Our Common Humanity in the Information Age. Principles and Values for Development

A HISTORIC PERSPECTIVE ON THE SHARED 
VALUES
Stephen Schlesinger, Historian, The New School University
The goals articulated in the Millennium Development charter “freedom for peace and 
development; freedom from poverty; freedom from hunger; freedom from diseases; 
freedom to be educated” are direct descendents of the freedoms about which President 
Franklin Roosevelt spoke in his famous January 1941 address to US Congress in which 
he articulated his widely-heralded "Four Freedoms" pledge: the freedom of speech and 
expression; freedom of religion; freedom from want; and freedom from fear.
Roosevelt's "four freedoms" proclamation led directly to his most notable creation just 
four years later at the 1945 San Francisco Conference: the United Nations. The UN 
embodied the notion that these freedoms which all human beings desire can only be 
achieved through international cooperation and the full interdependence of all nations. 
And the sole way to reach those goals is through the idea of collective security - all 
nations coming together to work in partnership for the ultimate dream of peace. 
Thus the founding fathers from the fifty states in California in 1945 concentrated on the 
formal ways that humankind could best accomplish their objectives. First, they set up the 
Security Council to guarantee the preservation of peace. They gave the Council the 
necessary authority to end conflicts in every area of the world. Second, they established 

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24 | Our Common Humanity in the Information Age 
the Economic and Social Council to address what they saw as the underlying causes of 
war, namely impoverishment, disease, lack of education and governmental break-down. 
Under this umbrella was included the World Bank, the IMF, the UNDP, UNESCO, 
UNICEF, WHO and related agencies.
Over the past sixty years, the UN has labored under difficult circumstances to work to 
achieve these aims. Its objective to maintain the peace has not always been successful - 
witness Cambodia, Hungary, Rwanda, Vietnam, etc. But a study by the University of 
British Columbia shows a dramatic drop in violence in just the last twenty -five years - a 
40% reduction in armed conflicts since 1992. Concomitantly there has been a rise in the 
numbers of people living under democratic rule (from 33-66% from 1950 to 2000). 
Meantime, health organizations like WHO have eliminated small pox, almost gotten rid 
of polio and are working hard on malaria. Now the UN cannot take full credit for all of 
these achievements, but surely the existence of the UN Charter and its Universal 
Declaration of Human Rights have together established the base line for societal behavior 
and have influenced t he improvement of governance around the planet. Still the incidence 
of poverty is a lamentable figure nonetheless: two billion people living on $2 a day. This 
has not yet been solved. Kofi Annan recently said that his biggest achievement as 
Secretary-General was to focus world attention on fighting indigence.
What of the future? The test for Ban Ki-Moon will be to advance the goals of the 
Millennium Development declaration along the lines of this "freedom" agenda. He will 
have to first review the recent reforms which the UN adopted in the Fall of 2005. The 
organization achieved a number of key successes: the Democracy Fund and the 
Peacekeeping Commission, above all, to help failed states. He should make sure these 
two ventures work as promised. He will have to make the "responsibility to protect" 
principle a part of the Security Council's essential tasks. He will have to turn the Human 
Rights Council into a more responsible body. He will have to push donor nations to give 
0.7% of their GNPs to the MDGs. In short, he will have to reassert the "collective 
security" of the UN mission. All of these measures can, in time, though, fulfill the agenda 
of the Millennium Development Goals.

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Chapter II – Freedom and Development | 25