A shared future or no future

UNESCO Courier, May, 1998 by Federico Mayor Zaragoza

The interdependence of the peoples and nations making up our world has become self-evident. No country, however powerful in terms of its economy or population, can any longer get by completely on its own. Transnational problems - whether they be environmental, cultural or economic - can no longer be solved at the national level. It is through international strategies, through concerted action between states and between regions that such problems can be addressed. Poverty, Aids, pollution, climate change, drugs and violence know no boundaries, whether national, ethnic, natural or political.

Globalization also means that the issues are interconnected. The sectoral, specialized, discipline-specific approach has shown its limitations, and these are becoming more and more of a constraint as real life, or at least our awareness of it, grows in complexity. Bioethics is an obvious example of a domain that "cuts across" several disciplines. If we wish to influence reality, we must adopt a transdisciplinary approach that makes use of all available expertise and skills.

This awareness of the interdependence of human beings and of the interconnectedness of the issues they face has become clearly apparent in recent years at the highest levels of political action and in global forums. Within the United Nations system, a series of major conferences has highlighted the connections between the various challenges we must take up - between environment and development, for example, and between education and population. Jomtien, New Delhi, Vienna, Cairo, Copenhagen and Beijing are among the cities that have hosted these global summits.

Too long overlooked or neglected, the human dimension is once again compelling recognition as the measure of all things. In the United Nations system, the approach to social development, to human development has become broader, more diverse and more flexible. Human beings, with all their unfathomable qualities, their strengths and weaknesses, are again moving to the centre of the economic stage.

And yet . . . compare the hundreds of billions of dollars siphoned off by the arms or drug trade with national education budgets! What a shameful disparity! Is not education a fundamental human right?

"Ecce homo. Behold the man!" exclaimed Pope John Paul II at UNESCO's Paris Headquarters eighteen years ago in an address that left its mark on all of us. "Behold the man! . . . the rich creativity of the human mind" which makes "untiring efforts to fathom and affirm the identity of man . . . always present in every form of culture".

For human beings to be worthy of the name, they must "belong" to the human species and experience that sense of belonging. If they know and feel themselves to be members of the human family, they will have no difficulty in assisting their fellow beings without ranking people close to them any higher than those who are far away. We must multiply our bonds of allegiance, that is to say, build more bridges between the individual and communities of different kinds and sizes, strengthen "community citizenship" while at the same time promoting the idea of "world citizenship", and think globally while acting locally, so that human solidarity may flourish.

The "intellectual and moral solidarity of mankind", seen by UNESCO'S Constitution as the basis of lasting peace, is a form of solidarity targeted at social disparities, one which strives against intolerance, jolts indifference and builds bridges between haves and have-nots, between Muslim and Jew, between prince and pauper. It is an active kind of solidarity between individuals who may be poles apart in many ways, a sense of community in diversity. And it is that solidarity, which grows up between different languages and cultures, beliefs and customs, ways of being and of thinking, and soon becomes indestructible, that makes people accept the idea of sharing, and indeed want to share.

Share their riches, resources and knowledge, and also their doubts. It is this universal imperative which must underpin our individual and collective thoughts and actions. Though we now know - and have known for several decades - that we, as civilizations, are mortal, it is only right that we should also know, as human beings, that the future will be one of sharing or there will be no future at all.