The following is an edited transcript of the video address by Pino Arlacchi to Panel One of the May 30-31 Schiller Institute Berlin conference, “The End of 500 Years of Colonialism: For a Dialogue of Civilizations—The Urgency of a New Global Security and Development Architecture.” Mr. Arlacchi is the former Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations and former executive director of the United Nations Office for Drug Control and Crime Prevention (UNODC). Subheads have been added.

First, thank you very much for the invitation, Schiller Institute, and my dear Helga [Zepp-LaRouche], for providing me the opportunity to speak about basically two things. First, my idea of the world order. And I’m very grateful to Professor Zhang, because he outlined a lot of concepts that I deeply agree with. I just published a book, unfortunately only in Italian, about most of the concepts Professor Zhang developed.

I would like to explain a bit about my candidature for Secretary-General of the United Nations to be a successor of Mr. Guterres, with an idea about changing the United Nations, coherent with what I will tell you now—my ideas about the current world order.

I am happy with the concept of a multipolar world, but it is a very large framework, a very large concept, which should be a bit better specified. What do we mean by multipolar order? A multipolar order cannot mean just a fragmented order in which one of the poles is on its own, making its own politics, its own idea, with, of course, mutual respect, no interference in others’ affairs, and so on. This is not sufficient to qualify the current situation we are living in now, because a multilateral, multipolar world is a system, let’s call it a world system, that is deeply divided.

Two main subsystems comprise this world order, the multipolar world. The best concept I can evoke to understand this system belongs to Roman history and Janus. Janus was a god with two faces, one looking at the past, the other one looking to the future, and he was at the same time the god of passage, passage between years, between centuries, between ages. The name of January comes from Janus. There are many other adaptations that try to repeat this very powerful Roman myth, and we live now in an international system that is exactly like Janus—it has two faces: One is the past 600 years of Western domination, what Giovanni Arrighi, my great mentor, called “The Long Twentieth Century.” The 20th Century that lasted almost 600 years, which was classical capitalism that started from Italy—from Genoa and Venice and Florence—and arrived to the United States in its final stages.

The Great South and the Real Economy

But Janus also means the future. The future is the other side, the other subsystem. So, the first subsystem is the West with the longer 20th Century, which is dominated today by finance, financial capitalism, which is the most unstable and dangerous form of capitalism that is dominating this phase of Janus.

Then we have another subsystem … which is what I call the real economy, the Great South new majority system. This includes first, of course, Asia and China, but also Africa and Latin America—the Great South concept, the rest-of-the-world concept, which is very easily understandable. But if you look at it a bit more carefully, this subsystem has common features. The common feature is an economy based on real things. It means real economy, industry, commerce, not finance. This world is led by China, which is a socialist system with a market economy in which finance has totally yielded to the real economy. It is a planned economy that is a model, because it is the engine of the rest of the world.

In other Asian systems, we have different political systems, of course. There is a liberal democracy in Japan, and socialist-like economies in Vietnam, Laos, and so on, or the developing states’ economies like Indonesia and other countries. But they have the same thing in common—it’s not the market that is the director of the orchestra, it’s the state. It’s the state, which means there are forms of state policies that come from the most coherent form, which is the Chinese and Vietnamese political planning, to the softer but very effective political planning of other countries. In all of Asia and all of the Great South and so on, it’s the state that decides the direction of the economy, not the market that decides.

The implications of these Janus-like international systems are huge. We have to start to understand, because the system is always the same. I mean, we are not two separate systems; there are subsystems. They are very strongly interconnected by commerce, by globalization, by everything that is global. It’s the global village. We are a global village divided into two subsystems. And today, they move in opposite directions. It’s really like Janus. They look at incompatible directions, even if there are attempts to dialogue, to see the unity of the system. But all these attempts come from the Global South. It comes with the peaceful projects … international relations, in a peaceful way.

I like very much Professor Zhang’s reference to the Asian peace, ASEAN Pact. Students call it Asian peace. A part of Asia that was in chaos, in conflicts, in a catastrophic and war-like situation, transformed itself in the last 40 years into a peaceful area, where countries have differences, but we do not have a single important conflict going on, except maybe an internal civil war in Myanmar. And we are talking about the biggest region of the world, the most important one. This subsystem accounts for (I am a bit more generous than Professor Zhang) more than 40% of global growth; if we join Asia to Africa and Latin America, we arrive easily at 60% or 70% of the world economic growth.

So, we are talking about the current majority of the world system that is peaceful. It’s peaceful. Chinese projects are peaceful. I examined all the international security strategies of Asian countries, but also other countries belonging to the Global South, and I don’t see one single country that has one single instance of being threatened by others. All the countries want development as the basis for a stable peace. All the countries want peaceful coexistence. And the figures for military spending reflect that. If we use military spending as a parameter for measuring the war-like attitude of states, and we take out the figures of Europe, the United States, Russia, and Ukraine—countries that are at war or at a potential war—we see that the Great South, the greater majority of the countries of the world, do not increase military spending measured against GDP. There is a constant multi-year, multi-decade chance of decrease that still works today. And this is very important for world peace, because we are talking about concrete figures, not just ideas.

Why the United Nations Must Be Changed

So it is on this basis that I am advancing my candidature to be the next Secretary-General. We simply need to update the UN system; make it more coherent with this new world order, with the aspiration and the position of the great majority of the states of the world. And I know this, because I was already Under-Secretary-General for five years. I took care of the fight against narcotics, crime, corruption, and so on. I was the head of the Vienna Center of the UN. I worked with Kofi Annan for five years. I know a bit of the system.

The system needs just a few basic changes. It should not be zeroed, destroyed, and rebuilt from scratch. We need simply to do a couple of basic changes, which are the equivalent of a regeneration of the UN. It means abolishing veto power and the Security Council, which is absolutely anachronistic and untenable today. We cannot have five countries that won a war 80 years ago that are at the top of all decision-making in the world. We need to have a sovereign system in which the General Assembly has sovereignty. The General Assembly, which is based on the revolutionary principle of “one country, one vote,” this is the most powerful force of the UN that gives the UN its universality. The General Assembly can elect a security body that is the executive body of the world: No veto power, majority and minorities, and a very clear political orientation.

I did an examination of the most important resolutions over the last 15 years. There is a very stable majority of countries that vote the same on most issues. It means that I’m talking about around 80%, 85% of the countries vote the same. If you take just one issue, Palestine’s membership in the UN, the last vote was very clear. One hundred and fifty-seven countries [of the UNGA’s 193—ed.] voted for the admission of Palestine as a full member of the United Nations. It was vetoed three times by the United States, but each time the U.S. used the veto, the majority increased. Last Autumn, even France and the UK supported the membership of Palestine in the UN.

Of course, I know the objection to my project. Obviously, the objection is very simple: How can you think that the United States will ever accept a system like this? Yes, of course they will not like it. They are the declining power, and everything that the international system does on the side that I spoke of before is diminishing its power. But there is nothing to do; they have to accept this or be outside the system. With President Trump, they are starting to do a kind of anticipation of this issue; staying out of every possible majority, even their own majority. But the pressure of a current in which almost all the large countries go in this direction cannot be sustained by the UN or Israel. Israel, of course, will never accept it, but Israel has de facto been out of the UN system for decades. It is a pariah state in the United Nations. It cannot really make a substantial opposition to a project like this.

I conclude by saying that I want to be the first candidate for this position who is not supported just by one country. My country is Italy—which for sure will not support me, because now in Italy we have an extreme-right government; but it will not last for long. It is now starting to collapse, but not in time for me to be an Italian candidate. But I don’t want to be an Italian candidate; I want to be a candidate of the great majority of the world. I want a group of countries belonging to the new majority, to the Great South, that like my ideas and support me to be the next Secretary-General, who will try to implement many of these ideas.

Thank you very much.