UN General Assembly
2019

The theme of this year’s session, “Galvanizing multilateral efforts for poverty eradication, quality education, climate action and inclusion”, is pertinent for several reasons. First, it rightly continues the theme of our previous session on our shared responsibilities for peaceful, equitable and sustainable societies. It is also an opportunity for us to recall that to date, multilateralism has made progress only in the wake of bloody conflicts, as was the case with the treaties of Westphalia, in 1648, and the Treaty of Vienna, which founded the European orders that succeeded the Thirty Years’ War, the Eighty Years’ War and the Napoleonic wars, respectively. The same was true of the attempt to establish the League of Nations after the First World War, and the creation of the United Nations following the Second World War. Each time, the objective was to create rules and institutions capable of establishing an order that was conducive to peaceful international relations and governed by the rule of law, and that could enable us to emerge out of a state of nature in which every State had absolute freedom to resort to force.