The century is approaching its conclusion in a climate of growing tension. Conflict springs up between individual rights and collective duties, between local roots and cosmopolitism. It is present in the tension between economic development and the safeguard of the environment, the aggression of global markets and the desire to protect fragile economies, the pressures of emigration from poor countries and unemployment in the more advanced nations. There is renewed bloodshed between ethnic, religious, cultural and economic groups, and between nations.
However, as the International Commission on Peace and Food reminds us, "the perspective the world seeks must be based on a greater understanding of the inextricable linkages between peace, democratization, development, equity and the environment. None of these great goals can be achieved, without corresponding progress towards the others. [...] What are the foundations of this new intellectual perspective and what sort of strategies, actions and results will it lead to? It requires a change in the way we look at and think of familiar things like war, developing countries, democracy, agriculture, industrialization. First, we have to awaken from the millennia-old nightmare that war is a natural and inevitable part of human existence, which can perhaps be mitigated or kept far from our shores, but never really mastered or eliminated. [...] Most of all, the new perspective the world seeks should be based on a recognition that humankind is the master of its own destiny, that the external limits are not binding on us if we tap the unlimited creative potential of our own inner human resourcefulness".
These recommendations are the starting point of the debate among the Nobel Laureates and international experts gathering in Milan, to discuss how to transform conflict into an occasion for dialogue, growth and innovation.
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A War-free World: A Utopian Dream or a Dire Necessity?
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Thursday 5 December 1996
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The main characteristic of the nuclear age is that for the first time in history we have acquired the technical means to destroy the whole of mankind in a single act. At present this can be achieved only with nuclear weapons, but further advances in science and technology may produce other types of weapons of a similar destructive power, perhaps more easily available.
The only means to prevent such a catastrophe is to eliminate war altogether. We must find ways to settle disputes by means other than military confrontations. For this purpose we have to develop in each of us the sense of belonging to the human race, a loyalty to mankind trascending other loyalties. A new system of education for world citizenship will have to be established.
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