The Future of the Past: The Sunni-Shiite Divide in the Greater Levant

AMERICA MAGAZINE

BY GIANDOMENICO PICCO

In his seminal book Voltaire’s Bastards (1992), John Ralston Saul noted that at the Vienna Conference in 1815, at the end of the Napoleonic era, the leaders of the old continent concluded that the nation-state, born in Westphalia in 1648, had to be re-organized: “institutions would no longer be allowed to marry genius but only mediocrity.” In 1981, almost a decade into my career at the United Nations, a new U.N. Secretary General was elected: Perez de Cuellar. The Cold War was at its peak and the new Secretary General told me that the United Nations, as it had been known, was gone, that the Cold War had made it marginally useful at best, and that unless we were ready to go for broke, the organization had no future. He asked me if I wanted to have a career or to make history. “If so,” he said, “you will have to forget the pension: the (mediocre) institution will see to it that you do not get it.”

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