With this aim, the Alliance of Civilizations was born. The initiative was presented by the President of the Government of Spain in September 2004, during the 59th United National General Assembly. Later, the Prime Minister of Turkey joined the initiative as co-sponsor.  Accepted formally by the Secretary-General of the United Nations on 14 July 2005, the Alliance has been, since then, an initiative of the Secretary-General.

This initiative has received the unanimous backing of the UN member States, as noted in the Final Document of the 2005 World Summit.  Thus, the Alliance of Civilizations is a part of the Spanish Government’s commitment to efficient multilateralism and strengthening the role of the United Nations in today’s world.
 
In very little time, the Alliance has become consolidated as a useful instrument in the effort to correct the reciprocal negative perceptions that seem to exist between the Western world and the Arab-Islamic world, an atmosphere that has been exploited and aggravated by extremists from all societies.  This is why there was a need to form a wide-ranging coalition to counteract this trend towards extremism and to avoid greater deterioration in the relationships between societies.  Governments have a duty to not stand by passively as this gap widens.  It is necessary to highlight our shared values and build, on this basis, common lines of action in a series of areas for political action.

The Alliance of Civilizations aims to create a global political space to combat lack of communication and mutual understanding.

The underlying causes behind this growing misunderstanding spring from various kinds of phenomena:

• Worsening of manifestly unjust economic and political situations;
• Lack of mutual understanding, one of the clearest and most recent examples of which was the cartoon crisis; 
• The capacity of certain governments—and above all, certain extremist groups—to multiply both phenomena, trying to justify violent actions.

However, the Alliance of Civilizations does not want to limit itself to a certain issue.  It is an initiative of the Secretary-General of the United Nations, and therefore aspires to be multipolar and global.  As a shared task, it wants all civilizations to participate in this project.  Based on such a premise, the objective should be to find common lines of action in order to:

• Strengthen mutual understanding amongst different civilizations;
• Try to counteract the influence of those elements promoting intolerance;
• Recommend practical measures able to help diminish those risks to world stability stemming from these extremist tendencies;
• Promote the idea that security is indivisible from—and global cooperation indispensable to—security, stability, and development.

The meaning of the Alliance of Civilizations is not entirely new. The Euro-Mediterranean, or Barcelona, Process - within the framework of the European Union - represented the first successful example of putting into practice the principles that inspire the Alliance of Civilizations initiative.

What the Alliance of Civilizations has done is to transfer this exercise of reflecting upon and designing practical actions to a forum with a universal scale, endowed with a mandate and a legitimacy that are essential to facing these questions: those of the United Nations Organization.  Until this initiative was launched, the issue had been dealt with using a more or less theoretical approach.  These efforts have been valuable, and we must continue to work in that direction, but it is also necessary to take new steps oriented towards common action.  The Alliance of Civilizations wants to focus on the political dimension, facilitating eminently practical recommendations that can be accepted by Governments, international organizations, and civil society as a whole.  Unlike former initiatives, the Alliance of Civilizations seeks to create a wide-ranging international political consensus revolving around a project for concrete actions of a political nature.