One of the world’s top four Organizations, standing beside the likes of
the International Red Cross, UNICEF and
the UNO itself and ranging its
activities over the multi-faceted, if overlapping, domains of Educational, Scientific and Cultural endeavour, UNESCO has
been , as of the late ‘80s, faced with its biggest challenge ever; that of
keeping track of global developments
affecting the social, cultural,
educational, scientific and ecological balance and taking place at an
unprecedentedly fast rate, as well as the challenge of
working out formulas of helping to
restore that balance, whenever
it is upset or threatened, whilst
holding on to long-sanctioned, mostly cultural and religious, standards of
major ethnic groups , now tested more than ever owing to the rapidly developing globalization
process.
Such developments as could be seen to affect global balance and
subsequently targeted by UNESCO in its bid to help restore it, include :
a) The floating rates in the global demographic chart recorded in
birth-death-and-life-expectancy quota and
brought about by local warfare and social disorder, endemics’ and pandemics’ outbreaks and
serious upsets in the food chain sequence as well as the global water table, the attested climatic conditions changes
and the gross ,ongoing mismanagement of
world and local reserve funds and budgets.
b) The ever-changing global financial and energy profile, incurred by
ever-appearing new states -mostly as a
result of the existing socialist regimes
collapse and fragmentation- the strengthening of ethnic and religious minorities, the formation
of new geopolitical alliances and the emergence
of new big corporate multi-national trusts; other factors having an impact on
the aforementioned profile are the
big-scale migratory mobility mainly attested in Eastern Europe and Africa ; the
fast-paced overconsumption of the planet’s energy resources and the ominous
ecological and climatic changes coming in its wake ;the unremitting economic
competition between major states or alliances and last, but not least, the social
uprisings and civil warfare, attested
mostly in Balkan, former Soviet Union and, as of late, Moslem world countries.
c) The ever-increasing need for the institution and establishment , through drafting
and voting the relevant legislation bills and earmarking the required budgetary
credits, of state or private welfare services-run projects for meeting
the needs of constantly emerging
high risk social groups such as under-aged as well as unemployed mothers, working or otherwise exploited minors,
long-unemployed graduates, unemployed immigrants, HIV positives etc. The number
of such groups has been on an upward
trend for the last twenty years,
triggered off as well as
sustained by the intermittent flow of immigrants to and from many European and
African countries, a situation incident
to the collapse of the socialist states and the numerous hotbeds of local warfare,
mostly in Moslem countries as a result of local uprisings
d) The unprecedented bloom of the
research, development and trading
potential in a broad range of sciences such as informatics and
communication, space aeronautics, economics, marketing ,medicine and nuclear
physics, with a tangible economic and
educational upturn in many a western country
being among the most notable upshots of this development, a process that is offset, to some extent, by the lack
of ways of adequately monitoring and assessing the enormous amount of
information easily accessed by all ages and often proving a threat to
habitually shared social, religious and
cultural values
e) The rapidly, if alarmingly,
increasing power of mass communication media
as a factor of influencing public opinion and affecting, sometimes to the point of manipulation , social, economic
and political developments as well as
the chart of average moral values by setting and promoting easy-profit-and impression- patterned models
of social behaviour
g) The downward trend in the development process of global environmental and climatic conditions,
resulting from the ongoing, hyper-industrialization-caused
pollution of the atmospheric, marine and
terrestrial environment , the rain forests depilation, still practiced to an
ominous extent, and the water table declining rate, registered in quite a
number of African, Asian and Oceanian countries
UNESCO has been playing an important role on a
global scale , through its projects undertaken in co-operation with its
non-governmental organizations, national commissions, clubs and
goodwill-ambassadors, in the promotion of the effort for the national, cultural and religious
identity retention of its country members ; it also solidly aims at these
countries’ citizens sensitization to the
major social, ecological and educational problems listed above as underscoring
factors of the changes targeted by UNESCO for eventual elimination of the needs
they generate , through phasing out these factors; UNESCO also tries to help
build patterns of solid resistance to the rampant onslaught of the almost
all-embracing commercialization- and easy-profit-making philosophy, launched daily by most countries mass
communication media, through funding a number of educational projects, mostly
run in underdeveloped or developing countries. This effort is usually offset by
the ongoing promotion of the long-standing , prevalent mentality of unadulterated
consumerism and profiteering, one of the
major components of the open
market economy, the leading
economic approach globally,
following the collapse of the socialist economic model. In an attempt to help
reverse or at least control this approach, UNESCO adopted (2005) and
published(2006) its Intersectoral Strategy on Philosophy, a declaration governed
by the espousal of the Neo-Humanist manifesto principles ,setting off the
transuniversalization of moral values, on the basis of common fundamental needs
for education, employment, social welfare and, above all, peaceful
co-existence, as its main goal and,
subsequently, that of mankind. Helped out, rather ironically, by the current
crisis in many parts of the western world ,of the economic system part of whose
philosophy many of its key strategies kept tripping over, UNESCO aspires,
through the co-ordinated application of its main principles, not least those of
its Strategy on Philosophy, to pave the way for a new, moral rather than
economic ,globalization, eventually establishing the World Citizen model, one
that will be impervious to social, economic and religious discriminations, like
the Greek philosopher Socrates had first envisaged.
