  During the second half of the twentieth century, expensive observatories are
being erected at La Silla (Chile), Mauna Kea (Hawai), Las Palmas (Canary
Island), and Calar Alto (Spain), to name a view. In 1990, at the beginning of
The Decade of Discovery in Astronomy and Astrophysics (Bahcall [2]), the UN/ESA
Workshops on Basic Space Science initiated the establishment of small
astronomical telescope facilities, among them many particularly supported by
Japan, in developing countries in Asia and the Pacific (Sri Lanka,
Philippines), Latin America and the Caribbean (Colombia, Costa
  Rica, Honduras, Paraguay), and Western Asia (Egypt, Jordan, Morocco). The
annual UN/ESA Workshops continue to pursue an agenda to network these small
observatory facilities through similar research and education programmes and at
the same time encourage the incorporation of cultural elements predominant in
the respective cultures. Cross-cultural integration and multi-lingual
scientific cooperation may well be a dominant theme in the new millennium
(Pyenson [20]). This trend is supported by the notion that astronomy has deep
roots in virtually every human culture, that it helps to understand humanity's
place in the vast scale of the Universe, and that it increases the knowledge of
humanity about its origins and evolution=2E Two of these Workshops have been
organized in Europe (Germany 1996 and France 2000) to strengthen cooperation
between developing and industrialized countries.
