In this paper we develop new extremal principles in variational analysis that
deal with finite and infinite systems of convex and nonconvex sets. The results
obtained, unified under the name of tangential extremal principles, combine
primal and dual approaches to the study of variational systems being in fact
first extremal principles applied to infinite systems of sets. The first part
of the paper concerns the basic theory of tangential extremal principles while
the second part presents applications to problems of semi-infinite programming
and multiobjective optimization