Permanent Representative of Chile to the United Nations
President of the Economic and Social Council for 1998
On March 4th of this year, I will be assuming my post as Director-General of ILO and will be finalizing my activities as Ambassador of Chile to the United Nations during a period of 9 years. Before departing, I have come to bid farewell today to a body which has occupied a very special place in my long association with the United Nations. I have served the Council twice as its President but also as Vice President three times.
Indeed, if I look back, I recall with the greatest satisfaction that many of the friendships and warm relationships that I have been fortunate to enjoy in the United Nations community have been a result, over the years, of my close association with this council. May I take this opportunity to thank all of my dear friends and colleagues who have made my stay at the United Nations and at the Council such a pleasurable and rewarding experience.
Deseo ante todo agradecerle a los paises latinoamericanos y del caribe su confianza en Chile y en mi persona para representar al grulac en multiples ocasiones. Mis responsabilidades en el ECOSOC, las que asumí durante la cumbre social, y la presencia de Chile en el consejo de seguridad, que tuve el honor de presidir en dos ocasiones, son todas oportunidades que se dieron gracias al apoyo de los países de la región. Se los quiero agradecer enormemente de nuevo.
I have had the honor of working with three Secretaries-General. Don Javier Perez de Cuellar, who was a friend of my parents, and called me "Juanito". Boutros-Boutros Ghali who I had never met but with whom I developed a close working relationship particularly in the preparations for the World Summit for Social Development in Copenhagen. And finally, Kofi Annan, for whom I have the greatest respect for his personality and vision and who will now become my new boss within the United Nations system. I am extremely happy at the prospect of working under his guidance.
I have also worked with many Presidents of ECOSOC who have been my friends and have contributed to developing the institution towards its present status. But of course, I have to mention in particular my successor, Ambassador Fulci. He has been an extraordinary Vice-President during this year and will continue to project ECOSOC with his energy to get things done and his acute understanding of the way the UN system works. We will have a President that will do us all honor.
It is difficult to express in words the enormous substantive and operational support I have received from the Secretariat in social and economic issues. Nitin Desai has been extraordinary. Patrizio Civili invaluable. Peggy Kelley incredible and Sarbuland Khan irreplaceable. Thank you to everybody else, in particular Kate Starr Newell who held my hand throughout the Social Summit. I will not forget so many, many conference officers, interpreters and documentation staff whom I befriended all these years.
I would like to make a few general comments in this goodbye address. This last decade has brought the UN to the threshold of the 21st century. It has been an incredibly creative decade for the organization. The series of world conferences and summits proved that this institution is capable of addressing complex political and technical issues, that it can bite the bullet, and in the end, that it can produce agreements and consensus to move forward. These sets of UN encounters helped shape the human development agenda of the 21st century. Through the whole process, we went beyond conventional wisdom, we probed behind existing policies, we looked at the future and proposed alternatives.
Now that the crisis of conventional economic wisdom is here, the contributions of the United Nations during the decade of the nineties are a clear source of alternative policies. Many of the problems that have become evident with the emergence of a global economy were highlighted and addressed. I think that their usefulness today is that whether we were talking of children, environment, human rights, population, social issues, women or habitat, we had at the center of our preoccupation the life of people. We looked at reality from the perspective of individual human beings, families, the communities and their countries, a perspective that only the UN has systematically put on the agenda.
Another central contribution of the United Nations is to look at reality in its complexity, to understand events in their interdependence, and to look at individual issues in a global perspective. I believe this approach is key because in the uncertain world of today, no single institution of the multilateral system with its own interpretation of events, and its own set of policy prescriptions has any real chance of bringing stability to economic and social matters. There is no space in the world of today for sectorial solutions to integrated problems. Unfortunately, the multilateral system continues to be sectorially divided and we have not yet devised the ways to make it think and act as a whole.
I believe that the multilateral system is facing one of its biggest challenges ever. The ongoing financial crisis is an opportunity to do things differently. I believe that it is necessary to go beyond the design of a new financial architecture which obviously is very necessary and we all support. But this should be done in close cooperation with institutions beyond the financial and monetary field so that development, trade, gender and social needs are all considered in an integrated way.
My first responsibility at ILO as the social pillar of the global economy will be to help define clearly the main strategic objectives of the organization: employment creation, social protection, tripartism and social dialogue in a context of respect for workers' rights. I will place development and gender a crosscutting issues. In each of these areas, we will focus on key programmes. Once that has been done, my next question will be, "with whom do we cooperate in reaching our goal, where are the old and new partners, how to expand the sense of collaboration and common purpose?" I want an ILO that is a team player within the United Nations system. An institution that brings its unique specificity, that of being both a public and a private organization made up of governments, employers and workers. It is one of the oldest institutions in the system created in 1919 and yet one of the most modern ones because it had the vision to incorporate business and labour as part of its decision-making structure. I look forward to the future meetings of ACC in order to implement this policy, and of course to future sessions of ECOSOC to which I hope you will invite me.
The reason the multilateral system has to be more closely-knit is the nature of the challenge that the emergence of a global economy poses to all of us. In a sweeping historical perspective, one could say that the 19th century was a century of nation building; that the 20th century was an incredibly vast struggle for liberty in all its forms. I believe that the 21st century will become the century of equity. There is no single most important challenge than that of giving stability to societies through social justice, human dignity for women and men and the opportunity for workers to claim a fair share of the wealth they have helped to generate, as the ILO constitution so aptly formulated at the beginning of this century.
With the end of the Cold War, it is possible to place the struggle for equity out of the framework of ideological confrontation and into its rightful setting, as a political and moral imperative. I know that talking about ethical needs always sounds unrealistic in the hardcore economic realities of today, and yet we all know that unless societies have a backbone of common values and commonly accepted norms that guide our behavior, they run the risk of disintegration through violence of arms, or markets, or exclusion, or through the indifference of the powerful. Why is all of this of relevance? Basically, because the United Nations Charter and all the structures under it is the only universal value system that the world has today. We have to develop, promote and protect it. It is a unique creation and particularly essential when the crisis of today has much to do with the loss of some basic human values.
Finally, let me say how much I have enjoyed my work at the delegate level. I have truly felt that I belonged to a community of delegates, of committed women and men, not just the Ambassadors who are my counterparts, but all of us dealing at the working level with specific issues in different committees or groups. I have always enjoyed rolling up our sleeves and sitting down to the tasks in search of that unique product of the international system: an agreement, a consensus, a decision to move forward with a particular policy or proposal. I want to express my gratitude to the representatives of civil society with whom I have worked so closely. They bring fresh air and new ideas. They can be constructive and, fortunately, also controversial. They are a reality that enriches our work and do not endanger our mandate.
All of this I have enjoyed in the context of a multicultural exercise in which we all become instinctively aware of the other, of other realities, of other sensitivities, of other needs, of other reasons. A community of delegates with a capacity to listen to each other to construct trust, to build bridges of confidence, and in the end, to be themselves, together with being official delegates of their countries or representatives of NGOs.
And this I believe is a key point. We all naturally operate under instructions, although we also know that the leeway we receive from our capitals is often large. We of course have to perform our duties as representatives of our nations; but we are also human beings with our own spiritual traditions, our own ideals, our values and our visions of the common good. I think it is important never to lose contact with our own beliefs while performing our official functions. It is so easy to get entangled in the game of negotiating, forgetting that real life, women, men and children will be affected by our decisions.
I have seen so often throughout this decade, in so many different issues, that intractable problems were addressed intelligently by delegates who felt a responsibility to help find solutions rather than to use the techniques we all know so well to make agreements impossible.
I want to end these words by paying homage then to the delegates, to all of you, to the individual human beings, who in so many ways, carry on their shoulders the weight of the United Nations Charter. In the end, what happens or does not happen has a lot to do with the persons that we all are and our commitment to a larger vision, to a common purpose, to a certain sense of contributing to history by simply doing our jobs well.
