UN General Assembly
2008

First of all, I would like to congratulate the President of the General Assembly on his election to his high office and to express my confidence that, under his able stewardship, the sixty-third session of the General Assembly will be fruitful and successful. When Christopher Columbus reached the shores of America in 1492, he believed that he had discovered a new route to India. Today we know that, many years before Columbus made that voyage, European explorers had reached Saint Lawrence Bay. Obviously, prior to the so-called discovery of America, developed civilizations had already existed there. At the same time, Columbus did discover America in a certain sense, because it radically altered the understanding of world geography. It is globalization that is giving us a new vision of the world in the twenty-first century. While offering new opportunities to the world economy and human development, globalization is also triggering a new surge of political and economic competition worldwide. We can now see clearly that it is imperative to prevent the interests of peoples and countries from