This institution, the United Nations General Assembly, may not be perfect and may need reform, but it does represent still, at this moment of extreme crisis, the most important institution where representatives of the entire human population come together to address existential problems.
This time, the UN General Assembly takes place at a moment of great danger to the very existence of the human species. Two regional wars, the Ukraine war and the war against Iran, are both threatening to escalate into wider regional conflicts, and even global nuclear war. Several senior military experts are warning that we are in a situation more dangerous than during the Cuban missile crisis.
Most recently in the United States and Great Britain, the discussion has broken out into the open about the potential use of tactical nuclear weapons, and even the idea that a “limited nuclear war” can be fought and won. Anybody who has studied the matter knows that there is no such thing as a tactical nuclear war, because even the use of a single so-called tactical nuclear weapon will escalate, within days, to a full global nuclear war, leading to the annihilation of the human species.
In the course of the last thirty-five years, after the end of the Cold War, the world has undergone the transition from the failed effort to establish an unipolar world to an unfolding multipolarity, which, however, is still governed by the logic of geopolitics. Geopolitics is based on the idea that one nation, or a group of nations, has a legitimate interest that it can impose on another nation or group of nations.
We are experiencing at the same time the end of the epoch of five hundred years of colonialism. If we, as the human species, want to prevent this tumultuous transition period from ending up in a new world war, we have to replace geopolitical confrontation with a completely new paradigm, the vision of the ONE humanity. It is the same question which was discussed during the time of the young American Republic, in the Federalist Papers: Can mankind govern itself?
If this question is to be answered affirmatively in this era of thermonuclear weapons, we must establish an entirely new paradigm: The idea of the one humanity first, must be put above all particular interests.
This U.N. General Assembly is the place to put the concept of a “New Security and Development Architecture” on the agenda, which must take into account the interests of every single country on the planet. The four Global Initiatives—but especially the Global Governance Initiative—put forward by China, represent a very practical approach to establishing the basis for such a new paradigm.
Let the “Spirit of Bandung,” and the “Spirit of Shanghai,” and the spirit of Beethoven’s Ninth symphony, that All People Shall Be Brethren, be your inspiration!
Respectfully,
Helga Zepp-LaRouche,
Founder of the Schiller Institute
