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Speech by Alain Berset, Secretary General of the Council of Europe

Intro

Thank you, Dean Hellman, for your kind introduction.

Ambassador Heckner,
Professor Newman,
Members of the faculty,
And above all, dear Georgetown students,

Most of you will spend your careers in an international order that does not exist yet.

The good news: there is no textbook, so nobody can fail the exam.

The bad news: I am the one giving the lecture.

Versailles and Washington

For more than a hundred years, the School of Foreign Service has prepared America’s diplomats, and leaders from across the world, to face the hardest questions.

It was founded in 1919, the year the Covenant of the League of Nations was signed in Versailles, as a new postwar order was being built. So this is the right place to have an honest conversation about an order that is coming apart.

And I have a confession to make. When I took office two years ago, I thought our work was to strengthen the international legal order. That assumes there is one. I never expected to ask if it is still there. And yet, in every meeting I had this week in New York, that was the question. Not how to make it better. But if it is still there at all.

The rules written after 1945 are being set aside, some of them by the very powers that wrote them. And the alliances so many countries built their security on are now questioned from within.

A perfect storm

Now, the rupture did not happen overnight.

I was Switzerland’s health minister when COVID-19 closed borders across Europe. Before that, there was the 2008 financial crisis. And climate change, with Europe warming faster than any other continent. Then Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, eight years after Crimea.

We treated them as separate shocks. They were not. Together, they were a perfect storm.

Over a single day, nothing seems to move. But take this year alone: Venezuela, Greenland, Iran and a war in the Middle East on Europe’s borders. The world is changing at a speed I have not seen in my lifetime.

A Cold War reflex

Greenland was back in New York this week, this time as an agreement between allies. It began in January as a threat between allies.

The threat of military action against one of the Council of Europe member states, by one of our closest allies, ended any illusion of distance. It was a Cold War reflex, where geography is destiny and influence is a zero-sum game.

At the time, I wrote in The New York Times that international law is either universal or it is meaningless, and that Greenland would show which one we choose.

So I welcome the agreement. But a threat that works once can be used again. Geography decides who our neighbours are. It has never decided who we stand with.

United States of Europe
and the Marshall Plan

So who writes the next order?

The question is not new. It was answered once, eighty years ago, in two university towns, one on each side of the Atlantic.

At the University of Zurich, in September 1946, Winston Churchill was a man without office. He had just lost election. He warned that the League of Nations had failed because the countries that created it abandoned its principles, and acted too late. He imagined a United States of Europe. His first practical step was the creation of the organisation I serve today: the Council of Europe.

Nine months later, at Harvard, George Marshall held all the power Churchill lacked. He offered to help rebuild Europe on one condition: the initiative had to come from Europe, and America would support it. It became the Marshall Plan.

Churchill and Marshall had the same message. Europe had to take charge of its own future, with America at its side.

And today, eighty years later, the first part is still true. The second is now an open question.

Democratic security

Part of the answer is in the latest US National Security Strategy, which calls on Europe to “stand on its own feet.”

But standing on our own feet takes more than military strength.

Marshall understood that. He saw hunger and poverty, and wanted economies working again so that free institutions could emerge. He never used the words, but he was describing what we at the Council of Europe call democratic security.

Democratic security begins with institutions people trust and democracies that hold under pressure. It is not a luxury for calmer times.

In 1947, it took bread and work. Today, it takes independent courts, transparent elections, free media, and the strength to resist cyberattacks and foreign interference.

And rules for artificial intelligence, because a world that cannot agree on them will hand AI to those who answer to no one.

The real rupture

The postwar order rested on several forms of security: military, economic, democratic and legal.

America guaranteed the first. Europeans built the others, with American support.

All of them rested on one idea: states are safer when they build their security together.

That idea is breaking now. This is the real rupture.

From force to law

Around us, power is once again measured in force and spheres of influence.

It would be easy for Europe to measure itself the same way. And in part, it has to.

Europe is rearming on the biggest scale since the Cold War. And it is necessary.

A more aggressive Russia and a less engaged America leave us no choice.

But now picture two lines. One line is Europe’s defense budgets, rising steeply. The other is trust in democratic institutions, falling year after year.

In ten years, who will control these armies? What kind of security are we buying if extremists arrive to power with no one to stop them? And by then, no one could stop them.

Strong armies need stronger democracies.

So what Europe has to offer in this moment is something else. Not a sermon about values. Not rearmament alone. But a strategy for democratic security, one that is built on law.

Europe’s common legal space

Europe does not need to invent it. It already has it.

The European Convention on Human Rights protects 700 million people in forty-six countries. The European Court of Human Rights upholds it.

Anyone can bring a member state before it. Over a million applications have been filed. Around the Convention and the Court sits a system of standards and monitoring.

This is the Council of Europe’s common legal space. The biggest common legal space in the world. It is Europe’s own answer to a world run by force.

Nothing about it is imposed on states from above. It grows within national law itself. When the Court finds a violation, governments change their own laws. What that returns is stability. Not always. Not everywhere. But nothing else comes close.

This common legal space also serves peace.

In Northern Ireland, the Good Friday Agreement needed a set of rights standing above both communities, and found them in the Convention. The Dayton Agreement did the same for Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Neither side had to trust the other. Both had to trust the same Court. Think of that for Ukraine.

Ukraine

In Ukraine, this legal space is already at work.

When Russia launched its full-scale invasion, Europe chose law. Within weeks, the Council of Europe expelled Russia. The European Court of Human Rights was already there. It remains the only international court ruling on the human rights violations of this war.

There can be no peace without justice. So the Council of Europe has created a Register of Damage to record every loss, a Claims Commission to turn those losses into compensation, and a Special Tribunal for the Crime of Aggression.

Four years ago, none of them existed. And they are open beyond Europe. The United States is part of the Register.

We are also helping Ukraine reinforce its democratic security. This is long-term work. It prepares the peace, and what must come after it.

When multilateralism is paralysed at the global level, or simply dismissed, regional organisations can still act and bring others in.

On Monday, the Council of Europe opened our observer office at the United Nations in New York to close the distance between regions, working with the UN and with other regional organisations.

Europe’s form of power

Ukraine teaches one more lesson. International law does not exist for the benefit of a few. It exists to protect all of us.

In a fragmenting world, law remains the last common language capable of restraining power. For Europe, it is more than a principle. Law is Europe’s form of power.

The real fantasy is believing that leverage without rules will ever produce stability.

So what will America be now? Europe’s sponsor, as Churchill hoped? Its partner, as Marshall offered?

Closing

Looking around this room, I think of the generation of Europeans and Americans who rebuilt Europe and built a new order.

They were not idealists. They turned a rupture into a new beginning. What is dismissed as unrealistic in one moment often becomes the only workable realism in the next.

They had no textbook either. They wrote their own together. So the question was never who writes the next order. It is who is willing to keep it.

Thank you.