UN General Assembly
1992

these areas through a restructuring of its economic and social sectors and through a meaningful follow-up to the Rio Summit. The United Nations Conference on Environment and Development has put sustainable development high on our agenda, and there it should remain. The establishment of solid machinery, including a high-level commission on sustainable development, will, we hope, be one of the major achievements of this session of the General Assembly. But in the political field, on which I will concentrate today, there has been a qualitative change. We are still thankful for the end of the cold war, with its menace of massive nuclear destruction, but in its stead a plethora of conflicts and potential conflicts has sprung up with a vehemence which nobody had foreseen. Each of these conflicts has its own characteristics, and each has to be dealt with in a particular fashion. The United Nations is, on the whole, the right organization to deal with these emergencies, whether directly or indirectly. In order to carry out that task it will need to possess all