Secretary General, Ms. Nane Annan, distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen,

It is not exactly the most natural thing in the world when the Secretary General of the United Nations visits a university, even when this institution is as venerable as the University of Tübingen. Of course our university is a miniature UN, with its 22,000 students, and its teachers, researchers and administrators coming from many countries around the globe. But there must be a deeper reason why you, Dr. Kofi Annan, grant us this extraordinary honour, for which we are deeply grateful.
As the world’s highest international civil servant you usually deal in your office with representatives of the national governments which make up the United Nations Organization. However, you have always been particularly sensitive to the fact that the main players in our world are not just the nation states. You have gone beyond them to deal with all the facets of civil society, not least with what a former Tübingen professor, Lord Dahrendorf, has called the ‘Bildungsbürgertum’: the educational estate, the academic world. This morning you are looking at a rather large cross-section of our civil society: students and teachers, representatives and members of NGOs, citizens of Tübingen and beyond. I extend my very warmest welcome to you, Secretary General, and to your wife, on behalf of all of them.
 

The United Nations charter begins with the words, “We, the peoples”. No empty claim, but the reality of our days. The UN is affected by – and is part of – the globalisation revolution: a theatre where new actors have a steadily growing influence and ever louder voices. Globalisation has foregrounded the differences between peoples and governments, and it is a challenge to forge a coalition which reaches out to new groups and situations. The existence of this challenge, and the possibility of pro-UN alignments growing out of civil society across borders can only enhance the credibility of the United Nation's goals and actions.
 
I sense in this an impatient imagination – ‘O we can wait no longer. We too take ship, O Soul’ in the words of the great American poet Walt Whitman. As Secretary General, you have gone out to look beyond governments. You have read a changing reality where grassroots voices don't always need an interpreter; where dialogue with them becomes the indispensable way to test your own credibility and the UN's. Here – now: in this hall – we are part of such a dialogue, something which can make the UN and its tremendous activities for world peace and human dignity more widely known among its peoples. Dr Annan, by your broad vision and your deep sense for dialogue you bear outstanding witness for the credibility of the United Nations – perhaps also because you are the first UN Secretary General who was appointed from within the UN system, and therefore you know both, its weakness and its strength.

You were born in 1938 in Kumasi, British Gold Coast, which meant your adult life coincided with your country's freedom – for in 1957 the Gold Coast became independent as the state of Ghana. You studied economics in the United States and Geneva and earned a Master of Science degree in Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. You joined the UN in 1962, first with the World Health Organization and the Office of the High Commissioner for Refugees in Geneva, later at UN Headquarters in New York. There you were finally appointed Under-Secretary General for Peacekeeping in charge of nearly 70,000 military and civilian personnel deployed in UN operations around the world.
 
It would be too much to detail all the special assignments which involved you before you were elected seventh Secretary General of the United Nations and began your first term on 1 January 1997, but your ability to handle delicate political situations and your deep commitment to promoting peace led to your second five-year term, beginning on 1 January 2002. It is fitting tribute to your wise leadership that you and the United Nations Organization were, for the first time jointly, awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2001. The only other Secretary-General to be so honoured, Dag Hammarskjöld, died forty years before, struggling to uphold his ideals and the UN's authority in the Congo. The twentieth century did not treat Africa kindly, but you have projected the ideals of freedom, justice and individual dignity of the movement for African freedom on a world stage, and maybe won a greater struggle.

Dear Dr. Annan, please take the presence of so many in this crowded hall as an expression of support for the work of the United Nations. If there is any single institution in the world which deserves our unqualified support, it is the UN. In spite of its failures and shortcomings, and you would be the first one to admit it, we have no better organization to struggle for peace, justice and human rights in all parts of the world.
 

Much of what I've said is not original. I've poached from the manifesto “Crossing the Divide” which you, Dr. Annan, commissioned for the 'International Year of Dialogue Among Civilizations' 2001. It came from an international group of twenty ‘great and good’ – again a tribute to your vision – and it is our privilege that you asked one of Tübingen’s greatest scholars and teachers to be a member: Professor Hans Küng. Not an accident, because Professor Küng already spoke as early as 1992 at UN Headquarters – just after the end of the Cold War – about “Global Responsibility: A new Global Ethic in a new Global Order”, and followed up his analysis and appeal with further speeches at the UN in 1994, 1999, and 2001. We are grateful to him and the Global Ethic Foundation that he invited you to deliver the Third Global Ethic Lecture, and I would now like to give him the floor.