rld Trade Organization, the World Bank and the
International Monetary Fund during the last two years testifies to the
depth of the fear and resentment that the rise of globalization has
provoked. Media coverage of these unexpected outbursts focused public
attention on protests against gross disparities in the distribution of
benefits and opportunities, which globalization is seen as only
increasing, and on warnings that, if effective controls are not speedily
imposed, the consequences will be catastrophic in social and political, as
well as in economic and environmental, terms.

Such concerns appear well-founded. Economic statistics alone reveal a
picture of current global conditions that is profoundly disturbing. The
ever-widening gulf between the one fifth of the world's population living
in the highest income countries and the one fifth living in the lowest
income countries tells a grim story. According to the 1999 Human
Development Report published by the United Nations Development Programme,
this gap represented, in 1990, a ratio of sixty to one. That is to say,
one segment of humankind was enjoying access to sixty percent of the
world's wealth, while another, equally large, population struggled merely
to survive on barely one percent of that wealth. By 1997, in the wake of
globalization's rapid advance, the gulf had widened in only seven years to
a ratio of seventy-four to one. Even this appalling fact does not take
into account the steady impoverishment of the majority of the remaining
billions of human beings trapped in the relentlessly narrowing isthmus
between these two extremes. Far from being brought under control, the
crisis is clearly accelerating. The implications for humanity's future, in
terms of privation and despair engulfing more than two thirds of the
Earth's population, helped to account for the apathy that met the
Millennium Summit's celebration of achievements that were, by all
reasonable criteria, truly historic.

Globalization itself is an intrinsic feature of the evolution of human
society. It has brought into existence a socio-economic culture that, at
the practical level, constitutes the world in which the aspirations of the
human race will be pursued in the century now opening. No objective
observer, if he is fair-minded in his judgement, will deny that both of
the two contradictory reactions it is arousing are, in large measure, well
justified. The unification of human society, forged by t