Sammy, Upper Sixth:

It has been a pleasure to chair this year’s Model United Nation Conference, and it is very good to see you all in person. I want to extend my special thanks to the master not just for her speech, but her tireless advocacy for this club and the causes of debating at MCS through all the years I have been at MCS.  I must confess that whilst I will always remember last year’s virtual conference, the sterility of the zoom era cannot compare to the conviviality of an in-person conference and the vibrant community that always accompanies MUN. It was that perhaps chaotic, but certainly unique, atmosphere that I first experienced when I was considerably younger and had, as a rather stumpy 13-year-old, the experience of being able to use and abuse my powers as delegate of France. In the proper French tradition, I mastered my veto powers on the security council and used my considerable influence in the proper obstructionist style, which probably drove the other delegates quite mad. And whilst I hope my powers of diplomacy may have improved this since then, what I have felt, through all my years at clubs and conference halls, is that the spirit of feisty diplomatic bartering that has always accompanied MCS MUN has remained wholly unchanged. It is my hope, that despite the gravity of events around us, all of us will be able to enjoy that same spirit of unfettered diplomatic horse-trading that makes these events so fun and enjoyable.

Even so, I am conscious that we are living in a moment where we must consider the role that post-WW2 institutions, designed to save future generations from the scourge of warfare, must play in a world that is forgetting, in multiple senses, the risks of calamities and warfare. We will probably be the last generation who can speak and talk to people who lived through the Second World War, and for many adults, they have known nothing but the cozy post-cold War fiction that humanity has vanquished the threats that plagued future generations. In the years in which we have all grown up, the realities of the world have collided with the inflated hubristic visions of triumph, and it is the task of all us to reckon with the contradiction of our demands for lofty visions of the international community and the apparent impotence of the apparatus set up to check those threats which threaten us. In a world that is apparently increasingly global, it appears that our own responses increasingly shrink further back into our own bubbles.  The events of the recent past shocked us out of those apprehensions. The pandemic rudely awoke us out of our modern perspective that pestilence was a thing confined to the history books, as society had to resort to draconian physical separation to stop the spread of a terrible disease, the pandemic leaving millions dead and societies torn against themselves. And yet, and the reason we are here today, vast international co-operation was the key to the development of a vaccine in an astonishingly quick period of time.  This gets to the root of the contradictions of the modern predicament- the combination of our increased capacity for global co-operation, but the apparent failure of our leaders to seize those opportunities.

I’m sure it has not escaped your notice that we convene here today during a period of international and European crisis, unparalleled since the end of the Second World War. All too sadly, we have discovered that the end of the cold war has not heralded an end between confrontation between great powers. From the cinders of a collapsed empire, Russia has brought war back to Europe in a desperate campaign to reverse the sands of time and restore an old, and imaginary, era of Russian predominance through a bloody invasion of Ukraine. The events occurring in Europe have showed us that the sacrifices of previous generations have not given us natural immunity to the from the events of international affairs and relations. It has become clear to us again that we can no longer dismiss “quarrels in a far-away country between people of whom we know nothing”. There may be a current vogue for calling such problems “unprecedented”, but we can turn to the hopes and aspirations of those who came before us, which witnesses the shocks of religious, and geopolitical, confrontation over 5 centuries. And whilst the situation here is not comparable to the horrors the young men of the late 30s and early 40s faced, on a rainy afternoon sheltering both from completing my German grammar homework and storm Eunice, I came across this passage, written by Bruce Dunn, an Old Waynflete, who was killed fighting against the aspirations of the Japanese Empire in Burma in 1943. He wrote this about the, all too still allusive, hopes for international unity, in the Lily, in his last editorial for the publication, published in July 1939, one month before the outbreak of the Second World War:

“I can imagine many, especially older people, saying how wild of a dream of a world state is. But is right, and it is the duty of youth to put that into practice ‘wild dreams’ which are right and just. That is why I am glad to live in the 20th century. I have before me an ideal for which I can work. The goal is far off, but in the unsettled condition as those of today, that goal may suddenly be brought within reach, easier to get because youthful idealism has prepared the way.”

What is evident to me, that even if such hopes for such sweeping global co-operation remain allusive, the enthusiasm that is manifestly demonstrated in your presence here today in the hundreds, in the tireless energies of youth activism demonstrated on issues from geopolitics to climate, that there is a hope that this generation will not forget the post-war settlement and continue to build on the slow progress towards international co-operation. That same spirit described by Dunn of the wild dreams of youth optimism for global co-operation provides compelling grounds for optimism in days where we must increasingly forage for good news.

To further introduce the conference, it is my pleasure to introduce our guest speaker, Sveto Muhammed Ishoq, who has combined tireless study with vociferous and unceasing activism for Afghan women, a country where she was born. She has sought to challenge traditional narratives about Afghan women and tell the untold stories of women throughout Afghanistan, including by contributing to the Afghan Women’s Writing Project and extensive work with the UNHRC. Please give our guest speaker a round of applause as she introduces the conference.