A few months before his death, the French historian, Georges Dumezil, noted with bitterness that, on the eve of the year 2000, the number of languages and dialects spoken throughout the five continents was only half what it had been in 1900. The modern world will therefore prove to have been a great destroyer of languages, traditions and cultures. The latter are being drowned by the flood of mass communications, the instruments of which all too often remain in the service of a handful of cultures. Today, cultures which do not have powerful media are threatened with extinction. We must not stand idly by and watch that happen.
Diversity is another name for the world.
It is true that, as Paul Valery said, civilizations are mortal. But just because civilizations are mortal, that does not mean that we must kill them. An inadmissible violation. We might even say that there can be no human rights unless cultural authenticity is preserved. We have seen how a culture that is marginalized eventually disappears, and we know that when a community is left out of the mainstream of international life, it is very difficult for its members to preserve even the most elementary human rights.