Globalization

From the post-war states to the globalization of

the economy

After the Second World War, both in the new countries founded on the

ruins of the colonial system and in the Communist countries and the

majority of Western countries, voluntaristic states emerged that sought to

create a new nation, to restore an economy destroyed by war, or to rapidly

improve workers' living conditions.

The welfare state, established in Britain in 1943 by the Beveridge

Plan, was certainly very different from the French system of social

security created in 1945. But in both cases, as in others, the key figure

in economic and social life was clearly the state, both because it alone

possessed sufficient resources to give impetus to an economic policy,

and because immediately after the war social and national upheavals

dictated a profound transformation of the laws and very definition of

political life.

Accordingly, the state intervened in all domains (economic, social and

cultural), often in authoritarian fashion, but, in the case of most Western

countries, with the intention of combining profound social reforms and a

transformation in national consciousness with economic reconstruction.

In Europe hopes of achieving a form of economic development more

attuned to social problems than the American model persisted for a long

time. Thus, Michel Albert has contrasted Rhenish capitalism (i.e. of a

German variety), in which co-management and unions play an important

role, with Anglo-Saxon capitalism, whose objectives are exclusively eco-

nomic. And it was only at the end of the twentieth century that Rhenish

capitalism came to seem more of a handicap than a driving force, amid

20 W h e n We Referred to Ourse lves in Social Terms

the triumph of international markets and the rapidity with which liberal

decision-makers could act.

In fact, all the economic aspects of this state interventionism more or

less rapidly fell into decay, especially in countries that no longer possessed

efficient public administration and where there was corruption. However,

until the beginning of the twenty-first century the idea that the national-

ization of economic activities was vital for the country's progress persisted

in some countries. In France, in particular, a quasi-religious conception of

nationalization was created; and during the great strike of 1995 one could

still hear rail workers and their friends extol the state as the bearer of uni-

versal values in the face of a bourgeoisie that only defended particular

interests.

Despite this resistance, the new mode of modernization, based on

free enterprise and the central role of the market in allocating resources,

was rapidly established everywhere. Thus, control and regulation of the

economy were less and less based on objectives or norms foreign to eco-

nomics. Throughout the last quarter of the twentieth century, the inter-

ventionist state was virtually universally (and completely) replaced both

by a state that primarily sought to attract foreign investment and facilitate

national exports, and by firms that increasingly formed part of transna-

tional entities and were combined with financial networks which, relying

on new mathematical techniques, can derive significant profits from the

circulation of information in real time. These rapid changes are the direct

result of an internationalization of production and exchange that was to

result in the globalization of the economy.

M y intention is not to describe this globalization of the economy in

detail. But we must situate it in historical terms in order to be able to

understand its impact on the break-up of contemporary societies.

Let us therefore return to the period that began in the mid-1970s up

until the fall of the Berlin Wall, and ended with the attack that destroyed

the towers of the World Trade Center in New York. This period began

with the oil crisis - in other words, a massive transfer of resources from

Japan and Western Europe to the oil-producing countries, which placed

their reserves in New York banks so as to generate interest - something

that already indicated a form of globalization of the economy. For at least

thirty years, despite the aggressiveness of the Soviet camp at the beginning

of the period, the Western world had taken a considerable lead in virtu-

ally all sectors of industrial and economic life, where the United States

assumed an increasingly dominant position. An economic view of history

became established, according ever more importance to economic and

technological factors in social change. The globalization of markets; the

growth of transnational firms; the formation of networks whose crucial

importance has been clearly highlighted by Manuel Castells; the new effec-

Global izat ion 21

tiveness of a financial system capable of transmitting information in real

time; the diffusion by the mass media, advertising, and firms themselves

of mass cultural goods that were invariably American - all these

phenomena, by now familiar to everyone, have created a globalization

characterized, according to many analysts, both by a rapid expansion of

participation in international trade and by the ascendancy of a capitalism

whose decision-making centres are invariably American. And indeed the

world now seems controlled by a virtually limitless expansion of the

American model.

However, from the outset ecologists stressed the impossibility of a gen-

eralization of this model; and protesters were soon demonstrating in all

parts of the world, while uprisings against the United States multiplied.

More recently, the serious consequences of the stock-market crisis, trig-

gered by strong speculation on technological stocks and shares, have

increased distrust of large firms, which appear less as the vanguard of

modernization than as agents of rampant speculation, or as sources of

direct enrichment for their directors. At the turn of the century, anti-

capitalist movements came to dominate an important section of public

opinion, resulting in a capacity for massive mobilization of discontented

wage-earners and consumers. Thus, we are witnessing the formation of an

important movement of opposition to globalization - a movement which

soon chose to change its name, in order to make it clearer that its aim was

to construct a different kind of global organization (alter-globalization).

An extreme capitalism

I f the theme of globalization has assumed central political importance, it

is for a reason that is not so much economic as ideological: those who sung

the praises of globalization most loudly in fact wanted to impose the idea

that no mode of social or political regulation of a globalized economy was

any longer possible or desirable, since the economy was situated at a global

level and no authority capable of imposing limits on economic activity at

this level existed. The very idea of globalization in effect contained the

desire to construct an extreme capitalism, released from any external influ-

ence, exercising power over the whole of society. I t is this ideology of a

capitalism without limits that has provoked so much enthusiasm and so

much protest.

The long history of national capitalisms is profoundly bound up with

the general history of each country. This is no longer the case today, for

the only powerful institutions at a global level - banks and especially the

International Monetary Fund and World Trade Organization - seek

to impose an economic logic on states, rather than social and political

22 When We Referred to Ourse lves in Socia l Terms

objectives on economic actors. For many years, this enthusiasm for glob-

alization was contested above all by the defenders of local or national

interests and of products requiring national protection in order to ensure

their survival in global competition - European and North American

farmers, for example. Despite everything, the World Trade Organization

was decisively strengthened when China became a member of it. And local

resistance has largely fused into a planetary movement of opposition both

to global capitalism and to American power, which is its main support.

The Porto Alegre World Social Forum has been its Mecca.

Some think that the undermining or decomposition of national soci-

eties and states constitutes a step towards the creation of a political and

cultural life at a global level as well as an economic one. Does not this idea

conform to what we have long observed - namely, the constitution of

increasingly large social entities? In this respect, the formation of national

states, imposing their power on local lords or collectivities, towns or

monasteries, was sufficiently protracted and tumultuous for us to be pre-

pared for the development of a global society being slow and difficult, but

also inevitable.

Such a hypothesis cannot be excluded. But when we seek to identify a

more limited period, we feel ourselves being pointed in the opposite direc-

tion: not towards the formation of a global society, but towards a growing

separation between economic mechanisms, which operate at a global level,

and political, social and cultural organizations, which only act at a more

limited level, losing all capacity for interaction with the global level. As a

result, what is called society is breaking up, since a society is defined by

the interdependence in the same territorial entity of the most diverse

sectors of collective activity. Accordingly, does not the globalization of the

economy necessarily entail the decline of the national state and, conse-

quently, an ever more massive deregulation of the economy?

These rapid indications enable us to bring out the main cultural and

social implications of globalization. The most obvious is the creation of a

mass society in which the same material and cultural products circulate in

countries with very different living standards and cultural traditions. This

by no means signifies a general standardization of consumption and the

'Americanization' of the whole world. On the contrary, we see diverse, con-

flicting currents combining. The first is the cultural influence exerted by

the major firms of consumption and leisure: Hollywood is indeed the

dream factory of the whole world. But it will also be observed that it does

not thereby bring about the disappearance of local products. For we are

witnessing a diversification of consumption in the richest countries. In

New York, London or Paris, there are more foreign restaurants than before

and one can see more films from other parts of the world. Finally, we are

also witnessing a resurgence of forms of social and cultural life that are

Global izat ion 23

traditional or nourished by a desire to protect a regional or national

culture which is under threat. But everywhere, as a result of these con-

flicting tendencies, the decline of traditional forms of social and political

life and of national management of industrialization is accelerating.

The clearest case is that of the trade unions. In France, for example,

unionization of the private sector has become very weak, above all in

small and medium-sized firms. English trade unionism, dominated by the

mine workers' union and the left, was defeated by Margaret Thatcher and

has not recovered from this defeat. In the United States, where the rate of

unionization is higher, unions have little influence and the era of Walter

Reuther and the large autoworkers' union is very distant.

In the 1980s and 1990s, when the Soviet empire was fracturing, the

theme of the information and communications society, based on the

development of the Internet and financial networks, became established

in world public opinion. This was a fairly brief but decisive period, during

which war and imperialisms seemed to be stripped of meaning by the end

of the struggle between the two blocs and the undermining of what used

to be called the Third World. Social thought assigned key importance to

the analysis of a new type of society, with broader contours than indus-

trial or post-industrial society, and even than the information society,

which had been defined by technologies that created what Georges

Friedmann had called a new industrial revolution. This type of thinking

was also different from that which had governed analyses focused on the

confrontation between capitalism and socialism, or on the problems of

many countries' dependence on an external decision-making power.

The information society was created by entrepreneurs of a new kind,

enthusiastic and swept along by a new conception of society. This was true

of the Linux group, created in California by veritable knights (or monks!)

of computer science, who developed an ethic of enjoyment opposed to the

Puritanism so well described by Max Weber, and which at a different level

plays the role once performed by the Saint-Simonians in France at the

beginning of industrialization. This information society is built on a new

mode of knowledge, new investments, and a changed representation of the

objectives of work and social organization.

The rupturing of societies

But are we really dealing with a new society? In previous types of society,

the technical mode of production was inseparable from a social mode of

production. In industrial society, the organization of work as defined by

Taylor and then Ford consisted in transforming manual work so as to

obtain the greatest possible profit; and payment by productivity, which was

24 When We Refer red to Ourse lves in Social Terms

so widespread, was above all an extreme form of class domination. In con-

trast, the world of information is purely technological - that is, its tech-

niques are socially neutral and do not in themselves have inevitable social

consequences. Does this mean that it no longer contains any relations of

domination? Obviously not. But class conflicts, i f they can be called that,

are now situated at the level of overall and especially financial manage-

ment, rather than at the level of work and the organization of production.

Industrial society was based on the factory or the workshop; and it was

at this level too that trade unions emerged, with their demands, their

strikes and their collective bargaining. The image suggested by globaliza-

tion is that of networks of information and exchange which might possess

practically no material existence; and the transformation of firms over the

last twenty years has often consisted in outsourcing sectors of production,

in fragmenting, and thus considerably reducing, the size of firms. The now

classic image of a central core of the firm made up of 'symbol manipula-

tors', as Reich calls them, captures the decline in importance of 'produc-

tive' workers well.

Major conflicts now take shape around the orientation of historical

change, of modernization. To adopt an important distinction, the social

movements formed in one type of society are replaced by historical

movements that respond to a type of management of historical change.

Globalization, i t must be repeated, is an extreme form of capitalism that

no longer has any counterweight. The class struggle thus disappears not

because relations between employers and wage-earners have become

pacific, but because conflicts have been displaced from internal problems

of production to the global strategies of transnational firms and financial

networks.

The movements opposed to globalization devote most of their time to

criticizing the policy of the United States and the richest countries, while

seeking to impart form to the very many grass-roots movements consti-

tuted in various countries. But they have not hitherto been able to propose

a general analysis of the conflicts that are taking shape at the global level.

The ecological movement finds itself in a similar situation. I t defends

nature, the Earth; it attacks those who destroy the environment and

defends the idea of sustainable development - that is, the interests of those

who are too remote in space or time to make themselves heard. But it

comes up against the resistance of states and has obtained only limited

results.

The notion of social classes became established in an age when the

various categories of wage-earners, starting with manual workers, were

predominantly defined by social relations experienced in work. When we

refer to globalization, it is necessary to use general categories; and the

category of classes is insufficiently general. Moreover, what is most often

Global izat ion 25

referred to today is humanity, future generations, or poor nations, rather

than a socially defined category. The definition of the historical actor is

no longer given in social terms but in a different kind of vocabulary, more

directly implicating the dignity of certain individuals, the conditions for

the planet's survival, or the diversity of cultures. Specifically social notions,

like that of social class, lose their explanatory power and mobilizing force.

The dominant role of the market, competition and coalitions of

interests, not to mention corruption, is nothing new. And i f we refer to

'neo-liberalism', it is precisely because the late nineteenth century was

dominated by liberalism, before trade unionism and the 'working-class'

parties introduced new modes of regulation of the economy by the state,

and elements of universal social protection, as well as a redistribution of

income. What is new is the fact that competition no longer pits compara-

ble countries against one another, as was the case when Great Britain,

Germany, the United States or Fiance entered into competition and at the

same time signed economic and political agreements to open up markets.

I t sets the rich, more or less 'social-democratic' countries against countries

where wages are lower and unions non-existent (and where there some-

times exists a vast sector of forced labour). It has hitherto been impossi-

ble to co-ordinate social and fiscal policies inside the European Union.

This new situation must be accepted. I t would be futile to think that bar-

riers could be erected around a national economy. Such a policy would

have - in the past has had - very negative results. State intervention must

no longer serve to keep non-competitive firms in existence or to offer guar-

antees to certain social categories, for political reasons and in defiance of

all economic rationality. The resistance of the European countries to this

transformation is considerable, but it is increasingly in retreat.

No political problem is more important for these countries, and for

those that have adopted a comparable social model, than the search for a

new mode of political intervention which does not damage competitive-

ness but nevertheless protects the population against the brutality of a

liberal economy over which most countries can exert no influence. The

specifically political difficulty of this problem is demonstrated by the

number of governments, in numerous countries, that have come a cropper

over it. Even greater is the difficulty of developing a set of interventions

in favour of those whose personality is shattered or exhausted in the face

of repeated aggression, and of those who can no longer find a job that

suits them. And as social protection must be strengthened at the same time

as the struggle against inequality, it is difficult to fix in abstracto the extent

of the budgetary shift acceptable to a population that aspires to measure

the progress made.

Those who find these tasks too difficult to accomplish, and want the

state to make do with offering aid to those who already demand the most,

26 When We Referred to Ourse lves in Social Terms

lead their country to ruin. There wi l l always be an acute tension between

the race for creativity and competitiveness and the endeavour to enable the

maximum number of inhabitants of each country to construct their lives

and have an influence on their environment.

European firms have made great progress and have internationalized

themselves. But the European effort in terms of the production, diffusion

and application of knowledge remains insufficient; and to varying degrees

there is a pervasive failure to equip each person with the possibility of

being a well prepared, well protected, well informed and clearly oriented

actor in social life. No solution is to be found either in the preservation of

the current welfare state, or in the acceptance of an unrestricted liberal-

ism. Only a renewal of our ideas about society and its transformation can

enable us to conceive the social policies that will allow us to supersede the

welfare state, by altering its objectives and especially the modalities of

public intervention.

Alter-globalism

Let us sum up. Globalization does not define a stage of modernity, a new

industrial revolution. I t occurs at the level of ways of managing historical

change. I t corresponds to an extreme capitalist mode of modernization -

a category that should not be confused with a type of society, such as

feudal society or industrial society. And war, be it hot or cold, belongs to

this world of competition, confrontation and empire, not to that of soci-

eties and their internal problems, including their class struggles.

A very diverse range of demands has gathered around the general theme

of anti-globalization, seeking to converge in the project of an alternative

globalization. The success of the Porto Alegre forum derives from the

fact that it has attempted to assemble social movements and currents of

opinion which aim to give a positive meaning to the demonstrations in

Seattle, Gothenburg, Genoa, and many others elsewhere, which had a pre-

dominantly critical function. A movement has thus been organized, as

powerful as it is diverse, that challenges the most important leaders of the

global economy.

A wave of sympathy has accompanied these Davids defying the Goliaths

of international finance. And the state of the economy, so often presented

as a step in progress, now seems to many to be a construct that serves the

privileged and harms the poorest. I f the anti-global movement has re-

baptized itself alter-globalist, it is (as we have said) in order clearly to indi-

cate that it is not against the global opening up of production and trade

and that it is fighting for a different globalization - one which would not

ride roughshod over the weak, local interests, minorities, and the environ-

Global izat ion 27

the exclusive benefit of those who already possess wealth, power

.itluence.

i'he alter-globalist movement occupies as important a place today as

socialism did in the early decades of industrial society. Both struggle above

all against the capitalist direction of the economy and society. Conse-

quently, both have attacked and do attack a mode of development, rather

than a type of society defined by forms of production, organization and

authority. The alter-globalist movement calls for democratic management

of major historical changes. This role is, and wil l remain, different from

that of trade unionism in industrial society, which was a social movement

of central importance in a given type of society. But the weakness of alter-

globalism, which is as manifest as its success, derives from the fact that it

has not succeeded in clearly defining in whose name, on behalf of what

interests or what conception of society, it is fighting. As a result, a certain

confusion has set in between the defence of certain established interests

and demands actually being pressed in the name of the most directly dom-

inated categories. Conversely, it would be an error to regard this move-

ment simply as a loose coalition of minority groups. The same error was

made in connection with the initial movement to defend the Larzac

plateau, which wasn't backward-looking, but on the contrary undertaken

by innovative farmers fighting against the unproductive extension of a mil-

itary camp. The alter-globalist movement is a key component of our age,

because it is directly opposed to globalization as the ambition to eliminate

all forms of social and political regulation of economic activity.

In conclusion to this evocation of globalization, what are we to say of

the period in which it has dominated economic reality and social thought?

That we have made the transition from a period dominated by the struc-

tural problems generated by a socio-economic system to an age in which

it is the triumph of capitalism - hence of a certain way of managing his-

torical change, of modernization - which occupies the central position.

This is the principal meaning of globalization. We must now examine what

followed the great turning-point of 11 September.

From society to war

I t is more difficult, but even more necessary, to define what sets this short

period, which I have defined in a figurative way as one symbolically extend-

ing from the fall of the Berlin Wall to the destruction of the towers of the

World Trade Center, apart from the great break that put an end to it and

saw the spirit of war triumph. Contrary to what is often said, the period

of globalization remained characterized by the accelerated circulation of

goods and services, but also of cultural works and practices - and even of

28 W h e n We Referred to Ourse lves in Socia l T e r m s

social and political representations. I t was no longer the logic o f a type of

society that was being imposed, but it was not yet that of a crusade or an

empire. The period primarily defined by globalization was dominated by

finance capital more than by industrial capital, which led to the bursting

of the technological bubble. But it saw a mode of transformation of the

world that remained multilateral. The United States did not yet consider

itself exclusively invested with the duty of saving the world. And those

who were opposed to globalization, while formulating just criticisms of it,

did not realize that it was precisely during this period that a multicultural

sensibility asserted itself. In the current phase of American policy, multi-

culturalism has been abandoned. I t is no longer a question of under-

standing the other and recognizing the differences between the Western

cultural model and the Islamic model, for example, but of combating

Islam - or rather those who wage war in its name. The wave of anti-

Americanism, which has continued to grow, especially since the beginning

of the Second Intifada and the Iraq war, too often intimates that there is

no change in a world completely dominated by American power. On the

contrary, the changes are profound and rapid: a civil vision has been

replaced by a military vision. In the years prior to 2001, the United States

- and consequently most of the world - which lived in a society dominated

by economic and technological problems, and by the rise of new social

movements - in particular, feminism and political ecology - still had a

sense of living through a comprehensive transformation of the world that

was not entirely in the hands of governments. Globalization was releasing

the economy from all the other sectors of society, and society was domi-

nated by the economy; the new warriors were not yet in power.

The transition from a logic of society - or, more precisely, of social

change - to that of war can also be seen among the Islamists. Major

projects to refound Islamic republics, in the spirit of Khomeini, failed and

were abandoned. Those who prepared and carried out the attack of 11

September were combatants with a different objective: to destroy and

terrorize the enemy, like the Palestinian fighters, in a logic which has been

(and still is) that of activists in a national cause ready to die for the liber-

ation of their country.

Even i f we cannot see the transition from one logic to another with suf-

ficient clarity, we have a strong sense that our categories for analysing

social life are rapidly disintegrating, are no longer of use to us. Our

internal problems are now governed by events that happen at a global or

continental level. We are gradually stopping defining ourselves as social

beings. Well before the idea of a holy war became established, we already

spoke less frequently of the problems of work and professional life. They

were masked by the problems of employment - that is, unemployment and

job insecurity. And when the wage-earners of a factory closed by its

Global izat ion 29

owners for reasons of relocation, even though it was profitable, went on

strike, occupied the factory, blocked the roads, or threatened to blow

everything up, television viewers were moved by their misfortune, but did

not associate themselves with any protest.

We have gradually discovered that the events, the political conflicts, the

social crises that occur in our vicinity are governed by distant events. Local

circumstances do not really contain the meaning of the events that unfold

there, even though the local situation adds a secondary meaning to events

that are predominantly explicable at a global level.

Since the Second World War we have known that it is necessary to look

to the world stage for an explanation of local news - notably with the Cold

War and the extension of the Communist regime to a vast China. Further

still, in the course of recent years it has become clear that the centre-point

of global conflicts is the strip of land shared by Israelis and Palestinians.

A globalized world

France, more so than other countries, is experiencing the indirect conse-

quences of this confrontation, because Jews and Arabs form large com-

munities there. They have long lived side by side in relative calm, but since

the second Intifada, which has transformed the guerrilla movements into

fights to the death, we have seen the construction of 'communities' in

neighbourhoods and secondary schools; insults and abuse have been

exchanged between Jews and Arabs. Anti-Semitic acts have increased

markedly in quantity and gravity, and a vigorous publicity campaign has

been launched in America to denounce the anti-Semitism that is sup-

posedly resurgent in France, raising the spectre of the campaigns formerly

waged against Captain Dreyfus and recalling the anti-Jewish laws of

Vichy. However, the attacks are of a different kind: racist references have

become rare; on the other hand, attacks on Israel predominate and Jews

are accused of using the Shoah they suffered to repress the Palestinian

national movement with the utmost violence. At the same time, small neo-

Nazi groups have been desecrating Jewish and Arab graves.

How can we fail to see that the explanation for anti-Semitism in France,

inseparable from anti-Arab racism, is to be found in Jerusalem as much as

Paris? We must turn to the war to the death tearing Palestine apart for the

reasons for an anti-Israelism containing an anti-Semitism reinforced by

themes derived from French reality - in particular, the unequal way in

which France treats Jews and Arabs. And it is almost uniquely against

Arabs that we see the development of a racism tempered by the fact that

anti-Islamism is primarily cultural.

30 W h e n We Refer red to Ourse lves in Social Terms

The attack of 11 September 2001 in New York cannot be reduced to its

local dimension either: i t was a challenge, launched by al-Qaeda, to

American power and the second Iraq war has bolstered this interpretation

from one month to the next. The Islamic world and the United States

are confronting each other and each camp can strike at any point on the

globe.

But this situation has also led to the emergence of humanitarian action,

conveyed in the theme of the need to intervene in the affairs of a state that

massively violates the basic rights of a section of its population. And,

despite the weakness of their resources, it is from Amnesty International,

the Red Cross, Mdecins Sans Frontires and Mdecins du Monde that

we receive the most reliable information on the dramas and scandals trou-

bling the world, whereas our governments seem to be bogged down in sub-

altern problems and Europe itself seems incapable of intervening beyond

its own borders.

How can we discuss the idea of globalization without referring to what

contrasts most starkly with it, provoking such passion - the idea of a clash

of civilizations as expounded by Samuel R Huntington in his book of that

title? Whereas the idea of globalization suggests a world dominated by

firms or economic and financial networks, vectors of goods, services,

shares and interests, Huntington's thesis resorts to the notion of civiliza-

tion, the word being employed in the plural - that is, in a very different

sense from the one given it in eighteenth-century France, and which cor-

responds more closely to the German idea of Kultur. He does so in order

to argue that the principal conflicts in the contemporary world involve

much more than economics and politics: the opposition of global com-

plexes, predominantly cultural and especially religious, sustained by states

that have a strong mobilizing capacity.

In fact, this general idea is applied to two rather different kinds of con-

flict. First, it is applied to confrontations that are simultaneously cultural,

social and political, like those that tore Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia apart.

Next, it is used of conflicts for world domination, like that opposing the

West to the Soviet bloc during the Cold War, the one opposing the United

States to Islam today, and the one which will oppose it to China tomor-

row - unless the latter decides not to wait before committing its power to

the struggle for world domination. Between these two types of extreme

exist what are known as 'intermediate' cases - in particular, those where

the struggle essentially aims at the conquest of political power and where

cultures (in the first instance, religions) are simply 'resources' mobilized by

the contending parties against one another.

Samuel Huntington depicts a multi-polar world for us and stresses the

decline of the West, which long believed that it enjoyed a monopoly on

modernity and power and that it alone embodied the idea of universal-

Global izat ion 31

ism. His thesis would be weak i f it merely staged a very unequal struggle

between a central empire and peripheral societies or states incapable of

genuinely challenging it. On the contrary, however, Huntington shows us

a West (i.e. the United States) losing its hegemony and threatened by the

rise of other civilizations.

Conversely, those who put globalization at the centre of their represen-

tation of the world show that it is dominated by American hegemony, since

global networks are to a very large extent in the hands of the Americans.

And it is against them that the alter-globalist movements have been

created.

The contrast between the two theses is so total because they are in

part complementary. The reason for the massive approval enjoyed by

Huntington's approach is that it highlights the increasingly central role of

cultural affiliations and beliefs - in particular, religious ones - in conflicts

that several generations of analysts have sought to explain in purely eco-

nomic or political terms. In this respect, Huntington is surely right to

speak of Islam where so many other authors only want to hear talk of oil.

But such cultural phenomena are implicated in policies and struggles that

discount state boundaries. In particular, as we know, al-Qaeda recruits

activists who are often highly integrated into Western countries. I t is there-

fore neither economics nor civilizations that should be placed at the centre

of analysis, but the forces for mobilizing the resources required for polit-

ical action.

We must go beyond this initial observation. The political world is dom-

inated by the confrontation between the United States (and its most loyal

allies) and Islam (or what is called such). Whether or not we accept it,

Huntington's thesis today calls for a more positive statement about the

relations between religion and politics in a world which is experiencing,

and has just experienced, major conflicts whose actors refer to themselves

as religious. Was it gratuitous i f I began this book with the thunder-clap

of 11 September 2001 in New York and the world's entry into a state of

war, which has since increasingly taken the form of terrorist attacks and

hostage executions that propel us into a state of utter barbarism and are

an obstacle to understanding the causes of these battles and to seeking

solutions to them?

To take the analysis forward, we must return to our starting-point of

globalization, in as much as it signifies, over and above the globalization

of exchanges, the separation between economy and society - a separation

that contains within it the destruction of the very idea of society. We have

seen a process of separation between the objective power of the United

States and the subjective, national, religious, or whatever resistance of

groups or nations that can now only defend themselves subjectively, by

appealing to their ethnicity or history. It is when this subjectivity and this

32 W h e n We Referred to Ourse lves in Socia l Terms

need for identity develop in a political vacuum that the relations between

nations can be reduced to a war between enemies defined by their forms

of worship, their religions or their laws.

In an already distant past, Khomeini's Iran attacked the United States.

Similarly, in Afghanistan, Sudan and Algeria in particular we have seen

Islamist political groups create or seek to found new Islamist republics.

But after the triumphant years came the defeats - especially that of the

Taliban in Afghanistan. And the great politico-religious enterprises have

given way to forms of bellicose behaviour, to attacks on the American

hegemonic power, in which al-Qaeda would appear to be the main agent.

One hundred years ago, Lenin was to be heard defending the idea of

the role of the revolutionary vanguard, and then, sixty years later, we saw

the birth of the idea of the foco, fashioned in Latin America, to foreground

the role of a vanguard that was even smaller - and even more cut off from

the 'masses'. Today, we are dealing with a guerrilla of kamikazes carrying

out armed actions whose impact on public opinion is enormous, but who

do not refer to any religious project. Many of these self-sacrificial terror-

ists seem to be motivated by hatred of the enemy. In the Palestinian case

the religious component of the movement has been limited (even at

the outset, when the role of Christians influenced by Marxism was so

important).

Thus recent history has turned its back on Huntington's thesis. But is it

not refuted by world history as a whole? I t was in the sixteenth and

seventeenth centuries that we experienced wars of religion. Thereafter,

competition between states, economic struggles, and totalitarian ambi-

tions inspired wars in which religion played only a secondary role, except

with the entry onto the stage of peoples or nations who were seeking to

win their independence, as was long the case with Poland. In short,

Huntington's thesis, which is brilliant and clearly presented, emerged at

the historical moment when it was least applicable.

Europe: A State without

a Nation

Many analysts regard the decomposition of 'society' and the undermin-

ing of national states under the impact of globalization as a normal stage

in the formation of ever larger entities. And their main argument rests on

the creation of the European Union, where they today perceive a political

wil l , a culture, and a shared awareness of citizenship being fashioned. The

creation of an integrated Europe is in fact an extraordinary success. But I

do not see a national state asserting itself at a European level. On the con-

trary, what is interesting about the construction of Europe is that it is born

out of the separation between a global economy, continental economic

management, and the renewal of local life and preservation of national

identities. That is why the historical importance of this construct cannot

be dissociated from the very restricted role it plays in the profound changes

in social life I am seeking to expose.

Decline of the national state?

Much has been said about the decline of the national state. In particular,

Europeans, who increasingly feel that they belong to larger or smaller ter-

ritorial entities than a state, define these entities in economic or cultural

terms, and less and less in institutional or political terms. But we cannot

make do with such vague claims. First of all, because many Europeans in

modern history have felt that they belonged primarily to a city and its

region: Amsterdam, but also Leiden and Hamburg, Florence and Sienna

- so many city-states that for a time at least played a major role, before

being incorporated into a national state.