U.N. -REPORT OF THE SECRETARY-GENERAL ON
THE WORK OF THE ORGANIZATION - 1998

VII. Conclusion

227. One of the founding missions of the United Nations was to prevent the scourge of war between States. As we move towards the new century, the international community has largely realized that goal. However, while inter-State war has become a relatively rare aberration, threats to human security have by no means been eradicated. Savage civil wars persist, terrorism strikes at innocent victims and the AIDS epidemic provides daily proof that not only armies move across borders and kill people. In some parts of the developing world poverty seems endemic.

228. Recent experience has shown that the quest for international peace and security requires complementary action on two fronts: on the security front, where victory spells freedom from fear; and on the economic and social front, where victory spells freedom from want. Human security and equitable and sustainable development turn out to be two sides of the same coin.

229. This past year we learned more clearly than ever before that the forces of globalization profoundly shape our ability to pursue these objectives: that they pose extraordinary opportunities as well as enormous challenges. Globalization has generated an unprecedented surge in prosperity. The market-friendly development strategies that created the so-called Asian economic miracle, for example, delivered hundreds of millions of people from poverty in less than three decades. Those same market forces last year substantially overshot any needed market "correction". The consequences have been sobering - absolute declines in GDP, increased poverty, hunger, human rights abuses and violent social unrest.

230. Globalization puts a premium on good governance, and it can help devolve economic power from repressive regimes while creating the social space for the emergence of a thriving middle class and a robust civil society. On the other hand, it reduces the ability of Governments to deploy policy instruments free of external constraint and can thereby limit their capacity to help those most in need at home and abroad.

231. Global markets trade not only in economic goods but also in social ills - the illicit arms trade, for example, including components of weapons of mass destruction; the means to evade sanctions; the rapidly increasing traffic in human beings for sexual exploitation; the multitude of environmental challenges.

232. Globalization not only expands economic and social ties that unite; by corroding existing cultural identities it can also reinforce differences that divide.

233. The fact that globalization has these complex and potentially volatile consequences should occasion no surprise. Markets are purely instrumental means for the efficient allocation of resources. Maximizing the beneficial effects of market forces while minimizing their negative consequences has always required that they be coupled with the effective exercise of public authority: instituting the political and legal frameworks that markets require, and providing the safeguards against the deleterious effects they can produce. Whereas markets have become global, Governments remain local, however, and in key respects the capability gap between them is widening. Multilateral institutions have a critical role to play in bridging this gap. Only universal organizations like the United Nations have the scope and legitimacy to generate the principles, norms and rules that are essential if globalization is to benefit everyone.

234. The task ahead, therefore, is not to try to reverse globalization - an effort which, in any case, would be futile. The task is to harness its positive potential while managing its adverse effects. Strengthening multilateral institutions can help accomplish that task.

235. If globalization involves costs as well as benefits, being on the periphery of the global economy is even more problematic. Nowhere is this fundamental reality more starkly confirmed than in the case of Africa. Vicious circles of unsound policies, predatory politics, natural disasters, violent conflict and the neglect of the developed countries have isolated large parts of the continent from the mainstream of global development. In my report to the Security Council in April, I addressed the sources of conflict and how to achieve peace and sustainable development in Africa, laying out a programme of action for Africa and the international community alike. In the past six months the situation, especially in central Africa, has visibly worsened. There have been too many false starts, too many pledges of uncorrupt rule routinely violated, too many broken promises of transitions to democracy. All of Africa's leaders must honour their mandates and serve their people, and the international community must do its part so that Africa can, at long last, succeed in the quest for peace and greater prosperity.

236. In the countdown to the new century, we must carry forward the reform programme I initiated last year, and Member States must engage those reforms that lie within their purview with greater determination and vigour. Reforming the United Nations institutional machinery is but a first step towards refashioning its roles for the new era. It is my hope that the Millennium Assembly will make this challenge its agenda. We all need a vital and effective United Nations - this indispensable instrument for achieving our common goals, this unique expression of our common humanity.

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