Global cooperation needed to create world peace
By Hillary Rodham Clinton
One of my first stops after arriving in Amsterdam this week was the house where Anne Frank hid during the Nazi terror of World War II.
I had read her diary when I was in school, but it wasn't until I climbed the narrow staircase of the townhouse on Prinsengracht Street that I more fully understood the fear that this Jewish teenager and her family endured day after day.
I saw the wall of which a lonely Anne pasted pictures of movie stars... the small window where she would bask undetected for a moment in sunlight... the bookcase that concealed a trap door leading to what they called their "secret annex."
Anne was among one million children under the age of 16 who died during the Holocaust, and tragically, her story is far from unique. But the diary she left behind has given us a lasting reminder of the inhumanity that hatred and intolerance breed.
Anne Frank's story stuck with me later in the week, when the President and European leaders gathered in The Hague to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Marshall Plan. The assistance the United States provided after the war helped rebuild the struggling, ravaged nations of Europe.
Yet as we celebrate the success of that effort, we must recognize that Secretary of State George Marshall's vision of international cooperation is needed just as urgently now as it was a half century ago.
Too often we forget that the enduring power of Marshall's plan rested not solely in the financial commitment it represented but in its understanding of our joint opportunities and responsibilities to create a united, peaceful and democratic Europe.
Although Marshall's endorsement of assistance may seem obvious, at the time, there was no clear consensus on what role the United States should play in the world. Many Americans would just as soon have let former enemies like Germany and Italy remain in ruins. Others thought the European democracies could do fine without American help.
But Marshall prevailed. And now, on the eve of a new century, the nations of Western Europe are on the whole, prosperous and stable. And the emerging democracies of Central and Eastern Europe are working to build vibrant civil societies and free- market economies and to integrate their citizens into the democratic family of the West.
One reason we are close to fulfilling Marshall's vision is that the United States and our European partners are willing to support new democracies across the continent and around the globe -- not only through economic, military and diplomatic alliances but through an alliance of democratic values based on our shared commitment to freedom and human dignity.
Among the countries most committed to these values is the Netherlands. Few can match the Dutch in supporting social investments that improve the prospects for democracy and prosperity around the world. From building a peace in Bosnia to helping refugees in Central Africa to investing in the health, education and equality of women in their own country and abroad, the Dutch have provided inspirational leadership to nations around the world.
The Netherlands contributes seven-tenths of its gross national product to foreign assistance -- one of the most generous rates in the world. And this commitment of assistance enjoys wide support among the Dutch people.
Marshall too, recognized that economic renewal and the flowering of democratic values must go hand in hand. As he said in his Nobel Peace Prize speech in 1953. "Tyranny inevitably must retire before the tremendous moral strength of the gospel of freedom and self-respect for the individual, but we have to recognize that these democratic principles do not flourish on empty stomachs and that people turn to false promises of dictators because they are hopeless and anything promises something better than the miserable existence that they endure."
I'm hoping that the events in The Hague this week are not simply remembered as the ceremonial commemoration of a past event, as important as that is instead let us use this occasion to signal a renewed commitment to the vision beyond the Marshall Plan and to a willingness to expand that vision beyond the borders of Europe to include people around the world.
-- Creators Syndicate