Embracing Our Common Humanity: Security and Prosperity in the 21st Century H.E. William Jefferson Clinton February 27, 2005, Taipei Thank you very much. Thanks for the introduction. Thank you for the warm welcome. Mr. Chairman, dignitaries, ladies and gentlemen. I'm glad to be back here. When I was a young governor, I came to Taiwan for four times between 1979 and 1988. I watched all the changes on this island. I watched your remarkable economic growth and your political growth. And I have watched the development of your democracy with great appreciation and admiration. This foundation was formed to support and promote democracy, not only in Taiwan, but also around the world. That is important work, work that I try to advance in the late years I served as president. If I might, tonight I would like to put the growth of democracy within Taiwan in the larger context of what is going on in the 21st century world and suggest some things that I think this Foundation could do beyond your borders to fulfil its mission. In the 1990s, everyone knows we saw a remarkable growth in the globalization of the economy. We became more dependent on international trade and investment. There was an explosion in information technology. We began to cooperate in other ways, in unprecedented ways, in science and technology. In my last years of presidency, I was able to announce the sequencing of human genome, a project that succeeded because of amazing and unprecedented international scientific cooperation. We put a space station into the skies through international cooperation. I can give many other examples but there were two other things that happened in the 1990s, particularly important to democracy which were often not noted in the press. First of all, in the decade of the 1990s, for the first time in all our human history, more than half of the people in this world were governed by those who they had voted for in free elections. And secondly, there was an explosion of civil society across the globe through non-governmental organizations now known everywhere as simply NGOs. Organizations which give people in rich countries poor countries alike a chance to pool their efforts as free people to change the lives of those within their concerns. The 21st century, I believe, can be best summed up in a word, that is not globalization, because globalization has for most people been an economic meaning. I believe a better word is interdependence. For interdependence can be good or bad; or it can be good and bad. It simply means we can not escape each other. On September 11th 2001, the United States got a big shock of negative interdependence when the Al Qaeda terrorists killed three thousand people from 70 countries in the United States by using the forces of global interdependence open borders, easy travel, easy immigration, easy access to information and technology. Two hundred of those who died were also Muslims. In the aftermath of the 9-11, I saw the forces of positive interdependence. My wife, who is now a US senator of New York, and I visited an elementary school in Manhattan where children have been forced out of their buildings by the damage of planes. There were 600 children there from over 80 different ethnic groups in one school. When I stood in line trying to console the family members of those who have been killed, I saw a man, a very large man about a head taller than me, with tears in his eyes, and I asked him if he has lost a family member. He said no. He had only come to offer his grief. I would never forget what he said. He said, "I'm an Egyptian and I'm a Muslim and I'm an American. And I'm afraid my fellow Americans will not trust me anymore because of what other people did. I hate them, more than you do." He was an example of positive interdependence. In the Middle East, I have watched, when I was a president, as we had seven years of progress for peace. Then I watched four years of disintegration. In the four years of conflict, more than four times as many Israelis were killed by terrorists in the entire eight years I was president. But in the bad years, the Israelis and Palestinians were no less interdependent than they were in the good years. It just shifted from positive interdependence to negative interdependence. As you might imagine, even though I’m not president any more, I watched the events in China and in Taiwan and the relationship between the two very closely. There was an amazing article in the British magazine, the Economist, a couple of weeks ago pointing out the explosively increasing economic ties between the two, saying that more than ten million people on mainland China now work for companies owned by Taiwanese people. I noted that there have been some direct air flights recently. So I see continuing negative tension over political differences and positive economic and personal contact. What does all this tell us about the world we are living in? We can not escape each other. China and Taiwan, the Israelis and Palestinians, the Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland, the different ethnic groups in Bosnia, in Kosovo, the Tamils and the Buddhists in Sri Lanka, the Muslims, the Acheh separatists, and the main government in Thailand and in Indonesia. All these things we are seeing, positive or negative, going on in the world remind us we can not escape each other. Therefore I believe that the great challenge of the 21st century is to move from an interdependent but unstable world to more integrated communities in which we share. We share responsibilities. We share benefits and we share basic values. Every person matters and there is a chance. Every person has a responsible role to fill in this society. Competition is good but we all do better when we work together. Our differences are important. They make life interesting and they matter but our common humanity matters more. How can we move from an interdependent to an integrated world? I will suggest five things. First of all, we must fight the enemies of integrated communities. We must reduce terror and war and the threat of weapons of mass destruction. Second, we must build the world with more partners and fewer enemies by bringing the benefits of globalization to the fifty percent of human beings on the earth who have not received them. I was driving through the streets of Taipei on the way to the speech tonight, thinking about the very first time that I came here more than twenty-five years ago; thinking about how the city had changed; thinking about how a small number of people have built almost three hundred billion dollars in cash reserves and companies that sustained the globe and a vibrant, political and educational as well as economic system. And it was almost impossible to remember that tonight, half the world's people live on two dollars a day or less. A billion people live on less than a dollar a day. A billion people would go to bed hungry tonight. One in four people have no access to clean water. One in 4 people who die on earth all over the world this year from all causes natural and manmade will die of Aids, TB, malaria and infections related to diarrhea. Most of them are little children who never got a clean glass of water. Ten million children die every year of completely preventable childhood diseases. 130 million children on earth never go to school a single day. -- 曾经沧海难为水 除却巫山不是云 取次花丛懒回顾 半缘修道半缘君 --

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