At the present, the responsibility for these areas of policy is spread amongst several often antagonistic entities both at national and global levels. We need a system which reflects and gives a greater voice to small and poor countries. Equally important, we have to create the space for nongovernmental organizations. These perceived deficits are in the minds of groups outside governments, which is precisely why those groups are increasingly demonstrating outside council chambers, in the streets, as they did in Seattle, Washington, and Prague. In some ways, the very fact that we have these protests is itself a product of globalization, of the improvements in interconnectivity and communication that globalization has made possible.
Development cooperation is in some ways a product of globalization.
Globalization itself generates the tools with which we can address the concerns that we have. So the answer does not lie in saying globalization should end. The Millennium Summit has focused attention on the potential of the United Nations, which in many ways was ahead of the curve in identifying, the need to integrate the social, the environmental and the economic dimensions of policy. The United Nations has the democratic structure and the breadth of mandate to provide the world with the type of political process necessary to manage these processes of globalization. The challenge now is to use this potential effectively, in the forthcoming event on Financing for Development and other processes in the General Assembly.