Nov. 22, 2002

Former President Bill Clinton's Nov. 17, 2002, speech at Mondavi Center

(Introduction by Chancellor Larry Vanderhoef)

…Ladies and gentlemen, I’m Larry Vanderhoef, I’m the chancellor here at UC Davis. It’s gratifying to once again see so many of you able to enjoy the Mondavi Center and Jackson Hall. It is also my gratifying and very great honor this afternoon to introduce our other distinguished speaker guests.

Universities occupy a unique place in society. Traditionally, they are places where vigorous public conversation and debate are the norm. this campus has a very long tradition of bringing you distinguished public speakers from science, the arts, literature and politics to our region of California. In fact, we have been doing this for quite a long time. We can trace our formal program of public lectures back to the years just after of World War II. Over those 50 plus years our Campus Presenting organization has brought dozens of writers and scholars and scientists, and later this year, for example, we will welcome, among others, Jehan Sadat, the former first lady of Egypt; and noted and controversial — not controversial for me but for some — sociobiologist Edward O. Wilson; and eminent mathematician, physicist, theoretician Stephen Hawking. I would like to acknowledge the generous sponsorship of SBC Pacific Bell and the individual sponsors who are helping to make the distinguished speaker series such a powerhouse.

Speaking of powerhouses, that is a description that has been aptly applied to William Jefferson Clinton. As our nation’s 42nd President, he presided over the longest economic expansion in American history, a period that saw the creation of 22 million new jobs, increases in income, significant declines in unemployment, and in poverty, and in crime. President Clinton was as well as advocate for global democracy and open markets. He and his administration worked forcefully for world peace, including important peace initiatives in Northern Ireland and the Middle East. His support for financial assistance to Mexico is now regarded as a key to preventing the financial collapse of that very key ally for us here in the United States.

A significant theme during his time in office was the pursuit of hope. Hope for the poor, hope for the disadvantaged. So it is not surprising that today he continues as a living hero in those communities. Nor is it surprising that since leaving office, President Clinton continues to work on many of the same issues through the William J. Clinton Foundation. The Clinton Foundation focuses on the economic empowerment of the poor for racial, ethnic and religious reconciliation and for the education and health of young people.

He is working with former South African President Nelson Mandela to combat the burgeoning global AIDS crisis and he has helped launch the William J. Clinton International Peace Center in Northern Ireland. President Clinton worked to establish the American India Foundation which, has helped the victims of India’s recent catastrophic earthquake to rebuild nearly 2,000 homes, four hospitals and schools that serve 6,000 students. Meanwhile, back in New York City, President Clinton is actively helping low income individuals and small business owners in Harlem and elsewhere. Hope. It’s about giving people hope.

He is also lending his support to a project that will enhance music education in the public schools, an area close to the hearts of my wife, Rosalie, and me and a large part of the reason we sit in this hall today — a hall that has already, in its young life, been filled to overflowing at least twice with just school children for matinee performances of world-acclaimed artists. Of course I could go on and on, but I’m sure you would rather hear President Clinton, and so ladies and gentlemen, it is with deep gratitude that I present our 42nd President of the United States, the Honorable William Jefferson Clinton. [Applause]

(Former President Bill Clinton’s speech)

Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you for the wonderful welcome and thank you, Chancelor Vanderhoef for the warm introduction. Ladies and gentlemen, I am delighted to be here at UC Davis, and at this magnificent Mondavi Center. As you can hear, I’m a little hoarse. On the week before the recent elections, I took three overnight flights, from Minnesota to Hawaii, back to Oregon and several others that got in late and I did 50 radio interviews on election night. So I lost more than just my vote on election day.

But I’m struggling to get it back, and the miracle of the microphone, I hope, will allow us to communicate. I want to thank UC Davis for giving me the chance to come here and for bringing so many other distinguished lecturers here, including my good friend Stephen Hawking, one of the brightest and most important people alive today. President Kennedy once said that the life of art and culture is the test of the quality of any nation’s civilization. I thank the Mondavis for their gift here and all of you for helping not only UC Davis, but the United States to meet that test.

I owe this campus a lot. Several of your alums were active in my administration, including Richard Rominger, my Deputy Secretary of Agriculture for two terms, your former Dean of Graduate Studies, now the Chancellor of UC Santa Cruz, M.R.C. Greenwood, was a science advisor on the White House staff. A graduate of your law school, a Korean American Angela Oh, was a member of my Commission on Race.

But perhaps the most special memory I have of UC Davis, occurred when Al Gore and I hosted a Presidential Forum on Preserving Lake Tahoe in 1997. One of your professors, Charles Goldman, took us out on a UC Davis research vessel for a tour of the lake and he showed us how he tested the quality of one of only two blue-water lakes in the entire world by putting a white plate down and seeing how far into the lake it could be seen. [Laughter] I was actually relieved to know, being technologically challenged, that there was an old-fashioned way to do something important in this new world.

That day we announced new efforts to help clean up and preserve the lake. But I was so impressed by the UC Davis researchers and the students I met that day. People who had been working for more than 40 years to ensure that future generations will always be able to see Tahoe’s brilliant cobalt blue waters. I hope we will succeed, and, if we do, it will be because of the people of this great campus. Your efforts in this area and in many others, developing new technology to fight plant disease or improve food storage, new ways to stop global warming, to ensure cleaner air and safer water, to end world hunger. All these things reflect the absolutely unparalleled potential of the century in which we are now living and where the students here will live most of their lives.

There has never been so much potential for peace and prosperity, for social progress and scientific discovery. It is ironic, I think, that with all the good things that are going on, so much of our attention here and around the world is focused on terrorism, the threat of weapons of mass destruction, and the fear and insecurity they breed in us. What accounts for the coexistence of all these conflicting forces?

o The emergence of the European Union on the one hand and the bloody wars in Bosnia and Kosovo on the other.

o The stunning potential of the sequencing of the human genome and the furious efforts of terrorists to develop biological weapons.

o The increasing diversity and harmony in the United States, especially in California, and in other rich societies and the rise of religious, spatial, ethnic and tribal conflicts around the world.

o The successful integration of Muslims into American society and the murder of 3,100 people from 70 countries, including over 200 Muslims, by the al-Qaida on September 11th of last year, claiming to be fulfilling the mandate of their faith.

The short answer to this question is that the globalization of trade and travel, of immigration, information and technology, have given us a world that is truly interdependent. Where all over the world people are more open to each other as never before. But it is a world that is far from integrated. An integrated world requires shared values, shared benefits, shared responsibilities, and organized ways to cooperate. This interdependent world of ours has brought us enormous benefits — the economic explosion of the 1990s, the social progress on every front.

But we cannot settle for an interdependent world. We have to move from interdependence to an integrated global community with shared values, benefits, and responsibilities. Why? Because if you are interdependent, that is, open to each other, whether it’s in one particular place like the Middle East or Northern Ireland, or in this case, increasingly across the globe, you are not only full of potential, you are constantly vulnerable. If there is no integrated community where interdependence exists, then at the very best, life is insecure and it’s confined. Remember how many people wouldn’t fly after September the 11th? How many tourist places were in trouble? What’s happening in Bali today because of the terrorists there? At the very best, their life is insecure and confined. At the worst, it is miserable and deadly.

So, we should try to move to integration. What are the adversaries? Those who seek their redemption in our destruction. Those among us who think we can forever claim for ourselves benefits we would deny to others.

And the curious paradox in the qualities of the 21st century world — I’ll just mention a few — the global economy has lifted more people out of poverty more quickly in the last 20 years than at any time in human history, but half the world’s people still live on less than $2 a day. Education adds more benefits than ever before, even in the developing world, where one extra year of schooling adds 10 percent a year to the income of the young man or woman who gets it. Everyone knows that, and yet 130 million children never go to school at all. Because of health advances, life expectancy is up and infant mortality is down, even in the developing world. But this year 10 million children will die from preventable childhood diseases. One in four of all the deaths on earth today come from AIDS, TB, malaria, and infections related to diarrhea, most of them little children who never got a clean glass of water.

We see unprecedented global cooperation. The recent U.N. resolution on Iraq, the work I did in Bosnia and Kosovo, and yet there is everywhere the rise of particular racial, religious, tribal and ethnic conflicts. The world seems to be at once awash in the forces of integration and disintegration, of cooperation and conflict.

For eight years, I worked to make America a model of successful integration, based on opportunity for all and responsibility from all and community of all Americans. And I worked to make our country the world’s greatest force for peace and freedom, for prosperity and security, through cooperation. I thought we could lead the world into the 21st century, but not dominate it. I worked to build institutions, habits and attitudes that would bring us closer to genuine cooperation. That is still the great challenge of our time.

I believe there are four major efforts which have to be undertaken simultaneously. First, we do need a security strategy to prevent the most dangerous threats and punish those determined to carry them out. That involves primarily fighting terror and containing the risk of weapons of mass destruction. I support President Bush in leaving our troops in Afghanistan until they eradicate the al-Qaida. Indeed, I would support sending more troops there, especially after the recent tape, which appears to be an authentic tape from Mr. Bin Laden, issuing new threats.

We have fewer troops in Afghanistan than I stationed in Bosnia after the conflict was over, to keep the peace. So I think we should do whatever is necessary to do that. I support helping our friends from Colombia, to Indonesia, to the Philippines, to do more to fight terrorism on their own, and I support better homeland defenses. I do think it is a great mistake — I realize it was useful in the recent political campaigns — but it is a great mistake to assume that creating this big new department is the end all and be all of homeland defense. The FBI, perhaps the most critical agency, is not even part of the department. And tens of thousands of people who will be part of it will have virtually nothing to do with homeland defense. It may do more good than harm, but it’s not all that needs to be done.

The most important thing is that the director of homeland security should be able to compel the cooperation and sharing of intelligence across all agencies. The second thing that has to be done, is that someone in the FBI, has to be held accountable for responding to the information they do get. Two FBI agents found in August or in July that people who turned out to be part of al-Qaida were training in flight schools to fly planes but not to take off or land in them. They reported that to the central office. Nothing was done to check all the other flight schools in the country. Someone should be responsible for that.

The next thing that’s important is that we have to have modern information technology. A lot of people are worried, and I’m concerned, that we would give up too many civil liberties or profile people because of their ethnic group or their religion, in the effort to secure America against terror. I can tell you one of the most important things you can do is just to make sure the government has the information on all of us that every mass mailing company in the country already has. [Applause.]

Now, you’re laughing, but let me give you a very specific example. About three days after September the 11th, I got a call from my best childhood friend, we’ve been best friends since we were 9 years old. He works for the biggest mass mailing in America, which happens to be located in my home state of Arkansas.

He said, "Bill, you’ve got to help me. We’ve got four FBI agents here and we’ve already found five of these al-Quaida terrorists in our computers." I said, "Well, that’s good, isn’t it?" He said, "Well, sort of good, but the government has none of this." And so he said the man who is the head of the company wanted me to come in and try to get together with the government on this. And so about a week later I went down, and this is what I saw in their computers. Because the most important question is, if the government had this information — and we tripled funding for terrorism for the FBI in 1995 and ’96 and nothing was done to modernize the computers.

So you say, "So what if they found them after the fact, couldn’t they have told beforehand?" I’ll give you two examples. Mohammad Atta, the ringleader of 9/11, had 12 addresses in the computers of this company. Under Mohammad Atta, Mohammad J. Atta, Jay Atta with his middle initial spelled out. Now if a person has been in our country for about a year, and they have 12 places to live, they’re either really rich or up to no good. And it shouldn’t be too hard to figure out which.

Another one of the terrorists who flew a plane into one of the World Trade Center towers had — listen to this — 30 credit cards with $250,000 in debt outstanding and a consolidated payment schedule of $9,800 a month. Now if someone’s been here a year and they’ve got 30 credit cards and a quarter million dollars in debt, they’re either really rich or up to no good. And it shouldn’t be too hard to figure out which.

Now, this information is already available on all of us. We’re in lots of computers that say how many credit cards we have, what our debt is, whether we pay our light bill, whether we pay our water bill. All that kind of information. And so before we constrict the civil liberties of Americans further they ought to make darn sure that our government has this information and the people that know how to look at it look at it, since that’s all out there anyway. That’s a genie you cannot put back in the bottle, and if that information had been carefully studied and screened and acted upon, we might have been able to prevent September the 11th.

Next point I want to make about homeland security is that a lot of it has nothing to with the federal government. A lot of it has to do with local efforts of prevention and response. At airports, at water systems, ports, tunnels. In setting up the healthcare networks necessary should there be an anthrax outbreak, things of that kind. And there’s still been a remarkable reluctance, I think, in Washington to fund this sort of infrastructure. Because if something were to ever happen, God forbid, around here, you wouldn’t pick up the phone and call Washington D.C. You would want to know where the local clinic was. Who was going to deal with an anthrax outbreak, how are we going to keep everybody alive?

So we should have homeland security. What should our goal be? Our goal should be to stop big, bad things from happening.

When I was president, we stopped planned attacks on the Holland Tunnel, the Lincoln Tunnel, the Los Angeles Airport, planes flying out of Los Angeles to the Philippines, millennium weekend bombs planned for cities in the Northeast and the Northwest, for Jordan, and for a Christian site in the Holy Land. We arrested and tried and brought to justice the people who were involved in any number of terrorist incidents — the CIA building murders, the first World Trade Center bombings, the bombing of the plane over Scotland in 1988, and several others. This is a constant effort. And it’s okay to say it’s a war, but it shouldn’t obscure the fact that it’s not a conventional war. A lot of this is hard law enforcement work, requires hard investigative work, and requires us to use modern tools of information technologies before they’re used against us.

Second thing we have to do is to deal with weapons of mass destruction, because they are by definition capable of making big, bad things happen. That’s why it’s important to enforce the United Nations’ will way back in 1991, that Saddam Hussein not have chemical and biological weapons or be able to develop a nuclear one. I’ll say more about that in a moment; I will only say that I support the approach that is now being taken to go to the United Nations and give the inspections one more chance. There are people who say they don’t work, that’s not true.

When I was in office, the inspections recovered thousands, literally thousands of chemical weapons and destroyed them, thousands of gallons of chemical and biological stocks, destroyed a big biological weapons laboratory, even with Saddam Hussein trying not to cooperate, trying to restrict areas of access. So if we get complete unrestricted access, it’s a good thing to do. It’s a good thing to do anyway for reasons I’ll explain later, even if some day there’s a conflict. These are not the only problems, however.

North Korea is a country whose cash crop has been missiles and weapons. The can’t grow food; when their soldiers defect, they weigh 100 pounds typically. They’re the most isolated society on earth. They were going to sell weapons, and we couldn’t be permit it to be done. So we reached an agreement with them, which they have honored. Then they agreed to stop testing their missiles in 1998, which means that if they sold any long-range missiles, they, in effect, wouldn’t have a warranty. And we almost got them to agree in 2000, to end their missile program — something I think is possible.

So now that they’re making up with South Korea and Japan, they up and admit they’re trying to build one nuclear weapon out of highly enriched uranium in a laboratory effort. We can’t permit that to happen either, but I think that the Bush Administration and the Chinese, and the Russians, and the Japanese, and the South Koreans are doing the right thing in trying to resolve this in a diplomatic fashion, because I don’t believe North Korea wants to drop a bomb on us. I don’t even think they want to sell the bomb to somebody else. I think they’re screaming for the world to say they still matter and to pay a lot of attention to them and go ahead and work through remaining steps to try to figure out how they can transition into a more modern relationship with the rest of the world. But we can’t take the chance, so we can’t let them have the bomb. So we should condition all future assistance on the termination of this program and the provable termination of this program.

Russia has the largest stocks of bioweapons in the world. We spent a fortune in your tax money when I was president getting all the nuclear weapons out of the other states of the Soviet Union, destroying as many as possible, and increasing the security of the facilities where the Russians kept nuclear, biological and chemical materials. There were some years when we paid for half of the 40,000 scientists who work in Russia in weapons of mass destruction-related areas and put them to work in positive partnerships with Western scientists. I wish we’d had the money to pay for all of them. Because they needed to feed their families, and I didn’t want them tempted to go to work for someone who would build a bomb or develop another weapon that could do untold destruction. We have to keep working on that.

Not very long ago in eastern Russia, in an island off the eastern coast of Russia, they dug up an anthrax stash that had been buried 10 years before and half the spores were still alive. So we need to do the same sort of thing we did for nuclear weapons with biological and chemical weapons — pay to secure these places, keep the scientists busy doing those positive things. And we need to do it wherever there are nuclear, chemical and biological stocks that could be troublesome, including some in India and in Pakistan, as well as Russia and a number of other places.

So there does need to be a security strategy. But the second point I want to make is that a security strategy alone will never work in an interdependent environment. We may be extraordinarily successful in keeping big, bad things from happening, which should be our primary goal, but it will never be enough on its own. Why? Well, look at the Middle East. If you live in an interdependent environment, it doesn’t matter how much stronger you are than your adversary, unless you can literally kill or jail every actual and potential adversary, you’ll always be insecure. So in addition to a security strategy, we have to have a positive strategy to make more partners and fewer terrorists. And that is equally important. And we’re spending nowhere near as much money on that today. Not even a tiny fraction of as much.

I was born in 1946. I’m the oldest of the baby boomers — I hate it, but I am. But my generation, you know, grew up right after the bomb was dropped. Then the Cold War started, and everyone thought, well my God, if there’s a World War III, we’ll all be destroyed. We’ve been through two world wars. The carnage of the totalitarian slaughters of the Soviet Union and China and the Holocaust. Tens of millions of people slaughtered with abandon. And when I was born, no one quite knew how it was going to come out.

Well, what came out was we built the great middle class, we educated more people than ever before, we had the civil rights movement, we had the women’s rights movement, we had the environmental movement, all from 1946, let’s say, ’til the early 1980s. I was able to start a family, raise a child, live the life of my dreams. Not just because we won World War II and because we had a military defense in the Cold War, but because after the end of World War II, Harry Truman and General George Marshall took a little of our money to build a world that had more friends and fewer enemies.

They spent money to rebuild Germany and Japan after all that had been done to us and to others because they realized that all public actions should be by tomorrow, not yesterday, and we had to build a world with more partners and fewer enemies. That’s what we have to do today. Foreign assistance is national security, not charity. The Marshall Plan proved that and we have to see it in that way today.

There are two great myths that prevent us from doing what we as Americans ought to do. Myth Number One is that we already spend too much money on foreign aid. Myth Number Two is it doesn’t work anyway. Let’s take them each in turn.

Every survey that asks the American people what, if you took a survey today, well, as you may know, we’ve now gone from surpluses back to deficits. How do you think we should deal with the deficit? Most people say cut foreign aid. You say, well how much do we spend on foreign aid? Most people say 10 to 15 percent of the budget. Well, how much should we spend? Survey after survey says, oh, between 3 and 5 percent. Actually, I agree with the people who say that. The problem is we spend considerably less than 1 percent of the budget on foreign aid.

There are also people who say, "Who cares, it doesn’t work anyway." Well, it does. I’ll just give you a few examples in the areas we should work — in the economic empowerment of poor people and poor countries. Foreign aid. We gave microenterprise loans to people, more than 98 percent of them are being paid back in poor villages and I have personally seen in Latin American Africa how they have changed the whole livelihood of villages. Targeted trade in poor countries. I signed the African Growth & Opportunity Act and I was just in Ghana where a woman came running up to me as I was about to get on the airplane, and she said, "President Clinton, I work in a factory with 400 other women, and we make shirts and sell them to America. Because you signed that trade bill, 400 people who wouldn’t have had jobs otherwise. So here’s your shirt. Take it." [Laughter] And, you know, I’m not a public official any more, I took the shirt. [Laughter]

So it works. In 2000, we got everybody from the Pope to Bono to Jesse Helms supporting America’s initiative to relieve the debt of the poorest countries of the world, but only if they put the money into education, healthcare or economic development. Healthcare spending exploded. Education investment exploded. Uganda built primary school enrollment, Honduras went from six to nine years of mandatory school. It’s not true that we don’t know how to do this, and that it doesn’t work. In the ’80s, Uganda cut the AIDS rate in half with prevention only in five years, Brazil cut it in half in three years with prevention and medicine. We do to know how to spend this money, in every area where we should be active.
We could double the amount of money we spend on direct foreign assistance and it would be less than 20 percent of the requested increase just last year for defense and homeland defense. That’s how small the numbers are.

Kofi Annan wants $10 billion for his global disease fund to fight AIDS, TB and malaria, and we should be giving our fair share. It’d be the best money we ever spent. Those 400 women working in that factory in Ghana, none of them would have dropped bombs on the World Trade Center. They don’t hate America. In the little villages I’ve been to, the poor communities in Latin America and West Africa, where people come out with their little receipts and show me what they’ve done with their microcredit loans. They want to raise their children and get an education, they don’t want to blow up Americans because we’re different races or religions. I’m telling you, it’s the best money we ever spent. We need to spend a little money to make more partners and fewer terrorists. [Applause]

Let me just say, parenthetically, the Chancellor was kind enough to mention some of the things I do with my foundation. But there are thousands of people like me out there doing this work and hundreds of thousands, maybe millions now in developing countries involved in non-government organizations. So there’s things all of us can do. You may think there’s not much you can do. This campus could have an impact on that. There are things all of us could do, because the developing world is getting organized to receive what we can do with them.

That brings me to the third point. We have to have a security strategy and a positive strategy, but we also have to do more to build the institutions of cooperation. That’s why the way we proceed in Iraq is so important. And why I am so relieved that in the argument about whether to attack Saddam Hussein or give the U.N. one more chance, Secretary of Defense Powell, Tony Blair and the others won. Because when you are the biggest player on the field — as we are now, but we won’t be forever — sometimes it’s just as important how you do something as what you do.

And I can’t say enough about how supportive I am of the fact that the United States kept working and we made a lot of changes in our resolution. We slimmed it down, and got just what we needed, which is complete and unrestricted and unfettered restrictions for inspections, took a lot of that other stuff out, got the whole security council including Syria to vote for it, including France and Russia, who have oil contracts with Saddam Hussein’s regime. We strengthened the United Nations.

If we just attacked on the front end, we would have weakened the United Nations and we have paid a bigger price over the long run; because then, if Russia wanted to invade Georgia because they said it had terrorists, what could we say? If India said it had to make a preemptive strike on Pakistan, what could we say? If, God forbid, China said I’m really worried about Taiwan — they’re closer to us and present a greater threat than Saddam Hussein did to you, what could we say?

Instead what we’ve done is we’ve strengthened the U.N. — it’s a good thing. I support it in the same way as the building and expansion of the European Union, when many Americans didn’t, because someday, if the EU continues to grow together, it would expand to be bigger, politically and economically than we are. But if they share our values and we share responsibilities and benefits, who cares? We have to keep integrating. We have to keep putting things together.

One of the things that I’m different from the current government on is their reluctance to do this in other areas. I think we should ratify the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. [Applause]. I think we should be part of the international criminal court. I think we should be part of strengthening the biological weapons convention. [Applause] And I think we have made a terrible mistake to withdraw from the global effort to contain global change. [Applause]

In every case they can make a compelling argument for what they did based on the assumption that, sort of, we know best and we’re always going to do the right thing and why should we chain ourselves to somebody else’s decisions. I understand that. I brought the World Trade Organization into being and joined and brought China in — because I thought it was important for China to be part of it and for us to be part of it. And for us to have some rules. And , Once in while when I was president, the WTO would issue a decision that I thought was absolutely nuts. And we appealed ones that we had the chance to appeal — we went through the procedures. And, in the end, we honored those decisions we lost as well as those we won. But we got a lot more out of a global trading system than we lost in particular cases. Thirty percent of the growth we had in the years that I was president came from the global economy.

If you never joined anything unless you got to make all the calls and everything went your way, there would be no marriages. [Laughter] There would be no business partnerships. Every faculty meeting would end in a fight. I mean, you get the drift here. People join together in cooperation and give up a lot of decision making when it is manifestly in their interest to do so — when they get more out the institutionalized cooperation than they lose from giving up on a lot of the decision making. So I hope we will continue to move in that direction. I hope we’ll develop more bipartisan support for that.

So we need security strategy, a positive strategy, a strategy for more institution building...The fourth and perhaps most difficult — and I think most important — thing we need is to develop habits of mind and heart necessary to live in a global community.

This is the most important and perhaps the most difficult of all. It may be hard to imagine here. If you look around at this group of people and how diverse you are, and think how much different this crowd looks than it would have looked 30 years ago with a former president up here giving a speech.

The truth is that for most of human history, people have derived meaning and identity in their lives in two ways. First of all, with positive reference to their own group — their religious faith, their tribe, their clan, their race. And, second, by negative reference to those outside their group in ways that may seem absurd to us now. I mean, I just went to the unveiling of the restored Brandenburg Gate, and I thought about how the French and Germans fought for 200 years and how many bullet scars there were on the old Brandenburg Gate and they took it all the way through World War II. Now they’re the best of friends and the anchor of the European Union. Their bull-headed hanging onto their differences being more important than their common humanity, nearly destroyed Europe in two world wars. But hang on they did, because they’re hard to give up. The land of my people, Northern Ireland. The Irish Protestants and Catholics, the Unionists and Republicans, they’ve been arguing for hundreds of years and fought for 30 years. And lots of people died. In a little country and a little piece of land without many people, without much land, with lots of problems. And finally, with a little help from their friends, they gave it up. But every now and then there’s still a riot in Belfast just so a few people can say we haven’t quite given it up.

And lest we think we’re blameless, here we are in 2002 — two Southern governors were defeated in the last election, if you believe the analysis, because of a rural uprising in South Carolina when the governor took the Confederate flag off the capital building, and in Georgia when the governor took the Confederate flag off the state flag. Why is that so important?, Well that kind of stuff has always been important. People have always wanted to think more of themselves by thinking less of someone else. They’ve always tried to build group solidarity by believing they had to diminish someone else. And at various times there were rational reasons for it. Hitler made us fight him.

When people first came out of caves and clans and there was only one animal to be eaten, you wanted your children to have it instead of someone else’s children. Not all conflict is irrational, but opposition stays long after rational conflict has ceased. And it becomes a habit of mind.

I’ll just give you an example. Is there anyone here who has not committed the following mistake? Who has not said, on a day when you did not feel good about yourself, "Well I may not be perfect, but thank God I didn’t do that?" [Laughter] "Thank God I’m not him or her." It’s like part of human nature. And it’s something we have to keep working to purge. And it’s really hard. And we don’t like it when members of our group betray us by trying to bring in others. It’s no accident that when I came out for responsible gun control and gay rights, the most bitter oppositions came from white Southern Protestant males because I was one and they thought I had left them behind.

But that was nothing compared with Gandhi, who was killed by a Hindu, not a Muslim, because he wanted India for everybody. Sadat — whose wife is coming here, Jehan, an old friend of mine — Anwar Sadat was killed by an Egyptian, not an Israeli commando. Because he wanted a secular government for Egypt and peace with the Israelis. My friend Isaak Rabin was killed by a young Israeli who thought he was a bad Jew and a bad Israeli because he wanted a home for the Palestinians and a future for their kids too. And he wanted to share the West Bank and the future. Mandela got away with just giving up 27 years of his life because he had this radical notion that the black majority in South Africa ought to have some say over their future.

It’s not easy.

For all the students here, this is my sort of class time. There’s been a whole spate of books written in the last two years about the human impulse to cooperate as against the human impulse to conflict — books by biologists: is there a selfish gene or is the body the best example of cooperation ever created?; anthropologists studying primitive tribes in Papua New Guinea, the Brazilian rainforests, the African Savannah or the habits of our gorilla or chimpanzee ancestors; or the habits of birds and bats; or the most successful species on earth — ants, termites and bees. They’re the largest in numbers and absolutely indestructible and totally useless individually. [Laughter] But their patterns of cooperation are so sophisticated and persistent, and varied they cannot be explained by the brain capacity in the individual.

Economists have weighed in about rational fools — people who always do what’s selfish in the short run and mess themselves up in the long run. Political scientists, positive and negative, talk about is there a class of civilization? Are we inherently bound to fight?

Theologians remind us that in every spiritual discipline there is some admonition which reminds us of the primacy of our common humanity. The Buddha: never by hatred does hatred cease but by love alone; the Bagavad Gita: where the Lord Rama says that the measure of humanity is to feel the wounds of another’s heart; the Christian New Testament: love your neighbor as yourself; the Torah: he who turns aside a stranger is like turning aside the most high God; and the Koran: Allah put different people on the earth not that they might not despise one another but that they might come to know one another and learn from one another.
Everybody knows this is how we ought to behave but hardly anyone does it.

In these books that have been written, if you’re interested in a survey of all of this kind of material, there’s a book by Matt Ridley called The Origins of Virtue. I think it’s the best survey.

If you’re interested in a very skeptical view different from my own about the possibility of global cooperation, read Robert Kaplan’s book Warrior Politics, in which he argues people never cooperate unless they’re forced to, and therefore American military power should compel it. He agrees with, therefore, what I did in Bosnia and Kosovo and thinks we ought to do a lot more of it. The most hopeful book that has been written on this is — and the view closest to my own — is Robert Wright’s book Nonzero, in which he argues that increasing circles of interdependence require greater cooperation. And greater cooperation, in his definition, means the search for non-zero sum solutions — win-win solutions — which is why what we do as the most powerful act today, is sometimes no more important than how we do it.

But if you read those three books you get a good feel of sort of where we are in this debate. If you read all the material, you come to the conclusion that no one knows for sure how this is going to come out. But what seems to be the case is people do cooperate and build communities with shared values, benefits and responsibilities when they finally realize that they have no other options. Which is what makes every period in history somewhat scary, because the capacity that we have to destroy each other keeps increasing. So we have to shorten the gap between the time the circumstances of interdependence change and when we start behaving as we ought to.

But I am, on balance, quite optimistic.

People rose out of the African savannah a hundred thousand years ago. Civilization started about 7,000 years ago. Then wider and wider circles of interdependence developed and more cooperation developed. But more ability to destroy developed, and we nearly blew ourselves away in the first half of the 20th century. For the first time in history, the idea of the global community was ratified with the U.N. charter, and the United Nations declaration of human rights — which is just as important because it says why we should cooperate, because our common humanity matters more than our differences.

The Cold War didn’t make it possible. The Cold War ended, in effect, 13 years ago. Now both China and Russia are moving toward the West, we have the European Union, we have successful peace processes everywhere, including the Middle East, where we had seven years of peace before Mr. Arafat made the disastrous mistake of turning down the peace agreement I offered in December of 2000/January of 2001.

We’ve only been working on this for 13 years. After 100,000 years of human existence and 7,000 years of civilization. Yes, there are terrors out there, yes there are weapons of mass destruction out there, and yes there are horrible problems from poverty, to ignorance, disease, to climate change, resource depletion. Yes, other bad things will happen. But, on balance, I think we will share the future — because we have no choice.

I just got back from Rwanda a few weeks ago, where, in 1994, 10 percent of the country was slaughtered in 90 days — mostly with machetes — in the worst genocide in percentage terms in modern history. It would be as if we lost 30 million people on September the 11th in America. These (Rwandan) people lived in the country before the killings for 500 years.

The minority Tutsis typically dominating the politics and economics; the Hutus, being the majority, dominated other aspects of life. In 90 days the Hutus were whipped into a frenzy, were told the Tutsis were going to kill them, so they killed the Tutsis and their sympathizers first — 700,000 people. I went to a Reconciliation Village, where I met a Hutu woman with two Tutsi children — adopted — one of them dying, so she was nursing him through his terminal illness. I met a young soldier who came back because the president of another tribe told him he wouldn’t be killed if he came home. I met two women living side by side and standing side by side talking to me. One of them lost her husband and her brother in the slaughter. The other woman’s husband is in prison awaiting a war crimes tribunal trial for leading the slaughter.

They created this Reconciliation Village. They give you a house if you live there, but you have to know that you will be living with your former enemies. I watched children dance together for what the governor said was the first time in eight years. He said they wanted to dance for me because I was the only person ever to come twice to our country and the only leader that ever apologized for not stopping this, which I did.

So I watched these kids, these Hutu and Tutsi kids, do this ceremonial dance. I watched them smile at each other and laugh and begin to trust again and begin to think that what they have in common is more important than their differences.
So I think this is going to work out, because we have no choice. Not because your generation is morally superior to any ones that came before, but because you have the information and the knowledge and you have no choice. [Applause]