Ensuring Security for All: Geneva Views and Contributions

Monday, 08 April 2019 at 13.30
Council Chamber, Palais des Nations

Minister Makei,
Excellencies,
Ladies and Gentlemen,

It is a pleasure to welcome all of you to the Council Chamber.

The words inscribed outside these doors in the 1930s are the succinct imperative at the core of our efforts today: “Nations must disarm or perish.”

In the decades and years since, much was achieved here in Geneva to promote disarmament. Painstaking negotiations and courageous leadership yielded treaties, established norms and created instruments that together made the world a safer place.

And yet, addressing this chamber just two months ago, our Secretary-General was blunt in his warning that “key components of the international arms control architecture are collapsing.”
Blunt perhaps, but certainly realistic.

The headwinds facing multilateralism almost everywhere are most immediately felt right here, in the disarmament arena.

The threat posed by conventional weapons with destructive power comparable to that of weapons of mass destruction is growing.

Amidst rising tensions between nuclear rivals and the chaotic transition from bipolarity, coupled with increasing recourse to the threat of force, the overall security situation feels more precarious with every passing week.

Geopolitically, we are experiencing an epochal shift; an era is ending, and the rough outlines of a new political age are only beginning to emerge. Almost anywhere you look, you see proliferating conflicts, entrenched and interlinked crises.

This proliferation of conflict is in sync with the diffusion of power, which sees medium-sized nations increasingly acting autonomously from the big powers.

Meanwhile, game-changing advances in science and technology are intensifying risks in ways we do not yet understand, not least the ways in which it further complicates power relations. The almost absurd example here is that a teenager with a laptop can technically shut down the power grid of an entire country.

But if the struggle to develop frameworks ‘indexed’ to rapidly changing developments on the ground wasn’t difficult enough, we are forced to wage it against the backdrop of a growing trend of discarding existing, meticulously negotiated and tested disarmament treaties, despite the critical benefits they continue to bring.

The paradox of course is that when each country pursues its own security without regard for others, we create global insecurity that threatens us all.

All of which is why it is so encouraging to see some Member States buck the trend. Let me therefore thank Belarus not just for organizing today’s timely and important debate, but more generally, for your constructive engagement and commitment to disarmament, including by tirelessly helping to revive the Conference on Disarmament here in Geneva.

And if I sounded alarmist at the outset; in closing, I want to leave you with a sense of optimism and hope.

Because there is momentum we can build on, and there is a will to rise to the challenge - the overall positive responses to the Secretary-General’s disarmament agenda are a clear sign of that.
And I am encouraged by the ways in which the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development is driving a shift in mindset towards greater collaboration across silos and disciplines that is also informing the way we think about disarmament.

In this spirit, we need to get better at looking holistically at the question of security by taking preventive action that tackles the root causes of conflict.

We need to be more receptive to the insights of academia; acknowledge the views of the private sector; and, above all, elevate the voices of civil society. For it is their advocacy that can jolt intransigent powers into the action that is so urgently needed.

All of which is part of building a multilateralism fit for the 21st century - inclusive, innovative and interconnected.

A multilateralism that aligns efforts towards sustainable development with actions towards sustaining peace, recognizing that at the end of the day, they are one and the same.

And Geneva - with its proud heritage as the birthplace of modern multilateralism; with its unique ecosystem of different actors united by a shared sense of purpose - is the vanguard of putting this vision into practice.

And that, in the end, is why Geneva is indispensable in our collective efforts towards “ensuring security for all”.

Thank you once again to Belarus for bringing us together today.