________________________________________________________________ ______________

Round Table: Dialogue among Civilizations United Nations, New York, 5 September 2000 Provisional verbatim transcription

Address by Abdelaziz Bouteflika (Algeria)

President Bouteflika (interpretation from Arabic): If we ask ourselves why we should proclaim the year 2001 the United Nations Year of Dialogue among Civilizations, my answer would be that if the lives of men can be measured in terms of years, ideologies in decades, and nations in centuries, then the unit measuring civilizations, born of the interaction among peoples, would be the millennium.

Throughout past millenniums the seven or eight major civilizations of the world were moulded in the form of the major religions which constituted their cradle. As temporal ambitions, demography or economy allowed, constant interaction among these groups has led to a fluctuation between dialogue and confrontation in a continuously renewed movement of ebb and flow.

Today, we reiterate our legitimate determination to regulate these fluctuations throughout the world to ensure that dialogue wins out over conflict and to promote and guarantee peace. Otherwise, having just emerged from an ideological conflict which might well have triggered disastrous consequences, we ran the risk of moving straight towards an even more dangerous explosion of violence stemming from the polarization of differences among our civilizations. Yet, history has shown that if material force can defeat some ideologies it can no longer obliterate a civilization without destabilizing the whole planet.

Today, nations have forged their independence and become aware of their identity as nations. They belong to cultural groupings that have durably marked their historical evolution and shaped their cultural being. The concept of a nation in its modern definition no longer implies a break with this basic heritage of civilization and the characteristics of a people. On the contrary, a nation must be embraced, rehabilitated and expressed as a tangible sign of human creativity and as an integral element of mankind's heritage.

Without going too far back in history, the colonial expansion in the nineteenth century ? and here I would mention only the Muslim civilization to which my country belongs ? led to attempts to obliterate that civilization seen as lifeless remnants, a fertile field for anthropologists, scientists and ethnographers seeking the exotic. There were and are today orientalists ? islamologists as we call them today ? who are above suspicion but that notwithstanding, the general usefulness of their work has often been distorted, wasted and even biased, given preconceived notions of ideologies that are no longer acceptable because they reflect a vision that disfigures the socio-historic realities which were set in stone only because the predominant ideology had decided that it was so.

The West, steeped in its power, claimed to be the bearer of a civilizing mission as if the rest of the world, the object of its envy, was peopled by barbarians. A thinker of renown as well known as Ernest Renan, the author of an authoritative work on Even Rochard "Averrois and Averroisme", and who along with Djamal-Eddine Al-Afghani was a well-known figure, did not hesitate to describe history in China as boring because nothing happened there, and that the Koran was a yoke binding the human spirit and that the last of the sons of Ishmael should be pursued to the far reaches of the desert. Meiji Japan did not escape this kind of ideological lynching either: it was said that the Japanese, unable to be creative, were only good at imitation.

Western ethnocentrism - this unilateral way of looking at another and deeming that other to be inferior when that other is no more than different, or deeming that the other's historical difficulties were permanent or even a congenital defect - has for a long time been a stumbling-block for non-Western civilizations. The West, taking on the lion's share of scientific and cultural development in the world from the time of the Greek miracle until now, has tended to reduce everything that was not part of the West to a marginalized fate, eternally destined to lag behind.

This attitude, claiming universality, in fact is not. The danger is that it brings into question the unity of the human spirit by setting aside for the West technology, philosophy and rational thinking general, while relegating the other to the gloomy fate of being excluded from human progress.

Proclaiming the year 2001 the United Nations Year of Dialogue among Civilizations was a welcome initiative taken by my brother, His Excellency, Mohammad Khatami, President of the Islamic Republic of Iran. This is a particularly timely proclamation. It has been made when we question the possibility of sustaining a fruitful and balanced dialogue among nations with varying degrees of material development and, in addition, given the common context of globalization.

Countries poor in resources but rich in culture could quite rightly fear that some of the ethical and social values to which they are most committed, have already suffered from the colonial confiscation of the past and that they might be further eroded and truncated by the universalization of a one-dimensional model stemming from materially wealthy or prosperous countries. This model does not take into account all of man's dimensions. It does not enable one individual to see the human in another individual. It is a one-way model that transforms genuine and warm societies into what I would call schizophrenic societies.

Yet, it is from the industrialized countries that the cry arises fuelling this irrational fear of a supposed Green peril, which is replacing the Red or Yellow peril and which could now be the prime danger for the survival of Western civilization. We find in the arsenal of concepts used to justify the inevitable clash between the Western civilization and the Islamic civilization a reference to stereotypes based on racial prejudice which would give rise to indignation were it to be applied to other ethnic groups. While abandoning the traditional, condescending clichés regarding privacy in Islam, these stereotypes now equate Islamic civilization with violence, terrorism and fanaticism, and that is done in order the better to fight Islam.

A dialogue among civilizations can be seen as a dialogue between the individual and the universal. Greater significance is given to this in the Koran when God, addressing men, tells them:

"O Men! We created males and females and We made peoples and tribes so that you may know each other!"

By transcending the mix of these national and tribal groupings the Koran has a specific purpose and reason for man to recognize man. To the motto on the Temple of Delphi, "Know yourself", we should add "by knowing the other" or recognizing the particular identity of the other. Cultures and civilizations, like individuals, can recognize their identities and originality only when compared to other cultures or civilizations.

That is why proclaiming the year 2001 as the United Nations Year of Dialogue among Civilizations could be a timely opportunity to root out the extremists from the West who boast of the final confrontation between the two civilizations, and those in the Muslim world who call for the Manichaen division of the world into the "realm of Islam" and the "realm of war", as between good and evil.

The proclamation is timely because it follows conflicts in Eastern Europe which have left atrocities in their wake, and conflicts which have set civilization against civilization using divergences as a pretext. It will promote throughout the world the active and positive coexistence of the great religions in pluralistic societies, rich in their diversity but experiencing today tensions and hardships.

In order to ensure a successful dialogue among civilizations it seems to me that the following prerequisites must be met: first, the countries participating in this dialogue must themselves be democratic countries. Otherwise, how can they seek to reconcile their disputes with others if they cannot even ensure that dialogue at home?

The second prerequisite would be that these countries must recognize that there is no pure civilization but that each civilization is a river with other civilizations as its tributaries and thus it must be open to the universal; otherwise it is doomed to fall into decay. In this context, the alleged opposition between the so-called Judeo-Christian culture and the Islamic culture ignores the harmonious coexistence of these three religions of the Book - in Andalusia, for example, where they gave birth to a highly civilized society. Western civilization today is no less Islamo-Christian than it is Judeo-Christian if one takes into account the contribution made by Muslim thinkers and scholars in the emergence of Western societies from the darkness of the Middle Ages and later in the blossoming of the Renaissance.

Furthermore, this dialogue must take place among nations. By that I mean that the various components of society must be involved. All levels of society must be involved. Dialogue should not be limited to States alone. We must ensure that a State's political power does not usurp the role of the nation as a whole.

Finally, the dialogue must be multifaceted. It must encompass the different areas of life, with dialogue among religions as an integral part of that life.

It is time to break with the narrow concept that only takes international relations and economic aspects into account while ignoring the problem of values which play a central role in the imagination of peoples today. Peoples who have historically known the grandeur of their nation through previous civilizational achievements will not rest in today’s world until they are recognized and reintegrated within the so-called civilized nations and are no longer marginalized, excluded or condemned to misunderstanding which is as injust as it is demeaning.

It goes without saying that this does not mean that they should not strive to overcome archaic practices and to choose dialogue. In do doing they will become more approachable in the critical eye of the other and will therefore be more open to the requirements of modern societies.

This dialogue can be seen as a therapy of choice. It acknowledges differences but does not aim to abolish them. It is not a question of falling into an insipid cosmopolitanism by sacrificing fundamental elements in each civilization. Karl Jaspers defined dialogue as a lovers' quarrel, that is, a kind of arm-wrestling match between two equally defensible logics, but moderated and guided by the awareness of working towards a common cause, namely the destiny of mankind.

The starting point could be the recognition by each regional grouping of the contribution of their diverse civilizations, recognizing that each civilization has its own sense of belonging and identity. But the underlying culture must be an open one seeking harmony and not a culture of "us" and "them", which alienates the other. That is why the proportions should be defined as basic elements in civilization: for example, an understanding between individuals and groups; between individualism and others; between a place of consensus, of participation, and competition; a distinction between the use of law, wise men and elders; between material and non-material values; between solidarity and charity; and an understanding of the place of history and the future, of tradition and progress.

Such proportions differ from one civilization to another. They should be explicit and made known. Civilizations do not stand still, they move forward, they evolve. This assessment will help each nation individually to bring the balance to this dialogue that is considered to be a necessary component of its civilization. It could also participate through dialogue in a collective effort that would lead towards defining a substratum of shared values which could truly be called a universal civilization based not on their respective truths and justices but on truth and justice.

The value of dialogue among civilizations lies in man's quest for his universality with the numerous cultural expressions he has given himself throughout time and space. This is a genuine antidote and remedy or racism and discrimination in all its forms. In this regard I pay tribute to the initiative taken by the Secretary-General of the United Nations and Mrs. Mary Robinson for the year 2001, an undertaking to know oneself better by knowing the other. It is an opportunity to deepen our humanity by fully understanding it. International ethics will benefit from this endeavour as will, inevitably, the cause of peace.

Mr. Matsuura: I now have the honour to call on His Excellency, Mr. Abdurrahman Wahid, President of the Republic of Indonesia.

________________________________________________________________ ______________

© UNESCO 2000 | www.unesco.org/dialogue2001