Social Justice in an Open World: The Role of the United Nations
plicable to all have replaced various preferential systems, which means that at the international level, as well, economic justice (whereby equal opportunities are provided and benefits accrue "to each country according to its capacities and strength") is supplanting social justice as the primary development objective. The pursuit of social justice continues at the international level, primarily through official development assistance, technical assistance, and debt relief, but with limited support from the main players. Furthermore, the emphasis on least developed countries, as logical as it may seem in the context of the new global compact between developed and developing countries, has connotations of charity that parallel the emphasis on humanitarian action seen as a substitute for social development.
6.3 A great political and ideological transformation with strong implications far the idea of distributive justice The national and internationai policy orientations outlined above were ail, in their own way, responses to a set of ideas with revolutionary power; some countries willingly embraced these ideas, some tried to temper their impact, and others were simply compelled to go along for the ride, During the past quarter of a century, the world has undergone an enormous political and ideological transformation. Primed and instigated by various intellectual currents, including the rise of the monetarist school among economists, fed by the power, prestige and accomplishments of the United States during the course of the twentieth century, made possible by the coming to power in the United States and in the United Kingdom of charismatic political leaders with a conservative and in many respects both reactionary and revolutionary agenda, greatly facilitated in its dissemination throughout the world by the collapse of the Soviet Union and, perhaps as importantly, by the tremendous advances in information and communication technologies, this transformation marked the beginning of a new era. Some were even convinced it represented the "end of history", but events in recent years have tragically exposed the fallacy of this assertion. The ideas that guided this revolution were certainly not new. It has been argued that the world has "simply" been brought back onto the course set by the Enlightenment and the American and French revolutions; interrupted by two world wars and by the aberrations of fascism and communism, progress along this course has now been resumed. This is probably, again, too linear a vision of history, but what matters most in the context of this review is that, old or new, these ideas have retained a remarkable appeal and politically transforming power. If one word had to be selected to characterize this trarlsforrnation and its appeal, it would have to be "freedomM-the freedom of the individual to operate in a society with no obstacles to suppress initiative, or more specifical!y, the freedom to produce, exchange and consume to the extent of one's innate or acquired, but not