This, I think, is where the United Nations comes in. There are in fact rules in the area of the environment, agreed at the Rio conference in 1992. There are of course rules in the area of human rights set out in the Universal Declaration on Human Rights as long ago as 1948, and in more legally binding form in various covenants adopted since then; the International Covenant on Political and Civil Rights, the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women, the International Covenant on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, and so on. But, of course, these rules are not enforced in the way that the tribunals of WTO - in theory at least - can enforce the rules in the commercial area.

So that is one big function of the United Nations: it is to act as a forum and to organize the meetings where representatives of governments come together and adopt shared standard of behaviour in different areas.

Another function is to act as a source of ideas. Not just a place where people can talk, although that is very important, but also actually to stimulate interaction, relationships, what we now call policy networks, often of a quite informal nature. I think this is a very fundamental shift in people's attitudes to the UN, and maybe to the UN's own approach to its own work in the past few years. We no longer seek to do everything ourselves. We are learning what we can and cannot do and especially what we can do best in partnership with others. And the ìothersî can be a very wide variety of people: civil society in its broadest sense, which I would say includes the private sector. It also includes foundations, universities, think-tanks. And then of course, also partnership with and among governments. But even our understanding of governments, I think, has changed somewhat. Probably we used to think of foreign ministries, and maybe heads of state when something specially important was going on. But now I think we understand more and more that government also includes parliamentarians, who are more directly representative of the people cuban cigars online who have expectations of the United Nations. And government also includes local government. And in many areas of the UN agenda it is actually at the local level that things can be done, and it is from the local level that we get ideas. I was very struck a few years ago when my wife was a district councillor in a rural area of England. Quite a part of her work was taken up with trying to implement Agenda 21 which had been adopted by an international conference, the famous Earth Summit in Rio in 1992. I think that this is probably not untypical. In China for instance, many people in local government are working on trying to implement different aspects of standards and policies that have been agreed internationally in events organized by the United Nations.

So this change is not something that was dreamt up by Kofi Annan. But it is certainly something that he has recognized. I think that if he were to summarize what is the contribution that he is trying to make, as Secretary-General, it is to adapt and position the United Nations in the light of these changes in the world, so that it can be more effective in these new conditions and above all, more useful to the peoples of its Member-States.† I know he would say that if we as an Organization are to be relevant and to have a future in the 21^st century we must do things that are seen as being relevant and useful by ordinary people around the world. We are an organization of Member-States. In other words we are essentially an intergovernmental organization. But, founded in the name of "we the peoples", we have a responsibility to go beyond governments, to the peoples of whom they are governments and whom, for international purposes, they represent.

I think Kofi Annan has found that he can do more as a catalyst in setting up informal policy networks, or often just putting people in touch with each other, than he can through the formal process of setting up new United Nations activities that require resources and require mandates of the General Assembly. I was struck by this anecdotal example: I was with him in Senegal last year and his secretary always has a list of people that she has got to contact for him. She said, "oh yes, I have got to get the president of Iceland!". So we said, "why the President of Iceland? Sure you don't mean the President of Ireland?", and she started to get worried that she got it wrong. But no, it was the President of Iceland, because the Secretary-General had been talking to the President of Senegal who had expressed some concerns about problems to do with the fishing zones in the Atlantic, how they were regulated and how Senegal could protect its interests. And he immediately thought, Iceland has a lot of experience in that problem. He perhaps remembered the cod war between Iceland and Britain some years ago. Anyway, he wanted to put these two presidents in touch with each other to see if that could help. Now that happens to be an example where it was two heads of state. In many other cases, he would think of a professor, a famous scientist, or a top businessman - someone who, he could see, could help with a contribution to solve a particular problem that someone else was telling him about.† He would put the two of them together.

Perhaps a more formalized version of that is what he is trying to do through the 'Global Compact' which I expect most of you have heard of. This was something that he proposed exactly two years ago in Davos, when he really challenged the businessmen present, who were leaders of big multinational companies, really drawing their attention to this problem of globalization that the rules and practices have not gone as far in the social, cultural and environmental areas as in the purely economic or commercial areas. He said "You know, you shouldn't wait for governments to tell you what to do. Governments have already agreed what are the standards in these areas. You should take the lead in applying those standards in your own corporate practices. The United Nations has specialized services which can help you do that - for human rights we have Mary Robinson, the High Commissioner, and her staff. For labour standards there is of course, the International Labour Organization. And for environmental issues there is the UN Environment Programme, based in Nairobi.î

At that time it was just an idea, a challenge that he threw out. But his staff had been working on it with people from the private sector and also with NGOs that are interested, and indeed with the International Confederation of free Trade Unions. And last July at UN HQ in New York there was a meeting where those three parties came together: senior or Chief Executive Officers of a number of big international companies and some leading NGOs like Amnesty International, the World Wildlife Fund, and others particularly concerned with human rights or the environment and development, and the ICFTU. They basically agreed on how to take this Global Compact forward.

It is not a code of conduct. It is not the UN acquiring authority over those companies and how they behave. The companies are invited themselves to adopt these principles which are already agreed at the intergovernmental level; and once a year, on the Global Compact UN site, to post information on what they are doing to introduce those principles into their own corporate practice, and what they have learnt both in positive and negative experiences in the process. The NGOs, I think, can advise them and help them to do that, and can also act as a kind of reality check; to see that they are in fact living up to the claims that they are making.

Not all NGOs are satisfied with this. Some are very critical and saying that the UN is selling out to big capital and so-forth. Actually the UN is being quite careful about that in taking measures to protect its identity. It doesn't mean that these companies are entitled to use the UN logo for their own purposes or anything like that. I think it reflects a basic insight of the Secretary-General which is that disagreement is important, creative, useful and anyway not going to go away. One can get beyond a shouting match, one can find common ground between people with different points of view. Civil society and the private sector can sometimes work together to define objectives and to define ways of reaching them.

This approach is reflected in the Millennium Report which the Secretary-General submitted last spring in advance of the Millennium Summit. It is a kind of review of the state of the world and what the things are that need doing. It is called appropriately enough "We the PeoplesÖ". The idea that runs through it is precisely that: the United Nations is not just the governments. It must be everyone, and everyone has something to contribute. We shouldn't just wait for states always to take the initiative. Some things can only be done by states, but very often they act only when prodded by civil society. Some recent examples would be the adoption of the Ottawa Convention banning landmines, or the adoption of the Statute of the International Criminal Court in Rome in 1998, or some of the measures taken for debt relief particularly in the year 2000, which was the jubilee year. There was this remarkable coalition of NGOs, ìJubilee 2000î which brought the issue up on the international agenda in a way that it hadn't been before.

We are not saying - the Secretary-General is not saying - that the nation-state is dÈpassÈ, but that it needs to be strengthened, and that it can be strengthened: first of all with closer cooperation among states, because so many problems now cut across national frontiers and are beyond the reach of any one state, even some of the biggest states, to deal with them on their own; and secondly by a more organic relationship between the state and civil society.

I was giving this talk in Turkey yesterday and someone mentioned that in Turkey there is a tradition of having a strong state and a weak civil society. I said that I think that this is an old fashioned way of looking at it. I know that it is the way that many people would look at it, but I think increasingly at the United Nations we are coming to understand that a strong state doesn't really go with a weak civil society. That a state that is trying to do everything itself and to control everybody's lives often turns out to be much weaker than it looked. Quite a lot of the problems that the United Nations is dealing with around the world today, are the legacy of states like that, who had a misapprehension of what strength is, and turned out to be weaker than they thought. I would say that the strongest states in the world today are the ones that grow out of a very vigorous civil society and that are constantly in interaction with it. I guess a shorthand way of saying this would be 'democratic' states, but democracy can take a variety of forms.