Excerpt from the Secretary-General's address to General Assembly, 21 September 1998

An accident of the calendar gives us a precise and dramatic deadline to focus our minds -- the opening of the third millennium. You have agreed to designate your fifty-fifth session, which falls in the year 2000, as the Millennium Assembly. I have proposed that I present a report to you on that occasion, outlining a set of workable objectives for the Organization as it moves into the new era, along with the institutional means for achieving them.

We have exactly two years before that Millennium Assembly meets.  My idea is that we should use those two years to reflect carefully on what we need to do. We are not going to tear up the Charter and write a new one, nor will we produce a blueprint for utopia. What we must do is identify a select few of the world's most pressing problems and set ourselves a precise, achievable prog1ramme for dealing with them. Much, if not all of that programme, I suspect, will be subsumed under a single rubric which has become the catchword of our time: globalization.

I believe that, taken all in all, over the long term,  globalization will be positive. It draws peoples closer together and offers many of us choices that our grandparents could not even dream of. It enables us to produce more efficiently and allows some of us, at least, to improve our quality of life.

But, alas, these benefits are far from being felt equally by all. The long-term positive change is, for millions of our fellow human beings, simply too far off to be meaningful. Millions still live on the margins of the world economy. Millions more are experiencing globalization not as an opportunity, but as a force of disruption or destruction, as an assault on their material standards of living or on their traditional way of life.

And those who feel marginalized in this way are growing more and more numerous.