Clinton's
Yale Speech about the Shadow Side of Globalization
October
6, 2001
Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank
you very much.
Mr. President, thank you for that
wonderful introduction. And thank you for coming out in such large
numbers today at such an important time for Yale and the United
States. I would like to thank the mayor of New Haven, John
DeStefano, for being here, and my great friend and former
colleague, your Member of Congress, Rosa DeLauro. Thank you, Rosa,
for being here. I have two other friends, who like me are no
longer in public office, but each in their own way, they made a
great difference to what we were able to do. Kurt Schmoke, the
former mayor of Baltimore. My great partner, Ernesto Zedillo, the
former president of Mexico. And thank you for being here.
I
also have seen already today a lot of people who are members of
our administration. There are five or six of them out there, and
so I appreciate Yale giving us a pretext for holding a Clinton
alumni meeting here today.
I was privileged to study
here for exactly one percent of Yale's three hundred years. I love
the law school. I love my professors, and have stayed in touch
with many of them over all of these long years. One of them I was
able to put on the Court of Appeals. One of them I tried to
torment in class with disagreements and he lived to torment me
my constitutional law professor, Robert Bork. And we had a great
set of debates 30 years ago. Now that I replay them in my mind,
they seem fresh today.
I was fortunate enough to be
here at Yale law school with a phenomenal number of outstanding
men and women who were my fellow students. One of them did become
the United States senator from New York . Senator Schumer went to
Harvard.
Meeting Hillary was the best thing that
happened to me at Yale, and maybe the only thing that really stuck
over all of these 30 years. I understand there was some discussion
here in the Yale community about whether this Tercentennial should
go forward in the aftermath of the awful events of September the
11th. I thank you for going forward. It is what President Bush
asked us to do when he asked to us get on with our lives, and it
is particularly important at this time.
Marking
three hundred years of learning at any time would be a significant
event. But marking it at this time, with a commitment to be a
truly global university, is obviously profoundly important. For
three hundred years, beginning three quarters of a century before
the Declaration of Independence, Yale has taught young people the
wisdom of the past, the analysis of the present and the importance
of looking to the future. Yale has asked hard questions and looked
for honest answers. That is what I found here 30 years ago, and
that is what I see when I look out on this vast array of faces
today.
America is full of hard questions now. I have
spent a great deal of the last three weeks in Manhattan, visiting
the crisis center, visiting ground zero, visiting fire stations
and police headquarters, going to three schools two of them
double schools because the children were blown out of their
schools by the events of September the 11th. And I have found so
many questions. Hillary and I went to an elementary school in
lower Manhattan, where nine and ten-year old students asked me
these questions: "Why do they hate us so much anyway?"
"How did that guy get all those people to commit suicide?"
I never thought I would hear a nine year old ask a question like
that.
The other day, I had a conversation with Mack
McLarty, who was my first chief of staff and my oldest friend. We
go back to the time when we were three and four years old. We were
talking about the events of September the 11th. We had a
conversation I had bet that thousands and thousands of Americans
our age have had in the last three weeks. I said, "Mack, if
we had been on that plane over Pennsylvania, do you think we would
have had the guts to take it down?" He said, "I think
so, and I hope so."
I have gotten calls from
women friends of Hillary's and mine, who are the mothers of young
children, from all over America with a simple question: "Bill,
is it going to be all right? Tell me it's going to be all
right."
Well, first of all, it's going to be all
right. I can tell you that.
Terrorism the
killing of innocent people for political or religious or economic
reasons is as old as organized combat. It's been around a
very long time. If we searchingly look through history, honestly,
we find it in uncomfortable places. In the crusade, in which the
European Christians seized Jerusalem, they burned a mosque,
slaughtered three hundred Jews and killed every mother and child
on the templemount who was a Muslim. But no campaign of terror
standing on it's own without organized military combat has ever
succeeded in all of human history. Indeed, it is not the purpose
of terror to succeed militarily. It is the purpose of terror to
terrify, and I would guess that a lot of young people in this
audience today who have never lived through such a difficult
crisis were understandably terrified. And what is sought from the
terror is the people who are afraid.
First of all, in
a vast and diverse country like ours you see, we have got
people here from just about every country, every racial and ethnic
group and every religious heritage. What is sought is, first of
all, to make us afraid of each other. And secondly, to make us
afraid of the future. We are afraid to plan; afraid to invest,
afraid to trust that is what they seek. Therefore,
terrorism cannot prevail unless we cooperate. It is not a military
strategy, it is a psychological and human one. We have to give the
people that attacked us permission to win, and I do not believe we
are about to grant them that permission.
Mr. Bin
Laden and his allies misjudge America. They think we are,
fundamentally, a weak, greedy, selfish, materialistic people. They
think we are weakened by our lack of a national religion and
imposed social order. But, they are wrong. All Americans have been
proud in these last days of the performance of our leaders, from
the president, to the governor, to the mayor of New York, yes, to
the senators. I am very proud of my wife and her colleagues, and
the House and the Senate, but especially the people.
Hillary
and I went to a Rosh HaShonah service the other night in our own
little village of Chappaqua, where we lost a person out of the
temple on September the 11th. And I met one of the two men there
who escaped from the 84th floor of the World Trade Center carrying
a disabled woman all the way to safety. When I went into the
family crisis center the first day, a man came up to me and said
to me: "Why Mr. President, I haven't seen you since Oklahoma
City." And I said, "How did I see you there?" He
said, "You came to console me. My wife was blown up in the
bombing of Oklahoma City and I had no one to talk to. So when I
saw that this happened, I went in to my job and I told my boss I
was taking two weeks off, and I got in my car and I drove here,
and I sit here all day, every day talking to people. I had no one
to talk to and I thought I might be of help."
I
have visited many of the firemen. The fire department is a
marvelous organization in the modern world. It's more like a
medieval army, where instead of sitting behind and issuing orders,
the leaders lead. And so in our fire department, we lost the
chief, his three top aides, the chaplain and some 200 other
officers three hundred and forty killed
necessitating over two hundred promotions, because no one took a
backseat when it came to sacrifice. I think those who believed
that we would be weakened by this have misjudged us. All over
America, there has been a tremendous outpouring of caring
over six hundred million dollars given by Americans.
everything from a dollar to a million. I thank the workers and the
people at Yale for the work you did, for those who have lost loved
ones or feared they had, in caring for them here. We are going to
be all right.
Still, we must realize that we have a
formidable adversary and a difficult challenge. Partly, because in
every conflict throughout human history, defense lags offense by a
little bit, and we got caught not being caught up. This has always
happened. But so far, the human race is still around because self
preservation and decency catches up and triumphs. Nevertheless, I
think we have to take this seriously and see it for exactly what
it is I believe we are engaged in the first great struggle
for the soul of the twenty-first century. We must understand
terrorism in the context of the modern world, and we must ask
ourselves what we have to do, not only to prevent terrorism and
protect ourselves, but to undermine the conditions and attitudes
that bring to the terrorists' banner their foot soldiers and
sympathizers.
If I had asked you on September the
tenth, the following question, what would your answer be? What is
the dominant trait of the world in the early twenty-first century?
If you are an optimistic person, it seems to me you might have
given one of four answers. You might have said, "Well, it's
the globalization of the economy and culture that has lifted more
people out of poverty in the last twenty years than any time in
all history and brought America unparalleled wealth and
opportunities, including the opportunity for first immigrants from
all over the world."
Or you might have said, if
you are a "techie," "It is the information
technology revolution."
When I became president
in January of 1993, there were fifty sites on the World Wide
Web.When I left office, there were three hundred and fifty
million. There was never anything like it in the history of
communications.
Or you might have said, if you were a
scientist, "It's the evolution in the sciences." We're
going to find out what's in the black holes in outer space. Last
year, we found two new species of life, in two previously
unexplored rivers. The human genome has been sequenced and soon
women will bring home babies from the hospital with little gene
cards saying, "Here are the kid's problems and the kid's
strengths." And very soon, babies born in America and any
country with a good health system will have a life expectancy in
excess of ninety years. We have scientists working on digital
chips to replicate the nerve functions of damaged nerves in the
spinal cord, and raising the prospect that what a chip might do
for a spine is like what a pacemaker might do for the heart. And
people thought permanently paralyzed might get up and walk, and
all of this is truly amazing.
Or if you are a
political scientist, you might say the dominant trait of this
period is the explosion of democracy around the world and
diversity at home. Just for the last three years, for the first
time in human history, more than half the world lives under
governments of their own choosing. It has never happened before.
And in our country and indeed in most other countries with a
strong economy, there is an absolute explosion of diversity.
America is a lot more interesting place than it was 30 years ago.
If we had this meeting thirty years ago, you wouldn't look like
you do. And it's a lot more fun to be here, and a lot more
educational and a lot more exciting because of that.
It
seems to me if you are optimistic, on September the 10th, when I
said "what is the dominant strength of the twenty first
century world," you could have given one of those four
answers: The global economy; information technology; the explosion
of democracy around the world and diversity; and the scientific
evolution.
On the other hand, if you are a little
more pessimistic, or if you are what Hillary refers to in our
family, as her being the "designated worrier," you might
have mentioned four negative things. You might have said all those
positive things are just fine, but the environmental crisis facing
us is so great that they all threaten to engulf all the progress
and let it go away. Nine of the hottest years ever recorded
occurred in the last 12. If the climate warms at the same rate in
the next fifty years, as it has in the last ten, we will lose
fifty feet of Manhattan Island, the Pacific island nations, and
the Florida everglades that I worked so hard to protect.
Agriculture will be disrupted all over the world and millions and
millions of food refugees will be created and there will be a lot
more violence out there. There is a terrible water shortage in the
world already, and one in four people on the globe never gets a
clean glass of water. There is a serious deterioration in the
quality of our oceans which are responsible for so much of our
oxygen And you could say it doesn't look to me like there is much
going on about this, and if we don't reverse these, we will be
having terrible problems.
Or you could say, "No,
no, before that happens, we will be engulfed by health crises, the
breakdown of health systems all over the world." This year,
one in four people in the world will die of AIDS, TB, malaria or
infections related to diarrhea. Thirty-six million people will
have AIDS. Within five years, a hundred million will. The fastest
growing rates are in the former Soviet Union on Europe's back
door, and in the Caribbean on our front door, and in India, the
world's greatest democracy. And China just admitted they have
twice as many AIDS cases as they had previously thought. And only
four percent of the adults know how the disease is contracted and
spread. You could say, when we have a hundred million AIDS cases,
it will collapse a lot of these democracies, and it is a recipe
for total turmoil and violence.
Or you could say,
"No, the real problem is the flip side of globalization."
Half the world's people aren't a part of it. It is true that more
people have been lifted out of poverty by globalization in the
last twenty years than ever before. It is also true that half the
people in the world still live on less than two dollars a day,
that a billion of our people still live on less than a dollar a
day. Think about it the next time you buy a cup of coffee: A
billion go to bed hungry every night. One woman dies every minute
in childbirth, and that is a recipe for revolution, compounded by
the fact that a hundred million of our children on the globe never
go to school at all half the kids in Africa, and a quarter
of the kids in East Asia and the Indian subcontinent. So you might
have said that.
Or even on September tenth, you might
have said, "No, the biggest problem is going to be terrorism,
coupled with weapons of mass destruction and rooted in racial and
religious and ethnic hatred." And here is what I would like
to say: Whether you would have given a positive answer, or a
negative answer, there is something that all eight of these
elements, positive and negative, have in common. They all reflect
the astonishing increase in global interdependence, the extent of
which we have seen the collapse of distances and barriers,
bringing us closer together for good or ill. Terrorism is simply
the dark side of our increasing interdependence. We have not
repealed human nature or the fact some people see reality very
differently than we do. And it was inevitable, if we take down all
the barriers, if we open the society, that people who represent
organized forces of destruction would take advantage of the very
forces which have made us richer, more diverse, and made our lives
better. Therefore, all the great questions of the twenty-first
century boil down to one: Is this new age going to be good or bad,
on balance, for me, my family, my community, my nation and the
world?
That's why Yale's mission in its fourth
century to build a truly global university is so
important. It is very important that it be good. I was delighted,
Mr. President, when my former deputy secretary of state and my old
roommate, Strobe Talbott, became the head of the new (Yale) Center
for the Study of Globalization, and his wife agreed to run the
World Fellows Program. Actually, I said I would like to be a world
fellow, and I was informed that I no longer qualify as a young
leader. So today, you are stuck with my opinions without the
benefit of further Yale study.
What do we have to do
to make sure that we encourage the positive forces of
interdependence, and that we restrain and combat the negative
ones? I'd like to make three points: First, first things first. We
have to defend ourselves against terrorism. I want you to know
if you don't that there are good people, lots of them, who
have been working on this for years. And I want you to know that
there were many, many more attacks that were planned on the United
States which were thwarted by career public servants, and on our
allies. In the last millennium alone, there were plans for a bomb
in Boston, a bomb in Seattle, a bomb for Los Angeles airport, a
bomb at the biggest hotel in Amman, Jordan, and at one of the
holiest Christian sites in the Holy Land, and a half dozen other
plans all thwarted. There are good people who are working hard.
Nonetheless, clearly, there is more to do to build our defenses,
to build our ability to be offensive, to build our capacity to
maximize computer networks to follow people who mean us harm. I
don't want to say more about that right now because the president
and his national security teams and our allies have some tough
tactical decisions to make. And I think we ought to stick with
them and give them the room they need to make decisions. So far,
they have been making good decisions and we have no reason to
believe that they won't do so in the future. I think on this, it's
important for America to stay united. We are and we must stay that
way. And I will say again, I know it was frightening to have the
first massive attack on American soil. And nothing can minimize
the human loss.
But
let me remind the young people here that the century we just left
was the bloodiest in all human history. Twelve million died in
World War I, twenty million in World War II, and another twenty
million from government oppression after the war, not counting the
millions who died in Korea and Vietnam, and later in the senseless
slaughter from Ruanda to Bosnia. And the world has never been free
of violence. We took down the walls and collapsed the distances.
We were interdependent and, therefore, all the things that we have
benefited from in this global economy, sharing with it the price
tag of being vulnerable to those who would do us harm. But we will
catch up and this will be handled. What we have to do as citizens
is to think about what else has to be done and what else we
personally can do. We have to lead an assault on the conditions of
negative interdependence and create more opportunities for
positive interdependence. America should continue to work to
reduce poverty and spread the benefits of globalization to people
in countries that haven't felt it, with things like more debt
relief, more micro-credit, more sensible trade.
America
should contribute its fair share to the secretary general's health
fund to fight the spread of the AIDS epidemic and other health
problems. America should deal with the challenge of climate change
through conservation through the development of alternative
energy, through helping our friends and neighbors throughout the
world do the same. America should continue to promote democracy.
One particular problem we have, in the present crisis, is that so
many people who hear the siren song of radical Islamic
fundamentalism the twisting of the reading of the Koran and
the teachings of Mohammed live in countries growing ever
larger, ever younger and ever poorer where there is no democracy
or chance to express dissent, or even assent, in a normal
political way. And it keeps the populace in a state of sort of
permanent infancy, in which you never have to take responsibility
for your own lives and making it better because you never get to
take responsibility.
And therefore it is very easy to
listen to someone say your problems were caused by America's
success. It's a hard case to make, because people from all of
those countries come to America and share in that success. It's a
hard case to make, because America last used military power to
protect poor Muslims in Bosnia and Kosovo. It's a hard case to
make, because America led the world in the most sweeping and
important debt relief endeavor because the money had to be used by
poor countries for education, medical care and development and
nothing else. But nonetheless, if you never get to vote for
office, you never get to stand up in a public forum and say what
you think. You are permanently disempowered. And you can hear the
siren song: It is all because of America. So, we have to keep
urging our friends to find ways to move to greater democracy and
freedom.
And finally let me say this: Even more
important than what we do, is who we are. We must understand that
this present conflict, as agonizing as the loss was, is about far
more than the buildings collapsing and the people dying. This is
about a global force with a fundamentally different view of the
nature of truth, the value of life, the character of human
community. Mr. Bin Laden and the Taliban believe they have the
truth, and everybody that agrees with them is good, and everybody
that doesn't is evil. This great university is dedicated to the
proposition that nobody has the absolute truth. We all get to
vote. We have the right to freedom of speech. We have the right of
freedom of religion. And we have the right of freedom of assembly.
And we have the responsibilities of a free people because we
believe that, fundamentally, life is a journey because we move
closer and closer to the truth. But because we are finite, limited
human beings, we never will achieve it. Therefore, we don't have
the right to impose our iron will on others. Instead, we try to
work with others, and the more the merrier, and the thought that,
with honest effort, together we might find more truth that
is a fundamental difference and it leads people to a
different view of the value of human life.
Because we
believe that we are all traveling on this journey together, we
have come, over time, more and more and more to value all life. To
think that everybody counts, that everybody deserves a chance. But
for them, they believe there are three kinds of people: There are
the people that will embrace their particular views of Islam; and
then there are the Muslims, who don't agree with their reading of
the Koran, who keep citing surrahs like "God, Allah, put
different people on the earth, not that they might despise one
another, but that they might get to know one another and learn
from one another." They hate that one in Afghanistan. People
who believe that are heretics to them. And the rest of us who are
not Muslims are infidels. We are all combatants in the war and we
all deserve whatever happens to us, including death, even if it's
a six year old girl who decided, on the morning of September 11,
to go with her mother to work in the World Trade Center.
Of
all the things that I have seen and been moved by this last few
weeks, the thing I will carry with me to the grave, is the lines
of the victims families holding their little flyers. Because, for
days and days and days, people didn't know whether their loved
ones were in the building when it was hit. So they all made up
flyers, and they had pictures of their loved ones. "This is
my wife, my husband, my brother, my sister, my mother, my father,
my child. Here is the picture." And outside, often in
handwriting, "This is what floor they were on, this is how
tall they were, this is how much they weighed." All these
people holding these pictures there were Indians and
Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, Japanese, Chinese, British, and German,
Mexicans, Chileans. There were people from every conceivable
religious faith. They were all there, a stunning rebuke to the
people who thought they had the right to kill them because they
had the whole truth.
We believe in a different
character of community. We believe we all do better when we work
together. And all you have to do in our country is to accept the
rules of engagement our rules about everybody counting,
everybody getting a voice, everybody getting to vote. People that
will have to show up every day to do what is right. It gives us
the freedom to celebrate our diversity, that we can be united by
our common humanity. Their community is not united by common
humanity it is united by what it is not.
And
Mr. Bin Laden has a political agenda. He wants to take over Saudi
Arabia, get rid of Israel and purge the whole Middle East in the
process, so they all look like the Taliban. What a dreary world.
We have seen in the pictures what we have seen on television from
that movie, "Behind the Veil," what their ideas are
like: forcing women to wear those horrible burquas, and beating
them with sticks in public and worse. But this is a formidable
adversary because they do not believe they are evil. They believe
they are doing good.
The most important thing over
and above anything we do is that we have, in our minds clearly,
the world we are trying to make that our wealth is not an
end in itself, but a tool to allow people to live up to their
God-given abilities, that we keep struggling to get beyond these
categories of difference to our common humanity. And we should
never be blind to how difficult it is going to be.
Think
of the great spirits of the last fifty years: Ghandi killed, not
by a Pakistani Muslim, but one of his own Hindus, who hated him
because he wanted India for the Muslims, the Sikhs, for everybody;
Sadat, killed by the organization that Mr. Bin Laden's number two
heads now, not by an Israeli, but by an Egyptian who hated him for
reaching across the religious and ethnic bloody divide to make
peace; my friend, Itzhak Rabin a lifetime defending Israel
killed, not by a Palestinian terrorist but by an Israeli
who hated him because he wanted to lay down arms and take up
peace. This is hard.
I thank God that, of all the
great spirits of the last fifty years, Mandela survived, probably
only because he first had to pay with twenty-seven years of the
best years of the his life being in jail. It is hard to get people
beyond the notion that they are defined by their differences and
not by their common humanity. But you can do it by living it and
you can do it by recognizing that it is time to take America's
eternal mission to the world a mission to widen the circle
of opportunity, to deepen the meaning of freedom, to strengthen
the bonds of community. We can no longer deny to others what we
claim for ourselves. That is the ultimate lesson for the
interdependent world.
We are going to get through
this crisis. Our leaders are going to make good decisions. But in
the end, we not only have to stop bad things from happening, we
have to build for you, the best, the most prosperous, the most
peaceful and most exciting time the world has ever known. And we
can do it, if we remember who we are and what we believe.
