UN General Assembly
1968

51. It took almost two decades for the United Nations to reach the point where it is now in developing a framework of concepts for economic and social development and the institutional framework for action that it now has. What has been achieved in this respect is a result of a great historical process — one of the signal achievements of the United Nations — of a confrontation over those two decades of human ideas and concepts representing the wide range of experiences of the peoples which make up the United Nations. 52. The tragedy is that, at a time when the international community has developed deeper insights into the problem of economic and social underdevelopment and its implications for international peace and security, the will to engage in action in the manner and of the magnitude necessitated by the seriousness of those problems is slackening.