UN General Assembly
1992

universal and the particular, or, alternatively, the dialectic of universalisms and particularisms. I am referring to the obvious fact that peoples today are expressing two attitudes that are seemingly contradictory but are none the less part of the same dynamic. On the one hand they are striving for complementarity through processes of integration that are laying out ever broader geographical, political, economic and commercial areas that already constitute a new world geography. On the other hand, simultaneously and paradoxically, those same peoples and citizens are reaffirming their identity and their essence, sometimes intransigently demanding their own cultural, historic, religious, and immediate political frameworks. In an apparent contradiction, they seem to be trying to experience, simultaneously and complementarily, the great and the small, the longer-term and the immediate, the universal and the particular. The second of these developments arises from the fact that the market economy has gained ascendancy in the same manner as democracy and, together with them, the awareness of a better life and the need for well-being and