| | During a visit to India in early February 1956, Dag Hammarskjöld presented one of the very rare impromptu speeches of his career as second Secretary General to the United Nations (1953 to 1961) when addressing the Indian Council of World Affairs. Prompted by a moving encounter with local culture performed in his honour earlier, his mainly extemporaneous speech explored the dimensions of human universalism. A commonality beyond Western - or, as a matter of fact, any other culturally, religiously or geographically limited - ideology or conviction. It is no news to anybody, but we sense it in different degrees, that our world of today is more than ever before one world. The weakness of one is the weakness of all, and the strength of one - not the military strength, but the real strength, the economic and social strength, the happiness of people - is indirectly the strength of all. Through various developments which are familiar to all, world solidarity has, so to say, been forced upon us. This is no longer a choice of enlightened spirits; it is something which those whose temperament leads them in the direction of isolationism have also to accept. |
