Message from the Secretary General
of the United Nations
for the launching of
Global Cooperation for a Better World

I welcome the launching of the Global Cooperation for a Better World project. This ceremony will begin one of the most innovative and imaginative efforts for peace to be inspired by the International Year for Peace.

There are many roads which must be followed to peace. Some of them have had only a few travelers. At the Untied Nations the Charter has committed us to work with and through governments at the Charter’s beginning in the name of the people who sent their representatives to sight it. We are thus regularly reminded that we are but one creation of the yearning for peace of men and women everywhere. We have long recognized that peoples and individuals must also have a more direct path of their own to take towards peace. From this recognition, the International Year of Peace was born.

Your project opens another direct path toward peace for peoples and persons. It challenges them to think creatively and practically about peace and about the nature of the future world peace could make possible. The ideas and suggestions you will collect and exchange all over the world will constitute a kind of thinking together about peace among all peoples.

The nations of the world are now recognizing once again the fundamental truth of their interdependence. At the same time they confront the reality that the world’s greatest challenges include peace which were always closely connected, are now inseparable. At this time of ever greater complexity of relations among nations and of the problems which they struggle together, the collective consideration you are encouraging of those problems by the people of the world is very important.

I hope that men and women everywhere will take up the challenge you offer. I wish you every success for your bold and creative project.