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Prime Minister Philip Davis’s Keynote Address at the Opening Ceremony of Diplomatic Week 2026
October 19, 2026（https://opm.gov.bs/2026/10/19/）
Friends,
Good afternoon.
Thank you, all of you, for being here. Some of you have travelled thousands of miles. Some of you travelled from Paradise Island. We are grateful to every one of you.
I want to do three things this afternoon.
First, I want to be honest about the world we are living in.
Second, I want to tell you clearly what The Bahamas wants from that world, and what small island states want with us.
And third, I want to ask for your help.
Along the way, I want to show you why this week’s theme is timely. Orange, Blue and Green Economies, New Frontiers for Trade and Economic Development – I believe it holds the answer to the questions we have come here to ask.
Let me start with something every Bahamian child knows.
Everything we need comes to us across water. Our food, our fuel and our medicine arrive by sea. Our visitors arrive by air. Our faith, our music and our ancestors crossed the ocean to reach these shores, many of them in chains.
So an islander learns two things early. You learn humility about what you can do alone. And you learn confidence in what you can do with others. For us, the sea that surrounds us is the road that connects us.
Hold on to that idea. I will come back to it.
Here is a fact I find remarkable.
On the tenth of July, 1973, the day our flag went up for the first time, Sir Lynden Pindling sat down and signed a letter to the Secretary-General of the United Nations. One sentence. It said The Bahamas accepted the obligations of the UN Charter, and solemnly undertook to fulfil them.
Think about the timing.
Our central bank was still a year away. Our defence force was seven years away. The last census had counted fewer than one hundred and seventy thousand of us, spread across seven hundred islands and thousands of cays.
And on the first day, before almost anything else, we signed up to the rules.
That was a bet. A small country with no army bet its future on a simple idea: that rules would protect the weak as well as the strong.
Ten weeks later we became the one hundred and thirty-fifth member of the United Nations. On the first of October 1973, Sir Lynden addressed the General Assembly.
I reread that speech this week. I would encourage you to do the same. Parts of it could have been written last month.
He opened with our Constitution, which proclaims a nation in which “no Man, Woman or Child shall ever be Slave or Bondsman.” He warned that if peace came to depend on physical power alone, it would remain the province of a privileged few. And he told the Assembly that the aspirations of the Bahamian people were “no less real or immediate than those of the big nations.”
Then he offered one of our seven hundred islands as a home for the United Nations, or any of its agencies.
For the record, the offer still stands.
He also left us a line our Foreign Ministry still carries. No man, no nation is an island unto itself.
The leader of a nation made entirely of islands told the world that no nation is an island. Every small state that has made it since has lived by that sentence.
So let us be clear-eyed about where we are.
Conflict has returned to regions that believed it settled. Supply chains are being redrawn around security. Trade disputes are multiplying faster than the institutions built to resolve them. Commitments on climate and development are under strain in capitals on every continent.
None of this belongs to any one country. Every great power, East and West, is recalculating its interests. That is what great powers do.
For small states, the effects arrive early, and they arrive hard. We have been placed on lists we had no hand in writing. We have watched correspondent banks pull back from our region.
Let us also be honest about something else. The rules were always applied imperfectly. Yet an imperfect referee protects the smallest player on the field more than anyone. When the referee leaves, the smallest player gets hurt first.
This is an old problem. Two and a half thousand years ago, Thucydides (thoo· si ·duh·deez) recorded what Athens told the small island of Melos: the strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must. Melos refused to submit. Athens killed its men and enslaved its women and children.
The UN Charter was our attempt to prove Athens wrong. It gave the island of Melos a seat in the Assembly.
And here is one more thing from that 1973 speech. Even then, a leading journal had declared that the United Nations was out of the mainstream of world politics.
Sound familiar?
Sir Lynden’s answer was that the great powers would define the mainstream only if the rest of us passively allowed it. That answer still holds.
So the question for this week is a practical one. If the old certainties are fading, how do small island states protect what we have built, and build what we still need?
The first step is to know exactly what we want. The second is to know where we will find it. I will come to the second shortly. It is printed on every banner in this building.
Now let me tell you what we want. And forgive me if I speak from the heart, because this is the part of my address to you I care about most.
When I was a boy on Cat Island, almost everything that reached us came on the mailboat.
My father began his working life at Hobby Horse Hall, cleaning stables and riding as a jockey. He later became a firefighter. He was an ordinary man who worked hard to provide for his family. He would send things home to us on that boat.
I tell you this because that is what aspiration looks like in an island nation. Someone who loves you, on the other side of the water, making sure something good reaches you.
Every Bahamian family has a story like mine. A parent who crossed the water for work. A child who waited on the dock. A grandmother who stood in line to vote in January 1967, so that her grandchildren would one day govern themselves.
When I tell you what The Bahamas wants, I am speaking for them.
We want security. We want the fisherman in Andros to head out at dawn knowing his waters are protected. We want every family, in every settlement, on every island, to sleep safely at night.
We want prosperity that Bahamians own. We want the young woman in Exuma with a business idea to find the capital to build it at home. We want our brightest graduates to see their future here, on the islands that raised them.
We want a voice. Wherever decisions about our future are made, in the Security Council or in the boardrooms that set the price of our capital, we want a Bahamian at the table, speaking with a Bahamian voice.