This transcript appears in the December 15, 2023 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.
KEYNOTE DEC. 9–10 CONFERENCE
The New International Security and Development Architecture
[Print version of this transcript]
This is the edited transcript of Schiller Institute founder Helga Zepp-LaRouche’s keynote address to Panel 1 of the Dec. 9–10 international on-line conference on the New International Security and Development Architecture, sponsored by the Central American and Caribbean Critical Thought organization. One subhead and an embedded link were added. The video of Mrs. Zepp-LaRouche’s presentation is available here.
Greetings to all of you! We all witnessed the horrible result of the UN Security Council meeting yesterday, where one single nation voted no to the resolution, so the incredible carnage which is going on in Gaza continues. Let me quickly go into the evolution of this. When Secretary-General António Guterres wrote this letter to the President of the UN Security Council, evoking Article 99 of the UN Charter, pointing to the danger of a further aggravation of the existing threats to the maintenance of international peace and security, this represented an urgent question, but also a desperate effort to appeal to the UN Security Council to intervene to stop the ethnic cleansing of Gaza, which is now taking place before the eyes of the whole world—being on the TV screens every single day.
The attack on October 7th, killing 1,200 people, clearly has to be condemned. But the completely disproportionate attack by the Israel Defense Forces since then, killing more than 16,000 Palestinians, 70% of whom were women, children, and elderly, and an unknown additional number buried under the rubble of the approximately 60% of all houses in Gaza which have been destroyed or damaged. There is no food, water, medical supplies, electricity, shelter; 2.3 million people have been driven from the north to the south, only to be bombed wherever they flee to. There is no safe place anywhere in Gaza, and now a very large number of people are being “concentrated” in a tiny area near the border with Egypt.
There must be an immediate ceasefire, and the convening of a comprehensive Southwest Asia conference such as China has proposed, to implement a two-state solution based on a general economic development plan such as the Oasis Plan proposed by my late husband, Lyndon LaRouche, already in 1975. If this is not done instantly, despite this shameful vote in the UN Security Council, it could very well be that the pending apocalypse in Gaza is the straw that breaks the camel’s back. It is not only a horrific experience for all Muslims around the world, but for the nations of the entire Global South, to learn how much value is given to the life of a Palestinian in the context of the present world order.
The inability of the UN Security Council to act to halt this barbarism due to the veto of at least one permanent member of the UN Security Council—the United States—underlines the urgency to rethink the basis of the present world order. According to the Stockholm Peace Institute, there are presently in 2023, 55 armed conflicts going on in the world. Two of them—the war in Ukraine and the war in Gaza—have the potential to escalate into a regional or even a global war which could involve the use of nuclear weapons. This could lead to the annihilation of the human species and the end of all life on Earth.
It is therefore more than urgent to define a new international security and development architecture which addresses the root causes of the present crisis, and which takes into account the security interests of every single country on the planet. One relevant precedent of this undertaking can be the [1648] Peace of Westphalia, which ended 150 years of religious war in Europe. At that point, the warring parties agreed to negotiate an end to the war and the following peace order, since they realized that with a continuation of the war, soon nobody would be left to enjoy victory, since they all would be dead. That could be a strong motivation for us today to create a new foundation for coexistence on Earth and the recognition that war must be excluded in the age of nuclear weapons as a means of conflict resolution.
In today’s world of disinformation, fake news, and propaganda, it is however urgent that we make sure that in the beginning there is a clear understanding of the meaning of the concepts used. Lack of clarity in the conceptuality used could ruin the effort to establish a new functioning order. Confucius famously insisted on that by saying that the first step has to be to bring the notions into order, if one wants to solve a problem.
One good example of this requirement is illustrated by the often-repeated mantra about the need to extend the “rules-based order” to the rest of the world; or that there were a supposedly necessary confrontation between the good rules-based order and the evil autocracies; referring to the apparent controversy between the West and the by now very large majority of the rest of the world. Apart from the fact that it is nowhere written what these rules are, and on whose authority they were written, they tend to be as solid as slippery Jello.
When it is convenient for the West to herald them as the protectors of human rights, they find violations of them everywhere. But when NATO, for example, leaves Afghanistan after 20 years of war, in what was then termed the worst humanitarian crisis on the planet, the Western banks had no scruples about stealing $9 billion worth of Afghan assets, worsening the situation for a population which was 97% food insecure, that is about to starve. To cover up what is going on in Gaza right now, the mainstream media gives out manuals to their journalists on how to report every horror as being caused by Hamas, and so on.
The Ten Principles
The Ten Principles I have proposed to be the basis of discussion for such a new security architecture, therefore try to be of such a nature that these principles are intelligible, transparent, and cannot be twisted into their opposite by our nowadays Pharisees.
I defined as the first principle the partnership of perfectly sovereign nation-states based on the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence and the UN Charter, because it pertains to the absolute need of self-determination and participation in the government for the individual, which is excluded in all forms of supranational institutions. The importance of the sovereign nation-state is often not clear to people, because they confuse it with chauvinistic forms of nationalism, which is frequently blamed as the cause of wars. But the sovereign nation-state, on the contrary, emerged in a very long and difficult process out of the sole existence of empires and their oligarchical form of rule in which only a small power elite would have all the privileges, while the mass of the population would be on the level of slaves or minions who would be kept as backward as possible so they could be more easily controlled.
In Europe, after many centuries of the rule of such empires, even the emergence of national monarchies was a step upward toward the breakthrough of the idea of the nation-state devoted to the common good of the people for the first time. This occurred in the 15th Century with the France of Louis XI, in whose reign of 20 years, the living standard of the population doubled; and the writings of Nicolaus of Cues, who defined for the first time the concept of the representative system between the government and the governed.
Perfect national sovereignty today must be upheld against interference into the internal affairs of all states and the right to define one’s own social system, and to define one’s own path of development based on one’s own culture and tradition. The only boundary of that sovereignty is that it can never be in contradiction to the interest of humanity as a whole; which is the case for the patriot, who is at the same time a world citizen, as Friedrich Schiller defined it.
The second principle, the need to eliminate poverty for all human beings on the planet, is based on the fact that it is easily feasible, if existing technologies are being used. It is also necessary, because poverty is one of the worst violations of human rights. A person who has to worry every day about meals, healthcare, shelter, education, etc., will not be able to find the necessary leisure to develop all his or her creative potentials as a human being. Poverty is life-shortening, and since it is eminently feasible to be overcome, it should not exist.
The importance of the third principle was underlined by the recent pandemic and the difference in mortality rates in the different countries: Peru, for example, had 221,564 deaths; China, with a much larger population, had only 121,877; the United States had 1,144,877. China has almost 4.5 times the population of the U.S.
The fourth principle, to make universal education accessible for every child and adult, is the absolute key for successful durable economic growth, since it is the continuous process of the discovery of new principles in science and art—innovation—which is the driver of economic growth. But universal education is also the irreplaceable method to unleash one’s own creativity and outgrow imperfections of the mind and soul by absorbing what humanity has accomplished so far, and by building upon that heritage with the noble aim to add something important to the benefit of future generations.
The topic of the fifth principle in all likelihood will force itself on the agenda much faster than is in the public perception. The trans-Atlantic financial system experienced already a systemic crisis in 2008, which was papered over with enormous amounts of liquidity, the so-called quantitative easing, which injected trillions and trillions into the system; which is now sitting on $2 quadrillion of derivative exposure. The U.S. is already spending almost 20% of its budget on debt service alone; and the ability to distribute deficits to the whole world by simply printing money with the dollar as a world reserve currency is clearly coming to an end soon.
The weaponization of the dollar, by seizing the assets of foreign countries in U.S. banks, the imposition of unilateral sanctions as a means of regime-change hurting especially the poor in the targetted countries, as well as especially the experience of the interventionist wars since 9/11, which left millions of people dead; these and more developments have led to a gigantic blowback.
Now a process of de-dollarization is underway; countries are trading more and more in their national currencies. Profound discussions are occurring between various countries about the creation of a new international reserve currency not based on monetary values, but on raw materials and the productivity of the countries involved. These are developments which have been forecast by Lyndon LaRouche since 1971 and conceptualized in the form of solutions such as his proposal for an International Development Bank in 1975. This was the idea to replace the IMF, whose function was and is to suppress development of the so-called developing sector, with a credit institution devoted to the economic development of the Global South.
The entire life’s work of Lyndon LaRouche, the sixth principle, was devoted to the concrete realization of a new world economic order with the Oasis Plan of 1975 for the greening of the deserts in Southwest Asia; the Africa development plan first proposed in 1976; Operation Juárez, which he designed in collaboration with Mexican President José López Portillo for the infrastructure integration of all of Latin America in 1982; a 40-year development plan for India in discussion with Indira Gandhi; and the 50-year development plan for the Pacific Basin. Then in 1991, the Eurasian Land-Bridge, which was expanded to become the World Land-Bridge in 2014. These programs are in large part in a process of realization due to the Belt and Road Initiative today.
The seventh principle concerning a new security architecture addresses the question of a new security architecture as such, which must start with the idea of indivisible security. That means that while the security interests of every nation must be considered, no nation has the right to insist on its own security interests if it violates that of another one. Geopolitics must be ended once and for all, since it has been the source of two world wars in the 20th Century, and countless wars beyond that. No country or group of countries has the right to insist on its right against another country or group of countries.
The way to overcome this apparent contradiction is through the common development of all. If all countries on the planet can participate in an equitable international order in which an international division of labor is directed towards overcoming disadvantages in a trajectory of improvement of conditions for all—in other words, if each nation can have the security that it at some point in the future can realize the full development of its own potential as a country and of its population—then harmonious development of all can be guaranteed.
Nuclear weapons must be banned and made technologically obsolete through international cooperation in the research and development of new physical principles. The military-industrial complexes are themselves the driver of ever-more wars, since their profit depends on a continuous sequence of wars. The industrial capacity of the military industries must be retooled to contribute to the productive physical capacities needed for the common good of all people. The transformation of what is now an enormous waste of capacity into the production of means for nourishment, health care, education, etc., will be so advantageous for the people that they will regard it as their vested interest that there will never be a return to the production for the war machine.
At this point, one can hear a chorus arising in the background protesting that this is too optimistic a view; that man is motivated by “interest” and not by a devotion to the common good. And that therefore such a vision is utopian and will never come true. That is the reason why the tenth principle belongs to this package. I read now the tenth principle:
The basic assumption for the new paradigm is, that man is fundamentally good and capable to infinitely perfect the creativity of his mind and the beauty of his soul, and being the most advanced geological force in the universe, which proves that the lawfulness of the mind and that of the physical universe are in correspondence and cohesion, and that all evil is the result of a lack of development, and therefore can be overcome.
If one investigates which forces agree with this definition of the nature of man, one can see that the three Mosaic religions agree with that—Christianity, Islam, and Judaism—then Hinduism and Buddhism, which together account for about 77% of the world population. Then, one can also count the communists and some other countries, who are also working to improve both the material as well as the cultural quality of life of their populations. So, it is clearly the overwhelming majority of the human species who have that positive image of man.
On the other side, one can see that it is only oligarchical forms of government that insist that the basic character of man is that described by the British Enlightenment of Hobbes, Hume, Locke, or the Dutch Bernard Mandeville, who argue that man is evil by nature and therefore must be suppressed by an all-powerful Leviathan—this is the idea of Hobbes—a world policeman in a unipolar world. That was clearly the underlying assumption of Francis Fukuyama’s erroneous prediction of the “end of history” after the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991. That is also the axiom on which the idea of Global NATO is resting.
But as I already indicated, these assertions have had a tremendous blowback already, because in reality they do not correspond to the true nature of man. They have led to the emergence of the Global Majority of nations, who are presently in the process of constructing a new world economic and political system which does correspond to the view expressed in the tenth principle.
The natural evolution of the biosphere into the noösphere according to Vladimir Vernadsky built innate into the lawfulness of our physical universe—or in God’s creation, if you want to express it in religious terms—will increase the potential for goodness more and more. It is up to us to implement this new security and development architecture now, and not let some relic of a previous stage of development, some form of Troglodyte intervene from the Stone Age, and destroy all of humanity with a thermonuclear hand axe. Thank you.
