Our Global Neighbourhood

[jbor]

http://www.cgg.ch/contents.htm

    Time is not on the side of indecision. Important choices must be made
    now, because we are at the threshold of a new era. That newness is
    self-evident; people everywhere know it, as do governments, though not
    all admit to it. We can, for example, go forward to a new era of
    security that responds to law and collective will and common
    responsibility by placing the security of people and of the planet at
    the centre. Or we can go backwards to the spirit and methods of what one
    of our members described as the 'sheriff's posse'--dressed up to
    masquerade as global action.

    There should be no question of which way we go. But the right way
    requires the assertion of the values of internationalism, the primacy of
    the rule of law world-wide, and institutional reforms that secure and
    sustain them. This report offers some suggestions for such responses.

    Fifty years ago, another generation, recoiling from the horror of war
    and the unleashed potential for human self-destruction, sought to
    secure a future free from fear and free from want. The result of that
    effort was the United Nations system, established in the name of the
    peoples of the world. Today, with the need as great and urgent, and with
    a heightened sense among people of an endangered future, humanity must
    renew that effort. That is why this report is a call for action.

    It is a call for action on many fronts, but essentially for better
    global governance--better management of survival, better ways of sharing
    diversity, better ways of living together in the global neighbourhood
    that is our human homeland. There is no question of capacity to take the
    action for which the Commission calls. There is only a question of the
    will to take that action.

    Removed from the sway of empires and a world of victors and vanquished,
    released from the constraints of the cold war that so cramped the
    potential of an evolving global system throughout the post-war era,
    seized of the risk of unsustainable human impacts on nature, mindful of
    the global implications of human deprivation--the world has no real
    option but to rise to the challenge of change, in an enlightened and
    constructive fashion. We call on our global neighbours, in all their
    diversity, to act together to ensure this--and to act now.

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