The foreign debt continues to be an issue and new voices have began to sound the need to look for ways to
face it; (ii) At the national level two questions are concentrating increasing attention: one is the reassessment
of the necessary role
of the state to correct the distortions
of a runaway market (currently discussed in Europe and in the discussions about the role the initiatives
of «an active state has played in the economic development
of Asian countries); the other is the need for a «participative democracy over against a purely representative
formal democracy: in this sense the need to strengthen civil society with its intermediate
organizations becomes an important concern; (iii) the struggle for collective and personal identity in a society in which forced immigration, dehumanizing conditions in urban marginal situations, and foreign cultural aggression and massification in many forms produce a degrading type
of poverty where communal, family and personal identity are eroded and even destroyed.