A word from the President

It is not an easy sentence to write today. The institutions born of the last world war are contested on every side, international law too often gives way to force, and we hear every day that each country would do better to rely on itself alone. Those arguments carry weight. I hear them, I read them, I understand them. I choose to believe all the same, because history offers more reasons to hope than to give up.

In 1945, fifty-one states signed the Charter of the United Nations on the ruins of a world that had just shown what it was capable of. Today there are one hundred and ninety-three. In 1948, in Paris, at the Palais de Chaillot, the General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a text no one was bound to honour and that so many constitutions have drawn on since. In 1980, smallpox, which had killed hundreds of millions of people in the twentieth century alone, was declared eradicated after a campaign led by the World Health Organization with countries that agreed on almost nothing else. In 1987, the Montreal Protocol committed the world to protecting the ozone layer. It became the first treaty ratified by every state, and the ozone layer is healing.

None of these advances came from a single country. All of them grew from the same slow, stubborn habit, sitting down with those you disagree with and staying long enough for something to move. That habit has an unglamorous name, multilateralism. It has never been spectacular. It is still all we have.

I grew up in Dubai, where you hear ten languages on a single street and learn early that the neighbour who looks nothing like you is also the one who knocks on your door when something goes wrong. My family comes from Lebanon, a country that knows what suspicion between neighbours costs and how much patience it takes to rebuild what it destroys. I take only one certainty from that. No one lives beside others for long without ending up living with them.

I also choose to believe in people, and that is why CINUP has become what it is. Every association that has joined us, every student who has walked into an embassy for the first time, every delegate who held on for one more hour in committee to win a single sentence of compromise, is proof that this is no illusion. We are more numerous than we have ever been, and no bureau can take credit for that. It is what happens when you trust students and give them something real to do.

I choose to believe that the students of Paris can be serious without being solemn, and ambitious without being cynical. That a simulation can shape people who, ten years from now, will sit across a real table. That a generation described as disillusioned is the one with the most reason to defend what nations still hold in common, because it is the one that will live with the consequences.

Belief comes with obligations. It asks us to prepare, to listen, to start again when a negotiation fails, to welcome the person who arrives knowing nothing and let them speak. That is what I will ask of everyone this year, and what I commit to doing myself.

If you are reading this and wondering whether any of it is still worth the effort, I have no final argument to offer you. I have only a decision, one I make again every morning, and one I invite you to make with me. I choose to believe.