management and governments have a lot to lean from each other, and indeed join forces in order to face transnational crisis and disasters of new kinds.
I wish to submit to you that, even in the face of these seamingly intractable problems and challenges, there is no reason for us to panic or lose our optimistic outlook for the future. First of all, we have to search for a new definition of our security and more common approach to international peace. Peace is too serious business to be entrusted to generals and politicians or I might add journalists also. In World War I only 5% of the victims were the civilians, while in the more recent turmoils in Africa, more than 90% of the victims have been civilians, pointing out utter inhumanity and total disregard for decency in recent conflicts. Our commonawareness
of the vulnerability to nuclear biological and chemical war should deepen our resolve to develop effective safeguards against the spread, productions and misuse of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction and aim at their eventual total destruction. Additionally, we have to develop instruments of defending societies from emerging new threats of more conventional weapons, which may be more likely to be used in practice.
The advent of market economy, the globalization of trade and the transfer of technology have combined to create an unprecedented opportunity and an expanding horizon for some kinds of universal culture. Economists are estimating that by the middle of the 21st century more than one half of global production will come from the developing countries. The globalization of economy and the ease with which currencies travel across the borders will, however, mean that instability can also spread quickly from country to country like a forest fire, as the Mexican currency crisis amply demonstrated a few years ago.
In the next century, we will be witness to an increasing tension between the logic of human rights and the logic of business profits. While the awareness of universal human rights is growing by leaps and bounds and the United Nations has established the High Commissioner for Human Rights and is moving now towards the establishment of an international criminal court, the contradiction between national sovereignty and the emerging international value system could sharpen in many situations. But we can take some comfort in the fact that, the U.N. has been able to pronounce itself on human rights
