SCHILLER INSTITUTE CONFERENCE
APRIL 9, 2022

For a Conference To Establish
A New Security and Development Architecture for All Nations

March 19—The Schiller Institute released today its announcement of this international online conference to take place on Saturday, April 9, 2022. More details will be available on panels and speakers soon. The registration page and more information are available here.

Our world is under the immediate existential threat of generalized warfare and economic destruction affecting billions of people, including the possibility of nuclear war, and thus the possible annihilation of the human species. It is therefore extremely urgent to establish a new Security and Development Architecture for all Nations, which must take into account the interest of every single nation on the planet.

The present war in Europe, the succession of wars in Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, Sudan, and the spread of famine and disease, have already killed millions of innocent people and destroyed their homes, livelihood, and future. The COVID crisis reminds us that all life on earth is interconnected, interwoven, and interrelated. We must focus on durability and inclusion to improve the condition of our planet and our people. For this, our mission is not only to stop such self-destructive motion but to organize all the conditions for peace and prosperity based on the common aims of mankind. We must design a new paradigm, a new order, which focuses on the needs of our planet and our people, to take humanity to the next level.

Behind the immediate danger of war is the already ongoing blowout of the trans-Atlantic financial system. A hyperinflationary process has been unleashed globally, with the accompanying collapse of the economies of the Western nations. The City of London and Wall Street, the controllers of this system, are quick to destroy any functioning alternative to their system, such as that presented by Russia, China, India, or others. China’s partnerships with the Belt and Road Initiative now incorporates nearly 150 nations. The presently ruling establishment uses its financial system to perpetuate the colonial state of underdevelopment of the developing sector with Malthusian policies. Therefore, to stop this drive leading to war and destruction, it is necessary to establish an entirely new economic and financial paradigm. It is the task of our Conference to meet the challenge by going to the core of the matter. That means an integrated approach to security, economy, and development of all nations.

The Peace of Westphalia is our reference point. Not only did it establish the Benefit, Honor and Advantage of the Other and the perpetual Oblivion, Amnesty, or Pardon of all that had been committed. It further included a financial reorganization of all countries participating in it. It sorted out and settled insolvent and illegitimate debt and financial claims, mostly by debt annulment or negotiated rescheduling. It also established the role of the state in the reconstruction of nations after the war.

International law in the interest of all people was developed from the Peace of Westphalia, which finds its most advanced expression in the UN Charter, which must be absolutely upheld in the New Paradigm. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Ten Principles of Bandung and the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence all contain ideas which are universal and remain valid for the promotion of peace, development, and cooperation in the world.

The world order that was designed after WWII gave birth to the UN, World Bank, IMF, NATO, WTO, WHO, and other such institutions. These institutions proclaimed their focus on democracy, human rights, capitalism, consumption, and military alliances, and for the most part functioned for 75 years. Their shortfalls, however, were in not fulfilling FDR’s promise of the Bretton Woods System, as he designed it, to increase the living standard of the developing sector, and to end colonialism. It is time to redesign the world to take advantage of hyperconnectivity and a new paradigm to deliver on basic human needs, inclusivity, new economy, durable survival, and peace for all.

We are deeply convinced that peace can only be achieved by drastically reshaping the world economic system in order to embody this outlook. Such a new vision of the world, in conformity with the best impulses of the past, mandates choosing durability, inclusivity, and connectivity against the prevailing order of geopolitical domination and moral humiliation of the weak.

This new vision, to create a new global platform and to take humanity to new heights, is specified in great detail in the proposals of the renowned American economist Lyndon LaRouche, based on what he called his four laws:

• The immediate enactment of the Glass-Steagall law instituted by U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt with no modification and this time globally, putting the entire speculative financial bubble through bankruptcy reorganization, to prevent the looting of human labor and lives.

• The return to a system of top-down and thoroughly defined National Banking, as specified by the first U.S. Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton, and later by those that he inspired in the creation of successful development systems.

• The associated credit system to generate high-productivity trends in improvements of employment and the quality of labor, with the accompanying intention to increase the physical-economic productivity and standards of living of persons and households.

• A nuclear fusion science-driver crash program to promote the discovery of new physical principles and fundamental breakthroughs in science, so as to generate the most advanced forms of development with the highest energy-flux densities.

Man is the only species endowed with creative reason, which distinguishes him from all other living beings. This creative capability enables him to continuously discover new principles of the physical universe, which is called scientific progress. The fact that the human mind, through an immaterial idea, is able to discover these principles, which have effects in the material universe in the form of technological progress, proves that there is correspondence between the lawfulness of the human mind and the lawfulness of the physical universe. Seen from this perspective, the economy has nothing to do with monetary profit, but with the happiness of the people, in the sense meant by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, i.e., that people are able to develop all the inherent potentials they have into a harmonious whole, and thus contribute to the best further development of mankind.

We hold this Conference to inspire leaders with vision, character, capabilities, courage, and commitment to communicate, cooperate, collaborate, and co-create toward unity, justice, democracy, decentralization, and human development, sticking to their pledges instead of submitting to the international rules-based order of the money makers and oligarchs. It is a matter of life or death to stop the “Doomsday Clock” before it strikes midnight.