Nadia Younes Memorial Lecture

Madame President
Members of the Younes Family
Dear Colleagues and Friends:

Thank you for that kind and warm welcome. It is a real pleasure to be here. It is actually the first time that I am in Cairo. And I appreciate that this first encounter with one of the most intriguing ancient civilizations includes a visit to the new campus of the American University and a meeting with the bright minds of the next generation. I very much believe that it is when we combine old and new, tradition and innovation, that we find true creativity and original solutions.

I am very happy to have this opportunity to pay tribute to Nadia Younes: the irreverent, the irrepressible and the irreplaceable Nadia - my close friend and colleague - who touched and inspired so many of us and who is much missed by all of us. I am deeply honoured to have been asked to deliver this 10th anniversary edition of the Memorial Lecture and I thank Nadia’s family for entrusting me with this responsibility. There is no doubt that the American University in Cairo with its emphasis not just on learning but on civic engagement is a most appropriate venue to remember Nadia and reflect on her legacy. Nadia was deeply engaged in trying to change the world for the better, driven by a passion for a better future, by a desire to help those in need and by a deep indignation at all that was unjust. This was the basis of her civic engagement - and I hope that it will be the basis of yours, too. It certainly is mine.

I know that Nadia would have relished the question of today’s lecture and the debate afterwards - a question that goes right to the heart of what she believed in:
Is the United Nations relevant in today’s world?

As most of you will know, when you ask a United Nations diplomat a simple question, that really only requires a “yes” or a “no” answer, you will get a long lecture. And I would not like to disappoint - so that is what you will get.

A quick glance at the news headlines today would seem to suggest that the answer to that question is a rather unequivocal and resounding “no”. The United Nations is an Organization based on power structures and geopolitical realities that have fundamentally changed over the past seventy years. The Security Council that has the primary responsibility for keeping our world safe cannot agree on action on the most pressing crises. Violence continues unabated in Syria and the wider Middle East - a stain on our collective conscience. Ebola was allowed to turn into a regional - and potentially a global health crisis - despite clear warnings. The aspirations of the Arab Spring remain unfilled for far too many. Our actions are making the planet warm towards unsustainable levels. The world spends over 1.7 trillion dollars on armaments every year.

It would seem that even the most zealous United Nations bureaucrat could not possibly argue, in the face of this amount of evidence, that the Organization still serves its purpose.

But I want to put it to you that despite its failings - and I will be the first to argue that we should not gloss them over - the United Nations remains extremely relevant today. And I will put it to you that in an increasingly complex and inter-connected world, the United Nations will - in fact - become even more relevant in the future. But only if it is given the right support. And only if it is allowed to reform and be restructured so that it can become better at addressing the challenges that matter to all of us.

First of all, we need to be clear about what the United Nations is: an Organization created by and for States. This determines the scope and possibilities for action. When we talk about the United Nations, we need to understand who we are referring to: the Member States who set priorities and make decisions – or the Secretariat implementing those priorities and decisions? An important distinction that is lost on most people.

Within that frame, let’s look at the facts of what the United Nations is doing.

The work of the United Nations touches every single person on this planet - every single day. Most of us just don’t know it. This is work that goes from the road signs we all saw on the way to the lecture hall this evening, to medical guidelines for checks to be carried out before an operation, to international dialling codes for the phones that we all use, to standards for the food that we eat, capacity-building for developing countries to be able to trade more effectively, to the clearing of millions of landmines to help communities develop, to the millions of children that get vaccinated across the Globe. The list goes on.

The United Nations system sets norms and policies that make our world function, it provides technical assistance, it addresses humanitarian emergencies and promotes human rights for all - and everything in between and beyond. Together, these efforts shape all of our lives - whether we live in developed or in developing countries, whether we live in peace or in conflict zones.

The fact is that the reporting we see in newspapers, online, on social media and on television only covers a fraction of what the United Nations does. The headlines capture and reflect only the tip of the iceberg. This is what the graphic here shows. Much of what the United Nations does, which has a profound impact on lives across the globe, goes unreported - and therefore unrecognized.

Take Syria as an example. It is a humanitarian disaster of tragic dimensions. The Syrian people have been let down by the international community’s inability to take action. It is a failure and we cannot call it by any other name. At the same time, while the Security Council has been sitting on its hands and, despite great risks, the United Nations family has provided food to over five million people a month, enabled millions to get clean water, supplied more than 16.5 million medical treatments, helped more than 2 million children go to school in 2014, vaccinated just as many kids against polio, and continues to assist the now close to 4 million refugees from the crisis. The United Nations led the elimination of the declared chemical weapons programme of Syria. Yet, we mostly hear about the blockage in the Security Council.

You may ask why this is a problem. Surely the United Nations does not exist to grab headlines for doing what it is simply mandated to do.

But it does become a problem when there is an unbalanced view of what the United Nations does and when this, in turn, undermines the support for the United Nations in general. It matters when it leads Member States and people across the world to look for alternative and less inclusive avenues to address the issues that concern all of us. And it matters greatly when it translates into diminished financial support for our many programmes.

The United Nations provides a table where everybody can sit down and discuss the challenges - where all countries come together, regardless of geographical size and population numbers, regardless of their economic power and political stature, large or small, developed or developing, they come together to listen to each others’ views and to find common solutions that are not catering to the needs of one group only. It is the table that brings everybody together, even when they may not always like what is on the menu or if the country next to them is not their ideal partner for a political dinner.

If that table is dismantled or if the constellation of participants becomes fragmented so that not everybody comes together around it, we will have solutions that only reflect the concerns of some. Maybe only of the powerful. Or the rich. Because there will be no mechanism that brings them into a dialogue where they need to consider the opinions and priorities of others.

The need for this table where everybody sits together, the need for a global forum where threads can be pulled together to weave a strong carpet of common solutions is greater than ever. And will become even more so in the years ahead.

Because our world is undergoing a radical transformation. A transformation that is much more profound than most of us realize. The impact and power of each one of us has changed dramatically. Education and new communication technologies have emboldened and empowered individuals.

People are on the move like never before: more than half of us now live in urban areas, and by 2050 70-75% of the world’s population will be living in cities. Increasingly, key decisions affecting citizens will be taken at city level. The functions and expectations of the State as we have known it in the past several eons are being recalibrated. It does not happen suddenly, but it is a process that is already underway.

The total number of international migrants has increased over the last 10 years, from an estimated 150 million in 2000 to 214 million persons today. This changes identities, alliances and allegiances – and as a result, our priorities. At the global level the balance between “north” and “south” and between “east” and “west” is being realigned.

At the same time, the challenges we face cannot be neatly separated and labelled as either “security” or “economic”. They are so inter-linked that national policy-making simply cannot deliver single-handedly for the well-being of citizens in an individual State. Our world economy is deeply integrated through trade and global value-chains in production. Security threats cut across borders, in the form of terrorism, criminal networks or flows of arms. Humanitarian emergencies create waves of refugees or mixed migratory flows that affect neighbours and countries much further afield. The changing climate of our planet and the depletion of natural resources create both economic and security threats for all of us.

Our world is now simply bound together in ways that would have seemed like science fiction at the founding of the United Nations in 1945. What happens in your country and what happens to you affects me and others across the Globe.

This is a reality that is far from straight-forward. And a reality that will become even more complex in the years ahead. In this reality, we need to strengthen the links between local, regional and global levels. And we need more than ever the global table where all these different levels can come together.

While I believe that the United Nations is still very relevant - and will become more so - we must also be realistic: the Organization is not in its current form, and with the current way of doing business, equipped to play its role fully and effectively in the future.

We need to work more closely with civil society to integrate the views of the people we serve. We need to address challenges in a much more holistic - or matrix-like manner - where we bring together security, economic, social and environmental concerns. The new post-2015 development agenda and the Sustainable Development Goals that are to be adopted in September, are breaking new ground in trying to do this. And, importantly, we need institutional reform or restructuring - of the Security Council and of the Organization as a whole - to make our decision-making more representative, more legitimate and more credible.

This will not be easy. The United Nations is an Organization that was conceived by States to deliver for States at a time where there were few other organized
stakeholder groups. The world has moved on since then and reality always imposes itself. It is becoming increasingly clear that business as usual does not work, and that policy and decision-making has to become more inclusive.

The good news is that the United Nations has accumulated over the years the expertise and experience, throughout the system, to enable it to play its fundamental global role if the right reforms are undertaken. The human capital that resides within the Organization is truly unique. Nadia whom we are honouring today was a shining example of that. Drawing on the knowledge and technical skills that reside within the Organization, the United Nations has the potential to serve as a much-needed bridge between old and new governance models, which is so critical as we are going through a transformation at all levels. As we are moving from a traditional State-centric way of doing business to a more hybrid governance model with new partnerships being formed, it is essential that we can tie together our efforts at the global level.

Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld famously said that the United Nations was not created to take humanity to heaven but to save it from hell. A rather pragmatic and realistic view. But a limited one. I see that there is more potential in the United Nations, for truly building a better world. It is this potential that we need to unlock – together.

And to do that, we need the support, the involvement, the engagement and, yes, also the criticism of people across the world. This is how we get better. The United Nations may have been created by States. But it was created to deliver for people. It was created to deliver for you. And I put it to you that over the last seventy years the United Nations family has delivered. If you look at the statistics, we, the human race, have never had it so good. We live longer, we are healthier, we are better educated, we are more inter-connected than ever before. Clearly, the United Nations played a major role in getting us there.

So, is the United Nations still relevant?

Yes. Very much so. If we closed it down today, we would have to reinvent it tomorrow. I cannot conceive of a world that does not need a unifying table around which we can all gather to agree on what future we want to shape. And then implement that vision together.

Thank you very much.