Towards really United Nations
By Sir Peter Ustinov
Based on an address by Sir Peter Ustinov to the Durham History Society 2000 conference
on “The United Nations: Past, Present and Future”
My blood is so mixed owing to the irrecoupable indiscretions of my ancestors that I have no alternative but to be fan of the United Nations. If you imagine that I was conceived in St Petersburg (I have that on the best authority) and I was born in London, Christened in Schwäbisch Gmünd near Stuttgart, you can see that I did a lot pre-natal travelling and immediately post-natal too.
I was born with a choice between German and British nationality because my father was the representative of the German news agency in London, even after Hitler came into power, which made things extremely difficult, and he eventually left with the help of Lord Vansittart. They advertised the banns giving my father's intention of changing nationality in a Welsh language paper in Swansea, so that the Gestapo wouldn't notice and luckily the Gestapo had no great Welsh expert. So he became British. After a long gap in which my father was unemployed, when we had a very difficult time, he worked for MI5. So I was always in the wings of very exciting things going on.
I only discovered after the war – thank God as I would have been nervous wreck had I known, – that under German law you couldn't renounce your nationality.
When I think of the United Nations it reminds me that to drive a car properly you have to look at the road ahead. But you're a danger to everyone if you don't take an occasional look in the mirror, and it's really important to see where you've been in order to understand where you're going, and in fact where you are. Look at Switzerland. The Swiss are exactly what should happen to Europe, once it is united in a sort of framework: they are the German-speaking, great majority, the French minority, the Italian minority, and the Romansch, whom nobody talks about, but are the really romantic part of Switzerland. The Swiss heartily detest each other, if you read the morning papers they're always attacking another part of Switzerland for obtuseness, stupidity and all sorts of things. As soon as they are attacked, especially by some maverick American senator, they all become Swiss at once and join in a union of spirit, with a very advanced sense of democracy too. I think this is exactly what Europe should be, and what the world eventually should be. Nobody loses their character because they are joined in a kind of federal system in which they are cradled in a sense of security and interdependence with their neighbours, which is everybody's hope.
I'm sure this will happen to Europe – the French will become more French, the Italians more Italian. That's as it should be. I think we are destined to understand each other, because there is no further room for dissent.
There was a time when empires were still the fashion. Bismark united Germany and Garibaldi united Italy, while other powers, many not as important as these two, like Holland and Belgium, had already taken large slices of available colonial territory. Italy found itself stuck with Libya which then had no great resources because no one had yet found oil, and Somalia. Germany had Western Samoa, Togo, what is now Namibia, and the Caprivi Strip and Tanganyika. It was all very unsatisfactory, and they said, “Where's the justice in this?” The First World War, I think, broke out because of that, obsession with possessing other territories.
At the end of that conflict, there was a different kind of peace treaty to the ones we allow ourselves today. The Versailles Treaty arranged the world differently. The negotiators were all very polite, they wore top hats, Lloyd George, Clemenceau and the rest of them. They decreed that Germany would pay enormous reparations and that life would be practically impossible for a while, which materially helped Hitler later on. The Austrian-Hungarian empire disintegrated and the peace treaty created Yugoslavia, which had never been a coherent country and today proves that it wasn't ready to be one, except under Communist leadership, and therefore a restricted one. Croatia and Slovenia were parts of the Austrian Empire, Serbia was always independent, and so was Montenegro, defiantly independent for an awful long time, and is a fascinating country. Bosnia used to be occupied by the Ottoman Empire and which was therefore largely Muslim.
Differences occur elsewhere. Russia and Poland have always been antagonistic, because one was always Catholic, and more Catholic than most Catholics because of their proximity to Orthodoxy. They use a different alphabet, but their language is recognisable to one another.
The same thing is true on a smaller scale, but a much more lethal scale these days, between Croatia and Serbia who actually speak the same language, except one is called Serbo-Croat and the other is called Croat-Serbian. But one is Orthodox with a Cyrillic alphabet, and the other has a Roman alphabet and is Catholic. The incompatibility, is really old. Old perfumes from the past still drift across and influence people. Then the Muslim element, which is in Albania, Bosnia, and Macedonia in the south, which again is full of paradoxes. The real reason for the continuing trouble in the Balkans is still the collapse of the Austrian and Ottoman Empires.
The Ottoman Empire had odd consequences. Peace treaties in those days were between vanquished and victors in which conditions, sometimes of great brutality, were imposed. It is interesting, I've always thought it extraordinary, that Kuwait is younger than I am. It is an independent country, but of course, before, under the Ottoman Empire, Kuwait was part of Mesopotamia which is Iraq, so some of Iraq's motivations there are not as mysterious as all that, nor perhaps as villainous. I have no wish to suggest that Kuwait isn't worthy of independence, I think anybody who wants independence is worthy of it. But it owes its independence to oil interests at a time when it was very expedient for the West and it seems to be expedient to this day.
The Russians were always leaning on their neighbours' walls, moving in and helping the neighbours to reconstruct the wall a little further from their frontier. That's the way Russia acquired an empire, it wasn't always evil. For instance, Armenia became a country because of Russian influence after all the persecution of Armenians in Turkey. Many distinguished Armenians and especially Georgians took leading parts in the Russian government: Mikoyan was Armenian, Stalin and Shevardnadze were Georgian. They all made their contribution in some way and although these countries are splintered now into many different republics there is still an undertow which drags them back together again.
There are endless connections between Belorussia and Russia and talks of reunion. One of the most important Soviet politicians I met was a Belorussian, Andrei Gromyko who had a very thin, razor slash of a smile.
So really, my point is that human beings are very, very alike and that the political conditions imposed on them for a time don't really run as deep as people think. Russia may have no great tradition of democracy, but she has embraced it as though she had never known anything else, and embraced it because the very word Soviet, means “council”. Russians have always had district councils, this council, that council, some council, deciding democratically within at times a totalitarian regime, who was going to be elected for this, that or the other job. So it's nothing new. I think probably the most striking of all these changes was not Communist at all, but was when Franco died. Suddenly it was realised that the battle between fascism and tourism was over. The tourists had won.
On the very afternoon that Franco died the first topless bar opened in Madrid. The whole epoch was over and forgotten very, very quickly. The same thing has happened in many parts of the world. In Czechoslovakia, what is now the Czech Republic, it is probably one of the first examples in history of a crowd reacting with the intelligence of a single person, and that is extraordinary.
The Russians nowadays demonstrate that Communism is almost a national form in the sense that Communism is a variant on the word Commune or Community. There are children's homes where I went on behalf of UNICEF, outside Moscow, a home might have, say, thirty fathers, forty-three mothers and ninety-five children, and by now nobody knows whose children are who but they all care for one another. It is very moving because in Russia today you find examples of the deepest human depravity and at the same time the most extraordinary sacrifice. In a sense they are reflections of their own literature – the whole of Dostoyevsky, the whole of Tolstoy, the whole of Turgenev is still there with all its paradoxes, its stupidities, its addiction to being late. And that is due to the size of the country. No other country has so much territory, and eleven time zones. How on earth can you be punctual with that background? It's like the Chinese. People are annoyed with the Chinese for not respecting more human rights. But with a population that size it's very difficult to have the same attitude to human rights.
I saw the Reichstag burn when I was in Berlin as a 12-year-old school boy and it was awfully difficult to return to prep-school in London after that, because nobody would have understood what the hell I was talking about. The children I used to play with at this time were the son of an SS officer, and his bosom companion who was Jewish. In the Grunewald, a lovely park in Berlin, they suddenly began a kind of Wagnerian tryst of cutting their veins in order to mix their blood before their inevitable parting. I was absolutely horrified, and I knew, as many people did then, that war was inevitable.
After the defeat of Hitler we had an enormous amount of idealism which created the United Nations. I think now it is extraordinary how it survived because it had to overcome all sorts of difficulties, and all sorts of paradoxes too. The United States hasn't paid, but one mustn't overlook the great generosity and friendship of the American people. No country that has been as powerful as that relatively in history has ever had people who are so pleasant. I'm sure that the British and French during their hey-day, were never personally as pleasant as the Americans are. They were never as approachable. I don't think Cecil Rhodes would have been anything like Bill Gates, considering their wealth.
We are now seeing a crisis in conventional elected democracy. Governments, up to now, have been inward-looking, and elections have been about internal politics, about whether this or that tax is going to stay. Nowadays financial strictures have become so apparent that there is far less choice at election time. Turn-outs are always disappointing, and people have to be dragooned into voting as part of national duty. Two or three countries, such as Australia and Belgium, even make it a crime not to vote, which I think is going too far, because a non-expression of a vote is also an expression of opinion, under certain circumstances, if you don't agree with any of the candidates. Living in Europe I have no vote anywhere, and even when I had a vote, I never managed to vote for anybody who got in, so it's no great loss to me. The fact remains that, whatever the difference between parties at election times, the policy of the victor becomes suspiciously similar to that of the defeated.
But now everything begins to go outward-looking and we had an example early this year AOL, a large corporation, fused with Time Warner and the two of them together have a budget slightly larger than that of France. Now EMI has joined them, God knows what the budget is.
The result of all that is that there is a new form of democracy in the shape of NGOs – Non-Government Organisations – who have cropped up like mushrooms after a thunderstorm. There are now over eight hundred of them. They bridge the gap between the difficulty of international thinking by Government and the actual reality of things.
The first great non-government agency was the Swiss Red Cross which began towards the end of the last century when a Swiss gentleman on holiday went for a walking tour across a battlefield and suddenly understood what war was all about. He was so horrified he conceived the idea of the Red Cross. No government now or then would ever have had the mandate to think of such a thing because it's strictly international in concept. So all these organisations like Greenpeace, Amnesty International, are really vital. They are a new form of democracy. Although not elected, they are obviously a response to a public need. Nothing can disappear more easily than a pressure group which has no pressure behind it.
The formation of the committee for the World Criminal Court is very important because there are corporations more powerful than many Governments. If Renault wants to shut a factory in Belgium, there's nothing the French Government or the Belgium Government can do about it, because it is accepted as a financial necessity. Immediately commerce is international, it follows automatically that crime becomes international because crime depends a great deal on commerce. What's the Mafia but, perverted commerce?
The first great conference on a World Criminal Court was held under the aegis of the United Nations in Rome last year. When it came to a vote 120 countries voted for the idea of a World Criminal Court, with 21 abstentions, and seven against. The seven against included the United States, China, Iraq and Iran, which is ironic, if anything is.
The United Nations has in Koffi Anan a marvellous Secretary General, who embodies the emergence of some absolutely remarkable, purely African wisdom. It began with Ghandi, curiously enough, who was born in South Africa despite being Indian, and found great expression in Nelson Mandela and Archbishop Tutu, another truly exceptional character. Robben Island, where Mandela was incarcerated for 18 years, has become a place of pilgrimage. A little village has developed on the island with a mixture of hardened criminals, prison warders, and political prisoners. I was there on the day they formally opened the first school for all their children. That seemed to me a symbol of something absolutely remarkable. We are never going to move forward unless we are willing to forget. The success of the Millennium depends on how much we are allowed to forget compared to how much we are incited to remember.
