The following is the text of the Andrew Carnegie Lecture delivered by Ambassador Bob Rae, Canada’s permanent representative to the United Nations, on October 9, 2025, at St. Andrews University, October 9, 2025.

Writing more than 75 years ago on the island of Jura (just 200 kilometres to our west), George Orwell famously described in his last great novel, 1984, a dystopian, totalitarian world where Big Brother knew our every word, and even our thoughts, where large power blocs suddenly switched alliances and the world was in an endless, perpetual war, where “the proles” lived in dreary poverty and even the quest for a private love affair led to betrayal and doom.

At the time, Orwell’s book was seen as a brilliant attack on communism, and was adopted by conservative commentators as an attack on the excessive state power that was a constant risk even in societies that saw themselves as free.

But we now live in an age where some people seem to think that Orwell was writing a guidebook on how politics should in fact work; where propaganda, surveillance and political lying are fully justified if we do it ourselves, and where the clear objective of social media outlets and the people who own them is to create so much disinformation that we shall become passive idiots, like the proles, where disinterest and even hatred of politics or the search for truth become the order of the day, and where we have become so determined to find the luxury of conformity that we are afraid of freedom itself.

At the time that Orwell was writing this book, which he made clear was written as a warning, and not as a “how to”, the world came together at the end of World War II to try and build a stronger system of laws, rules, and norms that would protect us from the same fate as had enveloped the world since 1914 — a world of conflict, aggression, economic crashes and depressions, high tariffs, colonialism and empire, and deep poverty for the vast majority of the world’s peoples.

Dame Barbara Woodward and I have been working together at the United Nations since the summer of 2020, and we are concluding our terms at roughly the same time. It has been a great privilege working with her these past five years, and it is an honour to be on this stage with her at St. Andrew’s University.

Unlike Dame Barbara, I did not have an illustrious diplomatic career, and after university, found myself immersed in the world of law and politics — so what I have to say to you in these few short minutes is that politics, law and diplomacy share this in common: they are are all about both power and values.

The French philosopher Blaise Pascale put it this way in a famous paradox “Justice without the power of enforcement is impotent; but power without justice is better called tyranny.”

The values and aspirations of the UN, and of the web of international laws and conventions we have been building for generations are weak because they do not have enough power behind them. And the power that many world leaders, states, and corporations are today taking for themselves is more like tyranny than democracy because they do not accept the higher powers of the law and justice.

An example I often use in describing this problem is the famous battle between President Andrew Jackson, the Indigenous people living in the state of Georgia, and the Supreme Court of the United States. The Cherokee people had what they believed was a valid treaty with the federal government of the United States. The state legislature of Georgia was determined to seize their land. Andrew Jackson agreed with them. Chief Justice John Marshall sided with the Cherokee nation. Jackson famously said “The Chief Justice has made his decision. Let him enforce it.”

What followed was a grotesque and tragic injustice, the famous “Trail of Tears” where the Cherokee people were dispossessed and expelled from their historic lands and forcibly displaced to Oklahoma, with many dying on the way.

As we speak today, there are more than 140 million displaced and dispossessed people in the world — the highest number since the end of World War II — caused both by an unprecedented number of conflicts, and a rapidly changing climate which is forcing people off land that is no longer arable.

In three other key areas of public policy — and these are just a few of them — the shared challenge is that attempts to rein in the exercise of raw power, to put the law and justice above us all, are not succeeding. In the realm of trade regulation, where one country is breaking every international rule and imposing tariffs unilaterally, forcing countries to make bilateral deals that will be less favourable than previously accepted international agreements.

On climate change, where we are seeing a steady retreat from key agreements to, first, agree to measure carbon emissions, and second, to agree to a timetable to reduce carbon emissions. We are seeing backsliding on both, because climate change denial is once again pushing back against agreed targets and timetables.

Third, we are behind in the international regulation of AI and what it means for a safer digital universe. The social media cesspool is getting more polluted and the fight for truth is more challenging than ever.

George Orwell’s world of systematic lying and spying is our world. But Orwell did not give up, he spent his life warning people about the terrible dangers that lay ahead.

In the face of all this, as well as the collapse of any kind of global consensus on the financial and economic steps that will be necessary to ensure funding for a more equal world, as well as the painfully slow progress on UN reform, it would be be easy to simply throw up our hands and say “stop the world, we want to get off”. But we all know that can’t be done. So engagement becomes the only answer.

Which is where Leonard Cohen comes in. In his famous song “Anthem”, Cohen reminds us

“You can add up the parts
But you won’t have the sum
You can strike up the march
There is no drum
Every heart every heart
To love will come
But like a refugee
Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in”.

Boris Pasternak put it this way: “Life is never an easy walk across an open field”.

Our fate is to struggle through our own imperfections to make something better; not perfect, but better. How we keep our principles will depend on the ingenuity of our pragmatism.

The weakness and failure of the United Nations is not an accident. It stems directly from the decisions that countries made in 1945 to protect their sovereignty, and to make collective security voluntary. To the vetoes of the the five permanent members must be added two other vetoes — the first and most important being the ability of countries to determine their own level of commitment. And second, the veto that is the level of deterrence (nuclear, the balance of terror, the unpredictability of what can be unleashed) each global actor can exercise.

These are not to be found in the UN Charter, but they have created a dynamic where the UN and other multilateral institutions designed to create peace and security are only as strong or weak as we choose to make them.

So, what are the bells that still can ring? The first is our own individual capacity to think, feel, and learn. The second is our ability to work with others. The third is our ability to listen to those who disagree with us, and to engage in the process of dialogue, listening, and acting that is actually at the heart of every successful collective effort to achieve anything.

And in those efforts, our enemies are found within us as well as outside us. Bullies and tyrants hold sway if we fail to describe them for what they are, and fail to respond to them. Equally important are the little voices inside our heads telling us to find ways to “just get along” and “don’t make waves”.

Peace is not just the absence of conflict. It is also the presence of security, the active sense that justice is with us, and that the bullies will be dealt with. Peace requires architecture, institutions, sources of protection, just as surely as war requires planning, logistics, strategy and armaments in order to have a chance of success.

We have had to learn the difficult lesson that giving in to aggression, seeking to accommodate dictators, is actually no guarantee of peace. Submission only buys time. It does not buy peace.

In World War II, two young Canadians decided to volunteer for the Special Operations Executive, known as “SOE”, the British-led clandestine organization that sent their operatives behind enemy lines. Their names were James Macalister and Frank Pickersgill. They were told that there was only a 50 percent chance that they would survive. They didn’t make it, were captured and were brutally killed in Buchenwald in 1944. Writing about them, a Canadian soldier-diplomat and poet named Douglas LePan wrote about the torment of their decision…

“He was too brave – He never truly knew himself – He should have waited – He was too highly strung – But the courage!

And without a core of courage how can anything be achieved, how can anything be built? And courage shadowed by weakness may be the most precious of all since it carries sweetness into the heart of the building, carries it like honey into the hollows of the honeycomb”

In closing, I want to remind us all that Andrew Carnegie’s vision for a “League of Peace” went far beyond either the League of Nations or the United Nations. He saw the need for a world government that would, in fact, have the capacity to enforce peace (what Churchill in his Fulton Address would describe as a “real constabulary”) that would go beyond mere words to deal with aggression and make peace happen. He quoted Rousseau, who called war “the foulest fiend ever vomited forth from the mouth of Hell”.

But neither the First World War not the Second have proved hellish enough to get countries to agree to the creation of a global agency with the actual capacity to enforce peace; the vetoes and caveats of nationalism have proved too strong.

But we owe it to ourselves to show an even deeper determination to make peace happen (as we are perhaps seeing in the Middle East today) and understand that it is by strengthening global institutions, and not weakening them, or pulling away from them, that we make the progress that must be made.

In Carnegie’s famous words, “To try to make the world a better place than you found it is to have a noble motive in life”. And Carnegie reminds us that “whoso wants to share the heroism of battle, let him join the fight against ignorance and disease and the mad idea that war is necessary.”

What we still must see as the world’s work it is to keep finding the cracks where the light gets in, the courage, if you will, to bring the honey deep into the hollows of the honeycomb.

It is often challenging, daunting, and discouraging. Like the work of the medieval cathedral builders, we shall not see it completed in our own lifetimes. But it is worth the effort, and on our journey we cannot let the naysayers, let alone the purveyors of no-hope, carry the day.

Peace and prosperity, like all projects, are built a step at a time. But these are the human footsteps we must take, and when we look up, let us be guided by the search for the light.

Policy Contributing Writer Bob Rae is Canada’s ambassador to the United Nations.