Democracy: An international issue. (From the Secretary-General).

In many parts of the world, over the last ten years or so, the United Nations has had to cope with conflicts in which one group's fear of another was cultivated and exploited by political leaders for their own selfish ends and made the basis of appalling acts of ethnic or racial hatred. It is for that reason, above all, that I attach such importance to the World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance. I hope it will help us devise a global strategy which each of us can use to combat these hateful phenomena in our own societies. They are the roots of conflict in every part of the world, and we must tackle them urgently in every society if we are to prevent more and worse conflicts in the future. No doubt that is one reason why the United Nations finds itself more and more involved in democratization, even outside the context of peacekeeping and peace-building. An increasing number of countries turn to us, not just for electoral assistance but for a much wider range of tasks in the area of governance and human rights.

States which respect the rights of all their citizens, and allow all of them a say in decisions that affect their lives, are also likely to benefit from their creative energies, and to provide the kind of economic and social environment that attracts that attracts investors. So democracy is an issue of great importance not only to international peace but also to development, and therefore to the, agenda of the United Nations as a whole-indeed, to the hopes of all humanity for better future. At its best, it provides a method for managing and resolving disputes peacefully, in an atmosphere of mutual trust. And nothing destroys that an atmosphere more corrosively than fear and intolerance, combined with injustice and discrimination.

It is true that in the past, many societies did combine a degree of democracy with racial discrimination. But today we see that discrimination is one of democracy's worst enemies, because people lose faith in democratic institutions-indeed, institutions of any sort-as soon as they feel that they are not being treated fairly, and especially if they feel they are being threatened or excluded simply because they belong to some particular group or category. I often quote a study done for the United Nations University, which shows that conflicts are more likely to break out in countries where social inequalities coincide with the divide between different ethnic or religious communities.

In Europe today, it is xenophobia and the political manipulation of fear of foreigners that pose the greatest threat to democracy, or at least to the quality of democracy. Perhaps I could remind you of the famous UNHCR poster depicting Einstein with a bundle of clothes on his back. The caption read: A bundle of belongings isn't the only thing a refugee brings to his new county.

Einstein was a refugee.

Europe today seems almost to have forgotten that message. Immigrants, instead of being welcomed for the contribution they make to a productive economy and a diverse society, are too often portrayed as a threat, and procedures aimed at detecting "bogus" asylum seekers result in the harassment or detention of bona fide refugees. Sometimes, they deter or prevent refugees from even approaching a country where they might be safe. These unpleasant phenomena have an impact on foreign as well as domestic policy, which is yet another reason why democracy is an international and not just a domestic issue.

Stability can hardly be taken for granted in a world where the majority of human beings are denied the economic opportunities enjoyed by the privileged few, and largely ignored when decisions about the world economy are taken. In my view, those States that do enjoy wealth and power have a moral obligation to take account of the views of those that-don't, and also a strong interest--an enlightened self-interest--in doing so. The United Nations does its best to bridge the gap. Its life is a constant, sometimes uneasy compromise between the need to take account of these inequalities for the sake of realism and the aspiration to redress them, or at least to compensate for them, by giving a voice to the small, the poor and the weak.

We cannot claim that there is perfect equality between Member States, but the small and the weak do, on the whole, feel less unequal in the United Nations than in other international bodies. Many of them believe, with Dag Hammarskjold, that the essential task of the United Nations is, indeed ,to protect the weak, against the strong. In the long rig term, the vitality and viability of the Organization depend on its ability to perform that task by adapting itself to changing realities. That, I believe, is the biggest test it faces in the new century.

Most Member States--and probably most people in general--believe that the United Nations would be more democratic if the Security Council were made more representative of the membership as a whole. I share that feeling, while recognizing that this very much a matter for the Member States to decide among themselves--and noting that sadly, while almost all of them agree on the need for reform, agreement on the details remains elusive. But I also suggest that we should not focus only on the Security Council. Many important decisions with profound effects on the lives of billions of human beings are taken in other institutions--the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization, the Group of Eight, and indeed the boardrooms of multinational corporations. I suggest that we would live in a better and fairer world-indeed, a more democratic world-if, in all those places, greater weight were given to the views and interests of the poor.

One argument that is sometimes used for resisting this is that those who claim to represent the poor are not truly representative, because of the lack of democracy in poor countries. I am glad to say that argument's validity is declining, as democracy spreads through the developing world. Already the Organization of African Unity has taken a courageous stand by declaring that it will no longer admit leaders who have come to power by unconstitutional means at its summit meetings. I look forward to the day when the General Assembly of the United Nations follows this fine example. Its authority will be greatly strengthened when all the Governments represented in it are themselves, clearly and unmistakably, representative of the peoples of the world, in whose name the United Nations was founded.

The idea of a connection between democracy and international peace is at least two centuries old. Many would associate it with the work of Immanuel Kant, whose essay "Perpetual Peace" was published in 1795. Kant argued that "republics"--by which he meant essentially what today we call liberal or pluralistic democracies--were less likely than other forms of State to go to war with one another. Broadly speaking, the history of the last 200 years has proved him right. Liberal democracies have generally found other ways to settle their disputes. Let me swiftly qualify that observation before we are tempted to build too many hopes upon it. Until recently, there were only a few liberal democracies in the world. So, we don't really yet have enough case histories to justify sweeping generalizations or confident predictions. Liberal democracy is essentially an open and transparent system, which contains built-in safeguards against military adverturism. Democratic rulers cannot mobilize their countries for war without convincing most of the citizens that war is both just and necessary, with the Government on the other side evil, aggressive and not open to rational persuasion or reasonable compromise. By contrast, it is much harder to convince people in a democracy that war is necessary against another country with an open and transparent political system, more or less like their own. It follows that democracies are least true to themselves when their Governments pursue covert or secret policies for which they are not fully accountable. Cases have come to light where even the greatest democracies worked to undermine the stability of other elected Governments by means they would probably not have dared to use if their decisions had been open to public scrutiny.

Much of the carnage in the Second World War might have been avoided if the democracies had been more decisive about standing up to Nazi Germany at an earlier stage. And even today, there is a painful paradox in the fact that the United Nations, in its efforts to maintain peace and security, often finds that mature democracies are unwilling to provide troops for peacekeeping operations. That paradox is all the greater when you consider how many of our peacekeeping missions over the last 15 years or so in different parts of the world have involved efforts to make democracy work.

In a number of countries--from El Salvador to Mozambique to Cambodia--our mission was not so much to keep the peace as to help build it, by helping people who had fought each other find ways of living together again as fellow citizens, in a peaceful and orderly society. And that, in fact, is much more typically the mission of our peacekeeping operations today. In a few cases--Kosovo and East Timor are the current examples--our mandate has expanded to providing a transitional administration which has to oversee the entire political process.

At the centre of virtually every civil conflict is the issue of the State and its power--who controls it and how it is used. No conflict can be resolved without answering those questions, and nowadays the answers almost always have to be democratic ones, at least in form. Once consent has broken down, or conflict has broken out, and stability has to be restored by negotiation, it almost invariably turns out that the only source of legitimacy all parties can accept, at least in principle, is the will of the people. A big part of the peacemaker's task is to help find a consensus on the mechanisms to ascertain the will of the people and by which, once ascertained, it can be implemented.

We must beware of what I call "fig-leaf democracy", which occurs when rulers attempt to legitimize or perpetuate their power by holding flawed elections that are not really free. Elections can only be truly free and fair if they are held in a peaceful atmosphere in which all parties can compete on an equal footing, with a chance to make their case through the mass media, including, of course, any media that are owned or controlled by the State. It must be an atmosphere in which unpopular opinions can be voiced; in which facts embarrassing to those in power can be exposed; and in which peaceful campaigning and political meetings are not only permitted but protected from violence. In other words, democracy requires the rule of law, administered without fear or favour, by independent courts and impartial police. All these things are necessary if conflicts are to give way to lasting peace or, even better, if they are not to happen in the first place. If you introduce them without waiting until violent conflict ha s broken out, you have a much better chance of preventing it, or--to put it another way--of ensuring that the inevitable conflicts which arise in any society are managed without violence.

Based on the Cyril Foster Lecture delivered by Secretary-General Kofi Annan at Oxford University in the United Kingdom on 19 June.