OCT 13 REMARKS OF MRS. CLINTON AT PRAGUE FORUM 2000
USIA
15 October 1998
TRANSCRIPT: OCT 13 REMARKS OF MRS. CLINTON AT PRAGUE FORUM 2000
(First Lady discusses civil society and the millennium) (4280)
Prague -- First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, speaking at the Forum
2000 Conference here October 13, compared society to a three-legged
stool in which the legs are government, the economy and civil society.
While each is important, Mrs. Clinton focused on civil society and the
need to strengthen it.
"If one thinks about the challenges that confront us, we have to
believe that nurturing civil society, creating opportunities for
people to become citizens in today's world, is essential," she
commented. "If we think about how better we need to invest in people,
then clearly we have to reallocate the resources that are being
produced by this global economy."
"We also have to do more to ensure that people learn about their
rights and responsibilities as citizens and then be encouraged to
exercise them," she added.
Referring to the millennium, the First Lady noted that the United
States has adopted a theme for its discussions about the millennium:
Honor the past, imagine the future. She reminded, however, that
"honoring the past requires us to be honest about our past. To take a
hard look about where we have been and who we are in order better to
live in the present and imagine a better future.
"It gives us this opportunity now to think through what we would do if
given the chance to imagine a future where we could summon the
political will, create the institutions, and provide an opportunity
for all individuals, in whatever society, to feel that they were
participating, and not only imagining, but creating their own
futures."
Following is transcript of Mrs. Clinton's remarks:
(Begin transcript)
PRESIDENT HAVEL: Thank you very much Mr. Hans van den Broek for your
address and mainly for your words on the crisis of complexity and what
you said about the world governments. It's very important for this
Forum. Now I should like to invite you, Mrs. Clinton, to deliver your
address. We are very happy that your planned visit to Prague takes
place, and we are looking forward to your address.
HILLARY RODHAM CLINTON: Thank you very much. I am honored to be here,
and I want to thank President Havel for convening another
extraordinary gathering of Forum 2000. I am told that during the
Velvet Revolution, there were posters all over Prague with the
message: "Havel to the Castle." Well, here we are, at the Castle, with
President Havel, thinking about the future that awaits all of us.
With poetry and prose, no one has done more to spread the message of
freedom and democracy throughout the world than President Havel. No
one has worked harder to nurture civil society and keep us focused on
the real questions confronting us as we end this century. He has
reminded us that we live our lives not just as consumers but as
citizens, as diverse and spiritual beings. And no one has done more to
make this Castle a place for gatherings such as this, where ideas can
be discussed and where all of us can do more to ask ourselves the hard
questions about what kind of societies and world we expect to help
build.
If we are gathered here today to talk about globalization, then I know
there are many different reactions to that rather long word. It is
hard sometimes even to define what one means by it. Certainly the
increases in technology, the changes in the economy help us to define
what we think we mean by globalization. We see the effects of rapid
transportation and communication on our everyday lives. We are more
interconnected and I would argue more interdependent than perhaps we
have ever been. And as with any great sweeping change at any point in
history, there are those who are the great proponents of
globalization, whether they can define it or not, and those who are
its great opponents, whether they can define it or not. So
conversations such as the ones that are provoked by this Forum are
extraordinarily important. We have to do more talking with one another
across the lines that too often divide us, so that we not only can
define what is occurring in our world today, but can summon up the
will to take the forces that are at work and try to move them in a
direction that will better our common humanity.
It is particularly appropriate that we would do this on the brink of
the millennium and again I commend President Havel, and the organizers
of Forum 2000, for choosing this theme, this year. My husband and I
have also done a lot of thinking about the millennium. We know it will
come whether we think about it or not. Whether we do anything about it
or not. We know that it will be accompanied by great parties on New
Year's Eve, either 1999 or 2000 depending upon how it is defined. We
know that there will be entrepreneurs who will produce products like
"millennium toothpaste" or "millennium candy," so we understand that
this event in history, which none of us will ever experience again,
has a significance in and of itself. But then, what we give to that
event and how we further define it can perhaps help us tackle some of
the issues that you are dealing with at the Forum.
We have adopted in the United States a theme for our discussions about
the millennium: honor the past, imagine the future. And if one thinks
about those two aspects of this theme, clearly, by honoring the past,
one cannot shut one's eyes to it. There were many references yesterday
night in the cathedral to the century that is just closing. We do
ourselves no honor if we are not realistic enough to acknowledge all
of the great violence and disappointment that came with this century
as well as the great progress. So honoring the past requires us to be
honest about our past. To take a hard look about where we have been
and who we are in order better to live in the present and imagine a
better future. It gives us this opportunity now to think through what
we would do if given the chance to imagine a future where we could
summon the political will, create the institutions, and provide an
opportunity for all individuals, in whatever society, to feel that
they were participating, and not only imagining, but creating their
own futures.
Now, there are pessimists among us as we end this century and the
millennium and there always have been at any point in history but
particularly at ends of points of time. I went back and read a little
bit about the first millennium's end and about the myth of panic
terror where people supposedly gave away their possessions and hid in
churches here in Europe waiting for the end of the world. There was a
rather controversial monk named Raoul Glauger who lived in the tenth
century. He consistently warned his local citizenry of impending doom.
He had quite a checkered past -- he was expelled from a number of
monasteries, but he always had an audience. There were always people
who were ready to believe the worst about themselves and about their
futures. The earth did not implode as he had predicted, but there were
great pockets of fear as there always are during times of transition.
So it is today, where the media is filled with doom and gloom and
those who are more concerned about painting a pessimistic future than
determining how together we can be realistic and optimistic. Even in
that time so long ago, there were changes occurring that, coming out
of the so-called Dark Ages, set the tone for what was to come later.
There was a spread of literacy; there was the emergence of craftsmen's
guilds, and new universities were begun and new religious orders
started. Not only in Europe but in other parts of the world, there was
the beginning of ferment about what would be the future and how it
would be created.
Today, as we stand at the end of a very different time, we face some
of the same issues that go to the root of who we are as human beings
and how we define ourselves, our relations with one another and
whether or not we do summon the will required to create a better
future. There is much to be optimistic about around the world and
there is much to be pessimistic about. But clearly, whether one is
able to define globalization or not, it is here to stay. There is no
going back. There is no turning back the clock, doing away with
computers, cutting off the Internet, stopping jet travel, preventing
the mass media from bringing messages of different cultural ideas to
remote parts of the world where they have never been heard of or seen
before.
So our challenge, given the reality of what we face, is to ask
ourselves some hard questions about how we will harness these forces
of globalization, to deal with the important issues that have always
confronted humanity. Will the global economy lead to growth and
stability for nations? Will it lift up the lives and opportunities for
all citizens in the world or only those of us lucky enough to be in
this fabulous hall, who have the skills to deal with information and
the ability to navigate our way through this new world? Will it help
us to humanize ourselves and each other? Learn from one another? Or
will it drive us further apart into our own particular self-proclaimed
identity as a way of protecting ourselves from the challenges of the
outside? Will it inspire a race to the bottom of the economic ladder?
Will we deplete our resources? Will we see our unique cultures
uprooted by a one-dimensional consumer culture? Our spirituality
replaced by an obsessive materialism? Will we retreat inward? Will the
fear of the unknown, which is always there when we think about the
future, be transformed into a plague of racism, nativism, and
xenophobia?
If you stop for a minute and think about how popular culture imagines
the future, it is not a pretty sight. Most of the recent movies
demonstrate our innate fear about what is to come: Apocalyptic visions
with only a few people left. Whole cities that can only survive under
domes because we have depleted our natural resources. We don't even
yet have a popular image of this new world that we hope we can create.
So what vision of the future do we dare to imagine today? I hope that
out of conversations like this here and others that are going on
throughout the world, we will begin to realistically parse through
globalization. In and of itself it is neither a good nor an evil. In
and of itself we are offered tremendous opportunities if only we take
responsibility to address our problems. As with every age, we have to
take the world as we've been given it, not as we wish it were, either
with a too optimistic or pessimistic vision. And we have to create
conditions in which democratic governments become even more the norm
so that all citizens are given a stake in their future. In which free
markets benefit all people and not just a privileged few. And in which
a vibrant civil society fosters free and active citizens who will,
after all, ultimately determine our common human fate in the next
millennium.
I often think of society with a very simple metaphor: as a
three-legged stool. One leg is the government, another is the economy
and the third is civil society. Obviously we cannot sit on that stool
if there is only one leg or two and we cannot sit on it if one leg is
longer or shorter than the other two. Rather, we need three strong
legs and a balance among them. They have to support each other. And so
if we think about the challenges that confront us, it is simple for me
to think about what needs to be done to make sure each of those three
institutions and structures are strong enough to support society in
the years to come.
We just a heard a very eloquent description of some of the global
governance issues confronting us, so we are not only talking about
government in terms of national governments, but how we will take
global governance to the next level? How we will create the
institutions that will enable us to have strong governmental effects
on runaway economies, on global capitalism and other challenges? How
we will redo international institutions like the IMF and the World
Bank, to create new financial architectures to replace what was
established more than fifty years ago at Bretton Woods? We know that
government is an essential part of strong societies that will enable
people to live up to their God-given potential, and yet in many parts
of the world, particularly in my own country in the last decade or so,
we have had a continued assault on government, as though the abolition
or weakening of government would create conditions that would better
foster human enterprise and individual freedom. That is, I believe, a
mistaken notion that hopefully we will put to rest as we end this
century. We need strong and active governments, neither oppressive nor
weak, but able to deal with the problems of their citizens and able to
create public goods for their citizens to enjoy.
Similarly, with the economy, there are those who are great critics of
the free market and those who are great advocates. Either position
probably overstates both the capacity of the market and also the
defects of it. We are working our way toward trying to create in the
global marketplace some of the rules and regulations that will enable
us to enjoy the benefits without suffering from its excesses. There is
a lot of work to do on that front. So there are many tough questions
posed by how we best structure and create governmental and economic
institutions that will prepare the way for a better future.
But I wish to just concentrate for a few minutes on the third leg of
the stool. That of civil society, of citizenship. The space that is
filled between, on the one hand, the government, and the economy on
the other. It is really in that space that life is lived. The economy
is not an end in itself, but a means to an end. To create enough
wealth that people can enjoy what is best about life. Government is
not an end in itself but a means to an end, to help us order ourselves
so that we have the freedom and individual space to pursue our own
interests. In that space of civil society exist families and religion,
voluntary associations, arts and culture and learning, and most
importantly, the training ground of what creates citizens from people.
Economic opportunity can provide jobs and income, but economic
activity alone cannot create the work ethic that capitalism requires.
It can create consumers and producers of goods, but not citizens.
Governments alone cannot create citizens either. Only civil society
can do that important job. As I have traveled throughout the world, I
have seen how critical this component is, for us to imagine a kind of
future that all of us hope for. I have seen what happens to people
whose spirits have been crushed, whose economies have been driven into
the ground, whose governments have oppressed their spirits. And yet I
have seen how their determination and support for one another can lift
them up to rebuild their lives and families.
If one thinks about the challenges that confront us, we have to
believe that nurturing civil society, creating opportunities for
people to become citizens in today's world, is essential. There cannot
be a strong, sustainable, global economy without a strong global
society. And there are some simple rules about how one creates
citizens -- simple to describe and very difficult to execute. We have
to invest in people; that means education and health care. It means
creating structures that value all people no matter whether they come
from minority groups defined by religion, race or ethnicity. It means
that when we look at civil society in any of our countries, as I look
at mine, we can see clearly where we are not investing sufficiently
and where we must do more.
Whenever I see, as I saw just a few days ago in Bulgaria and as I have
seen in so many parts of the world, great effort being made to make
the transition to full democratic, functioning government and strong
economies, I see also how there is also a great understanding growing
up on the part of individuals and non-governmental organizations, that
they have to play their role as well. Much of the work that was done
successfully in the recent elections in Slovakia owes its roots to the
recognition by so many people there that non-governmental
organizations and citizen activity were a necessary precondition for
true democratic values.
If we think about how better we need to invest in people, then clearly
we have to reallocate the resources that are being produced by this
global economy. We cannot be satisfied unless we are doing more to
better educate all children and better prepare them to be citizens, to
take their rightful places in their societies. And it goes without
saying, I hope in this room, that that means educating both boys and
girls to the fullest of their potential. It also means investing in
people's dreams and hopes by giving them access to credit, making it
possible for them to create their own jobs and businesses. Not leaving
them out of the great sweep of the global economy that pays little
attention to what happens on the micro-level, but instead to create
conditions in which local markets can grow and flourish and more
people can participate in them.
I have met literally thousands of people now around the world whose
lives have been transformed by something as simple as a loan of $15.00
or $50.00 or $100.00. When my husband and I were in Uganda, we went
with President and Mrs. Musevani out to a small village where we met
women, who because they were given access to credit, had transformed
their lives and in the process understood that they were worth
something, that they had dignity and value and because of that they
understood better their citizenship responsibilities in a democracy.
So within the civil society the creation of small enterprises that
then can grow into economic, viable ones is a way of giving people a
stake in their own futures.
We also have to do more to ensure that people learn about their rights
and responsibilities as citizens and then be encouraged to exercise
them. There is good work going on around the world to help people
understand how democracies operate, but there is not yet enough of
that. I commend the European Union for its work in trying to create
conditions in which people begin to learn, after so many years of
being shut out of their political systems, what it takes to be a
participant.
I have seen the effects of that in a very personal way. In Senegal,
for example, several years ago I visited a village where they were
learning about democracy by performing skits for one another. Where
people would stand up make speeches and others in the village would
listen and then critique their speeches. Where they would act out
going to vote. Now that may sound very basic, but it gave those people
their first understanding of what it meant to be citizens of a
democracy. We have to take the abstract discussion of democracy, take
the resolutions that are passed to promote democracy, take our
applause that we give when people make the transition to democracy,
and distill it into practical everyday advice and lessons about what
that actually means in the everyday lives of people.
We also have to make it possible for us to learn how to treat our
diversity as a source of strength. We have seen in too many places
around the world that even with people elected as leaders in a
democracy, old attitudes die hard. And old hatreds in the guise of
democratically-elected leaders are no better for the citizens of a
country and their neighbors than before democracy occurred. If people
don't feel that they have a stake in their own futures and if the
economy is working for them, if they don't have the space that civil
society provides to give them meaning, then they often turn (as you
know so well) against one another. They often begin to blame the other
for whatever it is that they find lacking in their own lives. Whether
that other is a minority group, religious, racial or ethnic, we have
seen the results of too much blaming of the other.
And yet when people defy history they can begin to rewrite it.
Recently I spoke at a conference for women in Belfast. We brought
together both Protestant and Catholic women who were doubly burdened
by the sectarian hatred that had stalked their land for so long and by
their status as women. They came together to talk about how they could
assume responsibility to help make the peace and reconciliation they
voted for real and lasting. They put aside old hatreds because new and
better leadership had encouraged them to do so, and began to learn the
tools of citizenship that will permit them to make their voices heard.
We also have to ensure that we do all we can to protect our natural
and cultural treasures and we require citizens to do that. It often
cannot be done from a distance or again by passing a resolution in a
faraway place, but citizens living in our rain forests, on the edges
of our savannas and our wetlands have to feel that they too have a
stake in protecting what is best about our earth. And when it comes to
cultural treasures we have to do more to be sure that we respect and
preserve our religions, our languages, our heritage, which do give us
our individual identity and which require us to learn to respect one
another.
There is much to be done, but I am an optimist. I believe that we have
great opportunities ahead of us if only we will seize them. If only we
will be prepared to do what is necessary at the global level to deal
with our economic and governance issues, as hard as that may be. And
then to do at the local level what it takes to build civil society and
citizens. Each of us in this room and so many countless beyond this
hall have the obligation to do what we can to promote positive
political and economic change and to nurture civil society wherever we
are. There is much that each of can do individually. We know today
that have global neighbors but we haven't yet decided we want to build
a global neighborhood. When we care about a toxic spill or a terrorist
attack, or an economic downturn, or a civil war in another nation, it
is not just because it may affect us down the road, but because we
recognize that in a very fundamental way, we are now more
interdependent that an any point in human history.
So that brings me back to where I started. When we imagine the future
over the next years and over the next century and millennium, what is
it we will see? In one of those popular movies I referred to that
swept my country and apparently made a lot of money around the world,
called Independence Day -- these movies always seem to start with an
attack on Washington D.C., which I don't really know how to take, the
blowing up of the White House and Capitol to begin with -- the ending
of it required all of us to cooperate to fend off an alien attack. And
certainly in the theater in which I saw it, there were great cheers as
people of all different races and backgrounds and societies around the
globe came together as human beings to save ourselves.
We certainly don't expect it to come to that, but in a real way,
unless we do come together, we will not have the opportunities we
deserve at the end of this very difficult and troubled century. We
have done a lot in the last fifty years to create opportunity, to
build democracy, to reach deep and to give more people a chance to
fulfill their God-given potential. But when it is all said and done,
globalization, however one defines it, can never be a substitute for
humanization. We have a lot of work to do if we are to make sure that
the global economy does not drive us apart from one another, drive
some down and lift others up, but instead is an engine that we harness
to create a strong global society in which all people are given a
chance to imagine a future better than their past.
Thank you very much.
(End transcript)