Speech at Spanish Socialist Party meeting

Our responsibilities will change with time, but our ideals remain unchanged and rock-solid: Freedom, solidarity and democracy with social justice.

Individualism, as an ideology - it plainly does not work. The individual cannot live without participation in communities which bind him or her to other people.

But social democracy also means that we must all contribute - that individuals have a responsibility, for themselves - and for others. This is the basic idea of solidarity: It is equally essential to give and to contribute as it is to receive from others

This is new to the present generations. We must face the new reality of ecological interdependence. There is today no limit to the number of future generations that depend on our solidarity.

The world population will double some time in the next century.

90 per cent of the population increase is taking place in developing countries.

The widening gap between the fortunate few and the powerless poor is dangerous and it is morally unacceptable.

It took all of human history to grow to the 600 billion dollars world economy of the year 1900. Today, the world economy grows by more than this every two years. Only a lifetime away, our 14 trillion dollar world economy may have grown fivefold.

In fact, if 7 billion people were to consume as much energy and resources as we do in the West today we would need 10 worlds, not one, to satisfy all our needs.

We have to adapt our economies and consumption patterns to the limits set by nature. Sustainable development means that we have to leave for the coming generation at least the same options that we have had. Let us join forces and meet this challenge.

To our children and grandchildren - we must be able to say that we saw to it that the ideals of social democracy where made to work when people and countries realized that our obligation was to move ahead, - based on solidarity, - towards more mature stages of civilization.