Conflict Prevention: Ten Lessons We Have Learned, Gareth Evans

Closing Keynote Address by Gareth Evans, President of the International

Crisis Group, to the University of Toronto Peace and Conflict Society
Conference Before the Crisis Breaks: Conflict Prevention, Crisis
Management and Preventive Diplomacy in the 21st Century, Toronto, 4
February 2007

In opening his excellent remarks to the first plenary session of this

conference yesterday, Professor Jack Goldstone said that, as an academic,
his role was to talk, but certainly not to do. He was gracious enough not to
spell out the obvious corollary to that proposition - that practitioners like me
should do, but certainly not talk!
But here I am talking to you nonetheless, so let me make the most of my
miscasting by first of all thanking the student organizers of this conference
for a job splendidly well done. I have to say that as an old warrior of the
(sort-of) left in my earlier political incarnations, I was deeply touched by the
wonderfully egalitarian, non-hierarchical spirit clearly infusing this whole
enterprise: I don’t think I’ve ever before seen a workforce commanded by
no less than two Co-Presidents and eight Co-Chairs. I’m not sure what
crimes or misdemeanours were committed by the your poor Treasurer and
Secretary for them not to have been called Director-Generals of Finance and
Administration respectively, but no doubt that slight can be redressed next
year. Congratulations to you all – and the volunteers, and the Faculty
members and everyone else who sailed with you – for an exceedingly well
constructed and stimulating event. It has been a privilege to be here with
you.
As the case study breakout groups worked their way around the world’s
problems over the last two days – from North Korea to Venezuela, via East
Timor, Afghanistan, the Middle East, the Great Lakes and Horn of Africa,
the Caucasus and the Balkans; as my own International Crisis Group finds
itself now reporting just about every month in our CrisisWatch bulletin that
more situations around the world are deteriorating than improving; and as
we all find ourselves getting so accustomed and immunized to extreme
violence in places like Iraq that yesterday’s horrific suicide truck bombing of
a crowded Baghdad market, killing over 120 people, barely rated a mention
on page 16 of this morning’s Toronto Star - it’s hard to believe that the
world has learned anything at all about how to prevent deadly conflict.
But let me try nonetheless - you may think a little heroically - to offer you a
number of reasons why we do still have some reason to look on the bright
side. For everything that is still going wrong, we have been learning, slowly
and painfully, how to do things better. And there are some lessons that we
ought very clearly to have learned from the experience of the last fifteen
years, even if some of them are still only just beginning to sink in.
Reinforced by the series of excellent presentations in the plenary sessions -
starting with Louise Frechette in the opening keynote - and by what I have
heard of the equally excellent discussions in the breakout groups, let me try
to distil what I think are the ten major lessons we have learned, or should by
now have learned, about conflict prevention.
Lesson 1. Conflict prevention effort does make a difference.
The point was made by Mike Lawrence and Max Kelly at the outset of their
excellent concepts paper, and by several of the plenary speakers, that as bad
as things seem at the moment, it’s important to keep a sense of perspective.
Contrary to conventional wisdom, and perhaps all our intuitions, there has
been a very significant trend decline – after a high point in the late 1980s
and very early 1990s - in the number of wars taking place, both between
and within states, in the number of genocidal and other mass atrocities, and
the number of people dying violent deaths as a result of them. In the case of
serious conflicts (defined as those with 1000 or more battle deaths in a year)
and mass killings there has been an 80 per cent decline since the early ‘90s,
and an even more striking decrease in the number of battle deaths.
Whereas most years from the 1940s through to the 1990s had over 100,000
such reported deaths – and sometimes as many as 500,000 – the average for
the first years of this new century has been more like 20,000. Of course
violent battle deaths are only a small part of the whole story of the misery of
war: 90 per cent or more of war-related deaths are due to disease and
malnutrition rather than direct violence, as we have seen, for example, in the
Congo and Darfur. But the trend decline in battle deaths is significant, and
highly encouraging.
A number of reasons contributed to these turnarounds, including the end of
the era of colonialism, which generated two-thirds or more of all wars from
the 1950s to the 1980s; and of course the end of the Cold War, which meant
no more proxy wars fuelled by Washington or Moscow, and also the demise
of a number of authoritarian governments, generating internal resentment
and resistance, that each side had been propping up.
But, as argued by Andrew Mack’s Human Security Centre in Canada, the
organisation which compiles and publishes all this data in its Human
Security Report, recently updated to the end of 2005, the best explanation
is the one that stares us in the face, even if a great many don’t want to
acknowledge it: the huge upsurge in activity in conflict prevention, conflict
management, diplomatic peacemaking and post-conflict peacebuilding
activity that has occurred over the last fifteen years, with most of this being
spearheaded by the UN itself (but with the World Bank, donor states, a
number of regional security organisations and literally thousands of NGOs
playing significant roles of their own.) Conflict prevention is a frustrating
business to be in, but those of us engaged in it - as policymakers, as
researchers or as activists – are not wasting our time.
Lesson 2: The Best Way to Stop Wars is Not to Start Them
It has taken the continuing catastrophe in Iraq, and the lesser but still painful
one of Israel’s confrontation with Hizbollah last year, to drive this point
home. For most high security risk situations, whether cross-border or
internal, the military force option should be absolutely the last measure
contemplated – with other strategies, whether they be political and
diplomatic, or legal and constitutional, or economic and developmental, or
involve non-coercive military measures like security sector reform, being far
more likely to be productive, and not absolutely counterproductive.
Enthusiasm for preventive warfare - preemptive strikes to deal with non-
imminent threats – remains undiminished in some dark and unlovely corners
of the US and some other administrations around the world, and we cannot
assume that the bottom has entirely dropped out of the market for a strike on
Iran’s still very early stage nuclear installations. But my sense, from
successive visits to Washington – most recently last week – that after nearly
four years of experience in Iraq, there now a fairly complete understanding
of not only the range of demons, both regionally and globally, that we would
be unleashed by preventive strikes, but also the limited and short term nature
of the gains that would be achieved. Life is a learning experience, even for
neo-cons.
None of this means that we should swing to the opposite extreme and
foreswear military responses in situations where this is both legal, as a
matter of international law, and legitimate, as a matter of morality and
decency: there are in fact two big problems with military force, not just
using it when we shouldn’t, but not using it when we should (as was
obviously the case in Rwanda and Srebrenica). The responsibility to protect
doctrine – to which the world is at least now paying lipservice – does now
clearly acknowledges the legitimacy of coercive military force, if only in the
most extreme cases. That said, one of the many pieces of unfinished
business in relation to R2P, is the absence of an agreed set of guidelines for
when the most extreme of all forms of reactive measures should, and should
not, be mobilized. A model set of guidelines were set out in the ICISS
Commision report, and both the High Level Panel and Secretary-General’s
reports in the lead up to the 2005 World Summit, but the Security Council
has so far remained unmoved.
The argument for such agreed criteria, is not that their application will
produce push-button consensus, but they will concentrate everyone’s
attention, both decision makers’ and publics’, on the critical issues: (1)
whether the situation is prima facie serious enough to justify even the
contemplation of force, (2) whether the primary reason for the proposed
attack is really the stated one and defensible as such, (3) whether other
remedial options are reasonably available and if so have been exhausted, (4)
whether the nature of the force proposed is proportional to the harm being
stopped or averted, and (5) – often the real show stopper – the balance of
consequences: whether the proposed coercive military intervention will in
fact do more harm than good.
Lesson 3. Conflict is cyclical: the trick is to stop the wheel turning.
One of the things we now understand most clearly about conflict is that the
countries and regions most likely to lapse into it are those that have been
there before. There is not a straight line sequence between the anticipation of
conflict and attempts to prevent it breaking out; the resolution of conflict, by
negotiation or force, when it has broken out; and then post-conflict peace-
building. Rather there is a cyclical process, in which each post-conflict
environment contains the potential seeds of the next round of destruction.
Viewed this way, post-conflict peacebuilding is not the end of a process of
conflict resolution, but the start of a new process of conflict prevention: as
Louise Frechette reminded us, the worst horrors in the Angolan civil war
came after the Bicesse Accords in 1990, and the Rwandan genocide
exploded just a year after the Arusha Peace Agreement of 1993, in each case
because manifestly inadequate arrangements were made for peacekeeping
and general implementation follow through. We’re now doing much better
at getting this right – and the fact that more existing conflicts are being
settled, then staying settled, is clearly a key factor in the trend decline in the
figures for the number of conflicts and battle deaths, as the latest UBC
Human Security Report makes clear.
There is a little bit of a disposition to say that post-conflict peacebuilding is
not real conflict prevention, which means doing what’s necessary to stop
violent conflict breaking out where it has not occurred before. But one can
agree that much more remains to be done to energise effective responses,
particularly longer term structural measures, while still recognizing the huge
preventive significance of the new emphasis on peacebuilding.
Lesson 4. One size analysis doesn’t fit all: every conflict is different.
To understand how to prevent - and resolve - conflict it is necessary to
understand what causes it, and one of the products of the much enhanced
focus on conflict prevention is much more academic and institutional
analysis than we have ever had before on what generates conflict. There is a
whole literature now, for example, on the economic causes of war within, as
well as between states, and the respective roles of greed and grievance in
fostering and sustaining violence. We have had a number of references to
that and other research on causation during the course of this conference,
and I won’t stop to summarise any of it here.
The short point I would make is that such general analysis has become
extremely helpful in getting us to ask the right questions, but it is a mistake
to think it can provide all the answers. Every conflict does have its own
dynamic, and there is no substitute for comprehensively understanding all
the factors at work. Everything starts with having an accurate take on what is
happening on the ground, the issues that are resonating and the personalities
and local dynamics – political, economic, social, cultural and personal -
that are driving them.
For a variety of reasons, mainly security and budgetary, traditional diplomats
are not performing this function in as much breadth and depth as they
traditionally have – it’s hard to get out and about when you are locked up in
a fortress or have minimal staff resources - and both early warning and
effective conflict prevention capacity have become more at risk as a result.
Filling this gap – providing the kind of detailed field-based analysis that is
absolutely critical for effective conflict prevention and resolution - has been
really the primary rationale for the creation and work of my own
International Crisis Group: but that will be my last piece of advertising!
Lesson 5. Conflict prevention requires complex strategies: one-
dimensional fixes rarely work
As a result of the much more systematic focus on conflict prevention since
the early 1990s we now have a much better understanding not only of the
causes of conflict but the repertoire of measures available to deal with them.
There are many different ways of categorising and classifying them, and
there is a voluminous literature on the subject, but the simplest way of
getting one’s head around the options available in any given situation may
be to think of a toolbox with two trays – for structural prevention and more
direct operational measures respectively. It’s generally the case that
structural measures tend to be longer-term in focus and direct operational
measures shorter term, though not always, as some speakers have rightly
pointed out.
Each tray in turn has four basic compartments for, respectively, political and
diplomatic measures, legal and constitutional measures, economic and social
measures, and security sector and military measures. And there are sub-
compartments within each of these – for example direct economic measures
might have separate slots for positive incentives , negative incentives (or
sanctions), and focused humanitarian aid.
The crucial thing is to recognise not only that each situation has its own
characteristics, and that one-size spanners don’t fit all, but that each situation
is likely to require a complex combination of measures. And the balance
between them is bound to change, and to have to change, over time as
circumstances evolve. Conflict prevention is a business for the fleet of foot,
not the plodders – but unfortunately in international affairs, as in life itself,
the latter usually have the numbers.
Lesson 6. Conflict prevention requires effective institutional structures.
These are necessary at the global, regional and national government levels,
and this issue has had good attention at this conference. . Globally, there are
at least three major structural problems, only one of which was seriously
tackled, and even then only partly, in the 2005 World Summit– that was the
establishment of the new Peacebuilding Commission, to ensure that there
would sustained and effective international focus on, and resource
commitment for, the crucial post-conflict phase.
A second big problem is the Security Council, not just ensuring its
commitment and effective delivery, both of which have often been
problematic, but in ensuring its continued legitimacy, when its structure is so
manifestly a reflection of the world of 1945, not the 21st century. The
complacency of the Permanent Five veto-wielding members is misplaced:
their powers will be a diminishing asset unless the credibility issue is
seriously addressed before much longer, but following the collapse of the
2005 efforts there is little or no sign that it will be.
A third issue is Secretariat reform: getting more resources into the peace and
security area, ensuring their quality, and enabling the Secretary-General to
have available to him a large store of early warning and analysis capability –
a function that has been largely denied it so far by member states anxious
not to be seen as suitable cases for treatment.
Regionally, while significant progress has been made in recent years,
especially by the African Union (although its doctrine and rhetoric remains a
long way ahead of its operational capacity, as we have seen so acutely and
alarmingly in Darfur), much more needs to be done to strengthen conflict
prevention and resolution capability, which in many parts of the world is
non-existent, or so deeply reluctant to become involved in the security
problems of the neighbourhood that it might as well be.
So far as national governments are concerned, increasing efforts have been
made to develop structural arrangements both ‘mainstreaming’ conflict
prevention – requiring all relevant policy officers to give attention to this
dimension in developing aid and other external policies – and also
specifically ‘tasking’ it by giving particular individuals or groups within the
government the specific responsibility to think about prevention, and devise
and recommend up the decision-making food chain appropriate policy
responses. And that is all a Good Thing.
Lesson 7. Conflict prevention requires application of resources.
Like many other worthwhile public policy activities, conflict prevention
struggles to get its share of public resources. Part of the problem is that it
doesn’t generate immediately visible returns: as a number of speakers here
have lamented, you succeed most in conflict prevention when nothing
happens, and nobody notices. And for most people in public office
performing good works without anyone noticing it is like having your teeth
pulled.
But there is no doubt a formidable case can be made for conflict prevention
on pure financial cost-benefit grounds alone. As Australian Foreign Minister
in the early 1990s I estimated, with the help of my Department, that the first
Gulf War, which cost the allied coalition some $US 70 billion to wage, could
conceivably have been avoided through more effective preventive
diplomacy - which in the institutional form of six small but highly
professional regional conflict prevention centres around the world would
have cost the whole international community just over $20 million a year.
Similar calculations have been made in many other contexts.
That kind of calculation has been done repeatedly in the US, where for
example a New York Times published study in August 2004 showed that the
$144 billion already then spent in Iraq (and that figure is now closer to $400
billion!) could have paid for, among other things, the more or less complete
safeguarding of US ports, airports and airliners ($34 billion); the security
from theft of the world’s stock of weapons-grade nuclear materials and the
deactivation of warheads (another $34 billion); the complete rebuilding of
Afghanistan, including drug crop conversion ($20 billion); the recruitment to
the military of another 65 000 U.S. troops, if anyone thought this a good
idea ($40 billion); plus another $10 billion in development assistance (which
would fill, for one year anyway, about 20 per cent of the annual gap to be
plugged if the Millennium Development goals relating to poverty, disease
and the like are to be met).
It is not only additional money that is needed for conflict prevention and
resolution, but a more intelligent application of money already being spent,
not least on the armed forces themselves. A critical resource problem
constantly facing planners is the availability of deployable military assets of
the necessary quality for peacekeeping, peace enforcement and
peacebuilding tasks. A major part of the problem in the developed world is
the lingering on of Cold War configurations in force structures. For example,
though it’s insidious to single out any single country when the problem is so
endemic, in Germany, where on figures I saw not long ago, of 250 000 men
and women currently in uniform, only some 10, 000 are deployable at any
given time on international peace operation tasks. One recent broader
estimate is that of the 2.5 million personnel nominally under arms in Europe,
at most 3 per cent are deployable. A good many of the rest are presumably
still waiting by their tanks for the Russians to come. And even with Mr Putin
at his most adventurous, that doesn’t seem terribly likely.
Lesson 8: recognize that there is no substitute for cooperative
internationalism.
We know, even if some countries who think they have the capacity to go it
alone are not always quick to admit it, is that it is simply not possible to
respond effectively to security threats, whether global or regional or in many
cases even local, whether coming from state or non state actors - aggressors,
or proliferators, or terrorists – without effective international cooperation,
whether on early warning and intelligence, effective preventive strategies,
conflict management and response strategies, or – as the has become
particularly evident in Iraq and Afghanistan - post conflict reconstruction.
There are limits to any country’s capacity, even the U.S’s, to do anything
without allies, friends or supporters, or by extension, working through
international and intergovernmental institutions, starting with the UN
Security Council. And it’s in every country’s interest, not just small or
medium sized ones like my own, to operate in a rule-based rather than raw
power-based international order.
Lesson 9. Conflict prevention requires the mobilization of political will.
This is the bottom line in just about every area of public policy: unless the
relevant decision makers, at the national or international level, want
something to happen it won’t. We can have the concepts right, the analysis
right, the resources and capacity available, but still remain totally inert in the
face of situations which seem to cry out for active response.
What we perhaps still need to learn (as a number of speakers here have
sensibly emphasized) is that merely lamenting the absence of political will –
as so many commentaries do, stopping the analysis right there - doesn’t help
very much: what we have to is work out how to mobilise it, recognizing and
squarely dealing with all the institutional dynamics and personalities and
interests involved. And that requires a combination of good institutional
structures – of the kind I have earlier discussed – and good arguments.
The obligation on all of us, both inside and outside government systems,
who are concerned about better conflict prevention is to provide those
arguments. The most relevant ones are:
 financial arguments, of the kind I have just mentioned (preventive
action is likely to be cheaper by many orders of magnitude, as we have
already seen, than responding after the event, whether through military
action, humanitarian relief assistance, post-conflict reconstruction, or all
three);
 national interest arguments (bearing in mind the risk posed in an
interdependent and highly mobile world that fragile, conflict ridden states –
even small ones far away of whom the Neville Chamberlains of this world
continue to know nothing - pose for others in relation to terrorism, health
pandemics, refugee outflows and damaging environmental spillovers);
 domestic political arguments (of a kind which appeal to parties in
power, and these can include shoring up a political base as much as getting
through to waverers: the Bush administration’s preoccupation with its
Christian right has certainly been an important element in its wholly
desirable commitment to peace processes in Sudan); and
 last but not least, moral arguments (because however base and self-
interested their actual motives are governments always like to be seen as
acting from higher ones);
This leads me to make the point that the most effective foreign policy for
any country, whatever its weight, is one that balances realism and idealism –
that in effect makes idealism realistic.
This is an ever-recurring debate in international relations and its certainly
alive and well right now in the US. With the neo-con confessionals now
overflowing after the conspicuous failure of the Bush administration’s
adventures in bombing for democracy - combined with its undoubted
success in uniting as one a previously almost completely disunited ‘axis of
evil’ - hard-headed foreign policy realism is back in business in a big way in
the U.S.
My Crisis Group Board member colleague Ken Adelman – a fierce supporter
of the Iraq war (he was the one who said it would be a ‘cakewalk’), and the
rest of original Bush 43 administration mission –is one of those who now
laments this. In the current issue of Vanity Fair, he says that after Iraq ‘the
idea of a tough foreign policy on behalf of morality, the idea of using our
power for moral good in the world’ is ‘not going to sell’ for a generation. If
he means the particular kind of idealistic foreign policy that has been
pursued over the last six years - impervious to demonstrable facts, naïve in
its assumptions, crude in its application of military power, and totally
bungled in its general execution - then we should be grateful to be spared
any more of the same.
But if idealism has its limits, the alternative is not a crude and one-
dimensional brand of foreign policy realism either. A foreign policy that is
founded only on hard-headed realism is a policy that can all too readily
descend into cynical indifference: the kind that enabled successive previous
US administrations ( both Bush 41’s, whose foreign policy performance in
many other ways I much admired, and Bill Clinton’s) to shrug their
shoulders about Saddam Hussein’s genocidal assaults on the Kurds in the
north in the late 80s and the Shiites in the south of Iraq in the early 90s, or to
find reasons for ignoring the rapidly unfolding Rwandan genocide in 1994,
or to talk the talk but fail to walk the walk when it comes now to Darfur.
What the U.S, like every other, needs, and what all the polling evidence
suggests all our publics will support, is a foreign policy based on a
principled and judicious mixture of both idealism and realism. And one
crucial element in that mix is a willingness to accept and embrace, without
ifs, buts and maybes, the principle of ‘the responsibility to protect’, which
have been referred to many times during this conference. The concept -
which had its birth in the Canadian-sponsored Commission I co-chaired in
2001 – is a simple one: that while the primary responsibility to protect its
own people from genocide and other such man-made catastrophes is that of
the state itself, when a state fails to meet that responsibility, either through
incapacity or ill-will, then the responsibility to protect shifts to the
international community – to be exercised by measures all the way up to, if
absolutely necessary, military force.
We can, if we need to, always justify making R2P a reality on hard-headed,
practical, national interest grounds: states that can’t or wont stop internal
atrocity crimes are the kind of rogue states, or failed or failing states, that
can’t or wont stop terrorism, weapons proliferation, drug and people
trafficking, the spread of health pandemics and other global risks.
But at the end of the day the case for R2P rests on our common humanity -
the impossibility of ignoring the cries of pain and distress of our fellow
human beings. For any of us in the international community - from
individuals to NGOs to national governments to international organizations
- to yet again ignore that distress and agony, to once again make ‘never
again’ a cry that rings totally emptily, is to diminish that common humanity
to the point of despair.
Lesson 10: recognize there is no substitute for leadership
Of course what I’m talking about here is not just any leadership: just before
Christmas I spent a weekend in Nuremberg, sampling not just the delights of
Europe’s most wonderful Christmas market, but reminding myself –
standing where Hitler screamed his obscenities from the crumbling podium
of the Zeppelinfield, and where Goering stood trial in the eery familiarity of
Courtroom 600 ¬– how monstrously, horribly astray a country can go when
it succumbs to the collective belief that the only thing that matters in a
chaotic environment is leadership strength.
The kind of leadership I’m talking about is what we can all recognize when
we see it, and lament it when it goes missing. That recognizes the big
turning points in national or global history, and makes the right calls, and
delivers the right responses – as Roosevelt did in the 30s, or Truman and
Marshall after the war; or as Dag Hammarskjold did in inventing
peacekeeping and keeping the UN flame at least partially burning during the
worst of the Cold War years; or as Gorbachev did in Russia, seeing the
impossibility of sustaining the Cold War, or as Deng Xiao Ping did in China,
at least in setting a wholly new economic course for the country in the
chaotic and desolate aftermath of Mao; or as George Bush Senior did in
leading, through the UN, the unequivocal response to Iraq’s invasion of
Kuwait in 1991, the first big post Cold War test of the system of
international order. Or above all, perhaps, as Nelson Mandela did with his
towering moral and political leadership of South Africa’s transition,
completely avoiding – with crucial support from another leader, in FW de
Klerk, who came to understand, late but not too late, what the moment
demanded¬ - what just about everyone feared would be an unavoidable
racial bloodbath.
The kind of leadership I’m talking about doesn’t always have to be delivered
in a spectacular way to be effective, and it doesn’t always have to be
delivered by the biggest figures or the greatest powers. I’m thinking of the
kind of leadership that was shown by Canada, for example, and its Prime
Minister Paul Martin, who worked away diligently behind the scenes for
months in the run-up to the 2005 World Summit to ensure that the
‘responsibility to protect’ norm would be embraced: an example which, if
followed by a few more leaders in a few more capitals, would have saved a
good deal more of the outcome we hoped for from that summit, which
turned out a huge missed opportunity for the international community.
I believe it’s also the leadership that Kofi Annan has shown throughout his
ten long and difficult years as Secretary-General, building on the
insufficiently acknowledged intellectual legacy of Boutros Boutros-Ghali, in
bringing back into prominence, and some kind of balance, the three great
roles of the UN in peace and security, development and human rights, and in
being a constant voice – even if not heeded as much as he should have been
– for doing the right thing. To be effective, an SG has to have practical
intelligence, particularly in his personnel choices, an iron constitution,
emotional resilience, good friends, and good luck - but if he is to be great, he
must also have an abundance of moral courage.
At the end of the day of course an S-G can only deliver what the member
states allow him to deliver. But he must never stop making clear what they
should be delivering, not least when it comes to their responsibility to
protect the world’s most vulnerable people. It is, as so many have said, a
more or less impossible job that Ban Ki-Moon is taking on, having to, inter
alia, meet expectations on the one hand that he will be the kind of secular
pope that Kofi Annan was often described as being (at least in his first term),
and on the other having to deal with the clear preference of the Permanent
Five that he be more secretary than general. I just hope that Ban does come
quickly to recognize not only the constraints and limitations, but the
opportunities, that go with this great office.
We all know, without me needing to take the time to spell it out, where
international leadership has spectacularly failed us in recent years, most
obviously in the Middle East, where it’s gone astray when it hasn’t gone
completely missing, and where its been shown over and again, if we needed
to be reminded, that tenacity is no substitute for intelligence; in Africa,
where a succession of celebrated leaders of a new continental renaissance
have turned out to have feet of clay; in Europe, which continues to punch
well below its weight across a spectrum of global issues and is showing
alarming signs of completely losing the plot on Turkey; and on weapons of
mass destruction, where none of the P5 nuclear weapons states seem to
begin to understand that the rest of the world is fed up with double
standards, and non-proliferation can only begin to get back on track if
disarmament is taken seriously.
We know all too well that when it comes to this crucial ingredient of
leadership, there is an awful lot of pure chance in play. So much does seem
to depend just on the luck of the draw: whether at a time of fragility and
transition a country finds itself with a Mandela or a Milosevic or a Mugabe;
an Ataturk or an Arafat; a Rabin who can see and seize the moment, and
change course, or someone who never will. Despite all our best efforts, that
has always been so, and I suspect it always will be. Looking around the
world at those individuals who currently matter most, we just have to
express the fervent hope that even if leaders are not always born, and only
on very rare occasions are elected, they can at least on occasion be made.
Of all the lessons we have learned about conflict prevention the need for
good leadership is probably the single most obvious and the single most
important. But it remains the hardest of all to get right. And maybe at the
end of the day, the responsibility for getting it right – in voting democracies
like ours at least – is something that we cannot pretend belongs to anyone
but ourselves as ordinary, individual citizens.
My generation has not covered itself in glory either in our performance as
leaders or in the choices we have made as voters. It’s up to the next
generation to do a lot better. And on the evidence I’ve seen here in Toronto
at least over the last few days, with some of the best and brightest of the new
voting and leadership generation showing us what they are capable of in
their organization and management of this conference and their debating and
questioning contributions to it over the last two days, I think the world is in
pretty good hands.