one coin. So we have not flinched from some fairly radical institutional reforms. What we did avoid is what I would call "blue-sky" thinking, such as proposals to abolish the veto, to set up a UN rapid reaction force, or to give the UN the primary role in global economic decision-making.

¶ 83         All those proposals have been extensively canvassed in recent years. There is something to be said for each of them. They have, however, one characteristic in common: they will not fly.

¶ 84         On the Security Council enlargement, we put forward a number of criteria which we believe should govern the choice of new members, either new permanent members or longer term members than at present. These criteria are based on Article 23 of the Charter.

¶ 85         And we suggested two alternative bases under which the Security Council membership could be enlarged to twenty-four. I have no doubt choosing between those options will be far from easy or noncontentious; but that is a choice which has to be made by the membership as a whole and not by any panel, however experienced, however distinguished. One trap really must be avoided and that is allowing this question of Security Council enlargement to become a cuckoo in the nest which expels all the Panel's other recommendations.

¶ 86         There was no doubt in our minds that negotiations over expanding the membership of the Security Council have already gone on for far too long and that enlargement is a necessity. But the settlement of that issue does not and should not determine the fate of the Panel's other recommendations.

¶ 87         We also devoted a good deal of our attention to the respective roles of the UN and of regional and subregional organizations in the maintenance of peace and security.

¶ 88         We concluded that Chapter VIII of the Charter, which provides for such cooperation, had been grossly underutilized in the past. We believed that in many parts of the world where tensions run highest, the absence of a regional organization is a weakness that needs to be remedied. The Gulf, South Asia and Northeast Asia are regions that come immediately to mind.

¶ 89         The interface between the UN and a regional organization is not straightforward. It can also too easily fall prey to turf fighting or to situations where both stand back and no one takes any remedial action. We have recommended, therefore, that in the future a more structured and more integrated approach is needed. There should be formal agreements between the UN and regional organizations, the capacity for peace operations should be encouraged, providing for the exchange of early warning indicators, for joint mediation efforts and for support in training and logistics. It should not be impossible to envision joint peace operations in which the relative strengths of the two organizations, the UN and the regional organization, are combined.

¶ 90         Nowhere is an imaginative approach to such cooperation more necessary than in Africa. The African Union has showed a commendable desire to come to grips with problems of the continent and to put behind it the failure of its predecessor, the Organization for African Unity.

¶ 91         But it is an error to suppose that African governments can on their own, without outside support, undertake the burden of complex peace operations. Ad hoc arrangements for outside support, for example, from the European Union which exists already, are helpful but inadequate. So we have recommended a long-term capacity-building program for backing up the African Union's own efforts; and where the Security Council asks or authorizes the African Union to undertake a peace operation on its behalf, we propose that the whole UN membership should be ready to bear the costs.

¶ 92         I realize that I have not done justice to the sections of the Panel's report that relate to our recommendations on social, economic, and environmental issues nor to the reforms we have put forward to the working of the General Assembly, the Economic and Social Council and the Commission on Human Rights nor to the changes we have proposed in the Secretariat.

¶ 93         All these are important subjects in their own right which deserve more extensive treatment than is possible today. I should perhaps in mitigation point out that many of the social and economic issues have been covered in the report by the group led by Jeffrey Sachs and that both sets of recommendations or proposals, those of the Panel and those of the Jeffrey Sachs Commission,⁵ will be dealt with in the Secretary-General's own paper that he intends to submit in March as the main preparation for the Summit meeting in September.

¶ 94         So I hope that this failure on my part will at least drive you back to a careful reading and rereading of the Panel's report itself. It deserves it. It needs, above all, to be looked at and to be judged as a coherent whole, as perhaps the most comprehensive set of proposals for reform that have been put on the table since those far-off days in San Francisco.

¶ 95         What I am trying to do today is to concentrate on those parts of the report which are directly related to the subject matter of this conference on the use of force.

¶ 96         So what happens next?

¶ 97         How can one ensure that this report does not follow so many of its predecessors onto the shelves of the UN's library, there to gather dust and praise but no action?

¶ 98         It is important not to be too impatient. There is a lot in the report which needs to be considered and digested by the governments, which, in the last resort, are the ones who have to make the decisions.

¶ 99         This needs, above all, to be a wide-ranging public debate, and this is something which is beginning here today and all around the world, I believe; and that debate really needs to be worldwide.

¶ 100         Support for the United Nations, if one is being honest about it, is broad but it is also shallow, and it is accompanied by much ignorance as to how the various parts of the organization interact.

¶ 101         If this report manages to raise public awareness and knowledge of the UN, it will have taken a first step towards success.

¶ 102         Time also is needed to demystify the discussion, to clear up many misunderstandings. On the day the report was released, I was awestruck to hear commentaries on this side of the Atlantic by people who had certainly not read it and who seemed to have the most bizarre ideas about what it contained.

¶ 103         Once the period for debate is over, a process of negotiation will need to begin, hopefully on a number of parallel tracks, because the Panel's recommendations are addressed to a number of different institutions and agencies and each has to operate according to its own decision-making procedures.

¶ 104         It will no doubt be for the September Summit in New York to draw together the various threads, but if there has not been progress made by then on the detailed components of the Panel's proposals, that meeting is unlikely on its own to achieve what is required.

¶ 105         In conclusion, it is against all tradition for a former diplomat to be too apocalyptic about the prospects of the UN if substantial progress cannot be made during 2005. Diplomats, as they say, do not do apocalypse; but I do fear that, as Kofi Annan said in his General Assembly speech in September 2003, we really are at a fork in the road.

¶ 106         By putting forward such an ambitious and far-reaching report, the Panel has raised the stakes. By sending this report forward to the membership with his full endorsement, the Secretary-General has raised them further. The alternatives, frankly, are not attractive.

¶ 107         Marginalization is not something that happens suddenly. It is something that creeps up on you; and marginalization is the real threat to the United Nations' viability and effectiveness. If on the other hand progress can be made, then we should be able to begin to build that new consensus which will bring us, in the words of the Panel's report, to a "more secure world."

¶ 108         Thank you very much.

Douglass Cassel:

¶ 109         Thank you, Sir David.

¶ 110         After this coffee break we will have two panels that will comment on and react to the presentation by Lord Hannay and the report of the High-Level Panel.

¶ 111         First, we will have a panel of diplomats who have honored us here with their presence. They will be followed immediately by a panel of independent experts with differing points of view. We will then have an opportunity for discussion, comment, and reflection.

ENDNOTES