Defence Forces Review 2008

The Nobel Lecture - 9 January 1989
The Nobel Lecture - 9 January 1989
Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, Secretary-General of the United Nations
Mr. Chairman, Excellencies, Ladies and Gentlemen,
I should like first of all, to once again thank the Norwegian Nobel Committee for the award
they have made to the United Nations Peacekeeping Operations. Their decision has been
acclaimed all over the world. I take this opportunity also to express once again my deep
gratitude to the countries which have contributed troops or provided logistical support to these
operations. It is to their willing cooperation that we owe the success of this great experiment
in conflict control.
Peace - the word evokes the simplest and most cherished dream of humanity. Peace is, and
has always been, the ultimate human aspiration. And yet our history overwhelmingly shows
that while we speak incessantly of peace, our actions tell a very different story. Peace is any
easy word to say in any language. As Secretary-General of the United Nations I hear it so
frequently from so many different mouths and different sources, that it sometimes seems to
me to be a general incantation more or less deprived of practical meaning. What do we really
mean by peace
Human nature being what it is, peace must inevitably be a relative condition. The essence
of life is struggle and competition, and to that extent perfect peace is an almost meaningless
abstraction. Struggle and competition are stimulating, but when they degenerate into conflict
they are usually both destructive and disruptive. The aim of political institutions like the
United Nations is to draw the line between struggle and conflict and to make it possible for
nations to stay on the right side of that line. Peacekeeping operations are one very practical
means of doing this. What we are trying to create in the United Nations is a world where
nations recognize at the same time the ultimate futility of war and the collective responsibility
which men and women everywhere share for ensuring a decent future.
All human experience seems to show that in international, as in national, affairs, the rule of
law is an essential ultimate objective for any society which wishes to survive in reasonable
conditions. We now recognize that all humanity - the whole population of this planet - has in
many respects become, through the revolutionary force of technological and other changes, a
single society. The evolution of, and respect for, international law and international authority
may well be decisive in determining whether this global society is going to survive in
reasonable conditions.
We have come a long way in the forty-three years since World War II. With the creation and
ratification of the United Nations Charter it seemed that governments had, at last, learned the
lessons of two world wars. However, in the forty years of ideological strife, tumultous change,
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