DIPLOMACY. Interview with the Foreign Minister Ignacio Walker Growing with justice
«We are neither populists nor free-marketeers». The Chilean Foreign Minister speaks about the realist policies of his country and of the positive awakening of Latin America. He also explains how it is possible to say no to the US on Iraq without being considered an enemy. And tells of his first visit to Rome to see the Pope
by Roberto Rotondo
For Ignacio Walker, the newly appointed Chilean Foreign Minister, the
old saying “all roads lead to Rome” has never been so per
For Ignacio
Walker, the newly appointed Chilean Foreign Minister, the old saying “all roads
lead to Rome” has never been so pertinent. In fact Walker, a forty-eight year
old lawyer, professor of Political Philosophy, resigned from the Chilean
Parliament at the end of September because he had been appointed ambassador to
Italy. But he didn’t have time to present his letters of credential to the
Quirinal, for on 1 October he had to scamper home because he had been appointed
Foreign Minister in place of Soledad Alvear who had announced his candidacy for
the next presidential elections in 2005. Despite that, one week later, Walker
was again in the eternal city making his first official visit, with various
meetings on both sides of the Tiber: at the Farnesina, the Foreign Ministry,
with Minister Frattini and his vice Baccini; at Montecitorio with the President
of the Lower House Pier Ferdinando Casini; in the Vatican, on 6 and 7 October,
where, before being received in private audience by John Paul II, he unveiled
together with the Pontiff and Cardinal Angelo Sodano, Secretary of State and
former apostolic nuncio to Chile, a large statue of Saint Teresa of the Andes,
set up in one of the outside niches of the rear façade of Saint Peter’s
Basilica. The Saint, a discalced Carmelite was born in Santiago and died of
typhus in the convent at the age of twenty in 1920. She was canonized by John
Paul II in 1993 and enjoys particular veneration in Chile. «In a time of so
much violence and death, the figure of this saint stands out: a young woman
with the same hopes, the same fears and the same dreams as all young people»,
said the cardinal of Santiago Errázuriz Ossa after the unveiling, pointing out
that Teresa of the Andes is the first Latin American saint to whom a statue has
been dedicated in Saint Peter’s Basilica.
Ignacio Walker receiving the appointment of Foreign Minister from Socialist President Ricardo Lagos
on 1 October
Your Excellency, your post has been
changed, but Rome remains the first place on your agenda... IGNACIO WALKER:
That’s true and, both as a Catholic and Foreign Minister of my government, I’m
glad that my first official visit was to Rome. As a Christian Democrat the
unveiling of the statue of Saint Teresa and the meeting with the Holy Father
also had a symbolic personal value: they were unforgettable moments that made
me aware of the affection and concern that John Paul II has always had for
Chile. I remember also that on 29 October of this year falls the twentieth
anniversary of the signing of the peace treaty between Chile and Argentina, in
which John Paul II played a decisive role. But the most important thing for my
government, which consists of a wide alliance between forces of very different
cultural inspiration and policies, is that I return from my visit with
confirmation of the excellent state of relations between Chile and the Holy
See. Let’s talk about Chile, a small
country when compared to the two giants Brazil and Argentina, but with an
economic, social and financial situation in some respects better. Well-wishers
describe you as the “Switzerland of South America”, your critics as “kamikaze
pilot of the free market”. They say in particular that the new free trade
agreement with the US is a mark of subjection to US free market policies and
may put your economic relations with the other Latin American countries that
back the Mercosur into crisis. How do you answer them? WALKER: The free
trade agreement with the United States, like the one we’ve signed with the
European Union (even if the latter is more a partnership, cooperation treaty),
the one we’ve signed with South Korea, those we’re going to sign with New
Zealand, with Singapore and perhaps with India and China, are part of the
strategy of openness toward the outside world of the small Chilean economy, a
country of fifteen million inhabitants that has everything to gain from the
economic integration of the world. But none of that
means being slaves of the free-market economic model. In Asia also there have
been large openings toward the outside world, think of China and Vietnam, but
it doesn’t mean that they are free-marketeers. Opening the economy, controlling
inflation, reducing the national debt, as Chile is doing, doesn’t mean being
free-marketeers, it means being serious people, it means having a realist
government. If we step off this road we can only choose between a return to the
rabid free-market that we knew under Pinochet – with the so-called Chicago boys
pursuing an economic and financial growth without rules and humanity - and
falling into the trap of neo-populism, an experience that we have gone through
several times on our continent and always without success. We are on a
different course where we want to reconcile economic growth and social justice.
The result of all this, after fourteen years of the “Government of concert”, is
that we have doubled our economic product and halved the number of people
living below the subsistence level, from 40% to 20%. Our strategy has broken
with the free-market scheme without putting up barriers to the great processes
of globalization common to all the countries of the world.
Newly appointed Foreign Minister Walker with John Paul II, 7 October in the Vatican
Are there areas of the Latin
American continent that could fall into the mire of a financial crisis like the
Argentinean one of three years or like the Mexican one? Can the rabid
free-market speculation of the ’nineties still strike? WALKER: It’s not
a problem with the free market, it’s not a problem of consent from Washington
and it’s not a problem of the dictates of the World Bank or the International
Monetary Fund. The problem that we have been through in Latin America has been
that of the volatility of the financial markets, which provoked a tough
collision and tremendous crises. It was the case with Mexico, with Argentina
and also with Brazil, where President Cardoso had to face four financial crises
in eight years. Today everybody is asking how to make globalization more governable,
but one has to start from the fact that globalization is not synonymous with
the free market, they are two different things. Globalization is a much complex
phenomenon that requires fitting political institutions. The Achilles’ heel of
globalization is the weakness of its institutions and we must be capable of
strengthening them without taking refuge in the slogans of the No-globals. But
returning to your question, the Argentinean economy is growing today at the
rate of 8% annually, even if it has to make up for the drop in the dark years
when it lost 15% annually. Furthermore the country is becoming politically
stabilized. Mexico has had a decided shift toward democracy with the passage
from President Ernesto Zedillo to President Vicente Fox, after seventy years of
uncontested dominance by the PRI [Revolutionary Institutional Party, ed.] So there are
comforting signs on the continent. Another example is Brazil, which for the
first time has a very solid party system. In short, despite the enormous
problems with getting into the international economy, there is a margin of
leeway for policies and it’s not true that we’re condemned to follow a rigid
scheme imposed from outside. Latin America seems to be moving
politically left. There is a Social Democrat in charge of the government in
Chile, a Socialist in Argentina, a trade unionist in Brazil, a populist left in
Venezuela, not to mention Cuba. What do you think? WALKER: I think
it’s a very much more complex process. It’s not necessarily a shift to the
left, and above all it’s not about the Left we knew before, that influenced by
the Cuban revolution. There has been a process of renewal in socialism, in the
Latin America Left, a very interesting one. We, as Christian Democrats, are
allied with the Socialists and with the Social Democrats, and we have created a
wide coalition that we can describe as center left, a concert of forces now
reconciled after having been practically enemies. That has been possible thanks
also to a certain change in the Left. So I think that
the old schema of left and right, of capitalism and socialism, are no longer
adequate to explain a situation as complex as that of Latin America, which is
very heterogeneous. Additionally, the idea of the continent’s shifting to the
left is full of commonplaces. For example, for ten years Brazil has been
following an interesting model, but that I wouldn’t describe as properly left.
First Cardoso and now Lula have set up pluralist governments, with a party
system that responds to very different experiences and cultures. You say that
Lula’s a government is left, but the first to say it isn’t, and to complain to
Lula about it, are precisely the more radical militants in the Workers’ Party. The free trade agreement with the US
did not prevent Chile voting some months ago at the UN against the war in Iraq.
Did relations with the US get chilly after that? WALKER: Our vote
on the war in Iraq was motivated by a question of principle. President Lagos,
speaking to President Bush, said that Chile did not agree with an intervention
that was not multilateral and legitimated by the United Nations, as was that
for the liberation of Kuwait some years earlier. The objection was to the
concept of preventive war and unilateral action, and we took that stance
precisely while we were negotiating the free trade treaty. So principles
prevailed over interests, but in the conviction that in the end the economic
treaty would be signed in any case. That treaty now stands. And despite the
disagreement on a question certainly of no small import, the state of relations
with the US is today good.
From the left, Chilean President Ricardo Lagos, Brazilian President Inácio Lula da Silva and Argentinean President Nestor Kirchner
Chile is instead present in Bosnia
and in Haiti alongside the military contingents of some countries of the
European Union. What is the significance of that presence on peace and of
international security? WALKER: It’s a
mark of the fact that Chile takes peace operations very seriously when they
come within a framework of multilateralism. Today we are present in Haiti with
a contingent of four hundred soldiers and we are working out a strategy for
contributing to the development of that tormented country. We have also
undertaken missions and peace operations in other countries of the world, for
example Cyprus and Pakistan. In short, we believe in the politics of security
and in peace operations when they have been conceived within the United
Nations. Which are the political and economic
prospects opened by the Association Agreement with the European Union? How do
you view the EU from across the Atlantic? Is it really, as they say, an
economic giant and a political dwarf? WALKER: For us
the agreement with the European Union, which is a treaty of political
association, of free trade and cooperation, has a fundamental strategic
meaning. For us the EU is not a political dwarf. Indeed, I believe that the
European Union is an economic and political power at the same time. In this
epoch it seems as if only the military and economic weight of the US existed,
that is considered the only superpower. But that’s not how it is. The European
Union is being consolidated and the fact of having expanded from fifteen to
twenty-five countries demonstrates a desire for development; just as the fact
that giving itself a Constitution is not only a cultural problem, but
demonstrates that Europe is getting stronger and can influence the political
and economic problems of the world. The scale of problems also expands for
European politicians and some old patterns no longer hold up. It’s no accident
that there is great debate in the UN Security Council and on how to eliminate
the right of veto that is a legacy of the Cold War. Much of my meeting with
Minister Frattini was devoted to precisely that topic. Last question. In May there is going
to be a meeting in Santiago at ministerial level of the countries that belong
to the “Group for the development of democracy, of human rights and of the
community of democracies”. We live in a world where democracy and human rights
are concepts often trampled on or manipulated for other ends. What contribution
to peace and understanding may come out of the Santiago gathering? WALKER: The
democratic political system owes its legitimacy to the capacity to guarantee
and respect human rights in the best of fashions. That was the lesson of Chile.
We have reappraised democracy because of what we have lived through as regards
human rights. When we speak about human rights, the ethical basis of democracy
is at stake. The Warsaw meeting in 2000, the Seoul plan of action in 2002 and,
now, the next meeting of the Communities of Democracies in Santiago in May 2005
represent an attempt, among others, not only to engage ourselves for democracy,
but to try to widen its horizons. When we see, for example, that India, the
largest democracy in the world, has just finished a difficult electoral
process; that Indonesia, which has suffered a very dire dictatorship for
thirty-five years, has had a considerable democratic process given the
situation in the country; when we observe the election of President Lula in
Brazil, two years ago, with 62% of the votes, we see comforting signs. With
this initiative of the Communities of Democracies we want to contribute to
ensuring that democracy is not only a political regime that manifests itself at
the moment of the vote or in the elected institutions but be embodied in civil
society, that it make the most of every sort of association, that it enable
all, men and women, to have a real share in the life of their own country.
