Core Labor Standards and the WTO: Beware of Unilateralism! — A Response to Werner Meng

This wonderful conference is taking place on Mount Scopus, an ancient hill with a beautiful view of the city of Jerusalem — hence its name. This city, a holy city to no less than three central religions of the world, serves as a meeting place for a myriad of different religious sects, cultures, nationalities, convictions, and political parties and groups, and symbolizes, perhaps more than any other place in the world, both the virtue and the vice of human diversity. Cultural, religious, and economic diversity is an integral part of our world, indeed of human existence, and is one of the sources of the world's continuous and healthy development, both economically and culturally. In the past, modem Western society saw the “melting pot” as the ideal and as one of the means that would bring peace and prosperity both within the nation-state and between nations. In the post-modem era, however, realization of the virtue of diversity has emerged and the model of multiculturalism has replaced the melting pot.' This realization, however, must not lead us to a destructive type of relativism, in which every act or position can be defended, and no act or practice — no matter how atrocious or malicious — can be denounced. Certainly there must be basic values and “core” human rights that have universal application and are respected by all.