Humanity has reached some basic consensus at this stage of its development. All the peoples of the world share certain values and certain goals, such as freedom, democracy, equality before the law, respect for human rights, the need to eliminate poverty, the development of creativity the need for man to always surpass itself. This has been the contribution of modernity, the contribution of the latest centuries consolidated in the XX century. Possibly the most complex of all these challenges, the most difficult of all the coincidentiae oppositorum that the XXI century will demand is to build an international system based on a genuine democracy. And by this I wish to indicate a democracy that does not consist of imposing a political form in the image and similar to a specific system that is promoted as a model, a democracy that is not built on the basis of a mere check list of institutions that have been taken out from a specific democratic experience and made into mandatory universal guidelines.
Democracy practices diversity and tolerance.
The task that awaits us, then, during the next century is to spread and promote democracy but, above all, further examine its own meaning to avoid contradictions which would lead to its own destruction. These are the major problems of our time. They are the major dilemmas that wilt have to be resolved within the XXI century. Any idea of a crusade, even in the name of democracy, is undemocratic because it is intolerant. And I would almost dare to say that any principle of social organization that seeks to impose itself universally has an undemocratic base.