UN General Assembly
2000

proceed with the remainder of my address. We must bear in mind that the entities we know as States are national and international corporate entities of enormous complexity, differing in so many respects from corporate entities of the private sector and, of course, differing as well from those innumerable entities, in their thousands now, to which we refer, broadly and benignly, but somewhat simplistically, as civil society. If the management of a developed State with more than adequate resources at its command is a complex undertaking, how much more complex would be the management of a developing State without such resources and such infrastructures? Then there are those developing States such as Sri Lanka, with their multi-ethnic, multireligious societies where the legacies of centuries of a colonial past take more than one generation to erase. Aside from the pressures inherent in the very nature and history of a State, let us not forget the additional external pressures a State is subject to — economic, social and political, legitimate and illegitimate, civil and uncivil, and often criminal —