If there was no set agenda for the summit, Secretary-General Kofi Annan still hoped participants would discuss at least four goals to be reached before 2010. Other leaders also wanted to bring their own issues before the gathering. Tony Blair drew the participants' attention to the crisis facing UN peacekeeping forces and relevant UN agencies in general as a result of the tremendous pressures placed on them by armed conflict worldwide. The UN and the nations that steer the globalisation process also saw the summit as an opportunity to hold a week-long seminar on the state of the world. The discussions, attended by 1,500 delegates representing NGOs, national governments, UN organisations and TNCs, focused on everything taking place in the name of globalisation.
Globalisation is no longer a question of choice.
People can choose to discuss it or not to discuss it, but it still imposes itself. The world now has a constitution that reflects a body of universal principles, a constitution made up of a collection of international treaties and conventions that have come into being over the past 10 years. In Vienna, a new charter for human rights was born. In Peking, the contours of an unprecedented convention on the rights of women were drawn. Copenhagen gave rise to a convention on development under globalisation, generating a new framework and prescriptions for development different from those which prevailed in the 1960s.