On Friday, April 18, 2008, the Right Honourable Gordon Brown MP, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, delivered a major address on foreign policy at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum. The speech was the first given by Prime Minister Brown in the United States since taking office in June of 2007, and was the only speech given during the Prime Minister’s April 2008 visit to the United States. During his visit to the Kennedy Library, Prime Minister Brown was taken on a tour of the Museum by Senator Edward M. Kennedy and Caroline Kennedy. Following his address, Prime Minister Brown was hosted at a private luncheon by Senator Kennedy and the Kennedy Library Foundation, which was attended by members of the Kennedy family; dignitaries from the United Kingdom including the Prime Minister, his wife Sarah Brown, and Ambassador Sir Nigel Sheinwald; Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick; and other state and local government and business leaders.
Excerpts from the remarks of Prime Minister Brown’s speech.
Click here to read or watch the Prime Minister’s speech in its entirety.
“Although he was President for less than three years I believe that much of the progress of this half century has been testament to the scope of John Kennedy’s dream, the worth of the ideals he lived for, the breadth of hope he inspired in us, and most of all – amid all the wit, style, elegance and statesmanship that adorned the Kennedy Presidency – his summons to service – one that never fails to inspire people to see farther and reach higher, a call which still reverberates around the world and always will….
If the 1776 Declaration of Independence stated a self evident truth – that we are all created equal – JFK’s Declaration of Interdependence in 1962 added another self-evident truth: that we are all of us – all of us throughout the world – in this together. Each of us our brother’s
keeper, each of us – to quote Martin Luther King – part of an inescapable web of mutuality.
Yet no-one in 1962 could have foreseen the sheer scale of the new global challenges that our growing interdependence brings: their scale, their diversity and the speed with which they have emerged: the globalization of the economy; the threat of climate change; the long struggle against international terrorism; the need to protect millions from violence and conflict and to face up to the international consequences of poverty and inequality.
Challenges that all point in one direction – to the urgent necessity for global cooperation. For none of them – from economy to environment – can be solved without us finding new ways of working more closely together. To recognize this is important. But simply to acknowledge that there are no ‘Britain-only’ or ‘Europe-only’ or ‘Americaonly’ solutions to the global threats and challenges we face – or to say we are all internationalists now – will change nothing in itself. Instead, we must go much further: acknowledging that our common self-interest as nation states can be realized only by practical cooperation; that ‘responsible sovereignty’ means the acceptance of clear obligations as well as the assertion of rights.
And my argument today is simple: global problems require global solutions; the greatest of global challenges demands of us the oldest of global reforms; the most urgent of tests demand the broadest of global cooperation; and to address the worst evils of terrorism, poverty, environmental decay, disease and instability, we urgently need to step out of the mindset of competing interests and instead find common interests – summoning up the best instincts and efforts of humanity in a cooperative endeavor to build new international rules and institutions for the new global era….
For the first time in human history we have the opportunity to come together around a global covenant, to reframe the international architecture and build the truly global society. So today my call is not just to the public purpose of this generation but to the idealism of this and the next generation….
And when today’s cynics dismiss as an impossible dream or naïve idealism proposals to create the institutions of a truly global society, let us remind them that people used to think black civil rights a distant dream, the end of the cold war an impossible hope, the ending of apartheid in our generation the work of dreamers, debt relief for the poorest countries an unrealizable idea.
It is fitting that this library – standing at the edge of the sea – is shaped like a great sail. For those it memorializes, to paraphrase Robert Kennedy, truly did send forth ‘ripples of hope’ that continue to move across history as a mighty wave. And so let us have confidence we can discover anew in ourselves the values we share in common, let us have confidence we can act upon John Kennedy’s declaration of interdependence, and let us have confidence we can create a global covenant across nations to make peace and prosperity real in our generation.”