SPEECH/08/131
Margot WALLSTRÖM
Vice President of the European Union responsible for Institutional Relations and Communication Strategy Women: Stabilising an Insecure World
Conference: "Women: Stabilising an Insecure World" Brussels, 6 March 2008
Madame Chairman, distinguished women, colleagues,
The concept of women as peacekeepers is not a particularly new idea. Aristophanes - the Greek playwright - made this point 2419 years ago in his play Lysistrata, which means “she who disbands armies”. You know the story – how women living in three cities at war organise themselves, barricade the public funds building and withhold sex from their husbands in order to end the Peloponnesian War and secure peace.
Lysistrata appeals to me not only as she portrays a woman of outstanding political ability who negotiates a conclusion to a devastating war. But also because three major strategic messages can be discerned in the play that I find interesting and highly relevant for our discussion today:
Firstly, it brings out a perspective on politics, a new content, which does not make distinctions between political rule and managing daily life; Secondly, this political perspective makes a social and political co-operation possible between women that cuts across class and nations. And thirdly, the play uses the metaphor of weaving to show the contributions women can make to society and politics... Women pulling together the strands of society and "weaving the fabric of a nation"...
So what are the differences between Sparta 411 BC and today? Well, in dark moments, not perhaps as many as we would like... But in comparison, Lyistrata and her women had rather limited tools to stop the war... On a more serious note, it has taken us two thousand years. Today women have access, although still limited, to the floor in the senate – to political power. However, there is another significant difference between the women of Sparta and us. And that is of course what constitutes security.
Security is, as we have discussed here today, no longer simply about putting an end to wars between states. Security is also about the impacts of climate change, HIV/AIDS, water scarcity, and poverty. It is about access to health-care and education. It is about violence against women and girls being a problem of pan-epidemic proportions. The list is long and hugely complex. And with globalization – there is no escape and no disconnect between what state and human security is.
I will not lecture this distinguished forum on the challenges we face. I would rather us my time and point towards the fact that today we have the means, knowledge and technology to address many of these grave threats to human security. So why isn’t more happening? Well, we may now have access to the space of politics. But that is not enough. There is more work to do. And if we revisit the strategy of Lysistrata, I believe we have not yet managed to follow her recipe and do what she did - change the content of politics by organizing ourselves.
What I mean is that when we discuss policymaking on security we must ensure that the content is squarely rooted in sustainable development and human rights. And we must recognize that sustainable development and security cannot be effectively discussed or achieved with the involvement of only half of humanity - the challenges we face will require the energies of both women and men.
And this will in turn entail, as Lysistrata advocates, that we organize ourselves. The accumulated experiences of women leaders now rising to power must be brought systematically to impact on local, national and international policymaking.
This is precisely what the Council of World Women Leaders is about. As you know, it is a global network of current and former women presidents, prime ministers and ministers. The Council's mission is to mobilize the highest-level women leaders globally for collective - organized - action on issues of critical importance to women and sustainable development. And last November the Council organized a Summit on Women and Security in New York. At this path-breaking summit 102 women leaders committed themselves, in a call for action, to ensure that the daily realities of women who do not have access to power are given a voice in policy-making and peace negotiations.
In this perspective I am proud to be part of the European Commission and the work of my colleagues, like Benita. In 2006 the European Union paid out €47 billion in public aid to developing countries, which makes us the world's largest donor. The EU works hard to further sustainable development and equal opportunities on a global scale by using our development aid and climate change policies. And gender and climate change issues are systematically integrated into all development cooperation.
I would in particular like to mention the new alliance that the European Commission is building on climate change cooperation between the European Union and poor developing countries, those countries that are most affected and have the least capacity to deal with climate change. A key objective for the so called Global Climate Change Alliance is to integrate climate change into poverty reduction strategies – and of course gender equality will be a corner stone in these strategies.
In all that we have talked about today there is one aspect that I believe is key to a sustainable future and that I simply can't get my head around – the violence against women. Madeleine Albright has put it clearer than anyone else – "violence against women is not cultural, it’s criminal"... It cuts across class, religion and boarders... How do we get past that? Perhaps we need to do what Stern did for Climate Change and put a price-tag on the cost for the systematic abuse and genocide of women. Because in the end there can be no sustainable development without an equitable development and there can be no equitable development without gender equality... The world cannot simply afford gender inequality if we are to fight climate change.
This year we will be celebrating the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Mary Robinson and the Council of Women World Leaders have called for us to use this opportunity to raise global awareness about human rights, climate change and gender equality. It is a call to shape a global human rights agenda for the coming decade that empowers women to make their voices heard. It is a call to change the content of politics to ensure a secure world for women and for men, for the future of children... If you want to join this call for action, visit the Council's website to get more information. We need all of you to get the message across loud and clear: that Human security cannot be separated from human dignity – and it is our duty to speak up for those women across the globe who lack their own platform to do so. A first concrete step would be to ensure that track two diplomacy becomes pro-forma and that 50 percent of all peace negotiators are women.
Finally, I would really like to thank Benita for taking this important initiative... and then conclude by lending a few words that I think captures the complexity of today's security issues in a brilliant way. At the Security Summit in New York, that I talked about earlier, the Canadian Prime Minister Kim Campbell said the following:
'When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. The women leaders at this summit understand that the complicated reality in the world right now is more like a Phillips-head screw. And that interconnected complexity requires the kind of consensus-building and focus on the human element that women excel at.
Ladies, thank you for listening...
