As humankind moves into the third millennium, it can rightfully claim to have broken new ground in its age-old quest to master its environment. The fantastic achievements of modern technology at the turn of the century and the speed at which scientific discoveries are translated into technological applications attest to the triumph of human endeavour. At the same time, however, some of these applications threaten to unleash forces over which we have no control. Man's grasp of his environment has gone beyond the world he can perceive by means of his five senses, and now extends to micro- and macro-worlds lying outside the realm of those senses. Because the features of these new worlds are so very different from those of his familiar universe, Man's understanding of their inner workings is less than perfect and his ability to control them far from certain. In other words, the new technology he now believes allows him to dominate this wider cosmos could well be a Frankenstein's monster waiting to turn on its master.

This is an entirely new situation that promises to change many of the perceptions governing life on the planet as we have hitherto lived it. The most acute conflicts we will be required to deal with in future are likely to be not only, or even mainly, those pitting man against his fellow-man, but those involving humankind's struggle to preserve the environment and ensure the sustainability of life on earth. A conflict waged to ensure the survival of the human species as a whole is bound to bring humans closer together. Technological progress has thus proved to be a double-edged sword, giving rise to a new form of conflict that was unimaginable when technology was able to do no more that scratch the surface of the planet: a conflict between Man and Nature.

The new form of conflict is more dangerous than the traditional form between man and his fellow-man, where the protagonists at least share a common language. But when it comes to the reactions of the ecosystems to the onslaught of modern technology, there is no common language. Nature reacts with weather disturbances, with storms and earthquakes, with mutant viruses and bacteria -- that is, with phenomena having no apparent cause-and-effect relationship with the modern technology that supposedly triggered them off.

As technology becomes ever more potent and Nature reacts ever more violently, there is an urgent need to rethink how best to deal with the growing contradictions between Man and Nature. For a start, the planet, and hence all its inhabitants, must be perceived as an integral whole, not as a dichotomous mass divided geographically into a rich, developed North and a poor, underdeveloped South. To privilege sectors of the international community at the expense of others is self-defeating in the long run. Today, globalisation encompasses the whole world and deals with it as an integral unit. It is no longer possible to say that conflict has shifted from its traditional east-west axis to a north-south axis: the real divide today is between summit and base, between the higher echelons of the international political structure and its grassroots level, between governments and NGOs, between state and civil society, between public and private enterprise, etc.

A word that has recently entered the lexicon of politics is governance, as in 'good governance.' No longer confined to its original meaning as an exercise of authority by state instruments and institutions, it has come to acquire a broader sense and now covers also the exercise of authority by the instruments and institutions of civil society. It is symbolic of a globalised society whose structure is closer to that of a mesh or network with many heads than that of a pyramid, a hierarchical system with only one head. The mesh structure is particularly obvious in the Internet, the net of all nets in the field of information, and one of the most striking manifestations of our time. While it is true that to date the Internet seems to be privileging the most developed sectors of the international community over the less developed, this need not always be the case. Indeed, it could eventually help overcome the disparities between the privileged and the underdeveloped rather than, as now seems to be the case, deepen the lag. Radio and television have spread all over the world at an astonishing pace; computers, e-mail and the Internet can very well do the same.

Another word whose meaning has expanded recently is illiteracy, which is now used to describe not only the inability to read and write, but also the inability to use computers, e-mail, and the Internet, the tools of the new information age. The ability to deal with the electron, to visit the infinitely small, has become a must for coping with the expanding horizons of our universe. On the other hand, the macro-world in which we live is exposed to distortions and perversions because of the unpredictable side-effects of a micro-world we do not and cannot totally control. Not everything science discovers or invents and that technology produces is beneficial to the human race.

This raises the need for a global system of checks and balances, for mandatory rules and constraints in our dealings with Nature, in short, for a new type of veto designed to manage what is increasingly becoming a main contradiction of our time: the one between technology and ecology. Under the Cold War, weapons of mass destruction threatened humankind with extinction. But the replacement of the bipolar by a unipolar world order has not freed man from the threat of self-destruction: the mishandling of our planet can come to represent a greater threat than that posed by conflicts between or inside societies.

A new type of international machinery must be set in place to cope with the new challenges. There now exists a veto system by which five members of the international community are empowered to proscribe given political acts and crimes against humanity. Can there be any greater crime against humanity than unleashing uncontrolled forces of Nature against the human species? We need a new kind of veto to harness the new scientific discoveries, to maximise their positive effects for the promotion of humanity as a whole and minimise their negative effects. We need an authority with veto powers to proscribe practices conducive to increasing the ozone hole, the propagation of AIDS, global warming, desertification, an authority that will tackle such global problems as water shortage and industrial pollution. The frame of reference for such an authority would be humankind as a whole, not any specific portion of it. That is why it should remain separate from the present structure of the United Nations which privileges certain great powers at the expense of all other states.

Even if they proceed from different premises the two authorities need not work at cross-purposes. They can co-exist while the new machinery acquires greater authority and eventually takes over the functions now exercised by the UN in its present form and with its present biases, which can be tolerated for a period to come, but not indefinitely.

There should be no discontinuity in the global machinery responsible for world order. The UN in its present form may fall far short of what is required of it, it may be undemocratic and detrimental to most citizens in the world, but its absence would be still worse. And so we have to hold on to the international organisation even as we push forward for its complete restructuring.

We cannot afford a repeat performance of the discontinuity that separated the League of Nations from the United Nations throughout World War II. A third world war is unthinkable. Our best hope would be that, over a given period of co-existence between the two machineries, the functions of the present United Nations, with its specific type of veto power, are gradually taken over by the new machinery of veto power representing genuine democratic globalisation. Meanwhile, how this alternative machinery will be built and how it will take over are complex issues that need to be addressed by a collective body of political thinkers.