Institutional Frameworks and Labor Market Performance: Comparative Views on the US and German Economies

A world without meaning

‘A World Without Meaning has been a major influence in French thinking about the wider impacts of globalisation on international relations. Particularly, it is a book that analyses the importance of the “postmodern sentiment” as a salient factor in international relations. Its translation into English is timely, and important.’ Richard Higgort, Director, Centre for the Study of Globalisation and Regionalisation, University of Warwick The end of the Cold War marked not only the end of communism but also the end of a way of thinking dating from the Enlightenment. With the emergence of a globalized world order, it has become increasingly difficult for us to make sense of the world we live in. In this provocative and incisive book, Zaki Laïdi argues that as our world becomes ever larger, our ability to find meaning in it diminishes. With the end of communism came the end of the intimate alliance between power and ideology. No power in our globalized world can any longer claim to provide meaning. In despair we look back to old models (religious traditions, nationalism, ethnicity) to give us a sense of identity. But how effective are these old certainties in a globalized world in a permanent state of flux? Zaki Laïdi is a Research Fellow at the Centre d’Etudes et de Recherches Internationales, and Professor at the Institut d’Etudes Politiques in Paris.

A World Without Meaning The crisis of meaning in international politics

Zaki Laïdi Translated by June Burnham and Jenny Coulon

First published in English 1998 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 Un monde privé de sens © Librairie Arthème Fayard 1994 This edition © Routledge 1998 This book is supported by the French Ministry for Foreign Affairs, as part of the Burgess Programme headed for the French Embassy in London by the Institut Français du Royaume-Uni. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Laïdi, Zaki [Monde privé de sens. English] A world without meaning: the crisis of meaning in international politics/Zaki Laïdi: translated by June Burnham and Jennny Coulon. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-415-16717-5 (hbk: alk. paper)—ISBN 0-415-16718-3 (pbk: alk. paper) 1. World politics—1989– 2. Civilization, Modern—1950– I. Title D860.L3513 1998 98–2515 CIP ISBN 0-203-98193-6 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-415-16717-5 (hbk) ISBN 0-415-16718-3 (pbk)

‘Does everything really have meaning? Aren’t there some empty spaces remaining, whose emptiness is perhaps their only meaning? Isn’t there a gap there, a hole, between the image produced and the meaning it supplies or dissimulates?’

Paul Zumthor, La mesure du monde (Paris: Le Seuil 1993), p. 15

Contents

Preface: itinerary

vi

Introduction: the divorce of meaning and power

1

1

The meaning of the Cold War

13

2

The fall of the Wall: the end of the Enlightenment

25

3

Out of step with time

37

4

Universalism runs out of steam

44

5

Europe and the crisis of meaning

58

6

The loss of the link between nations

74

7

Global social links (1): conflicts without identity

84

8

Global social links (2): actors without a project

91

9

Can Japan provide meaning?

106

10

The regionalization of meaning

117

11

Europe as meaning

124

12

Asia, or regionalism without a goal

131

13

America as a ‘social power’

139

Conclusion: the post Cold War, a world of its own

146

Notes

153

Bibliography

183

Index

194

Preface Itinerary

It is not original to say that the end of the Cold War has profoundly modified our view of the world. Nevertheless, the banality of this statement does not reduce the personal intensity of the feeling for someone who has chosen to organize his intellectual trajectory around the theme of ‘globalization’ and the issues surrounding it. The ‘East-West’ conflict has long constituted a real obstacle for me, confining me almost by default to something I knew less badly: North-South relationships. The end of the Cold War freed me too, in a certain way. It helped me to formulate much larger questions about ‘the meaning of the world’ and by that route to gain easier access to certain territories with which I had had only weak links until then, either culturally (Asia) or intellectually (Europe). It is to intellectual, personal ‘liberation’ that this book is dedicated. In my efforts I have benefited for more than ten years from the thoughts and the ‘role models’ of people as diverse as Jean-François Bayart, Pierre Hassner, Guy Hermet and Jean Leca. They have, each in their own way, given me a taste for the ‘open seas’. I have also derived immense profit from exchanges with most of my colleagues or visitors at the Centre d’Etudes et de Recherches Internationales (CERI), who have been kind enough to participate regularly in the multidisciplinary seminars on international relations I have organized since 1990. They are too numerous to mention by name, but they will easily be able to recognize themselves. I also owe much to all the ‘Temps Mondial’ team which, thanks to its indulgence, allowed me to get to know foreign territories and issues, to temper my natural but immoderate tendency to ‘globalize’ my arguments and analy ses. Finally I must acknowledge my debt to Rachel Bouyssou, a special but exacting reader of this manuscript, as well as all the administrative team at CERI who know the affection I have for them. Do I need to add that, without the inestimable faith of Claude Durand, this book would have never seen the light of day? Paris-Vandoeuvres

Introduction The divorce of meaning and power

The end of the Cold War did not bury just communism. With the same enthusiasm and in the same spirit it buried two centuries of Enlightenment, two centuries of which in the end the Cold War constituted only its most intense historic period, its most vigorous geostrategic expression and its most complete ideological form. Our feeling of an exceptionally strong change in world order after the fall of the Berlin Wall is coupled with our equally enormous inability to interpret it, to give it meaning. Though all the upheavals we experience daily can have several meanings, nothing indicates they have a meaning, if by meaning we imply the triple notion of foundation, unity and final goal: ‘foundation’ meaning the basic principle on which a collective project depends; ‘unity’ meaning that ‘world images’ are collected into a coherent plan of the whole; and ‘end’ or ‘final goal’, meaning projection towards an elsewhere that is deemed to be better. With the end of the Cold War these three principles were dislocated from each other. ‘Market democracy’ apparently triumphed, yet seems itself more incapable than ever of defending the debate over its foundation. Political, economic and financial disorders fit less and less readily into a common explanatory framework, though they have never been so interdependent. Finally, the need to project ourselves into the future has never been so strong, while we have never been so poorly armed on the conceptual front to conceive this future, which leaves a wide gap between the historic rupture that confronts us and our difficulty in interpreting it. These gaps are at the origin of the world crisis of meaning. It is to the damaging divorce they cause between the play of meaning and the play of power that this book is dedicated. A world without the Enlightenment At the end of the Cold War period, which came to an end without nuclear catastrophe but also without flamboyance, the dismantling of ideological, political, social and identification reference points was seen to be as pronounced among the former disciples of the Great Night of the social revolution as among those who fought step by step against the irreversibility of this event. Not only were the morose aesthetes of New Man left without bearings but so too were those who shared with them the cult of Progress—generally without knowing it,

2 INTRODUCTION

or in the belief they were fighting them. Progress was an identifiable course, a movement towards a better world, upon which movement, memory, identity and, above all, the promise of a world that was qualitatively superior were supposed to converge.1 The loss of reference points and the dispossession of a ‘principal meaning’ affect far more than just the former communist societies or just the continent of Europe. Because the message of the Enlightenment and its communist metastases had swarmed forcefully and loudly to the four points of the compass, the loss of meaning that followed the end of the Cold War was planet-wide; the crisis of meaning was universal. Moreover this proposition could easily be developed further when we consider that, outside the walls of the West, the end of the Cold War was probably more traumatic and very much deeper. The doubts it induced, the chasms it exposed and the fragilities it uncovered were sited well upstream of the Cold War, and their mental upheavals were not—as in the West—attenuated by the benefits of material prosperity. The meaning, which in the East as in the South compensated in some way for material misery, has gone. It has left these societies bare. It is perhaps not by chance that countries as different as India, Algeria and the former Yugoslavia have, to varying extents, found themselves blocked, dislocated or disintegrated, even though the states they represented were at the front of the world stage hardly more than a decade before. In hindsight, world politics constituted for them not only a source of diplomatic approval but also a powerful way to sublimate internal fragility. Politics defined identity, whereas today—and on a world scale too—the problematic search for identity exposes a very undecided political activity. In Russia it is becoming clearer by the day that the collapse of communism— which we interpret as an absolute break—was a less drastic rupture than the loss of empire. In effect, since the meaning of the Russian nation was built only in relationship to its empire, the deprivation of empire has led to a deprivation of meaning for the Russian nation.2 Put differently, if we want to examine the loss of meaning following the collapse of the USSR, we must almost automatically look back not only to the beginning of the Soviet revolution but certainly to the fifteenth century too, when the Grand Duchy of Muscovy was the nucleus of the future Russian empire. This example makes it easy to understand that the loss of meaning linked to the end of the Cold War can be ascribed not just to that event, but to the chain of events it set off. It shows how inadequate are the muddled references to ‘return to nationalism’—a quick exit from the bipolar ice age—for understanding the current situation. We are dealing with historical situations that are totally new. In China, though the context is completely different, the loss of meaning that followed the de facto collapse of communism puts the link between meaning and Chinese power not where the communists put it—that is, in 1949—but rather in the middle of the nineteenth century, when the Western powers started the economic and cultural disembowelling of the Celestial Empire.3 This planetary machine, which goes back in time to well before the Cold War, offloading on its

INTRODUCTION 3

way all the heritage of the Enlightenment, has probably scarcely started work. The extension of the political decomposition process that we saw in action in the USSR and then in Eastern Europe, is accelerating even inside Russia and, more surreptitiously, reaching Western Europe (Belgium, Italy) and North America (Canada). A wide range of political actors are soliciting and reactivating collective memories everywhere in order to give meaning to their ambitions, whether sane or mad. However, if we consider the former Soviet Empire, only Georgia, Armenia and the three Baltic states can be categorized as nations in the proper sense of the term. The Ukraine is only partially a nation, while Byelorussia, Kazakhstan and the Islamic republics come close to ‘national fictions’. For these nations, it is easy to see that their strategy is not so much to stamp out the ‘return to nationalism’ but to give meaning to a national ‘let’s live in our homeland’, particularly difficult to define and to organize once the realizable assets of ‘folklore identity’ are exhausted.4 That is why the growth of nationalisms is worrying. It is not just the political obnoxiousness of the themes they purvey, but the fundamental impossibility of satisfying them, of appeasing the passions of those who claim to have them. Because going back is impossible in an era of globalization, nationalisms tend to be becoming impossible to satisfy. Dissatisfied, they explore further each day the field of the infinitely small, exaggerating the value of the most minimal differences, even the most insignificant differences. The Yugoslav drama fits more within this context than that of the supposed ‘cultural war’. Until this force is matched with a project of meaning, it is very unlikely to die down or come to a halt. Yet the end of the Cold War started well. We saw an empire collapse and a Promethean ideology engulfed in no time at all and with a limited cost—in historical terms—in human lives. Moreover this was absolutely the first time in the history of the international system that people had spoken of sketching out a new international order—as indispensable as improbable—without this ordering being preceded by a major and brutal conflict between the great powers.5 It meant that the global ballet was no longer directed by the system of states alone, that the classic international system had given way to a world social system of imprecise contours and uncertain regulation. That is perhaps why, if the Cold War ended without military confrontation, it was less because the idea of peace had taken hold in the universal conscience than because the states, accustomed to settling the course of the world with cannon fire and diplomatic conferences, had run out of steam. But our growing uncertainties are not only about the architecture of world order, about the way in which ‘things are going to happen’. They refer to a more fundamental philosophical inquiry that can be summed up like this: is the crisis of meaning the crowning moment of the end of an issue of meaning—which would let us assume we would eventually find a new one—or does it announce, more profoundly, the end of any issue of meaning, of any representation of our future that has a final goal?6

4 INTRODUCTION

No more centrality, no more final goals We noted earlier the gap between power and meaning. Perhaps that is the crucial point of the post Cold War. Our experience seems to be of an urgent, growing tension between, on the one hand, the projects of individuals, enterprises and nations in a space becoming globalized at an exceptionally rapid pace, and, on the other hand, the brutal death of what Koselleck calls the horizon of expectation, in other words that asymptotic line, that telos, which we try to attain and which we have been trying to attain since the Enlightenment.7 To put this in other terms, we are experiencing a real divorce between a pace of power that is intensifying and a meaning, which by becoming fragmented and no longer global, is flaking away, disintegrating and dispersing. As the conditions of entry to the path to power and staying on it become more difficult, the access route to global meaning is crumbling away. Following the death of the USSR no nation would today dare to take up— except verbally—a risky bet on a new ideological transcendence. No state seems disposed to play the Timon (the leader), guiding us towards a new telos (final goal). Moreover, that is why the thesis of the unipolar world was and remains absurd, because the end of the Cold War tolled the bell for superpowers. We are well and truly without a Timon and deprived of a telos. There is no longer any Western centrality, even though Western modernity has never been so much present. Nor does collective action any longer have a final goal. This ‘double absence’ (neither centrality nor final goal) poses a real challenge to the stability of the international system. Although the nation-states, traditional guardians of meaning over two centuries, have painfully lost authority under the hammer blows of globalization, they are far from the only ones to suffer from the end of the intoxication with collective meaning. Trade unions, churches, international associations and even multinationals are indisputably faced with the fragmentation of interests, feelings and interpretations. Even religions that wanted to take over the field of meaning left unoccupied by the collapse of secular ideologies have found their ambitions thwarted. In the West the normative and prescriptive character of the Christian message has come up against an individualism that regards prescription as an intrusion into private space.8 In the Islamic territory the claim of Islamists to synthesize meaning and power has faced major constraints. In making Islam a largely political fight, Islamists have desanctified religion by instrumentalizing it.9 Though we must acknowlede that Islamism is more a political, identification movement than a religious one, it is very tempting to compare it to communism, which it resembles in its totalitarian claims. It is distinct, however, on an essential point: it refuses to think concretely about modernism and does not put forward a project that might take on responsibility for it. Its strength remains its capacity to manipulate symbols accessible to all and thus to quench superficially the thirst for identification in Muslim societies.

INTRODUCTION 5

Unlike communism, which claimed to supersede capitalism, Islamism offers no horizon of meaning other than the rejection of modernity for Muslim societies. Nonetheless, it is nearer to fascism than to communism, if one accepts Robert Paxton’s view that fascism is defined less in relation to an invariable theoretical model than to its practical capacity to play on ‘the prowess of race, nation or community’.10 Like fascism, Islamism combines three important characteristics: a totalitarian political claim, a global discourse about society in which the theme of exclusion is central, and a political and associational apparatus capable of taking under its wing social demands expressed by disadvantaged or underclass groups. But, like fascism, Islamism in power is a traitor to the social and moral rhetoric it claimed to incarnate. The example of Iran shows how the accession to power of an Islamic regime does not bring economic progress, a renewal of spirituality or a slowing down of individualization. It is hard to believe it could be different in Algeria.11 It is therefore too much to think Islamism could magically help Muslim societies overcome their identification crises. In this sense it might be thought that Islamic regimes are doomed to failure; which does not mean, however, that they will not grow in number or that they will not outlive their inevitable conflicts.12 It is simply to say that Islam will meet the same challenges and the same problems as other religions once it parades a claim to provide total, even totalitarian meaning. It is the fundamental reason why the thesis of ‘the return of the religious’ is now inadequate for understanding world issues, including those in Islamic societies. The common basis for all these losses of meaning remains that of globalization. Yet this process, which we examine throughout the book, is soon revealed to be too vast and too unstable to be signposted easily or carved into new furrows. Because globalization has no virtue of prescription—even less of prediction—beyond market efficiency, it lends itself to all sorts of deviations that no actor can condemn as excessive or reprehensible. That is, globalization has only a vague family resemblance to the internationalism of the nineteenth or beginning of the twentieth century, which corresponded to an aspiration born of painful memories and shared hope. People see globalization primarily as a constraint, which can be more or less rewarding (conquering the markets) or opportune (acquiring more easily some imported cultural goods), and only very rarely as hope. The great challenge of globalization thus stems from our difficulty in objectifying it, in interpreting it to ourselves, in investing ourselves in it personally, emotionally and collectively, other than from economic necessity. Globalization is a state; it is not a meaning. Moreover, no political, social or economic actor has volunteered an interpretation of it for us, by proposing a project that might help us experience it with serenity, enable us to integrate it into a collective project, to associate it with something positive. Globalization has thrown the state into confusion: the state has shown itself incapable of telling us if globalization constitutes something good, bad, dangerous or advantageous, even though the demand for meaning is very strong. The state has been reduced

6 INTRODUCTION

to formulating that trivial response of appeasement to which we are all reduced: ‘it depends’. In more formal terms, it could be said that globalization has largely dispossessed the state of its power for objectifying the social reality of the world. The state no longer reduces uncertainties. From a time when it used to try to make its meaning prevail over that of others, and to eliminate those who wanted to dispute its monopoly of meaning, the state has moved to a position in which it tries to preserve its residual power by subsuming some of its activities within the market game and by giving up certain arbitration functions that people, nevertheless, still expect it to do. In some cases it has reacted defensively, preferring to conserve its power, to the detriment of its legitimacy, by abandoning tasks it lacks the power to redefine. Globalization appears to be the first great historical process the modern state has not succeeded in objectifying, which means we cannot dissociate the crisis of the state from the crisis of meaning. It is as if this accelerated globalization, this uprooting, both territorial (loss of national reference points) and ideological (loss of final goal) were projecting us into a shapeless planetary space that no expectation could dominate. It is this space we shall call world time.13 World time is thus the time both of globalization and of the post Cold War, as if the two-bloc strategy, by sanctifying military force and national territory, had partly frozen or, at any rate, slowed down the progress of globalization.14 As actors in world time, we no longer try to move towards a goal, to cross the gap separating experience from expectation. We are constrained by the weight of necessity, though not that of a final goal, to move, to circulate and to communicate over a world space in which not only have expectations ceased to exist but, in addition, the field of experience is constantly reploughed by the speed with which our practices, our knowledge and our jobs become obsolescent. The gap that separated experience (what we have done) from expectation (what we aspire to), giving meaning to collective projects, no longer exists, as if our individual or collective projection in world time—dominated by the principle of instantaneousness—made even the notion of project out of date. Projection would contrast more and more with project as future does to becoming. Political actions no longer find their legitimacy in a vision of the future, but have been reduced to managing the ordinary present.15 Of course one could speculate that the disappearance of expectations would free creativity, favour diversity, stimulate inventiveness and enrich more generally the field of our experience. But it cannot be taken for granted that empiricism and gradualism will limit the profound doubt that social actors harbour about the meaning of their action. It cannot be taken for granted that social do-it-yourself, towards which we are moving for want of anything better, can dispense societies from a paradigm of transformation, especially when they all show a deep need for change and renewal. Thus the crisis of meaning is expressed by this disquieting gap between the expectation of change (‘we must start again on new foundations’) and the

INTRODUCTION 7

ideological discredit of grand schemes for social transformation with the end of the Cold War (‘no-one believes in grand ideas any more’). We can therefore state immediately that the central question posed by the end of telos, by the end of the grand narratives (Lyotard) and by the uninspiring declaration of a ‘low ideological tide’ (Morin) is very unlikely to condemn us to live in a world of ‘great ennui’, as Schopenhauer thought in a different era. On the contrary, individuals, businesses and states are required daily and almost automatically to project themselves towards the future and into the world. The real question is more about how we shall manage to project ourselves in this involuntary way into ‘globality’, when we do not have an end in view or ‘images of the world’ (Heidegger) in our heads.16 The centres of power no longer claim to provide meaning What makes the decoupling of meaning and power so relevant today is primarily the fact that it concerns us all. It affects the societies of the North as much as those of the South, individuals and companies as much as states. Under one hat or another we are all obliged to project ourselves into the future in order to preserve, in a way, our pasts. In industrial societies, individuals discover increasingly that the overall prosperity of their nation is no more a guarantor of their personal economic security than economic growth assures them of a guaranteed job. There is no better social illustration of the divorce between power and meaning. Our subjective representation of power—equated to success but also to stability— is less and less meaningful in our own eyes. Of course, the phenomena of declassing and exclusion do not have a direct causal relationship with globalization or with the end of the Cold War. On the other hand, world time—meaning the intersection of globalization and the end of the Cold War—exacerbates what this declassing represents. First, globalization gives rise in all professions—from customs officers to the ‘golden boys’ of the City —to a general feeling of social precariousness. Second, because the loss of the end goal has taken with it the social and political promise of ‘a better future’, guaranteed by the welfare state or through battles fought according to stable, codified rules (militancy, strikes, elections),17 it is up to individuals to take on responsibility for a double defection: that of the protector state and that of the promised time, to insure against their exclusion. To achieve that they have to participate constantly, actively and rapidly in world time by learning foreign languages, integrating themselves into international professional networks and acquiring new techniques. But there is no indication that this self-imposed projection will necessarily result in the definition of a project. In the crucial area of savings, the cracks in the welfare state do not automatically lead to individuals substituting for the state. In other words, the states’ incapacity to read and foretell the future for their citizens, for instance through social security policies, does not immediately lead those citizens to make up for the deficiency, either directly or totally. On the contrary, the forces of financial globalization lead

8 INTRODUCTION

savers to manage the fruits of their labour in a volatile way, by looking for highrisk, optimal investment rather than accepting the prospect of a minimal investment income over the long term.18 As it happens, globalization is widening the field of action of individuals (investing money on the world scale), but simultaneously constraining their horizon to short-term management. Here again, the projection of individuals into the future and into the world is far from helping define a project, because there is a disconnection between projection in space and projection in time. Urgency or the active negation of utopia The decoupling of meaning and power is also experienced by companies, even when they are at the forefront of globalization and involved in the monopolistic conquest of new markets (in search of power). Two changes attest to this. The first derives from the fact that globalization is no longer the privilege of an aristocracy of pioneer firms, but a mass process.19 Globalization is no longer a courageous epic but a universal constraint. Thus even the concept of a multinational, object of so much fine taxonomic argument in the last twenty years, is faced today with a serious loss of meaning. The second change results from the modification to the meaning of globalization. In the past, projection to the international scale was experienced as the outcome of a smooth process of maturing at home. Promotion to the international plane was achieved at the end of an apprenticeship duly carried out at the national plane. Companies were given an international blessing on the basis of their national experience. They conformed to a scenario, they followed the signposts. Economic internationalization occurred first through exporting their products, then by controlling the foreign distribution networks for these products, and finally by physical location beyond their own borders. Nowadays, this steady route and predictability, for companies as for other actors in the international system, are being called into question. To survive, the company must from the start think about itself in an international context by identifying its trump cards—its comparative advantages—by warding off its enemies using the tactic of alliance formation and, especially, by acting as rapidly as possible so as to be ahead of its competitors. Global projection and rapid execution have become the basic elements of economic competition, even if choosing between national and global strategies has been shown to be difficult and complicated to think about and carry through.20 Two-thirds of alliances between firms today are stimulated by the imperatives of conquering wider markets (space) or reducing the interval between innovation of a product and its commercialization (time).21 But, even here, this dual strategy enlightens us more about the paths of power than about its goals. As economic globalization intensifies it tends for several reasons to become less transparent. The first stems from the fact that the process—globalization— seems permanently ahead of its interpretation. The representation of the reality is

INTRODUCTION 9

in perpetual motion, lagging behind the reality itself. In other words, even businesses, which one might consider to be the favoured carriers of the meaning of globalization, are not capable of responding to this expectation. Businesses are as much the creatures of technological change, which is the motor of globalization, as they are its creators. When they invent products whose expectation of life turns out to be shorter than the time necessary to invent them, firms only appear to be making deliberate choices. But this escalation of the bidding caused by the compression of time is guided less by an end goal than by the need to anticipate the competition.22 The close link between loss of meaning and acceleration of the pace of change is reflected even more strongly in financial globalization. Financial markets, by the way they are constructed, integrate equally well interest rate movements, economic performance, political choices and even rumours. Yet the confusion between objective and subjective, the short term and the long term, is not by nature helpful for constructing durable collective representations of globalization. Moreover, this process does not lend itself to a stable interpretation: an economy reputed to be ‘strong’ when the markets open can find itself perceived as ‘weak’ or vulnerable by the time they close. Even the notion of a ‘strong currency’ is devitalized or devalued by the logic of globalization; either because the strong currency in reality needs to be protected by high interest rates to maintain its parity and reputation (the case of the German mark; its strength is no longer self-evident); or because ‘strong currency’ as an idea tends to be a competitive handicap or paid for at high social cost (the French currency demonstrated this tendency when merely the idea of a ‘strong franc’ was becoming internalized in French society—as was the case with nuclear deterrence). Finally, the acceleration of the circulation of nonmaterial wealth is accompanied by what one could call a certain social viscosity. In other words, the faster the wealth circulates, the fewer the actors involved in these transactions. Thus all the actors in the global social game project themselves into the future not to defend a project but to prevent their exclusion from an anonymous game. There is no longer any distance between what one does and what one aspires to. This confusion is of great concern because it appears to give states authority to be free of political perspective—as expressed most tragically in the Yugoslavian crisis. The end of utopia has brought the sanctification of emergency, elevating it into a central political category. Thus our societies claim that the urgency of problems forbids them from reflecting on a project, while in fact it is their total absence of perspective that makes them slaves of emergencies. Emergency does not constitute the first stage of a project of meaning: it represents its active negation.

10 INTRODUCTION

The loss of a symbolic representation of our future Of course, our perception that time is accelerating is probably not new, and therefore the gap in meaning and power perhaps represents a recurrent, even permanent problem. Sociology has helped us recognize the existence of social times with differentiated rhythms, and that, in a certain way, the divorce of meaning and power is a penalty for the time-lag between our social, cultural and historical representations of reality and the reality itself.23 That being so, two realities reinforce the tension and the lasting divorce between power and meaning. At the start of the twentieth century, the birth of ‘universal time’ and the progressive universalization of the telephone and car led to a collective perception of the acceleration of time and a necessary renegotiation of the relationship between people and space. We then saw a parallel development in literature, the arts, music and linguistics of ‘modernist’ choices that bolstered the promise of progress and the rational planning of the ideal social order that would result from it.24 In other words, the accelerated projection towards the future was backed up by a teleological promise that both made it more supportable and, for some, really aroused their enthusiasm.25 Today there are no celebrations over the losses of meaning that followed the end of the Cold War and the acceleration of globalization.26 On the contrary, wherever these phenomena are found the social actors will harbour deep doubts about their capacity for action, in part because they no longer have a global perspective into which they can slot their present and future choices, in part because the fragmentation of reality appears so great they feel they have no grasp on it, no lever by which to act—leading to the strong appeal of the theme of emptiness and impotence we find in literature and television documentaries. Under these conditions it is easy to understand that appeals to ‘pragmatism’, ‘realism’ and ‘empiricism’ are useless for tackling the crisis of meaning; on the contrary they help to intensify it, since the collective lack we suffer derives from the absence of a symbolic representation of our destiny. The crisis of meaning is translated into an unhappy gap between concept and reality, whereas the characteristic of a collective project is precisely to link a global and necessarily abstract representation of the world and of objects to tangible realities. When in the 1960s Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber expressed alarm, in Le Défi américain, about the arrival in force of American multinational firms in Europe, and about Europe being dispossessed of its politics, economy and identity, he gave meaning to his prophecy by assigning it a kind of adversary—America— and a project—American liberalism.27 Meaning and power were not only identified but fundamentally coupled together. The phenomenon of multinationals belonged, one could say, to a choice of society, a political game that could incorporate other political contests, that fed on other partisan emotions. To refuse American multinationals had a triple meaning: on the

INTRODUCTION 11

political front (defence against encroachment of sovereignty), on the ideological front (rejection of American liberalism), and on the cultural front (slowing down the Americanization of society). Today this tripartite grouping is less than certain. The spread of the multinational phenomenon has stripped it of all political content and emotional force. As for identifying this process with a country, the fluid, intangible play of fusions and acquisitions makes it useless. Neo-liberal theory, which might have served as a conceptual matrix for economic and financial globalization, threw in the towel in its turn. It showed itself unsuitable for understanding and interpreting the phenomenon of globalization. The tools of analysis it possessed for defending and promoting the market economy (a defined territory, stable factors of production, national currency, a workforce that did not cross frontiers, comparative advantages fairly insensitive to changes over time) no longer withstood the reality of a world in which technological change ignored the frontiers of time and space.28 The divorce of meaning and power has extended to the economic field, a field that invades our lives and imprints its rhythm on our experiences. It is as if meaning was hidden even where we were sure we would find it. But perhaps it is a paradox only in appearance. If liberal theories were made suddenly obsolete by the scale of the globalization phenomenon, whereas the end of the Cold War should logically have put them on a pedestal, it is probably because they and their anti-liberal homologues—though with some nuances—drew their resources from a common well, and ordered their weaponry from the same arsenals, under the illuminated sign of linear Progress commanded by the nation-states. The Enlightenment also left its mark here.29 We should not therefore be surprised to see that all businesses today are subject to the imperative of changing their interpretive paradigms, of defining a new identity—in the same way as individuals and states—even though the logic of the market and the political legitimacy of business have never been so greatly extolled. It is as if economics—supreme stage of power—has not managed to satisfy itself or to ensure its normative hegemony over the ensemble of representations of society.30 The centres of power—whether states, companies or individuals—can no longer offer meaning to us. It is really here that the major difficulty exists in organizing the post Cold War. Though all actors in the international system are facing, not without difficulty, the crisis of meaning, none has aspired to reconstruct a global meaning, to erect a flashing beacon behind which other actors could line up. It is true that power games, political rivalries and the quests for prestige are unlikely to disappear from the world social scene. But intensifying them would not generate a collective meaning. Power—understood in its widest sense—is conceived and experienced less and less as a process of taking over responsibilities, and more as a game of avoidance: avoidance of collective engagement by individuals, avoidance of social responsibilities by companies, avoidance of planetary responsibilities by states. Social actors avoid taking on their own responsibilities or some responsibilities because, in the absence of a project of meaning,

12 INTRODUCTION

responsibilities are measured only in cost terms. This tactic of avoidance, which allows the debate on foundations to be evaded, is leading Western societies to feed on the theme of the unknown, because there really is a drying-up of references that could be the basis for constructing a new social or global order. This situation has three consequences: the first is to weaken Western democratic societies. They are no longer in a position to debate their founding principles and thus their legitimacy, and by the same token find it difficult in the international sphere to engage in debate with those in Asia or in the Muslim world who pose a clear challenge to the theme of democratic globalization. The second consequence of this crisis of meaning is to think about the transmission of identities and values in terms that are narrow, even reactionary, as though those deploying ‘going back’ themes (religion, nationalism, ethnicity) knew that ‘going back’ would not be so easy to organize once they were in contact with the complexity of the reality or the constraints of power. Finally, the difficulty in positioning ourselves in relation to a strong reference point has led to a sort of immobility, of suspicion at any encounter with the idea of transformation, as if the idea of transformation and, especially, social transformation (already disqualified by the death of communism) appeared to contradict the imperative of transmitting identity. Transmission (of identities) and transformation (of societies) were thought and lived in antinomic terms, which goes a long way to explaining why the political forces that traditionally organized around the fight for social transformation found themselves so ill at ease in confronting problems of identity. The divorce of meaning and power seems set to continue.

1 The meaning of the Cold War

The more the Cold War fades into the distance, the more we shall be obliged to think of it, re-read it and reinterpret it not only geopolitically but also in cultural terms. We shall discover—doubtless risking over-rationalization of the past— how original this moment in history was in the way it was able, over an exceptionally long period, to reorder the main world issues around a battle for the appropriation of meaning. Within half a century the Cold War managed to ‘encompass’ very large-scale political, economic, social and cultural transformations: the decolonization of the Third World, the growth in economic power of Japan and Germany, the Sino-Soviet split, and the proliferation of bloody regional conflicts. It also managed to incorporate economic and sociological realities as fundamental as the decline of the industrialization strategy to the advantage of the service sector, the erosion of the Keynesian model, the blossoming of individualist values, the development of mass culture and the subsequent atomization of demands.1 A ‘tragic system’ But this ‘moment in history’ was not restricted to channelling the shifts in world power or conscientiously fanning regional conflicts. It enabled the pursuit, strengthening and perhaps completion of the long, slow, linear process of the historical transfer of meaning that, over the centuries, had fixed itself in succession on religion, nationalism and finally ideology, that great ‘mythogenous’ factor of the twentieth century.2 Indeed, it managed to combine two absolutes: meaning, symbolized by the ideological combat between two universal and competing value-systems; and power, carried by the absolute weapon, the nuclear bomb. Between 1917 and 1945, all the seeds of an ideological confronta tion had unquestionably been sown. At the same time as the Bolsheviks were seizing the Winter Palace, the American president, Woodrow Wilson, was already drafting the contours of a new order that could raise aloft the flag of democracy in the world.3 But the conflict taking shape still lacked a geopolitical structure that could put it into practice and give it dramatic intensity.

14 THE MEANING OF THE COLD WAR

American power was just emerging, while Russia had been bled white. The rivalry between the two continental empires, forecast by de Tocqueville long before the Russian Revolution, was showing only its first symptoms. Their confrontation did not yet have a large enough battleground or adequate symbolism. Conversely, the East-West conflict died down after 1989 despite the continued presence of some impressive nuclear arsenals because, once the use of these weapons was no longer linked to a precise doctrine of deployment, as it had been during the Cold War, it was difficult to make them real instruments of power. It is as if the absolute weapon needed an absolute truth, and therefore an absolute meaning, for its potential use to be felt as legitimate or, at least, less intolerable, as though military power required an end to make sense. Power is nothing when it has lost meaning. The historic originality of the Cold War surely derives from the totally new capacity acquired by two Timons (supreme leaders) to provide themselves with the most modern weapons of mass destruction while simultaneously justifying their planetary confrontation with a teleological perspective. It was the meeting point of mass production, mass culture and weapons of mass destruction.4 Consequently, it could be seen as the most complete and most formalized attempt to add meaning to power, to synthesize world order. This interlinking had the simultaneous effects of magnifying the confrontation and dramatizing what was at stake. By ‘magnifying’ we mean loading it with a strong emotional content, making it a subjective experience, once the rivalry between two supreme powers started to look less like a private fight between two proud, narrow nationalisms and more like testing out two competing universalisms that each offered the key to modernity. At the American exhibition in Moscow in 1959, at the height of the Cold War, there was a fairly lively exchange of views between a mischievous Khrushchev and Vice-President Nixon, as he then was, on the comparative merits of American and Russian kitchens. The anecdote demonstrates a strong symbolism that the Soviet Union’s subsequent economic setbacks led us to forget: both systems claimed to be bringing modernity to every sphere, including urban planning and interior design.5 Until the end of the 1960s the Soviet challenge seemed to the West to be not just military but global. The USSR’s ability for more than twenty years to deliver a rate of economic growth twice that of the United States fuelled a fear that it was catching up, a fear encouraged by Khrushchev’s propaganda.6 This fear was bolstered by the USSR’s early breakthrough in space and by the perception— however faint and understated in the West—of the greater suitability of the Soviet model—sturdy and exportable, ready to use—to the needs of deprived and politically fragile societies in the emerging Third World. Because Sovietism offered a global meaning, a synthesized representation of the world and its objectives, liberalism was for a long time required to produce a symmetrical counter-discourse, to try to export Locke to check Marx.7

THE MEANING OF THE COLD WAR 15

Magnified by the global character of what was at stake, the Cold War was turned into a drama by the rigidity of the game of nuclear deterrence, which left armed confrontation little room for manoeuvre between permanent tension and nuclear fire. It is true that for reasons linked to the evolution of military technology and cyclical variations in East-West relationships, the dramatic representations of the Cold War were not always the same. At the end of the 1960s the relative détente of Soviet-American relations led to less dogmatic interpretations of the Soviet system, while the development of precision weapons helped raise the deterrence threshold.8 But it is striking that from the late 1970s Western representations of the totalitarian system generally went back to what they had been in 1947, giving in retrospect an appearance of a relatively homogeneous moment, of a ‘block’.9 The dramatization of the conflict because of the nuclear factor helped reinforce the political and indeed social cohesion of each block, most curiously in the pluralist Western camp. Because nothing had been permanently decided, mobilization was obligatory. Because the balance could always tip either way, ‘moral rearmament’ remained on the agenda. From this point of view the Cold War well and truly constituted ‘a tragic system’ in Steiner’s sense, that is, a drama that had an assigned end which did not exclude the possibility of a fall or a collapse. ‘Since the French Revolution,’ he wrote in Les Antigones, ‘all the great teleological systems have been tragic systems, for they are all metaphors for the premise of the fall.’10 Far from harming the cohesion of the block or group, the ‘premise of the fall’ justified permanent tension, continual mobilization, and the repression of major domestic opposition. This dialectic was consubstantial with the communist system, until the end of Stalinism at any rate. But, at a lower level that respected pluralism, it was also a characteristic of Western societies. During those years the United States did not escape the development of a culture of social stability, even of cultural conformity that Elaine Tyler May was right to call ‘internal containment’.11 Thus there was within each camp a constant, fluid circulation between meaning and power. They fed off and reinforced each other, accentuating the effect of global symmetry between the blocks. This linkage of meaning and power was expressed in a variety of ways, as shown below. Meaning as a source of power The will and capacity of the two Timons to provide meaning indisputably added to their respective power. To ‘provide meaning’ was to convey explicitly their claims to be able to decode, advance and disseminate—to decode the world; to advance beyond present reality, ‘neither halting nor resting’ (Hegel), seeking an end that is deemed better; and to disseminate it to others, not because of plain, simple national ambition, but because of a claim to universalism. To provide meaning is fundamentally to make the world a ‘problem’ to be studied—as

16 THE MEANING OF THE COLD WAR

Edgar Morin put it so well in relation to Europe—and to advertise a claim to ‘universal validity’ (Habermas).12 It also challenges the disjunction between the ‘plan for oneself’ and the ‘plan for others’, the Good for oneself and the Good for others. The Cold War was thus a sort of teleological ‘issue’ superimposed on a geopolitical structure. To take Isaiah Berlin’s definition of teleology, it was a framework within which everything—or almost everything—was to be understood and described. In particular, inexplicable events did not result from shortcomings in the framework posited, but from our inability to discover the real purpose of those events.13 Thus, if we had misguidedly interpreted a minor ethnic convulsion in Africa as an exclusively endogenous phenomenon, we would be pitied and called to order for not having grasped or appreciated the wider ramifications—whether symbolic (ideology) or material (arms consignments)—that linked these microconflicts to megahistory. In the same way that the French Revolution opened the door to the historicization of the Individual, the Cold War ‘historicized’ the young nation-states, with all the manipulations this appropriation made possible. The claim to offer meaning generated as a reflex action a strong demand for meaning, which quite naturally helped the USSR and America to hoist themselves even higher up the ladder of nations. This effect was particularly true of the USSR and, to a smaller extent, of Maoist China. In fact the Soviet model of ‘the absolute state’ was very attractive to Third World regimes because it not only offered practical recipes for keeping power, but also gave it legitimacy, placing it within a larger, global ‘context’.14 The Cold War was thus able to quench the thirst for universalism in the most deprived states. The Somalia of the 1970s, which so unexpectedly obliged both Russians and Americans to court it, had a different appearance from the Somalia of 1992 that greeted American troops, who opened the road to humanitarian aid. It is not a total coincidence that the regime of Siad Barre and the Somalian state foundered in 1989, the year the Berlin Wall fell. In the name of meaning, and because of their respective strength, East and West simultaneously laid out a planetary system of meanings, according to Raymond Boudon’s definition of ‘ideology’: rallying signals and identification symbols.15 These signals and symbols signposted a global ideological market in which political models fully competed but increased their attractiveness by a recourse to ideological dumping.16 In fact, neither East not West, during forty years of Cold War, batted an eyelid at the actual use their allies made of their models—except in Europe. In what was the Third World, the Russians were primarily concerned with keeping up appearances, while the Americans encouraged democratic forces only sporadically. Even in the economic sphere, the use made of the ‘market economy’ label was never seriously regulated— including in Southeast Asia.17 We need to remind ourselves of these salient facts precisely because the end of the Cold War brought about the disappearance of this ideological competition and, consequently, of political models that had not only enabled fragile states to

THE MEANING OF THE COLD WAR 17

find their place in the world, but also promoted their internal political integration through this access to the universal. It is probably not by chance that the countries or states now tearing themselves apart (India, Algeria), or fragmenting (Yugoslavia) were in the 1960s and 1970s champions of non-alignment; in other words, of the instrumentalization of the East-West conflict. At that time a purely geostrategic interpretation could be put on that game: small countries were increasing their room for manoeuvre by playing and replaying on the active rivalry between the two camps. With hind-sight, this diplomatic posture can be seen to have exercised what was perhaps an even more vital political function: this projection into the planetary game was a source of internal political cohesion because it allowed the state a central role.18 The equalizing power of meaning By supplementing the power of states, meaning exerted a formidable equalizing force on this very power. In other words, meaning constituted an exceptionally good resource for the group of international actors who compensated for their handicaps by manipulating symbols exposed by the Cold War. This effect was very valuable for the Third World, as we have just seen. But, even more fundamentally, it was the USSR that derived the most decisive advantage. Because the USSR was geographically impressive, militarily threatening and ideologically persuasive, it managed fairly quickly to create an almost perfect symmetry between the two camps, even though economically American power was twice as large as that of the USSR.19 It was meaning especially that made a power of the USSR, in the style of Hegel’s Reason, by producing the (political) circumstances for its own fulfilment.20 France, through the double-game of its nuclear weapons and claim to universality, was to be one of the biggest users during the Cold War of the resource of meaning—to enhance its power and conceal the weaknesses of that power. It not only postulated the theory of the equalizing power of the atom— that the possession of nuclear weapons, even in small quantities, is sufficient to dissuade the enemy from attacking—but also the theory of what could be called by analogy, the equalizing power of meaning: that asserting your will and propounding a message to others is sufficient to be on equal terms with the great. This over-valuation of meaning gave rise to a typically French dialectic between role and rank, analysed so well by Alfred Grosser. This specialization in what Valéry called ‘the sense of the universal’ led to a sort of over-development of rank compared with role, a supercilious and narcissistic fixation on a global order of precedence. The important thing was no longer so much the role, that is, the achievement of French objectives, as the way it portrayed its place in the world and the image it presented to others. ‘The essential was the rank: rank as proclaimed rather than rank as acknowledged by the outside world.’21 The Cold War therefore dramatized international relations by conceding an essential place to the posturing of state actors. For this reason, though humanitarian action

18 THE MEANING OF THE COLD WAR

appears to be a new product of the post-Cold War period, its intensive, even intemperate, use by France was set within an action plan that systematically exploited its available resources of meaning to make up for the weaknesses in its power. America during the Cold War was in a very different situation from the USSR, France and the Third World, in that it had possessed considerable power at the end of the Second World War. Therefore it cannot be argued that its claim to provide meaning was to compensate for a deficit of power. That said, the Cold War and the ideological rationale that supported it reinforced the internal cohesion of American society and, notably, conferred prerogatives on the federal government it would have otherwise not have acquired. Until the Second World War, as Richard du Boff points out, the lower-tier authorities (the federal states and local councils) spent between them two to three times as much as the federal government. Federal expenditure then increased steadily so that in the 1950s and 1960s it was higher than that of the states.22 Du Boff adds that it was the military budget, and thus the Cold War, that caused federal government to expand, because it represented four-fifths of federal government purchases. Federal expenditure—as a percentage of GNP—went from 18.8 per cent in 1940 to 26 per cent between 1955 and 1959, and reached 34 per cent in 1984, on the eve of Gorbachev’s arrival in power.23 The Cold War provoked not just a reinforcement of the role of federal government—in a country historically reluctant to deploy government action—but, more fundamentally, a legitimation of its action. Thus Cold War imperatives hastened the advent of a sort of military Keynesianism that not only had an impact on the whole of the economic machine, but also legitimated government economic intervention in reducing regional inequalities, through the placing of military orders in zones that were economically backward or hit by unemployment.24 Certainly it would be too much to see this legitimation of the state just as a mechanistic consequence of the Cold War. The duty laid on the state to encourage economic growth and full employment owes much to the penetration of Keynesian ideas.25 But it would be difficult not to link the ideological triumph of Keynesianism to the rise in social aspirations in Western countries brought about by ideological pressure, direct or indirect, from the Soviet Union: direct in that the politico-ideological threat of the USSR obliged Western governments to reinforce the social fabric of their societies; indirect through the pressure exerted in numerous European countries by communist parties and their trade-union appendages. In other words, by osmosis as much as from necessity, the American federal government played a central role during the build-up of American power during the Cold War and its projection in the world. Even in this reputedly liberal country, the state played its full part in ensuring the coherence of meaning and power.26

THE MEANING OF THE COLD WAR 19

The fundamental origins of the Cold War What gave the Cold War so much coherence was its capacity, as a teleological system, to make not only the contemporary world but also its history objects of debate. In hindsight it seems to have succeeded in compacting—while at the same time sifting—the successive strata of what is called the philosophy of History. Through debates on the comparative merits of free enterprise and the socialization of the means of production, and on the relevance of Soviet or American models to deprived countries, the great issues of the philosophy of History acquired a realist political expression, an intelligibility that went beyond philosophy circles and the geographic boundaries of the West, a practical and political translation to an ‘horizon of meaning’. It seemed possible to reduce the philosophical incompatibility between theodicy and praxis, between theory and practice.27 With the emergence of two superpowers saturated with universalism and animated by what Leibniz called ‘consequential will’—in other words, the ambition to ‘do everything at the same time’—issues in the philosophy of History gave at times the impression of interacting with those of contemporary history.28 For example, to call yourself ‘progressive’ in the 1960s not only had more or less the same political significance in Paris and Conakry but, moreover, referred back to a clearly identifiable past, that of the Enlightenment. Through mechanisms for joining or identifying, a meaning could be found immediately for individual or collective action. The reserves of meaning were available, and it was ‘convenient’ to capture them to make use of them. And this tactic suited individuals and social movements as well as states. Its universal application did not lead always to rejecting specificities or internal dynamics, but to rebutting the idea that these things could in one way or another escape the Cold War. The vitality of the latter as a teleological-strategic system resided less in its capacity to block people’s inventiveness, the profusion of social practices or the diversity of states’ self-interest than in its aptitude for binding them into a system of meaning. Thus it conformed to the definition of Leibniz’s monad by Ernst Cassirer: The monad is not an aggregate but a dynamic whole, which can manifest itself only in profusion…and which, while differentiating itself infinitely in the expressions of its force, is preserved as a centre of unique, living force… the individual cannot be “thought” about in general or perceived “clearly or indistinctly” except by this reference and connection to the universal…. In sum the individual cannot be “conceived” of other than by the way in which it is, so to speak, “bounded” by the universal.’29 This identification of contemporary history with History, this adherence to a teleological representation of the world, does not stem from ideology alone, but also, fundamentally, from the fact that it was backed by continuous, and what might be called universal, material progress at an unheard-of pace. The Cold War years were years of exceptional growth in West and East but also in the Third World. The strong and widespread growth in which the Cold War ‘bathed’

20 THE MEANING OF THE COLD WAR

made the teleological promise credible, giving it a tangible character. There was thus every reason to adhere to the meaning proposed by the great ideological systems, once they were given a concrete, material significance by a continual rise in the standard of living. Levinas wrote that, with Hegel, concepts took to the streets. Before him, Goethe said to Valmy that, with the birth of the nation-state cemented by conscription, History became ‘the affair of John Brown’, that is, of everyone. With the Cold War it could be considered that the philosophy of History came to ‘share the ordinary business of nation-states’, even if this popularization opened by the French Revolution, pursued by the Russian Revolution and completed by the decolonization of the Third World led inexorably, under the fire of political action and diplomatic jousting, to converting concepts into bibles, and theoretical arguments into indigestible off-the-peg thoughts.30 Cassirer wrote of Enlightenment thought that it was characterized in the eighteenth century by its capacity to reduce the complex to the simple, and diversity to a fundamental identity.31 The Cold War incontestably inherited this system of interpretations by making it seem that the reductionism in which it was engaged was not an intolerable simplification but rather a quick way to the Universal and to ‘History on the march’. Certainly there never was one single philosophy of History if that means thinking of History as the answer to questions that humanity asks itself, elevating the relative to the absolute.32 From St Augustine to Marx, by way of Vico, Herder, Lessing, Leibniz, Kant and Hegel, attitudes to sense, telos and ultimate ends have been interpreted and systematized according to widely different methods and rhythms. Marxism sought to ‘invert’ the Hegelian view. Hegel opposed Kant. Kant was severely critical of Herder, who, in turn, did not spare Turgot or Voltaire.33 Along the same lines, Luc Ferry emphasized that in reality we had to wait for the French Revolution before the philosophy of History came to value practice as an instrument for transforming the world. And it was with SaintSimonism and Marxism that historical reality was thought not only to be completely rational, but also perfectly able to be grasped by one or more conscious wills.34 Over the centuries there had been a long, slow, tactical transfer of global meaning, which churches and states appropriated to themselves as a basis for power or domination. Of course, this transfer of meaning can seem purely metaphorical, and what we have seen may be less a transfer of meaning than a transfer of images. But was not the secularization of philosophy, religious in origin, also a substitution of images, a slippage from the ‘perfectus’ of the Church towards the secular ‘progressus’, as Koselleck noted?35 Was not the production of images, allegories and symbols also one source of the production of meaning for individuals, for societies and for international society? In contrast, is not the shortage of ‘world images’ today a major source of the loss of meaning in the post-Cold War period? On this hypothesis, the Cold War is characterized both by the effectiveness of these Timons on the diplomatic-strategic front and

THE MEANING OF THE COLD WAR 21

by its ability to root its teleological projection in history. In other terms, it enabled the actors to formulate a project which fed off images rooted in the past but was also very easily brought up to date. The present, the living experience, ensured a strong, natural liaison between a rooted past and an idealized future. But that does not mean the Cold War actors mechanically or deliberately constructed ‘world images’ extracted beforehand from the stock of the philosophy of History, but rather that certain symbols were even stronger because they were inscribed in a continuum whose origins went back to sources in the philosophy of History Though the Cold War was a conflict, it was, too, a system of symbols common to the two blocks and inherited from the ideology of Progress. Thus in the symbolism of the Cold War we find images whose origins go back to the founder of the philosophy of History: Saint Augustine. The strongest image is without question that of Progress, of which the Greeks were not conscious. The same Father of the Church gave History responsibility for time, which is given a meaning, a value and a direction.36 With Augustinianism, history was for the first time made temporal It did not stop being that until the end of the Cold War. By corollary, Augustinianism introduced too the essential notion of a route, of progress between a point of departure and a point of arrival. The civitas humana, the earthly state, was only a preparation for a superior state, the true reality which is the city of God, located beyond time.37 In Saint Augustine we find, as later in Hegel, an end of History. But in Saint Augustine’s eyes it signals the triumph of God.38 Thus in his work there is the central notion of expectation, ‘turning the future into the present’ and giving an essential place to ‘becoming’.39 To say ‘expectation’ is necessarily to say telos, even if the transcendence it craves is exclusively religious and implies human passivity. There is thus in political Augustinianism—summarized here extremely briefly— the idea of time oriented in a progressive sense, with a before and an after, during whose course the individual ‘progresses’ in knowledge, a knowledge which will not be revealed, but discovered gradually in successive stages.40 Time has a value and a cumulative meaning, in contrast to Plato, for example, for whom time created nothing because it was all but forgotten.41 This idea of progress was deemed all the more resonant because it had a counterpart: the fall. The metaphorization of the ‘premise of the fall’—mentioned earlier in reference to the modern ideological systems deriving from the French Revolution—was clearly present in Augustinianism. The strength of this premise and its retranscription in modern ideologies was that it was forged on the basis of a binary principle of opposition between good and evil, in which the opposing city struggles with ‘the City of God’. History is not a triumphal ode, which step by step leads us toward the promised horizon. To be able to think this complex reality we need to be given a polyphonic image: two concurrent themes are superimposed at all times, intercrossing and vying with each other: yes, there really is the city

22 THE MEANING OF THE COLD WAR

of God building itself little by little… but its progress is achieved through a thousand struggles, persecutions, difficulties without number.42 To this binary principle—which we find secularized again in the great ideological and political combats of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—the Enlightenment added the principle of coherence, of the synthesis of reality and meaning.43 The Cold War—first and only great polarization of modern History— thus did no more than transfer these contributions to the strategy of conflict to the field of inter-state relations. The aesthetic of the Cold War We should add a connected fact that stems from the common bases of the two opposing systems, and their shared need for an end. A modernity incarnated by the state was, as noted earlier, behind East and West. Because of its pluralism the West was able to go through an evolution in the idea of modernity whether sociologically, culturally or economically. It entered postmodernity even before the Cold War was complete. During the course of this period the social and cultural changes of the West were considerable. The East stayed in a fixed state of modernity, a prisoner of its monolithic nature. Material forms or customs which the West long ago thought outmoded seem still to be there in the East, petrified by communism. But, setting aside this essential difference, it is evident that both East and West fully adhered to the theme of Progress expressed in the blind cult of productivity called Fordism, and its corollary, Taylorism.44 When the father of the automobile, Taylor, asserted at the beginning of the twentieth century: ‘In the past, man came first; in the future, it will be the system which arrives first’,45 the jubilation that such a proposition caused among the Bolsheviks can easily be imagined, as they discovered the advantages of instrumentalizing this model in two stages. First, they carefully removed any reference to the pluralist American system, thus decoupling democracy and technology. Second, they used it in a typically Russian context to militarize production and ‘discipline’ citizens. Gramsci was not fooled, even in the depths of his prison. He gave a definition to Fordism that could, word for word, be given to Sovietism: ‘Creating a new type of worker, a new man, was the greatest collective effort ever undertaken, at an unparalleled speed and with an awareness of the objectives previously unknown in History.’46 Over the years and decades, the ‘system’ was developed, refined and propagated. It experienced its apogee in the two decades after the Second World War, that is, at the height of the Cold War. Far from being treated as a simple system of production, Fordism was exalted as a true way of life founded on mass production and consumption. David Harvey, in some excellent pages on this topic, noted that Fordism also created, in East and West alike, a certain art form that synthesized modernity, mass and

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authority, such as Le Corbusier expressed—to the point of caricature—in his architecture. Even though Le Corbusier’s career did not of course coincide with the Cold War, he symbolized in effect the family look, the intermingling demonstrated in the creations of East and West. He expressed a sort of aesthetics of telos, dominated by the ideas of centrality, exemplariness, social distribution, a desire for collective transformation, a permanent alliance of mass and meanings, of meaning and power. In his work could be seen a claim to integrate within a single project experience and expectation, ideas and procedures, practical responses and aspiration to a sort of symbolic elevation. The famous ‘need for a tower’ has resisted the end of the Cold War, as shown by the construction at La Défense of a new tower with aspects of Babel and in colours that dissolve into the depths of the sky. All translation of architectural innovation derives from public commissions, in other words, from the state. Only the state seems sufficiently strong, financially and symbolically, to give meaning to mass civilization. Architecture is a voluntarist representation, a transposition of production norms and their constraints into living space. It must be a sprig of the old town at the same time as it brings it air, light and space, and it expresses a fascination for progress, mechanical things and rationalism.47 This voluntarism goes further because it talks of ‘teaching the inhabitants to inhabit’.48 Architecture wants to involve people and involve itself in their goals without conceding one ounce of the power it has to lay down norms, to present the Truth. To provide meaning it has to be simplified, pared down so that everyone can understand it, and at the same time exhibitionist to answer the need for prestige, for radiating statist symbols. Architecture has no purpose except as part of a preconceived view of Progress. The ville radieuse, as imagined by Le Corbusier, expressed this ambition, an ambition fully shared by Russian architects before and during the Cold War. Finally, behind the absolute quest for modernity comes the ‘need for edification’. Architecture aspires to change lives, to make concrete a promise, to overcome confusion and chaos.49 The closeness of the models of East and West is expressed best and most clearly in France, because its internalization of the revolutionary theme of Progress combines with the historical weight of the state in the social field, according to Michael Schneider: Political, revolutionary and democratic France, and the intellectual France which amused itself with the opium of Marxism more than did any other intelligentsia, adhered for nearly two centuries to the dogma that history has meaning, progress and end. According to the dominant positivist philosophy, this meaning can be scientifically known. Finally, the propertied monarchism that remains confided the task of accomplishing this meaning historically to the State, giving its created intervention the title deeds, to say the least. Far from being what Althusser saw in History

24 THE MEANING OF THE COLD WAR

—‘a process without object or end(s)’—French intellectual and cultural history was conceived as progress, which was assigned an end, and incarnated in an object, the State.50 This claim of the state to play the guardians of meaning, to guarantee access to telos, hardly enters into the crisis of meaning, which knocked France harder perhaps than any other Western country, even apart from its intrinsically weak capacity for power. Of course, estab lishing the weakest causal relationship between the exhaustion of the Fordist economic model—to which we shall return —the rejection of avant-garde aesthetics, and the end of the Cold War, would be simplistic; that is not our fundamental proposition. The important point is to see that the end of the Cold War revealed, accentuated—or coincided with—a profound movement, which called into question all globalizing, linear and ‘forerunner’ conceptions, and that the way out from telos goes well beyond sanctioning the failure of the Marxist course.

2 The fall of the Wall The end of the Enlightenment

If we had to sum up the total disillusionment created by the end of the Cold War in one salient sentence, we might say: ‘We thought we saw the great work of the Enlightenment coming to fruition, whereas in fact everything seems to indicate it was brought ruthlessly to an end.’ If we consider the various interpretations of the post Cold War that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall, it is not difficult to see how much they borrowed, either implicitly or explicitly, from three propositions, three great principles of the Enlightenment:1 • the fall of communism deals out a radically new hand in the relationships between nations (the idea of ‘new times’); • the era opened up by the end of communism can be considered as qualitatively superior to the era that went before, since it is built on aspirations founded on freedom (‘History has a meaning’); • the fall of communism expresses the ability of the common people to ‘make History’ for themselves by rejecting the political system that took it away from them (‘It is people who make History’). For as long as the reality of the world seemed superficially to match these three principles, there was no reason not to continue working within the blueprint of the Enlightenment. But when we realized that the paths towards the deconstruction of communism were not all ‘qualitatively superior’, we understood that not only was the completion of the Enlightenment not guaranteed but, moreover, our own reference points (those of the Enlightenment) were useless for understanding such a new type of reality. The conceptual poverty that marks the post-Cold War period was then inevitable. Of the three principles of the Enlightenment that provided a framework for the message of the new world order, the first—that it is a radically new era—is probably the one which was best founded. Here, the false interpretation was not a result of overestimating the change induced by the end of the Cold War, but of underestimating its radical nature by reducing the change to just the end of communism. But, though the death of communism is fundamental to understanding the end of the Cold War, it is increasingly less pertinent to

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understanding the post-Cold War world. This world therefore is becoming a world in itself, an autonomous reality, in much the same way, of course, as was the post-1945 world. This essential difference needs to be stressed as the one way we can understand the main paradox of the post Cold War: on the one hand, there is a global consensus as to why the communist system failed and, on the other, a lack of common reference points for living in the new era. In effect the Cold War system had exaggerated the idea of Progress, as something being brought by the two ‘superstates’. When this double dyke was pulled down it brought with it in one fell swoop a questioning of the great ideologies and a growing challenge to the superstates as regulators of the international system. If we accept this hypothesis, the post Cold War can no longer be seen as deriving from one single point of rupture, the end of communism, but from two upheavals it set in train: the crisis in teleological systems and the crisis in the international system that had been guaranteed, first and foremost, by the superstates. Highlighting this double crisis makes it easier to go on to examine what brought about the failure of the new world order, a failure which rested on precisely that concept of a world project promoted by the dominant powers in the international system. If the new world order has not seen the light of day, it is perhaps because its emergence was linked too closely to the end of the great ideological battles, whereas the exhaustion of the ideological dynamic carried within it the seeds of a delegitimization of the notion of project—and, a fortiori, of a collective project. It thereby revealed that the two superstates’ sole responsibility for the new path of the world was historically exhausted. The idea of a new world order was the offspring of the Enlightenment and the Hegelian spirit in that it gave a leading place to the idea of will conveyed by the states.2 Thus, in place of a new world order, we are experiencing a world time in which three processes reinforce each other: ideological deconstruction; strengthened globalization; and acceleration of the technical change noted since the start of the 1990s; in other words, since the end of the Cold War.3 If the radical nature of the change introduced by the end of the Cold War seems unquestionable, the perception of the post Cold War as a qualitatively new era today seems singularly over-optimistic. No-one, for example, could interpret the tearing apart of Yugoslavia as beneficial, or see in dismembered Bosnia a sign of a new era preferable to that of Tito’s Yugoslavia. Here too the main ways in which the post Cold War is presented suffer from an optimistic, mechanistic vision of international reality, a vision the Manichean over-simplification into ‘good’ and ‘evil’, inherited from the Cold War, only serves to strengthen. For example, we tended to think all aspirations at the time of liberation were democratic aspirations, by assuming to be transitory what Pierre Rosanvallon calls ‘democratic dissymmetry’; in other words, the delay between the development of a political anti-establishment campaign in the name of democracy and the construction of democracy itself, that is to say the long, slow and uncertain setting up of the institutions and procedures of constitutional states. Simultaneously, ‘market democracy’, which had been thought unsurpassable, was

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revealed to be fragile and vulnerable, not only in Eastern Europe and Southern nations but also in the developed societies of the West. One explanation for this reversal depends, as we saw above, on seeing the inheritance of the Enlightenment in the most optimistic events. It was of course predictable that the rapid, peaceful collapse of the Soviet Union would fuel historical optimism. Louis Dumont, who was interested in the circulation of ‘idea-values’ in the world—what we call world time—emphasized the spectacular and volatile nature of grand planetary ideas.4 In its first stages the impact of a new idea from outside is powerful, taking those who experience it almost unawares. Thus it was felt that the collapse, one after another, of the communist regimes of Eastern Europe would spread inexorably to the best-guarded bastions such as East Germany and Romania. The movement grew in volume and in political credibility when the challenge to communist systems seemed to have a contagious effect on all authoritarian regimes, especially under the decisive influence of the media. Thus we saw the ‘Ceau escu effect’ spread throughout Africa. To the four corners of the world it gave a power of attraction to the extension of the fight for democracy that was difficult to control: if a dictator as powerful as Ceau escu could disappear so easily, the petty tyrants in Africa would slip away even more quickly. At least, that was what we might have imagined. However, the fragile nature of this planetary legitimization was underestimated. We did not take account of the ability of ‘local times’ to adopt world time so indirectly as to empty it of meaning, rather than by taking it head on. Certainly there is no systematic, global opposition today to world time, understood as meaning the conjunction of democracy and market. Indeed Islamic and Asian systems, though increasingly rejecting the West’s claim to universalize democracy, do not oppose the imperatives of the market. But, by rejecting a necessary linkage between democracy and market, they challenge the existence of world time and contest its claim to be a legitimate issue for the whole world. In addition, the rejection of a political structure such as ‘market democracy’ does not need a theoretical basis to be effective. On the contrary, the survival of authoritarian regimes relies increasingly on formal concessions to world time. Thus, when elected heads of state in Peru or Guatemala suspend parliament in order to fight terrorism, drug traffickers and corruption, international mobilization is infinitely more difficult to organize than in the case of regimes that are more clearly anti-democratic;5 all the more so in that external pressure cannot be sustained at a high level for ever. What Dumont calls a ‘resurgence’ of local time soon starts to operate and, depending on the particular country or culture, swallows, transforms or contradicts world time. Five years after the fall of the Berlin Wall it is precisely this process which can be seen in Africa or the Arab world. In fact, the advance of democracy in these societies since 1989 is very limited, while all the regimes in these two areas seem to have become extremely fragile following the collapse of communism. Syria,

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for example, still plays a key role in the Middle East, although the end of the Cold War was expected to lead to the end of the Syrian system.6 In Africa, the regime in Zimbabwe bears witness to an amazing capacity for survival, despite the death of the two political resources on which its political legitimacy was founded: the model of ‘scientific socialism’ and the foil of a racist South Africa. The case of China is even more spectacular in that it had to undergo both the de-legitimization of the communist system and the regional economic pressure of the new Asian powers. Now we are seeing the emergence of ‘market authoritarianism’—market Leninism—which no-one could reasonably believe would lead inevitably to ‘market democracy’.7 Although the events which took place in Tiananmen Square highlighted the existence of Western-style democratic protests in that country, we can be under no false illusion about how deep ‘democratic’ values really go. This assertion does not mean we have to fall into the trap of cultural relativity (‘the Chinese are not ripe for democracy’), but we have to understand that the path or conversion to ‘market democracy’ will never be ensured by a sort of historical necessity What does this mean? Simply that democracy never gains ground because it is a good thing in itself. To be constructed and take root it needs to be supported by experience that demonstrates in a very practical way that it is superior to any other political ‘state’. In other words, it will succeed in China only when it starts to be identified with order. For that to happen it must be possible to envisage political institutions in a position to manage that order. But although historically Chinese philosophy considered power and morals, it never envisaged institutions capable of ensuring political regulation.8 It is perhaps because of this philosophical gap, rather than a sort of ‘cultural unsuitability for democracy’, that the Chinese democratic structure is so fragile. This hypothesis is probably not the only one that ought to be taken into account, but it seems to have at least one merit: it goes beyond the static and sterile debate between those who see in the resistance to democracy the alibi of this very authoritarianism, and those for whom democracy is decidedly too perishable to be exported to ‘faraway countries’. In the case of China, this construction superseded Yi Fang, Jiu Luan, that is, the idea that all deregulation leads to dislocation and chaos. For the Chinese there is only one absolute relationship, notes François Jullien: that which links order to disorder.9 So long as democracy is not considered to be the best means of restricting the social deregulation currently taking place, its chances of acclimatization in China will be limited. From this viewpoint, neither loud denunciation of human rights violations nor mediocre commercial compromises with the Chinese powers will have a decisive influence on the course of events. The unforeseen opposition to ‘market democracy’ The challenge of historical, political and cultural diversity is however not enough to explain the weaknesses of ‘market democracy’ and the resulting

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disappointment with the new world order. In order to appreciate the problem fully, we need to ask why it is so difficult for ‘market democracy’, including in Western societies, to constitute a horizon of meaning. Conceptually, ‘market democracy’ presents itself as an optimal, almost natural, state. By doing so, it shows itself incapable of imagining that it could be superseded if the market, democracy or both should happen to go astray. Certainly, this optimal state claims to be favourable to change, improvement, development and adjustment. ‘Market democracy’ wants to be seen as flexible, adaptable and improvable, and therefore partly immune to the sudden upsets that are part and parcel of rigid systems.10 However, in contrast to the great teleological systems which, as we have seen, tend to be permanent metaphors for ‘the premise of the fall’, and therefore envisage a collapse of the collective project, ‘market democracy’ rejects this notion. Implicitly it sees a combination of democratic sanctions (elections) and market (competition) as a way of correcting errors or deviations at regular intervals (democracy) or even instantaneously (market). Its apparent indestructibility is based on the premise that systems that deny plurality or respect for the market will fail. Its fundamental weakness lies in the fact that its superiority rests on the absence of a countermodel that could challenge it as a whole, while ignoring the several factors which could upset it from within without necessarily seeking to overthrow it as a block. In other words, ‘market democracy’ believes it draws its strength from the fact that no-one challenges democracy and market together as a block. Paul Ricoeur said that the strongest utopias were those which found something unfulfilled in social traditions and that this unfulfilment constituted in fact ‘a reserve of meaning’.11 But everything leads us to think that ‘market democracy’ distinguishes itself and distances itself precisely on this issue. By presenting itself as a ‘presumed-necessary state’ on a world scale, it ignores or underrates the particular historical and cultural conditions which led Western societies to live in ‘market democracies’. Any claim to a historical or cultural specificity is implicitly perceived as a political alibi for delaying the arrival of ‘market democracy’. In other words, if the Iranians refused Western democracy, they would be doing it less in the name of incompatibility between Islam and democracy than because of a desire to legitimize the antidemocratic nature of the mullahs’ regime on cultural grounds. ‘Market democracy’ therefore sees its lack of conceptual or philosophical depth as providing good conditions for its universal propagation (‘market democracy’ is suitable for the whole world). It all creates a problem not only for the potential ‘candidates’ but also for Western societies themselves. Indeed, although ‘market democracy’ may acknowledge its weaknesses, and thereby its capacity for improvement, it considers itself primarily a contemporary state changed by everyday experiences, and unburdened by either the constraints of the past or the promises of a better future. Unused to waiting, it seems in no way inclined to live or think of itself as a utopia capable of accomplishing the unaccomplished, of cultivating what was fallow, or tackling a summit that until

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recently was protected by the ice of the Cold War. Instead it presents itself as infinitely variable, able to manage timelessly the constraints of the present. This rejection of utopia is likely to be reinforced further since Western societies seem —for economic and social reasons—to be more concerned with protecting themselves from increasing unemployment than with propelling themselves towards a ‘better future’. ‘Market democracy’ thus rejects any idea of transcendency. It does not seek to prove anything. It is the opposite of a myth, even if it is unachievable to its full extent, because the concept of final goal that it incarnates (‘market democracy’ is unsurpassable) is not underpinned with the idea of a conflict which would delay its achievement. It lacks that notion of potential for development which allows collective mobilization to be built on the fear of not arriving at the anticipated result. Nevertheless, while wanting to be rid of all teleology, ‘market democracy’ is not completely emancipated from the guardianship of the Enlightenment. By recognizing as adversaries only those representations that challenge it as a whole, it retains a holistic vision of the world. It looks like a leftover from Hegel in that it claims that all which is real can be seen in terms of democracy and market. Thus Western states seem to see the absence of a systematic, global challenge to their values as a sign of their universal legitimacy, whereas a thousand challenges to or deviations from democracy and market can be discovered, including within these same states. The fact that these actions are not thought through in a coherent way does not affect their reality and vitality, except for thinking that the problems or threats might call for a systematization and ordering similar to those of communism. By presenting itself as an experiment whose validity was demonstrated by the failure of communism, ‘market democracy’ implicitly challenges the creative tension between the field of experiment and the horizon of expectation. In other words, it aspires neither to reach a new objective nor to construct a new horizon of meaning. It seeks simply to confirm the viability of the existing reality. This rejection of utopia is even more interesting to analyse now that it has been incorporated into an entire philosophical critique of democracy, a critique usefully clarified by Rorty. Indeed Rorty tries not only to explain this shrinking away from utopia but also to justify it in philosophical terms. For him, democracy is a state of being rather than a foundation. It therefore does not require any philosophical or moral justification.12 On this point he joins the school of American ‘pragmatists’, led among others by Dewey, who believes that democracy can ‘economize on philosophical presuppositions’. It would join the list of important things in life that do not need to justify their existence or their legitimacy. Having a mother, he says, is absolutely fundamental for individuals. But are they therefore obliged to justify their mother’s existence?13 To this question Rorty replies clearly in the negative. He almost explicitly invites us to think of democracy as a reality that is consubstantial with Western identity, making debate about its foundations almost pointless. Although Rorty’s thinking

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remains philosophical, in other words not claiming to be operational, we cannot fail to see in it a sort of sidestepping of the debate about the foundations of democracy, a sidestepping that is problematic in the post-Cold War world, precisely because the challenges it faces are much more endogenous than exogenous. They emanate much less often from an external actor with an antidemocratic political project, and equipped with the attributes of military force, than from internal, partial and fragmented challenges that lack only the occasion or marching orders which would unite them. Yet how can we reply to these internal challenges except by reference to the issue of foundation, once the external threat is no longer there to serve as a foil, a counter-example, a ‘counterfoundation’? Does not the weakening of the democratic link in all Western democratic societies result from the difficulty in finding a basis for this link now that the list of perils and conflicts has been profoundly modified? Rorty does not reply convincingly to these essential questions. He leaves to one side the main objection of those such as Koselleck, for whom the disappearance of a horizon of expectation, which is basically only the projection onto the future of one or more foundations, necessarily leads to questioning the experience of the present. In other words, without foundation, democracy crumbles because we can no longer match it against a superior principle. At the same time, the fact that an end is no longer specified or, which amounts to the same thing, a foundation is no longer recognized, leads necessarily to a questioning of everything that had been accepted for the sake of this now-rejected end. On the face of it, the refusal to ‘found’ democracy can easily be interpreted as an act of political and philosophical relativism, which would fit Dewey’s idea that communal disenchantment would be the price to pay for individual spiritual freedom.14 However, we cannot fail to note the gap between the philosophical modesty of ‘market democracy’ and its political claim to provide meaning for the whole world. Outside the Western world, the pretensions of ‘market democracy’ in wanting to impose itself without having to justify itself generate international political tension that finishes up, ‘for want of anything better’, by being expressed and exaggerated in cultural terms. In what name could the West succeed in presenting democracy as ‘good’ or ‘better’ if it cannot succeed in defining ‘good’ or justifying ‘better’? It is therefore not an exaggeration to consider that the West’s claim to convert ‘market democracy’ into an unsurpassable political horizon is accompanied by substantial philosophical poverty in the very content of this ‘market democracy’. Under these conditions it is therefore unsurprising to see challenges to ‘market democracy’, sometimes subdued but often violent, proliferating throughout the world, including in Eastern Europe, as if the West were giving the impression of wanting to spread its values without knowing in what name it was acting. Here again there is a major political inconsistency in wanting to advocate a sort of abstract, almost dogmatic universalism in a foreign territory at the same time as a destructive relativism has set up on its home ground.

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Sidestepping the debate about the foundations of democracy presents real political risks which, moreover, go beyond the field of international relations. At the very heart of Western societies the disappearance of all horizons of expectation is leading to a complex questioning of the political order through a challenge to the ‘Cold War institutions’, the delegitimization of redistribution and social issues, and the undermining of state-led territorial order. The dismantling of Cold War institutions Opposition to the institutions and regimes of the Cold War was, most unexpectedly, strongest within Western societies. Though no-one expected everything to stay the same, few realized that the collapse of Soviet institutions would have a capillary effect on their Western counterparts. This symmetrical effect was underestimated or its existence denied, because it would have cast an immediate shadow on the victory of liberty over totalitarianism; and it would have fostered an idea that the institutions of East and West were similar, whereas the West considered itself radically different. The speed with which communism collapsed and the scale of its delegitimization meant that the perception and scale of things very quickly ceased to be relative. There was no longer any reason to accept the imperfection of institutions whose merit had been to be superior or preferable to those of communism. The terminology used in the East for taking apart communist institutions served in some cases to dismantle Cold War institutions. For example, the concept of ‘transparency’, which appeared during the Gorbachev period, was adopted by Western societies to end the opaqueness of Cold War institutions, meaning not only the political, social, cultural and military institutions that took part in the Cold War, but also more widely the strongly hierarchical, pyramid-type institutions, highly opaque and generally endowed with their own strong institutionalized culture. Such was the case with the World Bank, which can no longer use state sovereignty as an excuse for ignoring public opinion, which increasingly wants to know more about its development projects. But it is also the case of the French railway organization, the SNCF, which is now paying a high price for having a vision of the public interest that was far from the real needs of its users.15 Even a country such as Switzerland seems not to have escaped from this movement of defiance towards established institutions, a defiance that, in this case, is expressed more towards local institutions (cantons, towns) than to federal institutions.16 The French nurses’ strike in 1990, the first major strike in France after the Cold War, was symbolic. It made two complementary demands: for a greater transparency about procedures and the running of ‘big public services’, such as social welfare; and for recognition of the nurses’ own identity, torn between increasing specialization and the coherence of the nursing profession as a whole.17 It revealed a desire for participation and for recognition. In doing so it interpreted a demand for meaning.18

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Similarly, the collapse of the Cold War regime in Italy began in an analogous way to that of the Soviet system: ‘There is in Italy a moral crisis analogous to that of real socialism and its nomenklatura.’19 The crisis hit the political system and the state simultaneously; the former because Christian Democrat hegemony lost its historic role as a barrier against the Communist party coming to power; the latter because it had not created a legitimacy for itself independent of partitocrazia (party-rule). The increasing strength of the regionalist parties—the Leagues—not only underlines the exhaustion of the Cold War regime, which was based on a close link between ideology and clientelism, but also the blurring it allowed of the social and religious divides on which postwar Italy had been built.20 In the northern regions, the Northern League took a significant chunk of the Christian Democrat and Communist party electorates. However, in Italy as elsewhere, the collapse of the Cold War regime went further than the dismantling of institutions. The regionalist challenge attacks the very foundations of the modern Italy of the Risorgimento.21 In the case of Italy as in Belgium, what was felt to be the decisive failure of the strategy of a stateled modernization, based on the exercise of will and unification, meant that the challenge to the Cold War regime was closely linked to a radical challenge to national unity, with its implications for redistribution. We can see therefore that the appeal of the Leagues does not lie in their ability to activate a clearly defined regional identity—there is no Lombardian identity any more than there is a Venetian or Tuscan identity—but more in their challenge to the three foundations of postwar Italy: the parties, the nation and redistribution.22 The Leagues pit themselves against the clientelist national parties, the regions against the Italian nation, and local and regional appropriation of resources against national and social redistribution. The example of Italy makes it clear how much the Enlightenment’s integrationist principle, as well as the terminology it introduced, has been devalued. It would be a mistake to see the phenomenon of the Leagues as backward-looking, resisting the modernization strategy; or as a reflex of fear in the face of globalization; or as an identification strategy based on ethnicity resisting one based on a national project—on all three counts, reality is infinitely more complex and hugely different from these over-simplifications. In many respects the phenomenon of the Leagues is not an antimodernist reaction but a reaction to the failure of the political modernization of Italy.23 It cannot be stressed enough that the challenge to the corrupt partitocrazia system in Italy was less a ‘moral’ challenge than the result of its growing economic cost, which European integration makes increasingly burdensome.24 This interaction between the end of the Cold War—calling for a change of teams—and the pressures of globalization—demanding tighter margins— explains to a large extent the controlled upheaval of the Japanese political system. In Italy as in Japan—although the situations were very different—the denunciation of corruption cannot be understood without taking into account this conjunction of factors; that is, without the significance of world time.

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The end of the great ideologies and the increasing influence of the market principle in all areas of social life have contributed to making economic efficiency an essential criterion for evaluating Western political systems.25 These systems are now forced to show results, bringing the risks from demystifying public authority that this approach implies. The divorce between political archaism and economic dynamism explains in part the crisis of the Italian system, which the Leagues interpreted over-simplistically as based on a North-South divide, attributing political archaism to the hold of the South over the central political system, and modernity to the prosperous regions of the North. Having put this case forward, we must now see how the disenchantment created by the end of the Cold War progressively took hold throughout the world, and examine the various chains of events through which Hegel’s clarification of the ‘enigma of the world’ so quickly degenerated into planetary political confusion. It would be useful to summarize here the chronology of the post-Cold War period, or, more appropriately, periods. There are several ‘post-Cold War periods’ The first post-Cold War period began with the fall of the Wall and finished with the start of the Gulf crisis. It was the euphoric period during which the Kantian and Hegelian theses of perpetual peace and the triumph of reason flourished. It was especially, therefore, the period during which we thought the winding-up of the Cold War could be a limited moment in time and space. The Cold War constituted a sort of bad memory which we could conveniently clear from our heads. Emptying it from our minds was made easier by evidence of the widespread failure of communism. The West, like the elites of the East, thus tended to interpret the end of the Cold War as a ‘purging’, a kind of ‘reverse normalization’. The fact that the civil societies of the East appeared incapable of proposing the smallest new idea on how to organize the post Cold War; the fact that dissidence in the East had been more social (Poland) or moral (Czechoslovakia) than political; the fact that the transition to a market economy had never been debated by the dissident groups: all this was more or less interpreted not as a structural handicap but rather as a short cut towards ‘market democracy’. Although it was never given a theoretical foundation, this first post-Cold War period was animated by a great liberal will, based on the idea that the rejection of communism and the political vacuousness in Eastern Europe—reflected in a childish idealization of the West—constituted the best hand for ‘market democracy’. Limited in time, the post Cold War seemed equally limited in space. We pretended to believe and to hope that a sort of optimum political decomposition existed, which not only had no reason to threaten the territorial structure of the Cold War (East Germany and the Baltic countries excluded), but in addition, would confine itself to Eastern Europe. Both during and after the Cold War, the United States never desired the political and territorial

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fragmentation of the USSR. Dismantling the whole Cold War, and nothing but the Cold War. that was supposed to be the rational agenda for the new world order. With the start of the Gulf crisis in August 1990, the international system entered the second post-Cold War period. This crisis resulted in extending to the South the vision of a big, rapid restructuring of the world on new foundations. It increased Western euphoria, because it signalled the political disappearance of the USSR. Not only was there no longer an ideological alternative—which we had known since the fall of the Berlin Wall—but also no strategic alternative, something the vast majority of Southern nations discovered with fear. It was the period when the idea of a world order based on the triumph of international law and reason flourished. In truth it was less to do with building ‘a new world order’ than with revealing the rules of ‘a new public order’ based on a new, optimal linkage between principles and means, in the East as well as in the South. In terms of means, the Gulf War gave birth to the principle of coalition, combining the advantages of political consensus and of leadership exercised by a dominant actor. In terms of principles, it gave a blessing through the famous United Nations resolution 688 to the principle of interference, even if in reality the ‘founding text of interference’ relied on countless ambiguities. The most important ambiguity stemmed from the fact that, contrary to received wisdom, interference on humanitarian grounds required the formal agreement of the nation in which the intervention takes place (in this case, Iraq).26 Be that as it may, this second ‘moment’ superficially consecrated on an international scale— and no longer only in the East—the hypothesis of a post Cold War that was controllable, decipherable and qualitatively superior. One year after the start of the Gulf crisis, the putsch in Moscow, only just preceded by the dismantling of Yugoslavia, and then the subsequent collapse of the USSR in December 1991, destroyed this interpretation of the post Cold War. During this phase two new realities emerged that almost totally quashed the earlier euphoric perceptions. The first consequence of the disappearance of the USSR was its immediate demonstration that the principle of reverse normalization was not true. Decomposition would no longer stop at the gates of the Cold War, but take with it the whole building. In effect decommunization led not only to the disappearance of the GDR and the Soviet Union, but also to the division of the federation of Czechoslovakia, the disintegration of Yugoslavia, the extension of ethnic purification to Eastern European and former Soviet Union states with national minorities, and the exacerbation of local and regionalist claims within the Russian federation itself. In other words, not only did the process of decomposition not stop where it was expected to, but also it was difficult to see what could stop it. The second consequence—even more alarming than the first—was the demonstration that political decomposition was not going to be confined to the

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former socialist countries, but could reach the West, where regional demands with a separatist tone advanced in Belgium, Italy and Canada. The end of the Cold War can be seen to have accelerated the decomposition of Belgium through the combination of two factors: the ending of military conscription—which reduced the opportunity for interchange between Flemish and Walloons—and the example given to Belgium by the ‘friendly divorce’ between the Czech Republic and Slovakia. A third factor can be added which stems in large part from the devaluation of the socialist ideal: redistribution of wealth between regions of unequal levels of development has lost its legitimacy (Wallonia and Flanders). This factor played a key role in the circumstances leading to the dismantling of the Yugoslav republic, because Slovenia was increasingly reluctant to share its ‘prosperity’ with less-developed republics. The obligation to ‘pay for others’ within the same nation, when the ‘others’ do not speak the same language or share the same history, is losing its pertinence. After the Cold War the sphere of what is ‘politically thinkable’ has tended to free itself from constraints, whether territorial constraints (national) or social constraints (sharing), and going beyond that in the case of Belgium. For Europe the scale of this problem has become fundamental. The Treaty on European Union had, among other ambitions, that of responding to the double challenge on territorialism and redistribution with a sort of supra-state exercise of will. In economic and monetary policies national space was abolished in some way (single market, central European bank) or judged of little significance. In social policy the Europe of Maastricht proposed to reinforce the redistribution of wealth from affluent countries to less-favoured countries. Yet it is this dual policy that creates a problem, as it comes up against the residual sovereignty of the states as well as against the growing intolerance of public opinion for national and, a fortiori, supranational, redistributive policies. The extent of the upheaval induced by the collapse of communism is still undecided.

3 Out of step with time

The crisis of the final goal is developing in a context of confusion. It is in effect leading to a profound disruption of our relationship to time and a rejection of any idea of expectation—which we might define as an ensemble of private or collective declarations about the future, assumed to surpass previous personal experience.1 This concept corresponds to our need to project ourselves towards another existence we believe is better. It expresses the refusal to admit that everyday life, the experience of each day, is sufficient as a source of meaning. The loss of the relationship to time is most obvious in Eastern Europe, where expectation was devitalized, defaced and demeaned by communism—though Southern countries imbued with progressism were scarcely exempt either.2 In a way, excessive utopia killed utopia. Any idea of telos, any invitation to take a new path, is now met with suspicion. If the debate about the ‘end of History’ has any meaning, this is it. The crisis of expectation in no way announces the end of History, if we mean by that the process of transformation of human societies. But, on the other hand, it poses urgently and in new terms the problem of a representation of the future that is not a goal-driven projection in a preordained direction, with a predetermined outcome, of a potential future. Naturally, the issue is not the social change in the world but our capacity to interpret it, to direct it, to conceive it. The issue is thus not the rhythm of the world but the meaning of the world—to pick up the excellent expression of Jean-Luc Nancy.3 Georges Nivat writes that in Russia one dreams of Russian capitalism, of Siberia irrigated by Japanese capital, of private initiative worthy of the Russian merchants of earlier times, of a renovated Russia, of a federalist Union, of a new baptism of Russia…but the future no longer exists. The country of utopians, of the Slav utopia, the Marxist utopia, the cosmic utopia of Tsiolkovski, the ‘actualized utopia’ of Zinoviev, the upside-down and derisory utopia of katastroïka, has no further thought for its future.4 The first consequence of this eradication of teleology is the erosion of any political identification that has Promethean overtones including, of course, socialism.

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It appears the political tradition that derived from the Enlightenment and the French Revolution was weakened greatly by forty years of a communist regime. This tradition was often cited as the regime’s primary ideological source, bearer of the same ‘Promethean’, ‘constructivist’, ‘atheistic’ assumptions, that is to say, the presuppositions of which communism would have been the finished, final product. It does not say much for it that the 1989 revolutions were not seen in Europe as the distant echo of that of 1789: they were seen rather as its ultimate defeat.5 The traumatic nature of the teleological amputation that accompanied the death of homo sovieticus led not only to the death of any horizon of expectation but also to a return to the past, a reconstructed past based on the reproduction of traditions. The traditions were bearers of illusions in the same way as was the myth of the communist ‘New Man’. But, in contrast to the New Man, the return to the past offered no coherent access path, no teleological route, and certainly no conceptual, ideological, political or cultural unity.6 Attempts to reconstruct meaning are not lacking in Russia. They go from the myth of the Third Rome to a spiritualist Russia, by way of the most diverse catastrophisms. But their capacity to provide meaning seems very limited in comparison with the atomization of society and the vast problems of daily life.7 The upsetting of the relationship to time meant that a scenario for transition to ‘market democracy’, such as that we were able to define for Southern Europe or Latin America during the last twenty years, was almost totally inadequate for considering change in Eastern Europe. Transition’ suggested ‘path’ but also a reasoned and reasonable programme of change: a sequence of steps that included a gradual refounding of institutions, preventing antagonism between new and old governing elites, keeping them together in power temporarily while the state was remodelled.8 But it was striking to see how unsuitable the idea of a path based on gradualist objectives and mobilization proved to be in Eastern Europe: on the one hand, the field of manoeuvre turned out to be devastated, atomized, with no social mobilization; on the other, the sequence of steps towards change telescoped into one another. Immediacy ruined the idea of transition The idea of transition generally implies clearing a path between obstacles; sorting, selecting and balancing between positive and negative legacies; grafting democracy onto a pre-existing market economy (as in Spain or Latin America). It assumes a need to destroy political tumours that have infiltrated a healthy body. It implies too the integration into political society of non-democratic groups thought to be ‘retrievable’ (Francoist conservatives, for example). But this type of transition hypothesis did not prove useful for understanding the novel character of political transition in Eastern Europe. Curiously, decommunization seems to

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have been thought about with tools used to analyse the Spain of Franco, or the Chile of Pinochet, despite the enormous intellectual effort that had been devoted to differentiating between authoritarianism and totalitarianism. In other words, it was thought it would be enough to dismantle the institutions of totalitarianism to arrive at, or go back to, the democratic age. ‘We thought it was obvious that only the regime, the Russians and the communists prevented us achieving our ambitious plans, our desire to construct our country.’9 The quiet collapse of the communist regimes encouraged this confusion at first, since it masked the extreme nature of the problems generated by the collapse of the state, the breaking up of social relationships and the devastation of industrial production. The term ‘democratic transition’ had referred to the dismantling of authoritarian structures only, whereas the transitions in Eastern Europe had to face a triple dislocation—territorial, political and economic; in the ‘classic’ transitions of Western Europe, the stakes had been almost exclusively political.10 The vastness of the problems and their historically novel character—Western Europe took almost two centuries to move from the nation-state to democracy— turned any idea of referring to a model, or selecting a ‘recommended route’, into fantasy, the more so because no external power seemed conceptually and economically equipped to define the rhythm and conditions for transforming these societies. That is why the debates about economic aid to Russia were somewhat ludicrous. They seemed to forget that an injection of resources from outside could have only a marginal effect on the pace and conditions of social transformation in a country of that size. Behind the idea of transition was an image not only of a path, but also of a gradual change, negotiated by the agents of change. A quiet transition, a flexible transformation. It has proved difficult, however, to transpose this moderateness to Eastern Europe, because gradualism and radicalism are equally unsuitable. Economic gradualism, reflected for example in slow privatization, was bound to encourage confusion and the burying of reforms. The reforms therefore combined the disadvantages of the past with those of the transitory present. Radicalism would have in principle been able to remove these disadvantages by creating a shock effect, dislodging the supporters of the old order almost by surprise, and making change irreversible. Price deregulation is one example among others of this approach. But the disadvantages of accelerated dislocation and brutal restructuring seem just as great, whether economically (the market is a human and institutional construct), socially (social insecurity systems) or morally (the loss of reference points). Thus certain sudden privatizations ended up not in true liberalization but in a privatization of the state much appreciated by the former nomenklaturas.11 Economic deregulation therefore interlocked closely with the deregulation of the state, for example in Russia, where mafias, controllers of the economic game, have proliferated. That is to say, the simultaneous nature of the challenges and their unusual character made the choice between radicalism and gradualism an unreal one. In the event, most societies in Eastern Europe have experienced rhythms of

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transformation in which ‘gradualism’ and ‘radicalism’ mingle and telescope into each other. The upsetting of the relationship to time was accentuated by the rapid and unexpected conditions in which the change took place. In effect, the revolutions of 1989 fed a determination to destroy (the past), a willingness to break with the ‘living past’ and all that it symbolized, including the forms of opposition to totalitarianism. These oppositions foundered because they often existed only to oppose communism (Solidarity in Poland), or only survived thanks to it: ‘Our old culture foundered in front of our eyes after having held on to exhaustion point,’ said the Georgian film director Otar Iosseliani.12 But that determined will, which saw itself as the special instrument of change, turned out to be precisely the most substantial part of the heritage of the ‘rejected past’. It did not fool Václav Havel, who said he had ‘noted with some horror that his impatience had something communist about it’. For their part, Adam Michnik and Béla Farago could talk about anti-Soviet Bolshevism.13 The political culture of impatience is explained both by the communist inheritance and by the nature of present time, the constraints of world time. East European societies implicitly hoped for an immediate reward for their rejection of the Marxist telos, rapid compensation for what they had renounced. They perceived ‘market democracy’ as their due and not as a hazardous structure that did not offer much security socially. Though they seemed willingly disposed to see it as a horizon that was politically unsurpassable, they did not understand why the distance that separated them from this horizon would not at the same time be rapidly passable. The longing to emigrate that is seen so often in these societies, even as they are freeing themselves, is not a response to strictly material needs. It is a response to a refusal to wait even longer and a desire to obtain very rapidly what appears to be available elsewhere. The enormous misunderstanding between Eastern Europe and the European Union originates here. Eastern Europe finds it difficult to understand that its membership of a common European meaning may not result in prosperity being more evenly shared between the two Europes, and that a community of values (meaning) may not lead to a community of belonging. East European societies feel they have already paid, at a high price, their waiting fees. They want the immediate satisfaction of their demands rather than the definition of a new ‘path’. ‘Patience, confidence and belief’, urgently required by the size of the problems, as emphasized by Claus Offe, are precisely the values most undervalued in the posttotalitarian era.14 The disappointment is not however confined to East European societies; in fact it characterizes the whole group of societies in which rupture was thought to herald a radical change, real liberation. It is for example true of South Africa, where it is at present particularly delicate to make an exasperated black population accept that dismantling apartheid does not in itself guarantee a rapid improvement in the living standards of the majority population. The social atomization produced by apartheid

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encourages a slide towards delinquency and violence rather than towards a social mobilization channelled through powerful, representative social actors.15 In such a context, ‘market democracy’ is pure theoretical abstraction, or rather it has no great practical significance, even if it contains some ‘democracy’ and some ‘market’. The exit of apartheid cannot be reduced to the definitive abolition of apartheid, in the same way that the exit of communism cannot be equated with the foundering of communism. The end of expectation and the rising of frustrations The rejection of expectation in those societies imbued with the idea of final goal is magnified by the strength of the movement of cultural globalization or, in other words, by the force of the feeling of instantaneousness and proximity that is generated by the globalization of the market and the globalization of the media. What ensues is an extreme volatility of public opinion, which utters the bogus expression, ‘disenchantment’, as soon its immediate demands are not met. The historic conjunction of the end of telos and of globalization, with its retinue of frustration and impatience, upset the relationship of societies to time as well as the conditions for taking on political responsibility. In Eastern Europe, just as in the South, these societies have the means, one might say, to visualize ‘market democracy’. They are stimulated by its proximity to attain it as rapidly as possible, without transition. There is, therefore, a sort of objection to any different type of expectation. These societies are collectively trying to restrict their own experience to that currently experienced by West European societies. Political analysis lacks a proper theory of impatience that could take into account two aspects of world time: speed and feelings—forces that are constructed and nourished in a quite remarkable way by the media. Paul Virilio was one of the first to attract attention to the role of speed in political analysis.16 The most immediate consequence of the new deal is to substitute frustration for the principle of expectation. The globalization of frustration is the natural child of the technological revolution of the last fifteen years. A reduction in communication costs, combined with the commercialization of new forms of transmission, has made faxes and satellites standard vectors. The unit price of these new media has dropped so low that their propagation is less and less affected by the small disposable incomes at local level in the South. Some contest the current and future scale of this phenomenon by claiming that the chaotic profusion of superficial, deformed images has little effect on the rhythm of transformation of these societies in the South or East. Though worth taking into account, this criticism does not fully convince. In effect, globalization of frustration does not rely on assimilation, filtered and ordered, of external knowledge. Far from giving long-distance education on moderation, it encourages local frustration at home by offering an illusion that people could experience something different when in fact they have no real chance of

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acquiring it. Unlike the time of the conquering ideologies of modernization, when people tried simply to imitate or to be someone else, today they try to gain access to the prosperity of the North without sharing all its values.17 Frustration feeds on this double impossibility. It is, whether one likes it or not, one reason for the ‘complexification’ of the immigration problem. It is also why the ‘return to identity’, like globalization, occurs in synchronized rather than consecutive phases, with all its contradictory consequences. Globalization and fragmentation are acting in combination on the world social body. Actors in the world social system are ever more reluctant to accept the values of patience, because, more than ever before, they have the feeling of living in real time with the rich peoples of the North. Their demand for instantaneousness is stronger inasmuch as they fought for independence on the myth of ‘sacrifice for future generations’. That is why, in the South as much as in the East, frustration increases not at the moment the new order is settled but when all becomes possible in the long term. Suspicion about golden tomorrows has grown to the point of making the ‘marginal cost’ of waiting personally intolerable. The force of frustration then starts to work, even if its rhythm and its intensity differ, according to the society or country (India is not Mexico). From this point of view, the hastily calculated correlations between rates of unemployment in East Europe and emigration to the West do not appear justified. If the tax on frustration remains high, the cost of uprooting is even higher. The potential for frustration is powerfully developed by the media. But they are only one vector among many others, such as the lifting of restrictions on foreign travel, word of mouth, exchange of cassettes, tourism, and family visits. In addition, in various and often unexpected ways, ‘the man or woman of the South’ has acquired an almost intimate understanding of the hierarchy of material goods and values in the North: the price range of different models of Mercedes is part of the basic knowledge of people on Lagos street corners. Vehicle owners, moreover, are so conscious of the strength of this reality they use it to demonstrate their social rank.18 This transformation of the relationship to space and time is one of the most fundamental characteristics of social globalization. After the Cold War it was one factor in the overturning of social relationships between North and South, East and West. Somewhat curiously, this transformation of the relationship to social change in the world was not properly appreciated in the euphoria that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall. It seemed to have been thought of initially, in the East as much as the West, not as a fundamental obstacle to ‘restarting’ these societies, but as a short cut to ‘market democracy’. In other words, it was thought that copying Western experience would dispense a society from having to make its own way, or from having to reformulate in specific terms a new relationship between its experience and its expectations. Five years later no East European society appeared to have a collective project drawn up by its own political and social forces.

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It has been said and noted that East European societies, having rejected the communist utopia, tended to sign up to the liberal utopia. But this liberal utopia is for them more a simple idealization of ‘market democracy’ than the will to give themselves the means to build it in order to fulfil the expectation. The propensity of countries in Eastern Europe to project themselves into the future without really taking on their present is reflected in the precipitate way they went separately and rapidly to the European Union either to obtain a statute of association, or to attract investment, whereas they ignored the advantages of renewed regional cooperation, and the dangers of opening up their economies in a way that was short-sighted, mechanical and imitative.19 They thought a wholesale repudiation of the past would accelerate a radical and positive transformation. This divorce between expectation and experience tends, as Paul Ricoeur explains, to discourage action, because a projection into an idealized future without an anchorage in current experience is inadequate for proposing a practicable path towards the ideals.20 It is followed by an upsetting of the relationship to time, which tends to reject present experience in favour of projection forwards to a future liberal provider of prosperity (power) and backwards to an earlier past that might reinforce identity (meaning). In such conditions the linkage of meaning with the looked-for power becomes extremely problematic, because it relies on two temporal phenomena whose sole common point seems to be an escape from present experience.

4 Universalism runs out of steam

The exhaustion of universalism The rejection of expectation, the loss of legitimacy of progressive ideas, and the refusal to plan for ‘a promising future’ will be reflected from now on in the main challenge of the post Cold War: that of identity. It is no accident that there is a symmetrical relationship between the end of expectation and the emphasis on identity. As Charles Taylor notes, talking of identity means ceasing to see your horizon as destiny.1 We give up trying to plan ahead or set ourselves a destination; we reject expectation (and therefore the future) in favour of what seems a less unpleasant experience: the past. The strategy of the short-term, as we discussed in a previous chapter, comes into play again, since this rejection is translated into impatience with the constraints of ‘living together’. Petr Pithart explains the Czechoslovak divorce not as a necessary fate, but as the effect of impatience on both sides. The two sides chose between the long-term advantages of unity and the shortterm symbolic benefits— for the Slovaks—of a split.2 The search for identity is thus related to a sort of symbolic pause in time, of return to sources—real or imaginary—which are increasingly regarded as a means of emancipation from the larger-scale, either geographically (federalization or globalization) or symbolically (a teleologically inspired plan for the future). The return to identity certainly does not mean that identity was absent during the Cold War. It was simply hidden by other, more salient forms of identification of a social, political or ideological nature; being a unionized worker at Fiat was more significant than being a Lombard. Today, being a Lombard takes precedence over being a worker at Fiat, even if the Lombard at Fiat is very likely to have come from the Italian South, which is held in contempt by the League. The idea of searching for roots is generally described as ‘a return to nationalism’. Superficially the phrase is persuasive. Indeed, the past is being restaged everywhere; activities are taking place based on exclusion or differentiation. Attempts are being made everywhere to revive social ways fallen into disuse. Politicians have no hesitation in appealing to the collective memory

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—in a carefully selective way—in order to justify their present conduct by the past. But it cannot be said too often that ‘a return to nationalism’ is not an inevitable historical or cultural movement that will always bob up, like some multi-headed hydra. It is a reinvention of the past put at the service of a current project.3 Neither ‘nationalism’ nor ‘return’ enables us to understand the ensemble of phenomena and processes facing us today. The apparent similarity between different events is misleading. First of all, the paramount demands in ‘the return to nationalism’ jeopardize, paradoxically, the idea of ‘national’. The Leagues in Italy are the negation of Italian national unity; the shortcomings of national unity provide the basis for regionalism. The crisis in Italy lies less in a growth of nationalism than in the crisis of national feeling. ‘League-ism’ stems from a reaction to the three symbols of the state, namely parliament, parties and the redistribution of wealth in favour of the South. The periodic need for an ‘antisystem’ political argument has taken the opportunity given by world time to express itself, and above all to prosper.4 Second, the tribal confrontation in Afghanistan and in neighbouring Tadjikistan shows in a more bloody fashion how an increasing sense of primary identity is exercised precisely against former or newly created nation-states. These nations are not ‘returning to nationalism’. They are seeking at best to build it, at worst to destroy the rare symbols connected with it. Finally, even though Islamic movements frequently act on a national basis, their activities work exactly against the nationalist strategy incarnated—as in Algeria —by the socialist nomenklatura. There is, moreover, in Algerian Islamism a very clear demarcation between ‘Algerianists’ (nationalists) and ‘Salafists’ (traditionalists) for whom nationalism could lead to the weakening of the ‘Islamic’ tradition.5 The risks, now very real, of a decomposition of Algeria tragically prove that ‘nationalism’ in that country is no longer enough to curb possible national dislocation. Certainly it can readily be conceded that the political actors of the post Cold War are united in their incantations to nationalism. The partisans of the Italian Leagues invoke the Lombardic nation, the Islamists the Islamic nation and the Afghan Pathans the Pathan nation. But these speeches prove nothing, because more often than not they are about an invented or reinvented neo-nationalism and not a return to a practicable past: there has never been a Lombard nation in the modern sense of a nation-state, any more than there has been an Islamic or Pathan nation of this type. In Italy the capacity of regional Leagues to build a political movement founded on regional identity is limited by the fact that regional differences have not coincided with clear ethnic or linguistic differences.6 In reality the force of all these affirmations of identity stems from a certain exhaustion of universalism. For this reason the nationalist strategy does not seek anything positive: it has no aims in itself apart from destroying the wider reference framework, which it regards as ineffectual. The game of the Italian Northern League, even though it has joined the movement for political

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recomposition, reveals clearly its limitations as soon as it tries to pass from protestation to proposition. The destruction of wider reference points naturally matches the colours of nationalism when nationalism is pitted against a larger entity (the Soviet, Yugoslav or Czechoslovak federations). But in other cases— as in Italy, Belgium or Canada—where the larger framework is the nation, it is against the constructed nation that the political ‘deconstructions’ of the post Cold War fight so bitterly. In Canada the Quebecois are clearly rebelling against the Canadian nationalism envisaged by Pierre Trudeau in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.7 In China the growth of regionalism is against a political nationalism equated with communism. Loss, fear and instrumentalization The process of identification generally draws on three sources, sometimes complementary, sometimes contradictory: the feeling of loss, fear and instrumentalization. The feeling of loss constitutes one of the main motivating forces for neonationalism today—as in Russia, for example. It was the fall of empire, more than the end of communism, that damaged Russian identity. Here too it is easy to understand that the idea of ‘a return to nationalism’ would not gain full support if it implied only a pure and simple return to a past that already exists. The problem of Russian nationalism and its potential for aggression stems from the fact that it cannot invoke any powerful or weakly contested ‘identity sanctuary’. Indeed, the particularity of Russia today is that it can have little recourse to history because, following the fall of communism, its situation is not like that of 1917 but more like one dating back to the sixteenth century. The double break with communism and with empire feeds a feeling of humiliation and loss, summed up perfectly by Norbert Elias: For the inhabitants of any country, it is certainly painful and difficult to come to terms with being a country of reduced power and status, a country many consider to be dethroned… The relative decline of a national state within the hierarchy of states is widely regarded by individuals making up this state as a personal failure. It is not unusual for them to revolt against their collective destiny and try, even by force, to reverse the course of time. Incapable of adapting the image they have of themselves to reality, they may try by force to bring about another reality, while at the same time building imaginary pictures of their country to prove to themselves and the world that nothing has changed. They can even recognize in ‘rational’ terms the reality of the changed position of their country, while it the same time denying it in their imagination and feelings. Coming to terms with being a country with shrunken power and status can be a long and painful process lasting several generations.8

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Those who experience this loss are almost never ideologues or apparatchiks from the old regime. The feeling of loss is generally internalized by the wholly deideologized social or political categories, who feel the loss all the more strongly for knowing it to be irretrievable. In this instance ‘nationalism’ does not spontaneously or naturally provide meaning. It is primarily the expression of a harshly felt loss of meaning. Understanding this explanation makes it easier to see that, although communism failed ideologically, it succeeded in contrast in imposing itself as a system of rituals based on codes, complicities, customs and honours. Olivier Roy showed in a recent study how much the nostalgia for kolkhozes, decorations, parades, and visits to Moscow or to former fellowcountries is still present in central Asia. What appeared from the outside as rigid ritual (formal photos on the front page of newspapers showing model workers plucked momentarily from anonymity, or honours boards at the entrances to factories and offices), was regarded as social recognition. The number of people wearing lapel badges was amazing. These badges registered them as part of an order which was not so much social as commemorative: I did this; therefore I am that. There were hardly any associated material benefits, any power, at most a place of honour at some banquet or commemoration, though also a photo in the newspaper, a distinction which culminated in their funeral rites: an announcement listing the main qualifications, a social career inscribed in paper, stone or even bronze. Now, straightaway, the meaning has been lost from everything that branded this social being as positive, whether veteran of a Russo-German war, socialist worker hero, recipient of a Soviet leader’s handshake, member of a delegation to Moscow, winner of some prize…. What has disappeared is the teleology of everyday life. The real apparatchiks did not have this spiritual crisis. Independence brought them increased power and they were immediately reinstated in the new legitimizing values. But what of the retired man decorated with medals and commemorative certificates who finds himself as devalued as his pension? It is moving to see the wavering dignity of a veteran emblazoned with badges and medals rewarding a service record in a world that no longer exists.9 Fear constitutes the second motivating force of the identity movement. It is generally based on a self-fulfilling anticipation of reality. Thus, in Yugoslavia, the idea of breaking up the federation was ‘in the mind’ well before it split up. If the fires of discord were lit first in Slovenia when they had been expected to happen in Kosovo, it was precisely because the Slovenians—economically more advanced and ethnically more homogeneous—anticipated the break-up. They therefore separated themselves from the Yugoslav federation for fear of the consequences of rupture. In contrast, the Bosnians, who could hardly afford to become independent, opted to maintain the federation. It was only when the

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survival of Yugoslavia was found to be impossible that the fear of bearing the costs of Serbo-Croat dismemberment forced the Bosnians to think of themselves increasingly as a nation, even as an Islamic nation. Their nationalism is not ‘genetic’, because Bosnia was a creation of Tito. The force of fear left them no other solution than that of declaring themselves to be ‘nationalists’. It is easy to see that explaining the Yugoslav conflict as the mechanical exacerbation of nationalist or religious antagonism basically assumes the effect is the cause. Religion in this case lubricates rather than institutes the celebration of difference. As Michael Ignatieff writes: Even in the pre-modern period, Bosnia, far from being the inevitable frontier between two antithetical civilizations—Christianity and Islam— was on the contrary the place where both learnt over five centuries to coexist in peace. The secular instability of this region does not stem from confessional differences as such, but from the conflict between the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman powers over Bosnia and, from the 1870s, the expansionist ambitions of neighbouring states, notably Serbia…. The history of Bosnia is a tragic illustration of the paradoxical relationship between religion and nationalism, the paradox in this case being that religious ties seemed to loosen in Bosnia just as the nationalist significance of confessional differences intensified. In the 1980s, only 17 per cent of Bosnia’s inhabitants described themselves as believers. Being Muslim had lost practically all religious content. It meant choosing a Muslim first name, circumcising their sons, celebrating Bairam, which is the festival that ends Ramadan, getting a godfather or godmother to cut the children’s hair, drinking coffee from small handleless cups, and being sympathetic to spiders. In the same way, the confessional difference for Catholic and Orthodox Bosnians was on the way to becoming only a simple, secondorder cultural preference. It was at this moment that nationalist ideology started to exploit these cultural differences, redefining them as the essential, pure and indissoluble sign of national identity. Bosnia possessed in its three communities such a collection of secular, cultivated minds perfectly capable of understanding and anticipating the fatal consequences of any attempt to impose narrowly ‘nationalist’ labels on fluid confessional differences, that we must ask ourselves how this tragedy could possibly have happened…. Bosnia was not torn apart from the inside, but from the outside.10 Instrumentalization is the third factor in post-Cold War nationalism. It expresses the simple but forceful reality: nationalist demands are never abstract or purely symbolic. In order to prosper they need occasional support from being able to satisfy material or concrete demands whose rationality is relatively transparent: claims to possess a specific ethnic or national identity are made in order not to

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have to share wealth or goods with others considered more deprived. Following the rejection of socialism and with it the idea of redistribution, ‘economic separatism’ no longer has a reason for advancing under cover. Lombardic regionalism, and Flemish or Slovenian nationalism, could not be understood without taking this elementary factor of nationalist motivation into account. The potential dislocation process in Russia, and notably in far-Eastern Russia, could not be understood without referring to this reality. Certainly in some cases, such as that of Slovakia or Quebec, nationalist demands cannot be reduced to this one factor: both Slovakians and Quebecois have a less favourable economic status than have Czechs or Canadians respectively. But in these cases the economic disadvantages of the split are compensated by access to symbolic resources provided in turn by access to political sovereignty: they want their own state, flag and embassies.11 For the ambitious elite, generally at the leading edge of nationalist combat, there is a considerable advantage in taking this step. For almost all the former Soviet republics this purely political factor was decisive in the decomposition process and, in any case, more important than popular pressure in favour of independence. It is why all attempts at federal or confederal patching-up appear derisory once the idea of separation has germinated. Renegotiation of unity sounds to independence-seekers like a confession of weakness, like a recognition that there is a problem and a desire to delay the inescapable. This argument is one of the explanations for the majority of Canadians rejecting the Meech Lake agreement in 1990, which would have reorganized federalism on a simpler and more decentralized basis than before.12 Often, as in Quebec, Slovakia and Lombardy, the claims made on grounds of identity intensify at the very moment identity is actually shaken. This phenomenon could be called ‘the paradoxical awakening of nationalism’. At a time when there are fewer clear differences between Quebecois and other Canadians, economically, demographically and socially, they are trying to ‘reinvent their difference’. At a time when Slovakians are closest to Czechs they expressing an urgent need to be distinct. At a time when Lombards are less and less different from other Italians their separatism is being exaggerated. Paradoxically, the massive migration of population from the South to the North reduces the special character of a town like Turin compared with how it was before the war.13 Here we meet the fundamental problem of the meaning of nationalism after the Cold War. It is not based on a search for a clearly defined identity, easily available and directly operational. It is based rather on what Freud calls the ‘narcissism of small differences’, that is to say the exaltation of anything that separates us from someone historically close to us.14 The conflict, in this instance, is expressed not so much in an unconquerable hostility as in the promotion of differences. This is what Samuel Huntington seems to find difficult to understand when he brandishes the convenient spectre of the ‘conflict of civilizations’.

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The reference to Freud is more than just fortuitous. It merits further attention, because there is obviously more than one analogy between his interpretation of crowd psychology and the tensions of identification we see in the world today. In Group Psychology and the Analysis of Ego,15 Freud develops the idea that crowds constitute groups constructed artificially around what he calls a ‘fixed point’.16 This fixed point can be the army or the Church. But the analogy could be extended to an ideology, a state, or even an international system in a framework of states. In crowds two processes are at work: contagion and panic. Contagion leads each person to imitate the next: ‘We feel as though we are pushed and constrained to imitate others, to act in unison with others.’17 Panic grabs hold of the crowd when it loses its fixed point, its bearings, and leads to it breaking up: ‘Each then has the feeling of being alone in the face of danger.’18 Yet, notes Freud, it is at the precise moment that the fixed point disappears that the crowd appears most like a crowd: The collective spirit dissolves at the very moment it demonstrates its most characteristic priority.’19 In other words, it is at the moment the crowd breaks up that the feeling of belonging to a crowd is most felt. It is easy enough to understand; the feeling of being in a crowd at the moment it scatters out of control or unpredictably will always be stronger than when its dispersal takes place calmly. There is a clear analogy between this mechanism and the reality of the post Cold War. In effect, the international system displays similar processes of dislocation: a loss of collective bearings following the death of bipolarization (the loss of the famous fixed point described by Freud), a sort of ‘contagion-panic’ of the identification phenomenon, a universal feeling of belonging to the same world at the precise moment that confusion and break-up seem to becoming closer to taking over the world (‘the breaking-up of the crowd’). In the Yugoslavian crisis, for example, the phenomenon of ‘contagion-panic’ was an essential ingredient: political contagion from the Soviet Union made it futile and false to maintain a multi-ethnic Yugoslavian federation, while panic was set off among the Croats, who expected a breakdown of the federation that would profit the Serbs, and among the Serbs similarly with respect to the Croats. This ‘contagion-panic’ was in turn amplified by the media, which propagated the news at an unheard-of speed (the ‘contagion effect’) and gave it greater resonance (the ‘panic effect’). It was mostly those media controlled by former communists converted to nationalism that stirred up nationalist feelings among the peoples of the federation by rehabilitating and dramatizing carefully selected historical events. Thus the constant references to the massacre of Serbs by Croatian Ustashi very quickly revived, renewed and legitimized the use of ‘self defence’ in the eyes of Serbian public opinion, that is to say preventive expansionism against first the Croats and then the Bosnians.20 In this light, all or nearly all separatist movements are legitimized from the moment a small difference rather than radical otherness stirs up the fire of differentiationism. Thus, in the case of Canada, the independence of Quebec could logically incite British Columbia or Alberta to break away from the

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federation once there was little hindrance to the legitimization of the smallest separatist movement. It means, according to this argument, that no multi-ethnic political entity is safe from ethno-nationalism from now on. Meaning and nationalism Now that we have recalled these pieces of a complex puzzle, the question of nationalism must now be related to the issue of meaning. On this point, nationalism raises two formidable problems in the post-Cold War world. The first comes from its anti-universalist content, the second from its unstable, since insatiable, nature. These two factors in combination have a potentially destabilizing effect on global balance insofar as they exacerbate more than alleviate the two main ‘demands’ of the post Cold War: the demand for stability and the demand for identity. In effect, the nationalism of the post Cold War is special in being both antiuniversalist—neither related to a project nor referring to a final goal—and insatiable, because, by definition, the demand for identity which it exposes can never stabilize and consequently can never be satisfied. Unlike nationalism in Europe in the nineteenth century, and in the Third World in the first half of the twentieth century, nationalism today is not set within any historical perspective. It has no support other than the globalization of particularisms. European nationalism borrowed very clearly from the ideology of the Enlightenment; it was set in a world time whose two strands were liberalism and socialism. It aspired to free itself from the oversight of empires by integrating itself into a universal aspiration. For this reason Yugoslavism too was a nationalist idea, an emancipatory and integrationist idea.21 Today the issue appears very different despite the apparent resemblance of forms. Though the demand for identity has taken on a global character it is far from taking on a universalist meaning. Nationalism seeks to be self-justifying and anti-teleological. Neither among the Serbs nor among the Lombards is there the smallest search for a project capable of going beyond particularisms, of becoming part of an ensemble of planetary meanings. This is the very sense of Zhirinovsky’s remarks, when he says: National socialism has nothing in common with Hitlerism. Hitler discredited the idea of national socialism. In his doctrines he borrowed more from the ideas of the Comintern’s world revolution. There is little difference between claims of world domination and claims of world revolution. National socialism does not need to dominate the world, it will not measure the skull of a neighbour of another nationality, it will not seek combat. The philosophy of national socialism is that of the ordinary man, of the petitbourgeois if you like, of the person who wants to live quietly in his home, have a loving wife, healthy children, a secure job, go into the garden or to the country on Sundays, take a break once a year.

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He does not want to disturb anyone, but neither does he want to be disturbed. He is certainly not a hero, he does not want to dig the frozen ground under a tank in the name of some principle or other.22 In order to survive and be legitimized, nationalism draws on globalization and not universality: the first reinforces it, the second could condemn it. Whilst all peoples today vaguely aspire to ‘rediscover their identity’, they do not consider setting this strategy in relation to others. This historical reversal of the nationalist perspective, from universalist yesterday to differentiationist today, is clearly confirmed in the case of India. When the Indian National Congress was created in 1865, its founders’ ambition was nationalist: it was intended, within a national framework, to create an Indian nation in which all allegiances to intermediary parties would be eliminated, where religious practices would be confined to the private sphere. Indian nationalism clearly aimed to be universalist and not ethnic.23 Once in power, Nehru reinforced this voluntaristic and ideological conception of the nation.24 This primacy of a nation conceived as project and as will was reflected at the time in the 1950 Constitution which made jus soli the criterion for belonging to the Indian nation. The similarity with France is clear. With this view it was possible to call oneself Indian without necessarily being Hindu. Their uncoupling is now being demanded by Hindu fundamentalists in the name of an ethno-nationalist and communalist notion. For Savakar, the ideological father of Hindu nationalism, a Hindu is a person who considers India the motherland as much as the sacred land. This definition is territorial, genealogical and religious. Hindus, Sikhs and Buddhists could fit this definition. In contrast, Christians, Jews and Muslims are logically excluded because they cannot identify India as the cradle of their religion.25 There was therefore no resurgence of nationalism in India with the end of the Cold War. Rather it was transformed from the humanist and universalist meaning of ‘living together’ to an ethno-nationalist definition of ‘each to his own’. However, to be legitimized and win followers and voters, differentiationism needs to keep hacking away at the gap that separates one from another, to destroy the social ties binding one to another, and to discourage even the idea of a common affiliation that would necessarily put nationalist demands into perspective. We can see these processes in India where Hindu extremists are doing everything they can to erase the common heritage that links Hindus and Muslims in painting, writing and music.26 Insatiable nationalism This exaggerated differentiationism has a major consequence for the international order: it is by its nature insatiable. Nationalism cannot be sated in the way that a nation could be said to be sated after a war or conquests. In other words, the

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demand for identity needs, for its survival, to be permanently nourished by its anti-universalism in order that ever-smaller differences are exacerbated. If the nationalist idea referred, as in the nineteenth century, to a stable and constructed reality, it could be hoped that a return to nationalism might result in a stabilization of the international order. As soon as each nation had recovered the identity that had been destroyed or held down, the international order would be more or less stabilized. The crisis of the international system would then be more a crisis of adjustment than a crisis of disruption. If we now find ourselves confronted by a very different process, it is precisely because the demand for identity has little chance of being satisfied by a pure and simple accession to political independence. From the Ukraine to Tajikistan by way of Slovakia, access to sovereignty is perhaps only a ‘moment’ in the process of decomposition or disintegration. This insatiable force stems from several factors. Very often, as in the former USSR, political decomposition owes much to the economic and social problems of the time as well as to the multi-ethnic character of the newly constituted nations. It is striking to see the strength of national disenchantment in republics which were supposed to have rediscovered their dignity and their identity. A correlation could without much difficulty be established between the extent of economic and social dislocation experienced by a society and the intensity of the decomposition of its identity—which is why, without economic recovery, the most ethnically peaceful nation could not attain a sort of appeasement of identity. This is clear in the Ukraine, for example, where the risk of fragmentation between ethnic-Russian Ukrainians and Ukrainians would have stayed very small or latent if the Ukraine had appeared to be more prosperous than Russia. To this first explanation can be added a second, more important, explanation that can be categorized as ‘mistaken identity’. We believe that by freeing ourselves from the oversight of the Other we make our identity clearer, even when this Other is not necessarily responsible for the crisis of identity. This mistake is blatant in the case of Yugoslavia. By divorcing on amicable terms, the Czechs and Slovaks were supposed to have ‘settled’ their identity problem, both becoming again what they thought they had been, by settling their relationships with the Other in full. The Czechs once again became Czech, and the Slovaks Slovak. Yet if the separation was not of a type to settle the identity problems either of the Czechs or of the Slovaks, it was because the source of their respective problems of identity did not lie where they thought. For the Czechs, the definition of their identity stems less from their relationship with the Slovaks than from their historical relationship with Germany. The Slovaks’ identity mistake is similar. It is less their relationship with the Czechs that is a historical problem for them than their relationship with Hungary and the Hungarians to whom they were subservient for so long. The Slovaks have never really had their own state: it was imposed on them by the Habsburgs, the Hungarians…. The question of our identity lies there and not in our relationship with the Czechs.’27

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As a result, the Slovaks find it difficult today to feel Slovakian while the Czechs were not able even to find a name for their territory. On the one hand, ‘Czechia’ does not refer to anything; on the other, ‘Bohemia-Moravia’ would be too strong a reminder of Germany. The Czech identity therefore needs to be built.28 It is not spontaneously available. This example is important as it enables us to emphasize the fundamental imbalance which exists in the world today between the strong but complex demand for identity and the supply of identity, which can be expressed only through the medium of a nation-state. It is this gap that contributes to making nationalism insatiable. It is here, by the way, that one of the principal characteristics of post-Cold War nationalism lies: it can only be expressed through a nation-state, but there is no proof that, once this nation-state is obtained, it will be able to take full responsibility for the demand for identity. The demand for identity is in a certain way too complex to be incarnated by the nation-state, which is why the proliferation of nation-states does not resolve the crisis of meaning in the least. For the same reason the proliferation of new nationstates with scarcely viable economies and fragile identities is worrying for world equilibrium. Finally, there is in this insatiable aspect of nationalism a third source of difficulty: the ‘return’ to the past is showing itself to be much easier to conceive than to organize in practice. To exercise one’s ‘Ukraineness’, ‘Lombardness’ or ‘Uzbekness’ it is not enough to proclaim oneself Ukrainian, Lombard or Uzbek simply and quietly. In order to revitalize the questionable Lombardic identity, the League resorts to forgotten symbols (flags, shields, anthems), exploited by a tiny core of militants. For the majority of Lombards, the League fulfils a function of protest rather than of identity. Moreover, the conditions and methods of formulating this identity change very quickly. Ilvo Diamanti, quoted by Marc Lazar, shows how the phenomenon of Leagues shifted in a few years from ethnoregionalism as symbolized by the Venetian League to seeking regional autonomy on economic and fiscal lines.29 Besides, the political force of the Lombardy League lies in its capacity to understand that, to survive politically, it needs constantly to adapt itself to the way in which the Italian political cards are dealt out, rather than sticking—like the Venetian League—to a rigid ethno-regionalism. This capacity for adaptation may be, according to the situation, either a radicalization of the separatist discourse, or a political ‘transformationism’ which is both very Italian and very classic, exemplified by its entry into the Berlusconi government. In an admirable article on the Italian crisis, William Harris emphasizes that it is the blurred and the equivocal which feed the power of the Northern League and not its practical capacity to respond to a demand, since the difficulties start as soon as it moves from speech to reality. The idea of splitting Italy into three ‘macroregions’ (Padania in the north, Etruria in the centre, and the Southern Republic) was greeted with ‘hilarity’, quite simply because it did not correspond to a historical or cultural reality that even the people of the North would spontaneously accept.30 Francesco Maiello says the same when he writes

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that ‘there is no more similarity between Lombardy, Friuli and the Val d’Aosta, in the north, than between Lombardy, the Marches and Tuscany in the central region’.31 In reality the Lombard identity exists only thanks to the powerful foil of the south. If the latter were to disap pear after a partitioning of Italy, this identity would become really questionable. The example of the Ukraine is naturally not comparable to that of Lombardy. But Abraham Brunberg demonstrated how important it is for the Ukraine to recreate for itself a national history distinct from Russia, with which it was nevertheless closely linked historically Paradoxically, it is becoming more difficult for Ukrainians to feel Ukrainian now than when they shared a common destiny with Russia. In order to fight its identity sickness, the Ukraine is trying to reinvent grandeur, martyrs and myths for itself. The modern Ukraine has therefore been established as the inheritor of Ukrainian tribes living around the Azov sea, the Dniester and the Dnieper since the sixth century.32 Everything that happened after that date has been linked together to establish, support and exaggerate the differences from Russia, at the price, of course, of inevitable historical distortion. Thus the peasant revolts that proliferated from the sixteenth century onwards are today reinterpreted as the symbol of a nationalist uprising, when they were, more prosaically, local peasant rebellions against the Polish nobility, Lithuanians or Jews.33 The idea of a nationalist revolt is an anachronism, in the same way for that matter as the Cossacks’ uprising, also elevated to the rank of nationalist revolt. The Cossacks, in their own uprising in the sixteenth century, were not participating in any national movement: they were demanding their right to privileges similar to those of Polish nobility, including owning serfs.34 In the case of central Asia the task proved more difficult, since, as Olivier Roy emphasizes, the basis for the past is very poor, seen in the lack of names for roads, kolkhozes or monuments: The catalogue of new legitimate titles is limited. Many small roads have kept their Soviet names, whose origin in any case is increasingly less familiar to the inhabitants: thus, in Tashkent there are Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg streets. In addition there is some resistance to debaptizing: while the town of Leninabad (North Tadjikistan) has regained its old name of Khojent, the province of which it is the capital has deliberately and formally kept the name of Leninabad. In the Tadjik province of Khatlan, the towns of Kalininabad, Kouyibishev, Kolkhozabad and Moskovsky have not been debaptized, but Oktyabrsk has become Bakhtar again. Although the victory of the ‘conservatives’ in 1992 certainly put an end to debaptizing, it should be noted that in these examples there are not always direct links between the ideological context and the name change: the province of Leninabad and the town of Khojent are held by the same authorities, the direct heirs of the former Communist Party. It would seem therefore that the places that kept their ‘Soviet’ name are those whose creation and development were linked to the history of the last 70 years

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(such as the province of Leninabad), while the historical places, rebaptized during the Soviet period, have taken back their old name (such as the town of Khojent). This principle can be confirmed at a local level. Villages created following the displacement of populations conducted during the Soviet era, which therefore have no ancient name, have kept their ‘proletarian’ name: dozens of Lenin Yolu or Rah-i Lenin (‘Lenin’s Way’) can be found both in Uzbekistan and Tadjikistan. The phenomenon is the same for kolkhozes, a creation of the Soviet system by definition (for example, ‘Lenin’ (the largest kolkhoz in Dushanbes), ‘Red October’, ‘Proletariat’). A large number of kolkhozes called ‘Rashidov’ can also be seen in Uzbekistan, where nationalism is compatible with Soviet fidelity (because the attack launched by Andropov in 1983 against the defunct First Secretary of the Uzbek Communist Party, Rashidov, which was the starting point for the fight against the ‘Uzbek mafia’, is regarded in Uzbekistan as a chauvinist Russian action and the start of the disastrous perestroika), As for the kolkhozes which had names sourced from ‘national’ tradition (Avicenne, Nowruz), these have of course been retained. Nevertheless there is a move towards rebaptism, giving a kolkhoz the name of its founder or of a president who directed it during a long period of prosperity, or of a local hero from the recent civil war (Tadjikistan). Thus, in Kulab in Tadjikistan, even though it is a bastion of pro-communist forces, the Shatalov kolkhoz (after a Red Army officer in the war against the Basmatchis) has been renamed Safarali Zafirov (president of the kolkhoz for forty years). In certain other pro-communist zones the civil war in the autumn of 1992 provided a new bank of glorious names (Sangak Safarov, or Fayzali who gave his name to the former Tekhnikum sovkhoz). A kolkhozian identity appears to be growing, based on its recent history, as each kolkhoz has its past, its dignitaries, even its heroes.35 The reinvented character of the nation shows no historical originality, a problem at the very heart of the nationalist issue since the nineteenth century. The question therefore is not whether postwar nationalism is a ‘natural’ or ‘artificial’ process, a historical reality or a political manipulation, but whether this procedure of reinvention of the past and of national creation is still effective at the end of the twentieth century.36 Yet on this point the nationalist movement encounters two major difficulties. The first stems from the fact that the universalist repudiation of post-Cold War nationalism does not pose any political or principled barrier to the narcissism of small differences. Any particularism can be dressed with the finery of nationalism. All differentiationism becomes legitimate. The second difficulty is the powerful logic of social, cultural and economic globalization, which has tended to accelerate with the end of the Cold War. It makes the search for a common national reason even more delicate. This

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difficulty seems evident in Germany, where the redefinition of a national project comes up against a combination of growing constraints: constitutional patriotism is thwarted by the weak internalization of this concept by East Germans—East Germany did not participate in this project between 1945 and 1989; the patriotism of the Deutschmark, probably even better-anchored, has found the constraints of the European project in its path; finally, the social model is confronted with the imperatives of economic globalization.37 Germany must therefore learn simultaneously to be a nation again, even while knowing this nation cannot refer back to a historical ‘foundation’ easy to use in today’s world.38 Likewise, most nations find themselves in a historical half-way house where a pure and simple return to the past is impossible yet it is very difficult to come to terms with going beyond a national framework. We find ourselves in a position where a return to nationalism certainly constitutes the strongest force of the post Cold War, but where, paradoxically, its chances of stabilizing the political order of nations are extremely limited. It is for this reason that the nationalism of the end of the twentieth century is better at revealing the crisis of meaning than guaranteeing the crisis will be overcome.

5 Europe and the crisis of meaning

Of all the large regional groupings in the contemporary world, it is Europe where the search for a link between meaning and power is the most urgent and the most explicit. If Europe is to continue to influence an ever-rougher world game, to preserve its high standard of living and quality of life, and to reduce the socially devastating effects of increased world competition, it has to combine its forces and reduce its fragmentation. The nature of power is to try to take an ever wider space into its ambit, in which financial interests (wider markets) affect by capillarity the higher concerns of sovereignty like currency, research or military production—not to mention harmonization and legal codification.1 Thus a single currency has to be created to reduce transaction costs between different countries, joint programmes are drawn up to reduce the costs of research, and pan-European defence programmes are decided in order to counteract the limited size of national markets. Therefore a Europe based on need is developing, whose logical consequence will be a Europe of a final goal. Implicitly the means is to command the end, power is to determine meaning, and the need for economic and commercial unity is to encourage the aspiration for political community. Yet this process is in some ways slowing down, even stopping, despite the combination of forces that should be encouraging it: the strength of economic competition—which should legitimize the econodmic imperative—and the death of teleological representations—which should reduce the value of grand ideological goaloriented constructions and, in consequence, of meaning in international space. So why does the economic justification for the market integration of Europe—which scarcely anyone contests—find it difficult to generate an issue of meaning socially shared by all the nations and peoples of Europe? The need for meaning In contrast to Asia, but following the example of the Islamic world, Europe has always asserted and publicized its claim to provide meaning. Historically it has tried to give things names and to give them direction, to feed collective expectations that derive from current experience. Europeans feel a need to make their future a topic for discussion, to project into the world their strengths and

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values.2 In that respect they are distinct from Asian peoples and particularly from Chinese peoples, to whom nothing is more foreign than the idea of final goal, of truth, of a path: ‘They are interested in neither cosmological tales nor written, teleological suppositions. Neither to tell tales about the beginning nor to dream of the solution…. Thus the Chinese do not question themselves about the problem of being… but about the capacity to function: where does the efficiency come from that can be seen at work everywhere within the real world, and how can we best profit from it?’3 Where Europeans talk about meaning, the Chinese talk about the arrangements. Where Europeans evoke the transcendent, the Chinese invoke the immanent.4 As we shall see later, these historical and cultural differences strongly influence the way in which regionalism is developing in Europe and Asia. In effect, if Asia is being built, its architecture is expressing itself without an architect. It is not being thought-out beforehand as a design, a collective aspiration. There is hardly any social or political demand for systematizing the experience of the present in order for it to be projected into a desirable horizon of expectation. Symmetrically, there is no crisis of the Asiatic conscience, despite a regional history burdened with drama and heartbreak. It is, for example, accepted that if an integrated Asian economic space similar to a community of Europe were by some chance created it is unlikely it would be based on a regulated universe as sophisticated and harmonized as that of the European Union. It would probably be an affair of informal practices and ethnic solidarities. As it happens, libertarian traditions like Taoism and more ritualistic traditions like Confucianism are similar in not expecting the law to solve their problems.5 Asia can make itself without thinking of its destiny. Even when, occasionally, the meaning of Europe seems to distance itself from the voluntarist will of the Idea, it is amazing how the Idea in some way manages to catch up the marketeers, to embrace their vitality, and to convert their energy into a source of meaning. When at the end of the sixteenth century the merchant city of Amsterdam prospered and encouraged the use of the bill of exchange, it asserted no claim to universality. Simply, by placing money at the heart of the relationships between people and nations, the values of honour, heroism and war were set aside, making money and liberty increasingly compatible. Amsterdam thus succeeded, without intending it, in asserting a new linkage between meaning (peace between nations and individual liberty) and power (trading vitality) that eventually was called ‘Hollandization’, and summed up by Henry Méchoulan in these terms: ‘Europe will learn from Amsterdam that the sword does not weigh so much and that weapons do not make the decisions at all. The merchant of Amsterdam is at the origin of a new vision of the world.’6 The origin of the quest for meaning can basically be found in the political role played by Christianity (Roman Christianity renovated by the Reformation and Counter-Reformation) in the definition of a European cultural identity.7 Like other great monotheistic religions, Christianity placed at the centre of its interrogation on Man the questions of becoming, of transcendence and of the

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common good. Such themes are found in a secularized form in current debates— crucial debates in which the requirement for truth and integrity (meaning) sometimes collides with the requirement for liberty. The Christian European movement—though it is not the only one—has in effect not made up its mind whether to accept the idea that the invasive market principle can dispense with any form of transcendence. It shows a reluctance to accept that liberty might become the absolute that would be the basis for founding Europe to the detriment of a search for a certain truth.8 While the Cold War was on, the confrontation between liberty and truth was inevitably condemned to be stifled within the European Community, because they sustained one another in their rejection of communism. With its collapse the debate was reborn in two ways: first, through the emergence of a market space tempted to see in the free circulation of goods and persons the only final goal for Europe; second, through an ideological standardization that would lead, in the name of a certain liberal relativism, to thinking ‘everything is the same’; all meanings are equivalent and, according to this view, the discourses for generating truth would no longer have any legitimacy. The requirement for truth would thus be no more than one form among others of the demand for meaning. It could not in any case stand in the way of the imperative of liberty.9 Christianity, whose centrality in the history of Europe can scarcely be questioned, cannot however explain by itself the need for a meaning of Europe. As Jean-Pierre Faye reminds us, Europe is a continent delineated in space by a history of thought, which, here too, is not the case with Asia. When, towards the year 1200, the Universitas parisiensis was born, its authority extended across the whole of the continent, from Coimbra to Cracow, from Naples to Uppsala.10 It is important to emphasize here that this Europe of meaning cannot be reduced to a simple market Europe; that this Europe of thought has managed in certain circumstances to come before the market principle. Thus Humboldt Universität, created in Berlin in 1808, was born before the Zollverein, in other words before the beginning of German economic unification.11 From the end of the sixteenth century, when the religious factor ceased to be the sole basis for the collective identity of Europe, there was a progressive transfer of allegiance towards the nation, as Arnold Toynbee once remarked.12 Before taking on the connotation it has today, Machiavellianism was the theorization of this transfer of allegiance from Christianity to a cold raison d’Etat. Nevertheless, the retreat of religion within the definition of a collective relationship to meaning did not reduce the demand for meaning; quite the contrary. Transferring collective allegiances to the nation and later to ideology still fell within the realm of abstract representations that could not be reduced to the possession of goods or material gain. In other words, being came before having. The transition from the theological era to the teleological era maintained intact the demand for meaning. The retreat of the religious brought a turning away from expectation but not its disappearance. Even when the modern European state set itself, from the seventeenth century, to fight religious

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prophecies in order to establish its own monopoly on meaning, and to separate holy history from human history, it only channelled the demand for meaning, though no longer towards religious prophecy but towards political action.13 It was the French Revolution that would historicize this breaking away from a religious representation of the world, simultaneously constructing a new one that deified the Nation. It was in this phase that the meaning of Europe was the most identified with nations and modernity. And it is equally in this phase that a country like France excelled in universalism, showing the strength of its determination, exercising the role of teacher of nations, teaching others how to look towards it, playing the ‘public servant of Humanity’ and acting for the good of others.14 Its imperial mission carried to its last gasp the determinist claim of Europe to provide meaning. Europe has exhausted its need for empire At the end of the Second World War, Europe reduced its claim to universalism because its vocation to disseminate had begun to meet the practical limits of its power. The birth of a Soviet-American bipolar order changed Europe’s hierarchical position and narrowed its area of influence. Thus it gradually exhausted its need for empire. Moreover Europe’s ability to spread its influence in the world, to promote its values, no longer made it thereby the owner of these values. In many cases they were reappropriated by those colonial elites it had wanted to persuade and to submit—but these elites later reversed against Europe the intellectual principles Europe had tried to inculcate in them. The decolonization of the Third World, sometimes violent, was nothing but the expression of this reversal. Europe, which exported the idea of Nation, saw turned against it the nationalisms of the Third World it had in part brought into being. The task then began of a return to itself, that tended to harmonize the meaning of Europe with its power, to channel the need to have a conception of itself towards itself rather than towards others. The consecutive ordeals of World War and Cold War naturally encouraged Europeans to reflect about the best means of making long-term peaceful relationships, of containing Germany peacefully, of overcoming division. The contemporary experience and the memory of past collective suffering revealed almost spontaneously a horizon of expectation. The strength of the European project that was set up through the creation of the Common Market by the Treaty of Rome rested on two imaginative pillars, neither very sturdy today. The first consisted of promoting a project sufficiently determined, directed and conducted from on high that the construction of Europe would make progress, while respecting the political and identification rhythms of the nations of Europe. The second was to set out a prospect that had an ambition sufficient to mobilize opinions and offer a dream (a teleological ambition), while seeing to it

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that this strong aspiration had practical, tangible, identifiable landmarks. Let us note these two essential points. The construction of Europe in its community dimension was made with the consent of states. Certainly there was always a federalist movement, which from the start promoted a federal structure of the American type that would supersede the nation-states; but this movement was and remains a minority one. The Community strategy defined in May 1950 by Jean Monnet was based on what Brugmans called ‘reverse federalism’.15 In contrast to what happened in the United States, the abandonment of sovereignty by the European states would start in the sectors on which it was easiest to encroach (coal, steel, Euratom, single market) and then move gradually to more sensitive areas (currency, security). Europe was being constructed without it affecting the daily lives of Europeans or their representations of the world. The setting-up of the common agricultural policy (CAP) did not completely contradict this perception, insofar as it concerned only the life of the farming world. Adhesion to Europe was stronger because it involved nothing, or nothing much. It was being put in place without commitment, without arousing passions. Europe was, in the full sense of the term, ‘an affair of states’. Even within each state its influence on the administration was for a long time extremely weak.16 The French state, for example, adapted very well to the European idea because for a long period that fed its ambition, and the illusion that it was only a French plan on a European scale: the Capetian state hoped to expand into a Carolingian Europe.17 The risk of seeing this heroic approach degenerate into the establishment of a bureaucratic arrangement divorced from democratic control seemed to have been contained by an implicit pact between governments and their citizens. Public opinion delegated to states the responsibility for ‘making Europe’, which was regarded as a way of maximizing the national interest and, in exchange, the public would be discharged from any involvement. Public opinion has over a long period bartered ‘de-responsibilization’ for its membership of Europe.18 The risk of a bureaucratic or anti-democratic drift was scarcely questioned, because the democratic character of the construction of Europe was supposed to flow from the fundamentally democratic nature of the states involved. The value of this sophistry, which is now challenged, was naturally enhanced by the proximity of a communist, fundamentally anti-democratic Europe. But if Europe managed to provide a meaning, it was not only because it was controlled by the states; it was also because the European project proposed ambitious prospects and practical outcomes. From the beginning the founders of Europe allowed a glimpse of the prospect of federalism for the continent, but they refrained from defining its contours.19 The European project has, moreover, continually oscillated between a definition that referred to a well-known model (federalism) and an unknown model still to be constructed, never before achieved and requiring permanent mobilization for it to reach its goal. In this sense, the project was altogether teleological. It belonged

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very clearly to the constructivist representations of the Cold War. Simultaneously, this asymptotic plan—that is to say, a plan that approached but never attained its end—was kept supplied with practical projects. From the Treaty of Rome to the Single Act, the European Community was a Europe of tangible outcomes, not calling into question citizens’ almost exclusive allegiance to their nation-states. If there is a crisis of meaning on the continent of Europe today, it is less because the European project proposes a radical break with the exclusive allegiance to the nation-state, as people tend to think, than because it has shown itself incapable of giving a symbolic and unitary significance to a Europe founded on multiple allegiances. The concept of multiple allegiances The state today faces a previously unknown problem: it must organize the superseding of its sovereignty while taking great care to organize this mutation so it does not give advantage to ‘rival-partners’. Thus the state can neither plan its own disappearance in the name of supranationality nor protect fully the traditional boundaries of its sovereignty. It is both the motor of a supra-state Europe and the reinforcement agent of inter-state supervision in Europe. That is why a reinforcement of state control always goes hand-in-hand with the more sensitive and supranational political initiatives. For example, the creation of the European Council was accompanied in practice by the transfer of some negotiating tasks from the Commission to the European presidency, organized by each state in turn. The Treaty of Maastricht conferred its blessing on this ambivalence. It overcame state sovereignty by putting in place the single currency; but the states played their most prominent part since the Treaty of Rome in the relaunch of Europe (the Intergovernmental Conference). Never has the future of Europe seemed so vulnerable, so sensitive to the state of political relationships between European powers. Thus public opinion measures the state of Europe by the yardstick of Franco-German relationships while, paradoxically, the weakening of inter-state forces must be one explanation of the European crisis; each time Europe advances, the states are there to hem in its path. There is no longer a strategy of linear transfer of allegiance from the state towards a defined supranationality, but an attempt to overcome the national framework, partially and voluntarily, through a process of complex forms with imprecise ends. The difficulty undoubtedly stems from irreducible differences between states, from the timidity of European leaders, and from world circumstances that are more favourable to national retreat than to post-national redeployment. But we need to go further, asking whether indecision and imprecision were historical issues before they became political problems. In effect there are no models today, either in Europe or in the rest of the world, for constructing and organizing multiple, non-exclusive allegiances. The two great vectors of the European strategy were the states and the market. Yet, as

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the evidence shows, these two unitary agents have in a way used up their propulsive force. The source of meaning and of historically available models has dried up. The erosion of state will was shown by the Treaty on European Union. The Treaty suffered from not being endorsed by public opinion and therefore lacked inspirational force, and also from not offering a clear goal, identifiable with the construction of Europe.20 If this hypothesis is right, it would tend to show that it is less state will than having a will without a goal that is the problem. On this view, the European crisis is related less to systematic, coherent resistance and more to a demand for meaning. Nevertheless this possibility would not lead automatically to a rapid clarification of the meaning of Europe. Though it is acknowledged that the extreme complexity of EU procedures, and the resulting lack of transparency to public opinion, stem from inter-state conflicts—which lead to an overload of legal texts—and also from a use of the courts to reduce the ambiguities in the European political project, it is difficult to see how a greater effort of will could resolve such a fundamental problem. The promotion of the subsidiarity principle by the states, to give the construction of Europe a meaning understood and appreciated by public opinion, could not by itself rapidly provide a new interpretation. Besides, the fact that the debate on subsidiarity has purely and simply disappeared from the debate on Europe, after being trumpeted loudly to encourage people to accept the Maastricht Treaty, shows how difficult the European elites find it to think consistently about the continent’s future, or to give life and vigour to whatever symbols are available.21 Apart from subsidiarity the concept of European citizenship appears to be a ‘tactical’ response to the demand for the definition of Europe. The Maastricht Treaty put forward the idea of a citizenship which would be combined with national citizenship. This concept is weak, capable of being internalized only slowly and gradually, and has a basic imbalance insofar as the rights it confers are more important than the duties it imposes.22 While in most national territories citizenship contracts are tending to be renegotiated on an ever more restrictive basis, notably to slow down immigration but also to legitimize the cutting back of state social security, European citizenship is presented primarily as the sum total of advantages offered on a continental scale by nation-states. It is not tied to any allegiance to a European authority. That this ‘facility’ was not perceived as a significant resource for mobilizing citizens in favour of the Treaty, shows how much the European problem combines questions about meaning and reference points, not only material and category questions. Naturally one could envisage the internalization process of European citizenship coming about over time; there might be a gearing up to citizenship as there was a gearing up to the single market. On this judgement the gradual transformation of the European market into European public space would be a matter of time. The Europe of power would lead in time to a Europe of meaning.

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Europe lacks a dramatic representation of its destiny But this hypothesis seems seriously compromised in view of several difficulties that are part of the reality of today’s Europe. The first undoubtedly results from the collapse of any portrayal of our future that has a goal. European societies, like those of the rest of the world, are deprived of all-encompassing, powerful designs capable of proposing a credible linkage between market space and public space. The thesis that European public space was lagging behind market space, out of step historically, and that collective mobilization would close the gap, seemed to have lost any value with the end of the Cold War. In other words, even the idea that the construction of Europe would derive from an immanent ‘meaning of History’ came up against the radical, increasing rebuttal of the idea of the meaning of History, and even the denial of the idea of History.23 The European idea has suffered as a result of the teleological deconstruction at work today. It risks becoming a heritage site rather than a project and thereby sliding gently from an exercise of will to passivity.24 Meaning would no longer be a projection towards the future, but a nostalgic allegory of the past.25 One can see in France the close relationship between the end of the ‘national story’, that is, the story of a country which would achieve its destiny through an ‘identity-project’, and the increasing value of the idea of memory. But this impulse is not only French. Literary Europe— that of Magris and Eco—is not free of this feeling of retrospection or recycling.26 Curiously, however, the historic delegitimization of the meaning of Europe is not leading to a revaluation of the idea of a European model sui generis, specific and without equivalent in History, whose strategy would relate less to past construction or schemes than to an indeterminate future. The idea of the continent innovating and inventing a future outside known, tried schemes does not have the effect of spontaneous adhesion. In other words, the condemning of one project for being too deliberate is not, for all that, accompanied by a representation of Europe that is less predictable—more aesthetic, one might say. The imprecision of its contours accentuates the loss of meaning instead of restoring it. That is what we term the paradox of meaning. Though European societies demonstrate an extreme reservation and resistance towards any wholesale, voluntarist reformulation, they persist in expressing a strong but complex demand for meaning. Though they expect a collective project to have a practical effect on their daily lives, they cannot persuade themselves to construct a ‘horizon of meaning’ founded solely on instrumental rationality. The French debate over Maastricht revealed this essential contradiction in a symbolic way. In order to respond to a concrete demand for explanation and to parry criticisms that Europe was divorced from its citizens, political actors willingly engaged in debate on the technical details of the Treaty. Government leaders were seen expounding in school playgrounds on the advantages and disadvantages of maintaining limited public deficits or of seeing a central European bank impose monetary discipline. But, simultaneously, the extreme

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timidity of the Treaty on the symbolic dimensions of Europe, on its philosophical, moral and cultural values, often reinforced citizens’ thirst for an emotional attachment to Europe. There was no trace in this text of a collective ambition borne on words or principles which might have been able to compensate for its extreme aridity. It has thus, correctly, been reproached for its great lack of ‘spirit’, or of symbolism, although potentially it had implications for so many things. The indeterminate nature of the Treaty over its political ends has not been dealt with, and given a representation, for lack of a symbolic model capable of transcending its indefiniteness; while the need citizens expressed for something concrete found itself inhibited, even asphyxiated by the extreme technicality of the debate, on monetary convergence for example. Thus representation suffered a double crisis: that of the undefinable (the difficulty of expressing and explaining uncertainty over goals) but also that of the tangible (the tedious technicality of practical issues). Europe finds difficulty in symbolizing its ends as well as the means of its future. It has trouble metaphorizing its own destiny, dramatizing it, it might be said. Yet there is no legitimacy without metaphor, nor discourse of truth without its production on stage.27 The second difficulty derives from the different natures of the idea of single European market and the idea of European public space. A single market rests on a balance between consumer preferences (desires) and profits (interests), whereas a public space requires a choice between allegiances (values). Interests and desires are more easily reversed, in contrast to the choice of values, generally more constrained and more long-lasting. The juxtaposition of several national markets can end in the constitution of a large market as soon as the economic and legal obstacles to the circulation of goods are overcome. The constitution of a public European space is concerned with a different issue. It depends on initiatives and cross-linking arrangements, which develop only over a long period and for which there are few model-types. Methods of constituting public space must therefore be invented. But it is proper too to imagine its contents. Efforts to link young French and German people by the Office Franco-Allemand pour la Jeunesse (OFAJ—French-German Youth Office) have shown the difficulties in going from the stage of exchanges of information to a real shared understanding.28 In this process the idealization of the Other poses as many problems as does simple rejection. In other words, though it is acknowledged that a public space is not created by cultivating one’s specificity, a common political space is not created by idealizing a partner or exaggerating the mutual relationship—as is often the case in Franco-German relationships.29 What is true for cultural exchanges is true also for literature. When European authors meet, it is often in a solemn, starchy, formal way; their exchanges have something forced and artificial about them which do not bear much relationship to the time when Thomas Mann met Gide or Cocteau.30 In the third place, it must be admitted that the collapse of the great teleological sagas, which were founded on the coherence of means and ultimate ends, leaves

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the field free for more modulated, more deconstructionist conceptions: everything becomes possible; everything becomes conceivable. In this perspective the idea of decoupling market space and public space would lead not to a loss of meaning, but to a way of rearranging meaning and power. The power defined by the economic imperative would be guaranteed by the single market, while meaning would remain confined to the national, even regional public space. The increased demand for ‘community preference’, even by the most resolute opponents of the Maastricht Treaty, well illustrates this hypothesis. By a compensatory effect the renationalization of meaning would accompany a decentralization of power. Then we would enter into a really postmodern logic where meaning-space and power-space did not coincide. The divorce would not be traumatic but healing, durable and no longer transitory. The rise of the Leagues in northern Italy or Flemish separatism in Belgium reflect clearly the relevance of this approach. Flemings and Lombards would not have to pay a price for the break-up of the nation-state since they would already be integrated into a larger space, that of Europe. That is precisely the meaning of the message that the Lombardy League wanted to convey to the voters of Milan in June 1993 when its posters proclaimed ‘The League will take us direct to Europe’, implying that going to Europe via Rome—the symbol of Italian unity— was a useless detour. The Lombards and Flemings could in Europe rediscover their identity and they would be even more powerful, since they would no longer have to share their riches with the ‘peoples of the South’.31 There is no liberty without value Several possible political projects have thus been grafted onto the common pedestal of a market Europe, which raises an essential question, outlined earlier when noting the tense relationship between truth and liberty. If market Europe can accommodate any political or identification arrangement, can it become a source of values? In other words, is the prospect offered to actors in European society to consume freely, to set up wherever they like, and to move without hindrance, the prelude to a collective European order and meaning, or is it rather the prelude to its atomization? If the latter, the tendency of the European Union to issue more rules and norms daily in order to guarantee equity (the equivalent of the rules of the market game between Europeans), far from creating meaning or new allegiances, is perhaps contributing nothing more than the guarantee of freedom of circulation. These disquieting questions, which punctuate the debate between proponents of market Europe and proponents of political Europe, and all the possible variations on this theme, are set within a context of a more fundamental confrontation within Western societies—that between liberal disciples of simple equity and the partisans of a refoundation on common values, the only guarantees against disenchantment and complete narcissism.32 It seems difficult

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to think about Europe today outside this debate, without risking getting embroiled in a reductive argument between ‘nationalists’ and ‘federalists’. The liberal group, along the lines of John Rawls and his Theory of Justice, insists on the distinction between justice and the good.33 By recourse to judicial procedures society would posit rules of equity without necessarily choosing between different conceptions of good. Transposed to Europe, this approach would not only be indifferent to the political form of Europe, but also hostile to the idea that it might be based on a global and transcendent principle—whether of secular, religious or moral character. The approach would allow an implicit defence of a Europe based on market freedom but also on cultural liberty (multiculturalism). It would challenge any constructivist project ‘à la française’ and, conversely, encourage the search for a ‘cross-cutting consensus’.34 The strategy would no longer be to mobilize people around a project with a final goal, but to define the minimum requirements for coexistence between national and regional communities or ‘tribes’ living within the same space. Liberty, reduced to individual or communitarian liberties, would call for a disembodied state, with no project or ambition, its primary concern to ensure the cultural survival of the (European) tribes.35 There would be no need for an integrating cement between them, apart from the obligation to produce good-neighbour rules, non-aggression pacts between small groups. In some ways, this Europe would be the easiest to organize but the most difficult to imagine. It might be sufficient to leave the processes of national ‘deconstruction’ in Europe just, in a way, to drift—stimulating forces of identity and communitarianism—while developing ‘from above’ the judicial and regulatory procedures that could organize the link between this generalized cultural relativism and the free circulation of goods and persons. In other terms, liberty would not need to be backed up by a principle of truth in order to expand. Europe would have no reason to give itself a meaning overarching this liberty. Europe would belong to a galaxy of market tribes36 where the tribe would give meaning and the goods would give power. According to this view, the institutional forms and the geographic contours of Europe would matter little. The partisans of a recasting of meaning, such as Charles Taylor, take a very different view. For Taylor, the fact that individuals have come to define themselves in relation to themselves as individuals (exaggerated individualism), and not in relation to an ordering of collective values, generates an undeniable loss of meaning. This in turn is accentuated by what he calls the eclipse of ends, in other words the abandonment of any teleological perspective. Because there would no longer be ends, everything would become a matter of means. ‘Acting’ becomes the ultimate justification for things, to the point of making the question ‘why’ incongruous. But Taylor does not limit himself to this observation, which we all make today. He pursues his argument in engaging with it philosophically. Freedom of choice, he says, does not create value. It does not constitute in itself an act of truth in a world where all options, all ways of life declared equal would be objectively equal.

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When translated to Europe this issue is fundamental, because it imposes on Europe the need to define itself, to assume an identity in a positive manner and, especially, to define its difference. It needs for its own sake to say what, beyond vague principles, it hopes for, what it wants to conserve and to intensify; it needs to make clearer what areas it sees as meaningful for Europe, and to set out boundaries of what can be justified that everyone will recognize as valid.37 Without that, the special characteristics of Europe (such as social security) have a strong chance of being perceived as handicaps, anomalies or differences without value, in the philosophical sense of that term. To construct its identity Europe must neither seek to exaggerate its special characteristics nor necessarily to blend itself with a global norm, but to give itself a foundation for its distinctiveness by conferring real value on that distinctiveness. Should the opposite occur, the meaning of Europe is very likely to become imperceptible, or to seem to be a difference that is unimportant, which would not stimulate the Other (Japanese or American) to consider the comparative value of its own way of life. In order for originality to be perceived as such, Taylor writes, it must fulfil a double condition: that others perceive the value for which it stands and that this value is seen to be different from theirs.38 Taylor’s line of philosophical argument is about individualism in modern societies. But much of it can be applied to the construction of Europe. On the one hand, a Rawlsian approach would preach recourse to the law to organize a multicultural market, in which meaning would be guaranteed by the return to tribe or nation, while power would be ‘managed’ by a cold market mentality, without sentimental links to others, whether these others were a nation or a multinational firm. On the other hand, a Taylorist approach would plead for the rehabilitation of the notion of community—in the sense of common destiny and not of communitarianism—in which links between individuals and nations would be enriched by substantial agreement on the value and hierarchy of things. The instrumental reason (power) would not in itself reveal a horizon of common meanings (meaning). So a new set of questions then arises: how exactly can this horizon of common meanings Taylor speaks about be delineated? How can institutions that would not be limited to guaranteeing liberties be devised? How can relativist and valueless liberalism be rejected without retreating to the cul-de-sac of a ‘high-flown’ utopia? How can Europe be given a ‘ruling idea’ without reopening debate on the foundation? How can a project be conceived without succumbing to the trap of an end goal? Here perhaps the reflections of Richard Rorty must be introduced again, even if his approach has a disadvantage in wanting to economize on representation. In Contingence, ironie et solidarité39 he tries precisely to think about meaning without bringing in any deification of thought. He tries to reformulate the hopes of a free society, which would respond to the exhaustion of Enlightenment rationalism by abandoning notions of truth, rationality and moral obligation in favour of those of metaphor and self-creation.40 The reconquest of meaning

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would therefore pass via a sort of teleological de-intoxication. Rorty says we must cure ourselves of a profound need for metaphysics without, however, giving approval to a value-free relativist liberalism.41 On these lines he invites us to move by abandoning the quest for a foundation in favour of a better knowledge of ourselves, of a description of ourselves. For Rorty, meaning is constructed by making convictions, inclinations and distinctions coherent.42 He says we need to find a description of things of our time and identify those which we are inclined to approve or in which we can recognize ourselves. He therefore calls for a search for language and metaphors rather than the definition of an endgoal. Rorty thus encourages us implicitly to give ‘breadth’ to words that give a foundation to Europe (such as community, subsidiarity, convergence, union) and resist an evolution which, from political necessity, tends to make these terms dry or dull. In this essential debate, the politicians’ revival of the concept of subsidiarity was neutral. In laying down that the principle of subsidiarity denies government the right to stop people and social groups from conducting their own affairs, deploying their talents, their creativity and their imagination, Europe recognized the primacy of the good over the law. In appearance it opted for ‘community’ against ‘liberty’. It replaced the sacredness of law with permanent negotiation over responsibilities between different levels of authority. Politically the significance of this choice was both strong and simple: the law could not be the enemy of the good; Europe could not be constructed to the detriment of the citizen. But this apparent clarification of the meaning of Europe carries also the risk that technocrats or politicians will encourage it to ‘fade away’. Faced with public disquiet, subsidiarity might have looked like the ‘rediscovery’ of a simple principle of ‘good sense’ that had been a bit forgotten. It might therefore be captured and instrumentalized by the actors in the European game so they could divide their powers more favourably, but without encouraging the rooting of this principle in public opinion in a decisive manner. To resist this slippage, and in order for the debate on subsidiarity to be raised to the level of an issue of meaning and not reduced to a game between competitive actors, jealous of their prerogatives (states against the Brussels Commission), subsidiarity must be placed in the context of its historical and philosophical roots. But can public opinion be enlightened about this principle effectively without its application being generalized everywhere, at all institutional levels, and not only at the European level?43 It is easy to understand. Choosing in favour of the common good does not constitute a decisive thrust if it is not coupled with a more precise definition of the common good. In other words, asserting the primacy of the good over the law is very likely to remain rhetorical in the absence of a clarification of the common good.

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The meaning of a Europe challenged by globalization This demand is at the heart of a debate on Europe. But this Europe, constructed from ways of being and doing, has come up against what might be called the shrinking of the field of its own experience. By shrinking of experience, we mean the reduction of sources and forms of available, specific identity within the powerful globalization process. There is in effect now more of ‘the world’ in Europe than of Europe in the world. The decline in the need for empire has a substantial counterpart in the dislocation of identity experienced in the countries of former European conquest. Australia is a faraway but patent illustration of that. At the end of a slow process, during which changes in the ethnic origins of Australian immigrants, the relative decline of the European presence in Asia, and the end of the Cold War started to take effect, Australia searched for its own identity, impelling it to break away, symbolically at least, from Europe.44 By contemplating becoming a republic it has weakened the royal link with the former British Empire. By recognizing the Aborigines officially as the first inhabitants of Australia it destroyed the fiction of a European nation in the antipodes. In this connection it should be noted that the symbolic knots were cut shortly after the Cold War ended, as though this war had held back artificially Australia’s separation from Europe. In Latin America, the terms of the relationship with Europe reflect a different history. But Europe was not invited to the celebration of the democratic revival seen in that part of the world in the last decade. Why not? Because Europe is seen as an access route to globalization more than as a source of values. It is at best a model of regional political organization; it is not a model of identification. It is very clear in Latin America that the renegotiation of identity is proceeding via the rehabilitation of the Indians, and by a sort of distancing from a European reading of its past or of its future. Mexican literature reflects clearly this ‘rebalancing’ of identity.45 But what is true for Latin America is even more so for North Africa. There Europe is perceived primarily as an aspirational ‘Western project’ that lacks any attraction where it concerns identity. In North Africa, the Japanese example seems to make more sense, even though the weak cultural links with Japan and a lack of practical understanding of Japanese society necessarily lead to the idealization of its ‘model’. Europe today can no longer dampen its fears by projecting its image and its identity to the rest of the world. The enlargement of Europe: convenience before meaning The difficulty in projecting Europe as a source of values, and not only as a supplier of material resources, stems probably from the historic circumstances in which the European Union was created. But this reaction seems so strong that it leads many nations to consider joining the European Union as a way to

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maximize their power, not to reaffirm their identity. Joining Europe constitutes ‘a strategy of convenience’, not a ‘strategy of meaning’. They want to join from fear of being excluded from a collective economic process, not from anxiety to join a project. Sweden’s application to the European Union was announced, very revealingly, by the Stockholm government as part of its ‘anti-crisis’ economic plan, thereby reinforcing the construction of a representation of Europe founded on instrumental rationality only.46 Membership is seen as a means of surviving in a difficult world, though at the risk of adulterating a regional or national identity so far preserved. The Norwegian essayist Erik Fosnes Hansen summed up the dilemma in these terms: ‘We have a terrible fear of finding ourselves alone outside, and it is an understandable fear. But no-one—or almost no-one—is specially enthusiastic about the European Community as such.’47 The lack of spontaneous feeling about membership can be attributed to simple, relatively understandable factors: fear about participating in an entity dominated by the great powers of Europe, of renouncing an identity of neutrality, and of breaking up the close relationship between governors and the governed in ‘small societies’. The feeling is made worse for these societies because they have the impression they are negotiating away the bases of their identity at a time when, across the world, demands for identity are growing stronger. Thus joining Europe was made against the tide. Getting into phase economically was accompanied by getting out of phase on identity. Joining was thus experienced in a nostalgic mood of loss. Pursuing a more sustained argument, however, we must ask whether the issue for Europe is less about combating this feeling of loss—inevitable, after all— than offering some new and strongly symbolic compensation. The problem with the acquis communautaire imposed on any incomer is that it is more a sort of technical standardization than an invitation to share in a project. It is more an economic pre-requisite than a common good. The only convergence that can be talked about it, and which might provide a basis, remains monetary convergence, although the same idea of convergence is sufficiently rich philosophically for it to be thought about as a consensus over claims to the truth. Thus, contrary to received ideas, the fears associated with Europe stem less from what Europe proposes or Europe does than because, through a lack of collective will or the way it is being constructed, it seems incapable of making proposals on identity or symbols. When the Scandinavians feared the consequences of their entry into Europe, it was less because they saw their own project contradicted by a competing design, whether clearly defined or intangible, than because the inexorable erosion of their own historic model (social democracy is in crisis in Northern Europe) reflected the uncertainty of the European project. This issue was not about a structured confrontation between two representations of the world, two claims to the real, but about the unstructured confrontation of two uncertainties, of two tendencies to doubt.48 Thus Europe is not managing to construct new post-national expectations by calling national experiences into question. It is at best managing to stem, through common rules of conduct, the

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perils of a solitary approach. Even in societies where Europe has contributed greatly to modernization, such as in Spain since the end of Franco, where feelings on Europe remain overall positive, the European idea has not managed to offer a positive model that might be copied, in order to correct the withdrawal from politics, the retreat from good citizenship and the reversal of opinions. Through this European example we see in reality a more general problem at the very heart of the crisis of meaning: the cleavage lines of value, interests and meaning feel more severe when they involve forces or actors deprived of certainties about their own future and implicitly convinced their primary reference model is in decline. Then Europe starts to be perceived as the instrument which is brutally converting Europeans to a rootless and faceless globalization, though the meaning of Europe is precisely to promote the opposite approach. The Europe of meaning, rich in diversity and history, would find it advantageous to give itself, not a circumscribed identity, rigid and exclusive,49 but instead a ‘frontier identity’ (in the sense Magris gives this term when referring to Trieste). This identity would rest on a diversity that would refuse to allow itself to be reduced to unity, on a particularism that was experienced without necessarily being defined, and on a collective meaning, internalized rather than exhibited.50 The identity of Europe would be lived without having to be declared. But, simultaneously, all the force of the global economy, all the constraints of the global power games, lead the Europe of power to close its ranks, to think of itself and organize itself as a totality, and to see in all obstacles to convergence and to harmonization a sort of intolerable breach, heralding a fall in its place in the world order. The Europe of meaning would identify itself with the ‘Trieste model’, the Europe of power with the Brussels model. The former would encourage Europeans to ‘live and let live’, without incurring the disadvantages of prior identification, while the latter would condemn Europeans to defining themselves in the narrowest possible manner in order to be able to survive. There is no better illustration of the divorce between meaning and power.

6 The loss of the link between nations

‘Conflict’, Simmel tells us, ‘refers to the positive moment which weaves with its negative side to create unity.’1 It creates joint and shared reference points between friend and enemy providing they respect certain rules and conforn to certain codes: as with all the main schisms, the Cold War was ther efore both conflict and identity. This identity played a considerable role in the life of countries for forty-five years. It set against each other nations that were led by identical actors (the states), similar tools (nuclear weapons) and, above all, final goals that were in competition (ideologies). Today the effect of unity has disappeared. As in other social fields, one strong line of conflict is being replaced by several dispersed, unstable lines of conflict. The common characteristic of these diffused or open conflicts, whatever their intensity, is that they increasingly fall outside the logic of conventional conflict between states. This loss of meaning that was provided by conflict is not restricted to the world of states. It can also be found in the world of work, a world where workers live in universes that are too fragmented for their demands or confrontations to be integrated into a unified rationale which would give them a strong, collective meaning.2 Today, the crisis in links between nations and the crisis in social links go hand in hand. The champions of ‘a new world order’ have neglected the essential sociological relationship between conflict and identity. People thought a collective identity founded on cooperation and interdependence might quickly replace an identity built on conflict. The hypothesis of the new world order rested implicitly on the existence of a complementary relationship between the—very superficial—planet-wide consensus that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall, the globalization of problems, and the universalization of the issue of ‘market democracy’. The Cold War was seen as a veil which had hidden the reality of the world; the end of the war was therefore seen as a great unveiling operation, exposing the world to the light of Reason. By reducing ideological cleavages, the post Cold War was supposed to restore a sort of natural contract between nations. Yet it seems this process has met two sizeable obstacles. The first stems from the ‘chain reaction’—political, social and psychological—that followed what is termed ‘enemy deprivation’. The second

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results from the difficulty of setting up strong social ties between nations when, paradoxically, they are becoming increasingly interdependent. Enemy deprivation The relationship with the Other constitutes one of the fundamental issues in any organized human society. For a society to define itself, it needs to construct itself and find what is external to it, to define an outsider. Extending Simmel’s analysis of the relationship between conflict and identity, Carl Schmitt went so far as to say that discrimination between friend and enemy is the basis of politics and constitutes the raison d’être of states, the possessors of jus belli.3 The power to designate the enemy would thus be the ultimate political act and the very condition for the existence of a meaning to the organization of the relationship between people. The relationship with this enemy would not always be antagonistic, neither would it lead to open warfare. But it would always be an outsider relationship that excluded any lasting accommodation and could not rule out the possibility of war: The political enemy will not necessarily be bad according to the moral code or ugly according to the aesthetic code. He would not have to be an economic competitor; it could even, occasionally, seem more advantageous to do business with him…. It is simply that he is the other, the foreigner, and that conflict with him could not be resolved according to a set of general norms…nor by the judgement of a third party.4 There is nevertheless no necessary or historical requirement to create new enemies. The historical example of ancient China shows us that, although the enemy is the generator of identity, a deprivation of enemy can lead to the exploitation of other types of meaning, other identity mechanisms. The historical model of ancient China In the history of China there are two great models linking meaning and power.5 The first model existed between the fourth and third centuries BC. China was not to begin with a unified entity. Its emperor—the son of Heaven—had no political authority. The empire was made up of a mosaic of feudal domains continually in conflict, trying to take over each other. In the fourth century BC a minister in one of these kingdoms, that of Ch’in, attempted to make a real ideological breakthrough with his theory of the hegemony of the Ch’in kingdom over the other kingdoms. For Shang Yang, domination must be based on manipulation. Contrary to what might be expected, however, manipulation was not defined as a sophisticated activity based on cunning, ambiguity, uncertainty and opacity. Quite the opposite: it tended to base its domination on the brutality of its

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objectives. In other words, the political ambition of legalism—the theory of Shang Yang—was to make the Chinese people accept that the power of the state was necessary, inescapable, even if its interests were absolutely opposite to those of the people, even if the wellbeing of the state was harmful for others, even if the domination of the state transformed its subjects into slaves. It was not a question of dominating by cunning, but of dominating by killing cunning. To be successful, domination must be internalized by each family rather than imposed by public order agents, for, according to Shang Yang, ‘when order is ensured by each family, the king reigns in the universe’.6 To make the application of laws ruthless and predictable, the legalist system called on two fundamental resources: agriculture and war. The former was required to ‘fill up the stomach to empty the head’, but also to provide the buildup of surpluses essential for any war effort. The strength of this system lies in the close link it establishes between wealth and war. The building up of agricultural surpluses, like the conduct of war, has as its main aim to strengthen the kingdom’s power while tightly controlling the people. Labour in the fields and military service became almost the only social frameworks experienced by the Chinese of the Ch’in kingdom. In this construct of domination, everything or almost everything seems to have been provided for, including the risk of social slackness that might follow an excessive accumulation of agricultural surpluses. To avoid this risk, legalism therefore envisaged destroying all accumulated surpluses above a certain threshold. This action also dispelled the risk of autonomous trading groups appearing, which would chal lenge the iron system that had been set up. The perpetuation of the political order was therefore theoretically ensured by the planned partial destruction of all agricultural surpluses, to allow the cycle of production and war with other kingdoms to be renewed. War was both the end and the means. This system, therefore, provided for every eventuality, everything apart from the most distant possibility: that of the total success of this regime to the point where all other Chinese kingdoms had submitted, where a single China had been created and the risk of war had permanently disappeared. And that is precisely what happened. In 221 BC, a Ch’in ruler managed to take over the whole of China and unify it. However, hardly was peace made than the power of the kingdom was weakened, because the cement that had kept it together (the existence of an enemy) had disappeared. Agricultural surpluses accumulated and were no longer destroyed. War no longer made sense since the unity of China was assured. The system therefore collapsed because the empire could no longer provide meaning. Of course, it continued to be opposed by nonChinese enemies it called the Barbarians. But they were so distant from the centre that they hardly existed. In any case they could not fill the mobilizing role that had been played by the wars against the kingdoms. This deprivation of an enemy was traumatic for the elite. Faced with the sudden collapse of an empire that had just found its unity, they sought collectively to think of ways to bring back meaning to the political system, to

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enable it to overcome the problems of the legalist system. In short, they considered the very question considered by all large states since the end of the Cold War: how to construct an identity without the existence of an enemy? How to define a link between nations outside the context of war? Jia-Yi tried to find an answer to these two fundamental questions at the end of the second century BC by ‘inventing’ a policy of meaning that was to structure Chinese society until the nineteenth century. He started by learning from the mistakes of legalist determinism and went back to Confucian tradition by placing more importance on rites than on law. It was still a framework for making society suit nature. However, nature was interpreted as synonymous with conventions rather than with brutality. The legalist system was succeeded by a ritualistic system that proposed a structure of collective meaning based on two levels: society and the state. At the level of the state, the ritualistic system created a new symbolism expressed through the Mintang, the Palace of Light. The [Mintang] can be seen as a representation of the world with its round roof—the Heavens—supported on a square base—the Earth—which is composed of four sides facing four directions around a central hall…. The emperor moved around this residence according to the relevant season, symbolizing by his position the planetary configuration of the moment…. The general perambulations of the ruler wove the web of the seasons, which converted time into a liturgy of norms…. Thus the ruler, through his wanderings around a building representing the universe…diffused and expressed the structuring configuration of nature by reducing it to symbols. In so doing, he fulfilled the dual purpose of education and government.7 The ruler thus became the symbol of a celestial norm, which spread not only throughout the whole of Chinese society, but also beyond to the Barbarians. The ritual acts of the ruler, recorded in royal edicts and diffused by the schools, set out a meaning. It expressed the movement of the heavens, interpreted through the rites. The rite was the source of power in providing for social cohesion based on the family, but it also diffused a civilizing message for the Barbarians, who were also called ‘the bare ones’, since they lived in a world where the Heaven no longer covered the Earth. In the ritualism there was one meaning for self and another meaning for the Others, an instrumentalized meaning for the use of a power. Meaning was given a political sense to ensure the perpetuity of the empire, to escape from the definition of identity based too strongly, or even exclusively, on a relationship with the enemy. Four lessons, provisional but perhaps essential to the understanding of the post-Cold War period, can be derived from the fact that this system of meaning lasted from the second century BC to the nineteenth century (in other words until the arrival of the West), while the legalist system lasted only two centuries:

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• implicitly or explicitly, all human and political societies need a meaning to organize themselves or to survive when faced by Others; • systems of meaning constructed on the existence of a total enemy have the virtue of being strongly mobilizing, but are also very vulnerable in the long term; • building a system of meaning based only on the existence of a total enemy is not necessary. The construction of an exterior based on values is preferable— since more fruitful—to a too-hasty, easy mix up between the outsider and the enemy, between the indispensable definition of self and the inevitable stigmatization of the Other; • to be constructed, systems of meaning need to rest on a combination of acts of will and existing political and cultural values. The future of war The collapse of the Soviet Union happened at an exceptional pace and in exceptional conditions not dissimilar to the conditions under which the first Chinese empire collapsed. We saw the swallowing-up of a regime whose legitimacy had relied on the possibility of war or, at any rate, permanent conflict. But in addition it was swallowed up without a transition, as if there could be no intermediate position between an aggressive stance and complete collapse. The loss of meaning following enemy deprivation affected in the first instance the most crucial instrument of the Cold War: the military machine. There had been a fairly broad social consensus in the West in favour of a war effort proportional to the perception of threat. In addition people were relatively united on the ultimate aims of the war. It can therefore be said there was cohesion, a linkage between military power (means) and military policy (aims), and between meaning and power. With the collapse of the ‘total enemy’, this linkage was shattered. There was no possibility of the military policies being recycled, either in the West or in the East, by defining a ‘new enemy’, which might provide the cohesiveness the Soviet model had brought Western societies. In fact, it would be an illusion and superficial to believe that defining a new enemy, whether Muslim or Japanese, would instantly give back meaning to international relations, and re-establish a strong link between nations. Behind the collapse of the Soviet Union there were two essential questions: one about the future of war and military power in the relationship between superpowers, and one about the future of relations between states in a world system that is no longer just about states. Unthinkable war between democratic nations With the death of the USSR, it is now possible to envisage a transformation of the rules of the world game without the transformation necessarily being preceded by a widespread military confrontation between the leading world

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powers. Of course, the break-up of the former Soviet empire and rising Russian nationalism make it difficult to construct a collective vision founded on world relationships becoming more peaceful. Nevertheless, the sum total of current or future conflicts bears no relation to the potential costs of the holocaust that might have followed nuclear confrontation between the two former superpowers. For this reason, despite the post-Cold War world seeming a long way away from Kant’s project of eternal peace, the end of the Soviet Union confirmed the historical tendency of the major developed nations not to go to war to settle their differences.8 It is difficult to imagine today the possibility of military conflict between France and Germany, between France and the UK or between the United States and Canada. Three factors are inextricably linked in this process: the declining relevance of territorial gains as a means of adding to a nation’s power; the recognized importance of economic interdependence; and the increasing convergence of political systems. Taken separately, none of these factors guarantees that force will not be used. Albert Hirschman stressed that economic interdependence could be a source of war.9 Moreover, the phenomena of economic globalization and dematerialization tend not to remove conflicts of symbolic territoriality (the location of the headquarters of the European Central Bank and the various institutions created by the Maastricht Treaty).10 But, in these conflicts as in others, resorting to force seems unthinkable for reasons of cost, efficiency and values.11 Even though Russia has not espoused the most developed forms of ‘market democracy’, and even though the temptation to resort occasionally to military force does constitute a considerable political resource for its leaders, in particular to ‘bring together’ Russians living outside the new Russia, there is no way Russia could rebuild itself and rethink itself just on the basis of hostility to the West. In this vast country the infinite fragmentation of social groups and identities is too great, too developed for a political or religious actor, with one wave of a magic wand, to take control of the crisis of meaning.12 This process would seem all the more difficult to manage in that it is perhaps the first time in modern Russian history that the construction of a national or political identity could not be reinforced, one might say, by the existence of a strong external threat. If there is a threat, it comes primarily from Russians themselves, even though the Western nations, and particularly the United States, have pursued a systematic policy of humiliating Russia politically in the early years of the post Cold War, a policy which is only just starting to be recognized. Curiously, few people have woken up to the West’s responsibility for nationalist tensions in Russia. Be that as it may, the collapse of the USSR means we are probably seeing an expanding circle of nations for which generalized war has become almost unthinkable. Not only do most of the democratic Western nations have a place in this circle, but perhaps too some of the more democratic parts of Latin America, as the simultaneous rejection of nuclear weapons by Argentina and Brazil bears witness. In this area of the world the trend towards a less frequent use of force to

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regulate relationships between nations owes much to the arrival of democratic political regimes that, here more than elsewhere, were formed in opposition to military regimes. Resorting to force would mean reintroducing the military into the political arena and jeopardizing a democratic balance that is still precarious. We should note that economic and social breakdown, particularly in Brazil, is creating among some sections of the population a demand for order and therefore a return of the military to power.13 Democracy is too recent an acquisition and too fragile to be able by itself to make war unthinkable. That said, it would be wrong to minimize its influence when combined with other factors which pull in the same direction. For example, the universal principles, to which Latin American nations might refer in order to legitimize armed conflict, are disappearing. Even the ‘nationalist’ motive is seriously shaken these days, either because it is identified with military power, or because no-one fundamentally believes that a nationalist policy of isolation could help solve even the slightest collective problem.14 From this point of view, policies for liberal economic reform have made a big contribution to breaking the nationalist hold where it still exists in Latin America.15 In a rather chaotic way, but probably increasingly, Latin American states seem to be acknowledging the need not only to limit their political fragmentation by rejecting war, but also to transcend it through a strategy of economic regrouping. But, in contrast to what prevailed in the 1960s, the search for a certain unity is no longer based on a determination to exert a political identity. It is being defined and constructed on the basis of need: they are uniting in order to prevent a fall down the world economic ladder. To all these factors should be added the last but not least: in Latin America, as in the rest of the world, there is a tendency for the most challenging problems to be posed, considered and resolved on scales that straddle national state boundaries. Major social problems (drugs, crime, environment) and major economic issues (economic liberalization, debt) are good examples. Naturally, when faced with these problems, the use of certain military means and the recourse to force are not excluded, as the growing role of the military in the struggle against drug traffickers shows. But there is, in terms both of meaning and of political symbolism, a fundamental difference between socio-political systems which make the potential use of armed force against an enemy the central element of their political identity (as was the case during the Cold War), and political regimes which use them, whether occasionally or on a long-term basis, to fight opponents who defy their authority. Everywhere war is becoming increasingly unthinkable, and nations are being forced to invent other types of identity than that of ‘armed nation’. It is remarkable that the end of the Cold War brought into question part of the political identity of Switzerland, even though it had been founded on neutrality. The fierce debates that took place in France over the future of military conscription underlined the extreme difficulty of maintaining a strong collective feeling in the context of a weakening threat from the East and the political construction of Europe. The

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disappearance of the threat is thus closely linked to the impossibility of pursuing a defence policy on a strictly national basis. War and identity The end of the Cold War did certainly not condemn war as a method of employing force between peoples, but rather the value of war as an instrument to construct a collective national identity worn by the state. What is tending to disappear is less war as an instrument of recourse to armed violence than war as an instrument of regulation between nations. It is difficult to see and interpret the post Cold War as the emergence of a Kantian system based on the elevation of the universal conscience from a common good—except in a very fragmentary way. But it seems agreed that the name ‘post Cold War’ will be interpreted less and less as a Rousseauist system in which war was defined fundamentally as a ‘state-to-state relationship’.16 Thus there would seem to be a close relationship between the relative decline of inter-state violence and the weakening of the role of states in the global process. This reality would confirm only what historical sociology has always emphasized: the decisive role of war in the creation of states.17 The possibility of a resurgence of major regional inter-state conflicts cannot be excluded. It is in Asia that this risk is greatest, because there is no strong regional identity and none of the major actors (Japan, India, China, Korea) is a natural regional leader. But we are unlikely to see the creation of a regional system with a structure clarified or simplified through a classic military confrontation between states. Once again, this retreat of classic inter-state wars heralds neither a calming nor a rebirth of conflict, but more fundamentally a loss of meaning. In other words, it will be increasingly difficult to see in any armed conflict an immediate political significance or to interpret it in the context of a global representation of the world. Contrary to the idea of a new world order, regional conflicts tend increasingly to have a looser relationship to states or to universal categories. The dissociation from the universal means that actors can follow their war aims without needing to trim to a universalist issue, without having to appeal to new or structured arguments essential to the pursuit of combat. The Angolan rebels of UNITA and the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia continued the struggle against the powers that be even though the world context that used to carry them along has disintegrated. The end of world ideology means they are no longer required to produce an articulate political argument when calling for international support, be it political or military. The corollary of this loss of political and universalist references is an unprecedented violation of the rules of war, in particular the growing involvement of civilians in the tactics of war. In almost all the regional conflicts that survived the Cold War, though in radically modified contexts (Angola, Cambodia, Afghanistan), there has been a shift from an internationalization

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process guided by the superpowers to an internationalization built sometimes on air, and from a dissociation from universalism towards an affiliation to particularism. Economic predation, brute force or the inertia of war are as much the means as the aims of war: the war is not waged necessarily to achieve predefined objectives, and it is in waging war that the motivation needed to continue it is found. In these cases—of which there are very many—war is no longer a continuation of politics by other means, as in Clausewitz’s classic model —but sometimes the initial expression of forms of activity or organization in search of meaning. It is no longer—or at least it is less and less—an institution carefully controlled and manipulated by states.18 It is rather a process that reveals the internal deregulation of some societies and the consequent loss of meaning.19 War becomes not the ultimate means to achieve an objective, but the most ‘efficient’ way of finding one. The ability to motivate regional or ethnic type support is far more impressive than a search for foreign political godfathers. This is why the end of South African support for UNITA or of Chinese support for the Khmer Rouge did not change radically the respective strengths of these movements.20 The dissociation of conflict from ideology is nevertheless closely linked to another process that is just as fundamental: dissociation from state. In order to pursue a war and win power, it is particularly important to enter and become established in the war market, in the sense of the place where arms are exchanged in return for goods that are more or less rare. In the Cambodian conflict, the external factor remains essential to the political survival of the Khmer Rouge. But traditional geopolitical and ideological considerations have been supplanted by economic factors, and state actors by a complex association of social actors, and political and military factions. This dissociation from state and from universalism, and the mixing of public and private strategies, economic considerations and political calculations, lead us to talk, increasingly and imprecisely, about ‘mafias’, by which we mean the processes and players we are only just starting to recognize. The alliance of Thai military and business people is emerging not only in Cambodia, but also in Laos, Burma and perhaps soon in Vietnam.21 For all that, the dissociation of conflicts from state should not make us to forget too quickly the still complex play of states. The predatory strategy used by Thai actors in the region is certainly compatible with a classic plan for regional hegemony: the reconstruction of a Greater Thailand.22 Moreover, states play an increasing role, paradoxically, in the dissociation of conflicts from states. In some cases, such as that of Cambodia, the privatization of war serves as a screen for the enrichment of Thai leaders but also for their objective of hegemony In others it is the states which, eager for financial resources, forget caution and political principle in supplying the private markets of war. Russia, the former Soviet republics and the former East European countries are big contributors to this process of deregulation of war on an international scale. Here again, meaning and power are greatly at odds.

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Thus it is easy to see that, in the post Cold War, the central problem of war is less about intensity than about identity. In other words, the challenge is less to ask whether we are heading towards a more peaceful or belligerent world than to be able to give a meaning, a sense, to the entanglement of areas at war and areas at peace.

7 Global social links (1): conflicts without identity

If war seems to be changing its identity with the ending of the great East-West divide, it is because the global game has changed profoundly. We are shifting from a system largely governed and regulated by states to a global social system in which there is no longer a frontier between internal and external. This observation is true for states that have lost an enemy, for companies that have to face up to market globalization, and for individuals who can no longer escape the process of globalization. But the creation and organization of a global social system seems a long way off. The economic and social forces of which it is composed are finding it difficult to settle down into a system. In other words, the multiple actors and issues in the world are connected in ways that are not always stable, identifiable, regular and complementary.1 Globalization of the social linkage is bringing about its deregulation. The traditional issue of war and peace between nations certainly remains present at the heart of this global social system. However, it no longer serves to confer a meaning on the reality of the world, and peace alone no longer guarantees world security. It will be increasingly difficult to use slogans such as ‘the world is at peace’, even on a regional scale, not only because the realities of this world will be increasingly at odds, but also and especially because the state of peace—technically non-belligerence—will be less and less identified with a nation’s security. The European community for example has been living simultaneously and intensely with two ideas: that war is now unthinkable between nations in the European Union, and that war is rumbling in Europe (Yugoslavia). The extreme contrast and simultaneous nature of these two perceptions obviously complicate the construction of stable interpretations and magnify the sense of insecurity: people can be living in peace and at the same time feel unsafe. Therefore the question is perhaps less about the classic strategic balance between competing state entities than about the balance of globalized social systems that have to find new linkages between meaning (identity) and power (resources). We might therefore see a considerable number of challenges, problems and crises emerging, which will have a lasting effect on the balance of the global social system, but which nevertheless do not upset the traditional relationship of peace and war between nations. An ecological disaster, a

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pandemic, computer piracy on the world scale, financial or genetic malpractice, disinformation programmes and massive economic relocation are all potential sources of disequilibrium that could perfectly well run alongside a state of peace between nations. This line of thought could be taken further, to say that some of these events require a peaceful, regulated inter-state space. Drug traffickers and mafia need the stability of the Western world to make profitable investments. Raymond Aron defined the Cold War as a dialectic relationship between ‘impossible peace and improbable war’. The post Cold War could be defined as a relationship between ‘imperfect peace and unobtainable security’. At the beginning of the previous chapter we said that the crisis of the links between nations resembled the crisis of the social links within each nation. This observation must be extended to show that this similarity is not merely fortuitous, and that the crisis of the linkage between nations is none other than the expression of the crisis of global social linkage. It is now impossible to dissociate the social arenas, to live in the fiction of an ‘international space’ separated from ‘social space’. The consequence is not only a growing interaction between social actors (states, companies, associations)—as we have known, of course, for a long time—but a growing similarity in their modes of operation, a newer idea. This similarity is not just fortuitous, but rather is the manifestation of a new global social system being born. It is striking that the difficulty nations found in establishing mutual links after the Cold War is matched by a parallel difficulty for social actors (workers, unions, employers) in creating new relationships beyond that of an imagined class struggle and thus beyond the Cold War. Just as states have to rethink completely their security relationships beyond the binary ‘peace-war’, social players ought to think about their security in the world of work beyond the binary ‘employed-unemployed’. At the heart of each nation, as in the relationships between nations, there is a question about the basis and goals of social ties, if we accept that the relationship to war symbolizes in generic terms the relationship to the Other in an inter-state system, and that the relationship to work symbolizes in equally generic terms the relationship to others in the world of work. War and work, naturally, are not in themselves disappearing from the arena of the thinkable. But the relationship to war and the relationship to work no longer have the same explicit identity function they used to have between nations or within societies. They no longer have the ‘all-encompassing’ virtues they use to exercise in the collective life of societies and nations. This development is expressed and demonstrated on at least two levels: • by the decoupling of conflict and identity; • by the priority given to seeking an identity, which pushes the idea of a collective project into second place.

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Conflicts without identity In the decoupling of conflict and identity the decline of ideology plays an essential role. However, this explanation is insufficient. The shaking of identities based on conflict is also affecting social-democratic systems founded on compromise, which confirms that the loss of meaning in social (and military) conflicts is less about intensity than about identity. Conflicts are more present than ever, but it is not easy to interpret them clearly. Two factors reinforce each other: the globalization of economic activity and technological progress. Globalization is in effect increasingly destroying the unity of place, the focus of identity, and the common spatial framework in which social actors learn to know and understand each other. Production, research, accounting and training activities are being dispersed, accentuating the breaking of a company’s links with a particular place. This break-up is aggravated by the footloose nature of economic competitiveness, which exacerbates rivalry between territories (delocalization) and, increasingly, between profit centres within a single company. Partly as a result of the information revolution, the costs of dismantling and transferring activities from one region to another or one country to another are tending to fall.2 For example, a company can now organize its production on a twenty-four-hour basis without resorting to night shifts: all it needs is for the production data to be transferred electronically to a country in another time zone.3 The most fundamental consequence of this development for meaning is that it makes the relation between globalization and universality increasingly antagonistic, without at the same time creating a new identity of conflict that is stable and all-encompassing. The feeling of belonging to a common world does not bring with it the sharing of a common meaning.4 Although the social conflict might have been extended into an imagined class struggle on a world scale, globalization has induced a feeling of professional insecurity, as well as the perception of an inescapable choice between preserving one’s own interest or the interest of an Other, indefinable and ever-changing. Nevertheless, the reconstruction of the social conflict around a new identity based on the cleavage between national and global seems rather unlikely. On the one hand, as nations start to see the relationship to globalization as conflictual, this pressure—and the negotiations associated with it—will tend to have repercussions at a national level, in the form of opposition—or at least tension— between the ‘protected sector’ (public servants) and the ‘exposed sector’ (the private sector). Although the growing feeling of economic insecurity is general, its impact is unequal, depending on whether it affects an exposed or a protected sector.5 On the other hand, even supposing the reconstruction of identity through conflict could take place as a result of globalization—as the debate over GATT and culture in 1993 might suggest—it could hardly take place on the basis of a split between occupations, or between social actors, because of the considerable fragmentation of the world of work brought about by technical progress. The

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information revolution and the progress of robotics have led to the downgrading of many trades that used to have a strong identity (for example, miners and steelworkers). They caused a profound and wholesale recasting of the whitecollar workforce and manual trades, and consequently, the advance of service trades at the expense of industrial jobs. Simultaneously, the relationship that linked man to the machine has disappeared in favour of a hyper-specialization of trades, which prevents their symbolic unification, and accelerates the transformation of classic mass production systems by reinforcing part-time and temporary work. Since employment is identified more and more with a service and less and less with a machine, it is tending to become abstract. It is becoming more common to talk about jobs than about trades, as though the issue were more about acquiring a position in a hierarchy than about having a skill or a qualification which—in itself—provided an identity.6 This reduction of meaning has a paradoxical and socially destabilizing consequence: it leads to work or employment being seen as a right which society is not able to satisfy, just at a time when the state is withdrawing from any responsibility and limiting its involvement.7 In this domain as in others, the economic and social intensity of a problem (employment) is undeniably magnified by the difficulty that actors have in interpreting their reality, in symbolizing their present and their future. The crisis of meaning or the problem of conceiving unity The social actors are therefore confronted by this demonstration of the crisis of meaning: they notice the differences that separate them, one from another, which might forge their identity, but they have trouble in formalizing this difference, to make it systematic. At the same time, the deep-seated need they sometimes feel to unite, to reconstruct a collective identity in the face of so many changes and challenges, comes up against the difficulty of conceiving what might unite them. This difficulty in considering their difference and their unity simultaneously is revealed in other social fields too, particularly in the religious field where the question of meaning is of the essence. In the Christian world, for example, the extent of this problem is shown in the progress of ecumenism. The Catholics and the Orthodox Church agree fairly easily on the minor nature of their theological divergences, but their common conclusion leads paradoxically to some disillusionment. ‘Between the Roman Catholics and the Orthodox Church for example,’ notes Christian Duquoc, ‘theological divergences are minimal. But people are continually harking back to them without understanding they are metaphors for the de facto separation.’8 Besides, the idea of enclosure or totality sometimes implied by ‘unity’ accentuates by its very nature the real gap between the cohesion sought by ecclesiastical institutions, and dispersed religious practices. It is interesting that the Ecumenical Council of Churches accepts that the end of the Cold War changed the way ecumenism could be depicted. ‘Ecumenism’, said the pastor Kaiser, ‘was linked to a global vision of the world where particularist characteristics would represent obstacles to be overcome. In

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1993, particularisms were promoted.’9 Indeed, while the Churches sometimes try to unite, their members are in contrast considering diversifying their practices and their affiliations. Therefore, whatever the domain or social field, as soon as attempts are made to organize dispersed conflicts or behaviours around a central and mobilizing axis, the axis seems to shift, especially since conflicts are no longer limited to a clearly identifiable group of actors. They are set within processes and chains of events difficult to decipher. The problem in considering and fighting exclusion stems from the heterogeneous character of those who are excluded. They are the victims of circumstance more than of deliberate historical or social strategies.10 That is why exclusion destructures identity whereas exploitation structured it.11 People were willing to shout out that they were exploited; they are reluctant to accept they are being excluded. Exploitation did not exclude hope, because the ‘exploited’ were integrated. For the excluded their fight is against degenerating further. This problem is remarkably similar to that in international relations, in the relationship between the wealthy states of the North and the poor states of the South. The existence of a North-South divide has never seemed to affect so naturally the actors in the international system as it does now. However, as soon as it comes to ‘formalizing’ this distinction, we come up against the approximate character of the terms ‘North’ and ‘South’. To begin with, there is much of the South in the North and of the North in the South. Moreover, the idea of a NorthSouth divide refers simultaneously to the gulf between rich and poor—reflected in migratory pressure—and to the South’s ability to catch up economically— translated as competition. In addition there are several Norths and several Souths. And though there are a considerable number of areas of friction between the North and South, there are also a good number of crossing points, illustrated daily in migration, trade and media communications. Here again, the logic of circumstance takes priority over the social-historical determinism of the actors. Thus, while the North-South conflict is seen as problematic, in the North as well as in the South, it has not resulted in a decisive restructuring of the political identities of states, either in the North or the South. And although the economic success of Asia destroyed definitively the theory that the North ‘blocked’ the South economically, everyone accepts that Asian models can be reproduced only imperfectly under other skies. In this sphere, as in others, the debate has gained in intellectual maturity but has probably lost political effectiveness. In other words, the fact of admitting that situations and solutions are complex weakens the desire to look for new solutions. In the area of development aid, for example, the failure of the processes for transferring resources from the North to the South has led to the discrediting of the very idea of aid rather than to its redefinition. The calls for an increase in public aid for development fall on deaf ears. It has to be said that the end of the Cold War was accompanied by a decline in importance of the idea of redistribution that is very worrying, whether the terms it is expressed in are social (wealthy and poor people), regional (integrated

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regions, underclass regions) or international (wealthy countries, poor countries). In this respect it is striking how much the idea of secession has gained ground in Italy (as we have already seen), and also in Brazil, where the developed south cannot see why it should continue to share its possessions with an impoverished north.12 Within the Northern countries, the concept of a ‘triumvirate’—bringing together the USA, Japan and Europe—seems particularly weak in comparison with what was once called Atlantic ‘solidarity’. It is a grouping which, from the outside, appears integrated, but which in reality is not a system at all. Today, the expression ‘the Western world’ does not really ring true, because of the accumulation of diverging interests, in economics, defence and culture, and makes us wonder whether its less tangible base of common values is not also starting to crack. However, at the same time, Europeans and Americans would find it difficult to formalize their differences or interpret their conflicts of interest into a wider and perhaps more mobilizing perspective of a conflict of values. There is no fundamental opposition between Europeans and Americans. But, significantly, the definition of what is fundamentally common remains hard to find. From time to time, governments with worries about their legitimacy seem tempted to enliven their conflicts of interest by associating them with conflicts of value. But at the same time they fear that such a challenge might weaken the existing networks of a strong, almost wholly complete interdependence. All players in the global social system are thus confronted with a need to differentiate themselves from others while at the same time participating in a game with common constraints. To this first disjunction we can add a second, just as paradoxical. For an identity to exist and survive, it needs to find its defining characteristics, to cultivate its difference, and to construct its externality But we know too that any construction of identity works increasingly by interacting with the Other rather than by turning in on itself. Identification occurs more through interdependence than through introspection. Sociologists have for example stressed that a workbased identity is increasingly the product of external factors. A professional qualification is no longer sufficient: it needs to be accompanied by a sort of social qualification, which could be defined as an ability to communicate with others, to demonstrate talents outside what is strictly the framework of work. ‘Work is distinguished less and less from other forms of influence and power games in which individuals participate as social beings.’13 It is no longer sufficient to regard social relationships as conflicts in the expectation thereby of delineating a better-defined or clearer identity. States face an almost identical problem. They will sometimes be able to find a new enemy figure in the appearance of a political adversary. However, the ‘identification benefit’ from this approach is necessarily limited for several reasons. The first reason is practical. The rise in ‘Japanophobia’, for example, will always remain relative as long as the behaviour of ‘Japanophile consumers’ contradicts that of ‘Japanophobe citizens’. Giving a devil-image to Japan or to

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the Muslim world is not an easy way for Western societies to find a new identity after the end of the Cold War. The second reason is even more fundamental. With the end of the Cold War, we are seeing a complete overturning of the relationship with the Other, which goes well beyond the question of enemy deprivation. The challenge lies in the transformation of what Marcel Gauchet calls ‘the general economy of otherness’. In the Cold War strategy, like the teleological strategies that preceded it, there was both an Other and a Beyond.14 Today, the reality is significantly more complex, as we have simultaneously lost the meaning of the final goal and the enemy figure which legitimized the collective effort towards achieving this final goal. In one fell swoop, the field of ‘otherness’ moved from the ‘outside’ to the ‘inside’. It is now inside societies and even inside individuals.15 Deprived of stable references, societies are becoming ‘susceptible’ to internal dislocation, a dislocation summarized by the brutal expression: ‘the enemy is within’. This theme plagues Eastern Europe under the generic and very approximate term of ‘a return to nationalism’. And its possible extension to Western Europe is the problem. This shift is fundamental, because it is at the heart of the crisis of meaning. It will in effect always be more difficult for an individual or a group to admit that the source of a problem should be sought within itself rather than with the Other. As a result, it will always be more difficult to accept that the boundary between oneself and the Other, between the good and bad, will be increasingly relative. This issue explains in large part why the disappearance of a clearly identifiable threat is accompanied by a feeling of intense insecurity in the Western societies which emerged victorious at the end of the Cold War.

8 Global social links (2): actors without a project

All social actors are now affected by the loss of a natural reference space that could guarantee their source of identity in a quiet, stable way. No longer a naturally available resource, identity has to be renegotiated. As we saw earlier, this ‘reconstructing’ of identity is as true for actors in the world of work looking for a social qualification, as for state actors responsible for locating their countries within a global social system rather than just within a system of states. Not so long ago, entering the professional world was equivalent to entering a social order. It offered rites, codes and constraints. The most radical industrial disputes adhered no less respectfully than others to the rules of this order. Status and membership of a world full of promises, of ‘fulfilment’ and resources were awarded in exchange. The world of states functioned in the same way. Achieving political sovereignty was almost an end in itself (symbolic membership of the United Nations). It not only granted an identity (‘I am a Third World country, a Socialist country or a country of the free world’), but also a way to make local use of the resources of an identity provided, as it were, by the international system itself. States did not have to ask themselves the ‘question about meaning’, as meaning was in abundant supply. For this reason a resource such as Third Worldism’ had a powerful effect on political societies dislocated by history (Algeria) or weakened by their cultural and political heterogeneity (India, Yugoslavia). It explains why Third World countries were held in the thrall of ‘international politics’ for such a long time. As soon as identity was granted to actors in exchange for what might be called ‘joining up to the world’ (of work or of states), they could naturally envisage a future for themselves, and set out ways and means of maximizing their resources, whether material (higher salary for wage earners, increased economic aid for states) or symbolic (search for a social or an international status). For the social or international actor, it was less important to question who you were than to ask yourself about the best way of achieving your desires. The development of the idea of ‘project’ was, under these conditions, no more than the projection into the future of an identity that was apparently already in hand. Paradoxically, the natural interlocking of the concepts of individual, social and national project were all the more successful and natural in that the web of interdependence connecting the ‘different worlds’ (such as those of work and

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states) was much looser than today. A social conflict could all the better be affiliated symbolically to an international conflict of an ideological nature (the class struggle on a world scale) if its regulation only marginally depended on it. For a long time the great trade negotiations remained ‘socially abstract’, since the issues were singularly limited. For the most part it was mainly a question of dismantling tariff barriers for the free movement of goods, although the topics of recent trade negotiations affected more fundamental areas: the harmonization of social and cultural conditions of commercial production throughout the world.1 For example, national levels of employment today depend directly on the world context. But this dependence is thought of only as a weak point. The economic and social interdependence of the world of work and the world of states is therefore reinforced economically but dislocated symbolically. There is, in a way, a growing affiliation to the world but a disaffiliation to collective meaning. The strong demand for identity that all actors in the global social system expressed after the Cold War is designed to fill that gap. But there is a heavy price to pay: that of a considerable withdrawal from utopia. For globalization in itself is a poor source of meaning. It imposes a requirement on all actors in the global social system to project themselves towards the future by leaving aside the question of project. In effect, the divorce of meaning and power in the post Cold War is expressed by the gap between the imperative of ‘projection’ and the absence of ‘project’. By projection, we mean the need for individual or collective actors to tie their present ever more strongly into a future brought nearer by the compression of time and made wider in space by the globalization of reference spaces. For individuals the necessity of projection will translate into the need to think ever earlier and in ever more personal terms about their professional future (training) or social future (security). This projection will require them to renegotiate their relationship to space by integrating globalization into their choice of qualifications and profession (learning languages, working in a foreign country). A project is by nature like a construct. It implies an effort to make the future into an issue, to symbolize destiny, to tear a social or political human group away from reality, not to deny it but to transcend it. Yet today there is not only a gap between the nature of projection and the nature of project, but perceptions of these two ideas in contradictory terms. In the international sphere, the urgency of problems poses such a constraint that it does not give the major states the chance of setting out a global perspective, a true project. Yet the nature of immediacy and emergency is to asphyxiate every day a little more of their political imagination, their ability to set out a path, a way, a project. They have lost what one might call the ‘language of priorities’, as if the latter were too closely identified with the era of utopia: emergency is the mirror image of utopia. They behave rather like actors involved in a succession of plots who are asked to use their skills, as different scenes take place, to provide the appropriate reaction to any given situation.2

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States not only have lost the monopoly of meaning, but are also forced to find one, just as other social actors are, and in conditions that are more or less identical. Projection has thus replaced project, leading to a widespread feeling among states that they are locating their actions within the future without being able to assign any meaning to it. The lack of life and credibility in many government employment policies, for example, is because they let themselves make projections without placing them in a perspective. They sometimes think of the future, but never manage to ‘think the future’. There is for instance a vital difference between proceeding with a more or less planned reduction in working hours in order to hold back a rise in unemployment, and setting this procedure within a project that forces consideration and symbolization of the place of individuals in a society in which work would no longer be an ‘absolute’. In the first there is projection—imposed by the constraint of unemployment. In the second there is a project, because the policy to counter the constraint is coupled with a representation of the future. The social actors—and in particular wage earners—experience an identical contradiction. The rise in unemployment puts concern about the future at the centre of their daily lives. Their projection into the future is permanent, even indispensable. But at the same time, no union or actor thinks of discussing a social project. It is now a matter, at best, of preserving, and no longer of conquering. Military power in search of meaning Let us take another example, that of military power: the gap between projection and project is just as obvious. In 1994 France had never before projected so much military might outside its territory. Yet no-one dared to talk about a real French project, a French military policy Of course, military leaders are fully qualified to think about the weapon systems of tomorrow, to integrate the concepts of operational flexibility, inter-service cooperation and ‘fuzzy logic’, to take into account the increasing role of intelligence in waging war.3 Nevertheless they could not replace the political actor when it comes to setting out a project, a military policy. The nature of projection is to adapt armed forces to operational scenarios of military power in the post-Cold War world. The nature of project is to subordinate military forces to the definition of aims within the framework of a political doctrine on the use of force.4 In France the force and credibility of its nuclear policy depended not only on the damage it might cause an adversary on the basis of the ‘strength to the weak’ principle of deterrence; it also resulted from the political conditions under which the use of atomic weapons could potentially be authorized. Thus it was meaning that gave the nuclear weapon its status of an instrument of political power, and not the destructive power in itself. In today’s world there is no longer really a true nuclear policy, because the conditions under which nuclear weapons might be used are vaguer than ever. As a result, while nuclear weapons remain an instrument of security or for guaranteeing a safe haven, it is much trickier to consider them as a vector of

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military-political power, the flagship of a power identifiable to all potential enemies. While all the major countries have the means at their disposal to project their forces beyond their frontiers and in new contexts, it certainly does not mean that they are ready to act according to a project or an ambition, in line with some vision. They possess instruments of power but lack a military policy. In reality the reason military powers have trouble in finding a meaning although, paradoxically, the feeling of insecurity is increasing, is that here too they increasingly need to manage ‘crisis situations with no enemy’, whereas the development of a strategy has traditionally assumed that a previously identified enemy exists.5 In effect, it will tend to be less and less the existence of an enemy that sparks off military action, and more that developments in some event in which states were led to intervene causes an adversary or an enemy to emerge here and there. Humanitarian action falls clearly into this scenario. Nevertheless, despite appearances, the taking on of responsibility by states for humanitarian action is not something that can fill the gap between projection and project, between meaning and power. As the operation progresses, the humanitarian policy becomes an instrument of power and ceases to be a source of meaning. Whatever the retrospective interpretation we put on the Gulf War, we can see that Resolution 688 organizing humanitarian intervention in Kurdistan was based on a fairly coherent connection of the humanitarian and the political: the humanitarian intervention was aimed explicitly at paving the way for a clear political operation, the protection of the Kurds against repression, the military guarantee of autonomy for Kurdistan and the fear that an overflow of Kurdish refugees might destabilize neighbouring Turkey. Since this crisis we have seen a growing autonomization of humanitarian policies from the political aims they were supposed to serve—Yugoslavia and Somalia illustrate this shift well. In the Yugoslavian affair, humanitarian action was, in its initial stage, an implicit instrument for correcting a major political error: the recognition by the international community, with no true project, of old Yugoslav republics. As the months went by, humanitarian aid took a predominant role in Western policies because the international community found it impossible to find a political solution to the problems: the humanitarian policy ceased to be a prerequisite and became an end in itself. In the Somalian crisis the decoupling of political strategy from humanitarian policy became almost farcical. The humanitarian operation not only was launched after a period of total disinterest in the problem but, in addition, was expected to bring about a political movement of reconciliation. A shift can be seen in all three crises—Kurdistan, Bosnia and Somalia—with humanitarianism moving from an instrument of political action to becoming a political action itself before incarnating the terminal stage of political inaction. Humanitarian action, which claimed to be a new source of meaning in a disoriented world, tends to lose any meaning as fast as it becomes autonomous from politics. Paradoxically, it is becoming a transient source of power more

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than a source of meaning. The intervention of the United States in Somalia showed, once again, its ascendancy over the Europeans but not its ability to control the crisis. By intervening in Rwanda, France ‘maintained its rank’ as an African power. But its inability to act alone on that continent was revealed to be greater than ever. This ‘human catastrophe’ confirmed how ill-adapted humanitarian policies were to both preventing and controlling conflicts. This crisis showed humanitarianism was ‘outmanoeuvred’ on its own territory. In order to understand the gap between projection and project and to take it beyond the day-to-day contingencies of political debate, we must go back to Koselleck’s point about the decisive relationship between expectation and experience. The end of the Cold War caused the horizon of expectation to vanish. Therefore, the only available space left is the field of experience, the daily immediacy, a field where there is a confusing muddle of who one is (identity), what one does (action), and what one wants (project). This problem causes the inevitable dislocation between ends and means reflected by humanitarian policies today. Thus we saw in Somalia the intervention of humanitarian bodies whose main mission was to care for victims of the ‘humanitarian’ war carried out by the UN forces.6 Politics is not forgotten in this confusion. Without it, humanitarianism would not have gained the place it has today in the field of international politics. Rather it has changed meaning. It contributes to diverting states from challenges to do with a project, end-goal and perspective towards challenges about means, immediacy and emergency. Humanitarianism becomes a field of action largely created by states and fed by them. They project themselves towards it at the same time as being without project. As a result, the slightest humanitarian act becomes a political act, the slightest disturbance to a convoy becomes a diplomatic incident. It was possible to think of sending 50,000 UN soldiers to Bosnia, not to ensure the country’s political existence but to guarantee its official dissection. The size of the resources put to use (projection strategy) was all the greater for not being at the service of a precise or convincing end-goal. In this particular case it was the international community’s inability to find a solution that meant it had to provide such an orgy of means. This explains for the most part why, in the Balkan crisis, the more that governments reassured public opinion about their involvement and their humanitarian activism, the more the public felt, with resignation or with indignation, how passive the said governments were. There is no better illustration of the discrepancy between action and the sense of action, between projection and project. A symbolic halt for nations The most fundamental consequence of all this chain of events is to make ‘avoidance strategy’ the main principle of the global system of tomorrow. States will seek less to cooperate—as the rhetoric of the new world order would suggest —than to avoid any excessive involvement induced by the imperatives of already

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established power. Avoidance strategy is above all a representation. It is neither theorized nor theorizable. It is sensed in a confused and contradictory way before it is thought about. In its ways and means it can be differentiated from notions of ‘withdrawing from the world’, retreating to a sanctuary or ‘isolationism’ for at least one reason: the strategies of intervention and withdrawal are no longer thinkable in the current global social system. Actors can no longer choose to ‘exit’ or ‘enter’ the world game. It is forced on them. For states, globalization is translated above all by the disappearance of opting out, the symbolic possibility of changing systems, of exiting the game, of calling for ‘a political alternative’, to use an expression familiar in French public debate. Avoidance strategy is therefore necessarily more complex. It responds to the need of Western societies to take a ‘symbolic half’ at a time when, after the Cold War, they feel they are participating in a profound renegotiation process of their relationship to time (acceleration) and to space (globalization). Knowing they are no longer the controllers of the international system but more modestly the privileged actors in a global social system, states need to go back to their starting blocks. They ought, in the metaphor of Clifford Geertz, to see the world no longer as a landscape that can be shaped in their image according to a hierarchical position clearly and already defined (building the world in the image of the USA, for example), but as a ‘giant collage’ of which they would be a central part, but only one part among many.7 ‘Designer states’ have given way to ‘adapting states’. This fundamental change henceforth condemns any ‘architectural’ concept of the world, any ‘ex cathedra’ definition by the states of a new world order. The challenge is no longer to build a new world order based on states alone but to regulate the birth of a global social system. Because they have departed from the exclusive world of states to merge into the global social system, states no longer have to try to project themselves. Projection is forced on them by the very configuration of the global system. But, at the same time, this force sparks an identity reflex which makes them ‘locate’ themselves in this global social system. It is this need to locate themselves which we can define as a ‘symbolic halt’. The search for ‘escape areas’ The first type of avoidance is of an economic nature. It is shown in the attempts by the major economies to escape from the economic and financial disciplines imposed by globalization. Faced with the impera tives of economic convergence, which tolerates ‘deviance’ less and less and which daily produces further norms in order to equalize conditions of competition, Western states are looking for ‘escape areas’, exploring and occupying residual areas of sovereignty that they do not yet have to share. States tend to experience globalization in political terms as a suffocating process against which they can no longer fight, but from which they can try to distance themselves, at least symbolically.8

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This quest for a margin of manoeuvre when faced with the process of globalization is a response to several factors. The first stems from the residual pride of states which want to reaffirm their symbolic sovereignty. Nothing is more humiliating for them than seeing their autonomy eroded by movements of capital that are far more powerful than their own instruments against speculation. Nothing is more difficult for them than accepting the relative loss of meaning of the major national indicators, such as that of the trade balance.9 Recognizing this fact is one thing; declaring it politically is another, as it would risk facing up to a further erosion of the idea of nation. Their whole approach will therefore be to manage symbolically the gap between a globalized, complex economic reality and a territorialized, simplified political representation (‘the nation’). As the emphasis falls more on factors for economic convergence between advanced societies, the management of this symbolic gap between meaning (the nation to which all else refers) and power will become increasingly important. Yet states today find themselves confronted by a double problem. Not only do they find increasing difficulty in evaluating—even in the area of defence —their degree of dependence on industries in other countries but, in addition, they find difficulty in considering sovereignty in terms other than those of the legal ownership of companies, although foreign control can be exercised without ownership of capital.10 To this first reason for wanting to escape symbolically from global economic restraints we can add a second, more concrete one: to respond to social demands or political imperatives that require rapid solutions with low political cost. The conditions in which the economic reunification of Germany took place are a prime example. They demonstrate that the practice of ‘everyone for himself’ (Germany made the rest of Europe pay dearly for the conditions of its reunification) is emphatically not the result of doctrinal divergence from one’s partners, but instead a sort of ‘uniformization’ of economic strategies. By choosing to finance its reunification by borrowing rather than by taxing, Germany behaved like the USA, so to speak. It took the easiest solution and preferred to tap world savings rather than the revenues of its inhabitants. One of the major problems of world coordination and regulation stems from the fact that most economies today resort to the same policies to ensure their autonomy, which, in an interdependent world, means that seeking isolation has an impact on others.11 Budgets are clearly one domain where states seek an escape area—it is governments’ last big sphere of autonomy. The average level of public deficit in G7 countries rose from 1.2 per cent in 1989—the year of the fall of the Berlin Wall—to 4.2 per cent at the end of 1993.12 It was not just by chance that the end of the Cold War coincided with the growth in public deficit. It stemmed in part from the ‘chain reaction’ caused by German reunification. It is also explained by the recession and by the increased charges imposed on social systems by ageing populations. But an even more important factor needs to be taken into account: the political delegitimization of most Western governments, which followed the

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fall of communism. It led very logically to many of them using public expenditure as the favoured instrument for political survival. Onto all these factors are grafted the increasing demands on the state generated by two forces of globalization: the need for social welfare because of the destruction of unskilled jobs (and the rise in unemployment), and the growth of the market sector relative to the non-market sector. With the end of the Cold War there has been exceptional growth in demands on the state, though here too it cannot find political support for its expression and legitimization. The effects are stronger in that the pressure is being applied within a global context of ‘rolling back the state’, although the excessive nature of this state withdrawal is already recognized. The end of superpowers Although the source of the crisis in international cooperation can be found in these various factors, it can be understood fully only by taking into account another central factor of the post-Cold War period: the lack of a super-powerful actor able to impose collective discipline on the others. The difficulty experienced by an organization like the IMF in imposing a collective discipline on the G7 countries stems clearly from this uncertainty about relative strengths, and from the disappearance of an actor that could produce hegemony. After the Cold War, and especially after the Gulf War, the United States believed its politico-military power could be converted into economic power. In other words, it believed its political authority would help it impose conditions for economic recovery on Japan and Germany—without itself having to make any sacrifice, such as in its budget. Today this power to link economics to politics is more tenuous for at least two reasons. The first is that Europe and Japan are catching the United States up economically: these three groups are now almost equivalent in strength. The second stems from a decline in the ‘fungible’ (substitutable) nature of the symbols of power. That is to say, it is increasingly difficult to capitalize on political or military power to demand commercial or technological concessions from partners. Though politics and economics are more closely linked than ever, diplomatic-strategic weapons have lost too much ground compared to the other realities of the international field to allow a state to use them to gain clear advantages in other domains.13 The end of the Cold War confirmed the weakened nature of classic diplomatic strategies in the international field and, in consequence, the probable decline of the concept of ‘major power’. In this respect the theme of a ‘unipolar world’ as expressed by the United States was a contradiction in terms.14 Admittedly the GATT crisis underlined the endurance of the power game between Europeans and Americans, but it had probably never occurred to the United States that it was possible to balance trade concessions from the Europeans with maintaining their military guarantee in Europe.

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If the notion of superpower is probably destined to perish with the end of the Cold War, it is because the cost of supremacy is becoming prohibitive. But consideration of the exponential costs of power would be incomplete without a reference to the widening split between military power and economic power. The search for military strength is held back by the search for economic strength. During the Cold War, military research led civil research. There was a relatively simple linear path from basic research to applied research, first directed towards the military sector, then towards the civil sector. The benefits of major military programmes on the civil economy were such that the monopolization of research and development budgets by the military sector did not seem negative in character. The United States thus succeeded in being simultaneously a great economic and a great military power, in building a ‘Cold War economy’ that was not entirely irrational. At the present time this linkage is less and less easy to ensure, not only because the popular legitimacy of military power in Western countries seems to be eroding, but also and above all because technological developments led to a widening gap between civil and military research. In this domain too we are seeing the end of an era that started with the industrial revolution, during which military power went hand in hand with economic power.15 Although there is a common technological basis for civil and military research, the specifications for military products are laid down increasingly earlier in their development. In other words, the civil and military end-goals of a research programme need to be defined right at the start, while previously the distinction took place further down the line. As a result some refereeing is needed between civil and military research, because there now seems to be a negative correlation between military research and economic competitiveness. Putting it simply, we could say that some characteristics of military technology are in contradiction with the organizing rules of the world technological market: it places more importance on performance than on costs and reliability; it is subject to ever longer development cycles (whereas throughout the civil sector, the emphasis is on reducing the cycle); it relies on inefficient production processes; it restricts, for security reasons, the transfer of technology.16 The construction of military power no longer in itself facilitates the development of technological power, which is not without consequence for the collective view which society may have of the usefulness of military power. In certain cases, such as that of Germany, these considerations of pure economic rationale tend to be superimposed, at least for the moment, on historical or cultural views which support withdrawal, or at least what Hans Peter Schwartz calls ‘Machtvergessenheit’, which is to say ‘forgetting about power’.17 In 1991 Switzerland was far ahead on a list of nations which Germans would like to emulate.18 The culture of ‘inner directedness’ becomes highly significant in this context, because Germany is primarily interested in itself. This feeling of having to choose between brute force and material prosperity can also be seen in the declining profitability of military power. In order to face up to new threats and to project themselves, the major military powers need to

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develop increasingly costly and complex defence systems. But to do this they need to find a greater number of partners for military research.19 Yet this process, now indispensable, raises the essential problem of knowing how developed military powers can set up jointly funded research programmes without having to share their technological expertise. It is the challenge of balancing cooperation and competition that even companies, which set out on this road long before states, often have difficulty in resolving. It would be relatively easy to construct such a scheme in a world where the threat was very widely shared and where one of the partners decided to use technological involvement to compensate another partner for its provision of military protection. The Japano-American alliance during the Cold War had precisely this meaning. This scheme has not totally disappeared, but its fate has already been sealed. The United States and Japan are no longer linked by the existence of a joint threat. In a more general way the crisis of cooperation at the heart of wealthy nations stems from the simultaneous erosion of three major sources of regulation in international relations: a shared threat that allows conflicts to be moderated, the presence of a dominant player (the United States), and the control of states over their economies. It is therefore necessary to try to organize international regulation on the basis of the identification of common interests rather than of common threats, on the basis of collaboration between associate rivals rather than on a hierarchical relationship between the dominant and the dominated, and in a way which would take account of the loss of control by states of certain sections of international reality. All are fundamental changes particularly hard to bring about, but nonetheless indispensable. The second problem is the result of the gap between the economic cost of a credible policy of military security (the setting up of a network of anti-missile missiles) and the ability of a growing number of politico-military actors to arm themselves with unsophisticated weapons of destruction (low-accuracy ballistic missiles, chemical weapons) forming what has been called ‘poor man’s nuclear warfare’. The cost of deterrence against ‘strength in madness’ is colossal. Deterrence against strength in madness includes the problem of interpreting the strategy of the ‘new nuclear powers’, the risk of seeing a tyrant use nuclear weapons without judging the consequences for his country or his people. The possession of the most powerful military weapon therefore brings the risk of facilitating access to technological expertise by competitors with whom cooperation would become indispensable, and the disadvantage of it being increasingly expensive in relation to its declining political effectiveness. Even if it is not possible to imagine the former major powers of the Cold War purely and simply abandoning military power, it is now recognized that possessing a military weapon will be less and less about total supremacy. It will be less a question of being able to do everything alone, of planning the means to annihilate your adversary totally, than to act before the enemy does through putting together the intelligence required for a political decision. In a world

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structured by speed the absolute weapon does not exist. The future is with ‘exclusive weapons’, the most decisive being observation and intelligence.20 This change will not in itself lead to more ‘reflective’ policies being put in place. But the intelligence it provides states will help them conduct more effectively their strategies of limited responsibility based on keeping enemies at a distance, avoidance and precaution. This distancing will be simultaneously technical (use of precision-guided stand-off weapons), mediated (emotion experienced only through television) and political (refusal to engage in a politics based on pre-established principles).21 The strategy of caution The third source of avoidance is in the place given to the increasingly pervasive ‘cost-benefit principle’, materially and symbolically. All public action is now to be viewed through its prism, whether in the domestic sphere or extended into international space. In other words, we are required to judge the effectiveness of a foreign policy in terms like those used to evaluate a business service. This development derives from the constant advance of the market principle in social life and the absence of a collective symbolism capable of containing it or transcending it. The consequence of the rising importance of profitability is that all social and political institutions are expected to ‘show results’.22 Social actors react to the cost principle in two stages. They try to accommodate the constraint while taking care it does not weaken them further. In an authoritative report François Ewald demonstrated clearly how the ‘results imperative’ developed in medicine into what he calls a ‘strategy of caution’.23 Rather than risk an action whose outcome could not be justified in the short term, people preferred not to act, not to take on any new responsibility. Paradoxically, inaction became the best way to meet the requirement for results. Suddenly, it was the very meaning of collective action that changed. People were trying less to protect others than to protect themselves; they tried less to act and more to take precautions so as to avoid a collective punishment imposed by the need for short-term results. There has emerged a profound transformation of the end-goal of collective action, which is no longer defined or assigned in advance. It is now limited and contained by the cost-benefit principle. The knock-on effect has been to devalue collective action, the common project, whenever it is associated with taking a risk. The transposition of this principle into the international sphere is obvious. Public opinion increasingly evaluates the external action of the state in the light of the cost-benefit principle. As soon as the fires had gone out after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the post Cold War changed its meaning. What had earlier appeared to be the dawn of a new era, marked by a return to cooperation between states, was transformed into a mountain of never-ending expenses, whose size was initially underestimated. Who today would dare to talk about ‘the peace dividend’? Before organizing the post Cold War, the structures inherited from the Cold War

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need to be dismantled. This dismantling seems difficult to do, not only because it meets the resistance we all recognize, but because no-one is able to provide a direction, to give a meaning to the changes. The dismantling could be portrayed as four major challenges: German reunification; the transition of Eastern Europe and Russia to market economies; the regulation of various regional conflicts linked directly or indirectly to the end of the East-West conflict (the Middle East, Cambodia, El Salvador, South Africa); and the reconversion of military capability in Western countries to other purposes. In objective terms these problems are a source of considerable difficulty and financial constraint for the world’s most developed countries. Reunification cost Germany the annual equivalent of 5 per cent of its GDP.24 The dismantling of the American military economy is for its part extremely difficult to organize, as it puts in jeopardy over one and a half million jobs.25 The cost of maintaining peace in the world through United Nations intervention is also very high. Nevertheless, we would be guilty of a major misinterpretation if we saw in the constraint of costs a sort of unsurpassable absolute. Costs only ever have a relative importance; they acquire meaning only in relation to the end-goal assigned to them. The serious financial crisis experienced by the United Nations is not a result of the large number of operations being carried out around the world, but more simply because the major nations which control it are not interested in financing multilateral actions over which they do not have total control. We should remind ourselves that the combined costs of the UN’s budget and operations are, for example, equivalent to one and a half days of American operations in the Gulf War or two American ‘stealth’ aircraft. The lethargy of the UN, which used to be explained by the Soviet veto and is now explained as ‘the weight of financial constraints’, in fact reveals the crisis of the inter-state system, and the simultaneous difficulty states have in agreeing among themselves, and in delegating authority to an even remotely ‘supranational’ power. The allegedly high cost of maintaining world order is therefore only an alibi for the absence of a collective project for the international community, for the unprecedented devaluation of the very idea of an international community.26 The problems of giving aid to Russia, in contrast to the Marshall plan, are caused not by the financial burden that it creates for Western economies, but by deep uncertainty about whether aid will help former socialist economies convert rapidly to market economies.27 Paradoxically, this scepticism seems to increase as fast as the ideolog ical-economic debate between the supporters of ‘gradualism’ and those of ‘shock therapy’ dies down.28 In effect there is now fairly wide consensus that a combination of macroeconomic stabilization, market deregulation, company privatization and the development of public infrastructure will provide the support for a market economy.29 But the linkage of these four processes cannot be reduced to any particular model. The influence of internal conditions for success (social cohesion, political will of the ruling powers, existence of a national consensus) is so great that, step by step, the idea is growing that external aid is of little relative benefit, leading in consequence to an

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increasing perception that its cost is prohibitive. Since the requirement for tangible, short-term results has become critical, Western governments are increasingly unable to justify a constant involvement over the long term. In these circumstances there is a strong chance that calls for a fight to spread democracy, which was to replace the containment of communism, will remain largely rhetorical. In effect, for the moment, it is the democratic principle of ‘saying less’ which now seems to triumph, even if this strategy of caution seems to be hampered by the existence and strengthening of the last fragments of ‘world solidarity’. Pierre Hassner sees this solidarity resting on an imperfect and uncertain linkage between what he calls ‘cooperation, conscience and expert’.30 ‘Cooperation’ refers to the international community, ‘conscience’ to the development of major transnational solidarity movements (such as Amnesty International), and ‘expert’ to the profusion of institutions charged with enlightening decision-makers on issues that are increasingly complex and difficult to resolve politically But it is difficult today for these three global forces, which could be said to link interest (states), reason (the people) and knowledge (experts), to form a system, to provide a meaning. In effect, the idea of a world organized by a ‘cooperative of nations’ is ambivalent. The increasing interdependence of states means they have to agree on an infinite number of subjects and problems. The ‘cooperative of nations’ is from this point of view indispensable for world regulation. Yet its legitimacy is far from established. When the major nations do manage to agree on a certain number of rules or ways of proceeding (as in the Gulf War) they do not escape criticism that they want to agree at the expense of the weakest or least privileged, seen in the obvious political resistance which the question of a new world order encounters in countries south of the Mediterranean. But as soon as the major states publicize their disagreements, the very idea of an international community is discredited. There is a third hypothesis intermediate between these two: that of cooperative inaction by the major nations. It could be called ‘passive coalition’. Since the end of the Gulf War it has constituted the dominant form of international action. It demonstrates the extreme fragility of world consensus. So why did what seemed to have been achieved during the Gulf War become obsolete in three large international crises of the post-Cold War period: Bosnia, Somalia and Rwanda? Besides the fact that Kuwait possesses riches that are cruelly absent from Bosnia, we cannot fail to miss the coincidence between the new character of these more recent conflicts—their non-inter-state character—and the problem the major states had in deciding on a clear line of conduct. So a crucial question arises: if states did not manage either to understand or to control these conflicts, was it because they felt they did not concern them or, far more seriously, because they were doomed not to understand conflicts that did not obey the old classifications of conflict between states? If this hypothesis is true, it would mean a particularly pessimistic future for world regulation, as it is agreed that classic conflicts of the interstate type are being replaced by new forms of international dispute (for example, civil war, tribal conflicts).

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In reality, since the Gulf War, the commercial negotiations of GATT have been almost the only ones to show the effectiveness of cooperative action between nations, which tends to prove that market forces are truly the only forces that can bring states to agree, since the cost of lasting conflict represents the greatest danger to their direct interests. If we now tackle the second aspect of the problem, that is to say whether a ‘universal conscience’ exists that might remedy as it were the blind spot in the reason of states, we note that here again ambiguity triumphs over clarity. In favour of what we would call universal conscience are three positive developments. The first stems primarily from the increasing density of the world solidarity network, which means that international movements today can truly organize themselves outside the interest strategies of states or of the major world bodies. They range from committees against ethnic purification to international action against the Narmada Dam in India. This global social solidarity is not only quantitative. On the qualitative front, it allows universal principles to take a more concrete role, to look after both collective rights and individual rights. There has been a two-pronged effect: first, a movement from abstract universalism to a more concrete or pluralist universalism (the best illustration of this change is the contrast between the Declaration of the Vienna Conference on Human Rights in 1993 and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1946) and the ‘new legal permeability’ which means that today the classic distinction between domestic order and external order is clouded rather than abolished. The second development can be found in the increasingly sophisticated body of law which is characteristic of today’s world, which means that there is an amazing legal arsenal available for any problem or situation. There is a tendency to move from a recognition of human rights in general towards concern for women’s, children’s or minorities’ rights. Finally, it seems undeniable that our knowledge is tending to grow about the range of the world’s problems, and is becoming accessible to a larger number of people, even if this access is increasingly through a prism of emotion and media simplification. But it would be wrong to conclude from these different factors that the progress of the universal conscience outlaws a return to barbarism. The genocide of the Tutsis in Rwanda tends to show that the ‘movement of universal conscience’ has trouble expressing itself in preventive action. It also leads to strong doubts about whether the combination of international pressure from public opinion and the media would make it difficult today to carry out actions that are in flagrant opposition to an elementary respect for human rights. In addition, legal sophistication is just as deceptive. First, new laws often only add another layer to older laws that have so far proved ineffective: this is demonstrated in the area of humanitarian law.31 Second, the legal sophistication of laws and definitions is not an unmixed blessing. It is, for example, clearly used by states to resist demands for granting asylum, and even more seriously, to justify non-participation.32 Thus we saw the US authorities refuse to speak about genocide in Rwanda for fear of finding themselves with a legal requirement to

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intervene. Western states which claim to base their international action on a certain universalism are therefore reduced today to looking for forms of action and legitimacy which might help globalize their values without their having to take on the costs which this principle imposes on them, whether political costs (loss of human life), economic costs (huge transfer of resources) or social costs (possibility of migration). The trend in humanitarian policies certainly seems to fit this perspective to the extent that it allows three requirements to be reconciled: spontaneous legitimization that is hard to reject (‘defending human life’); action with a limited timespan, in order to ward off the public’s fear of action becoming bogged down; and finally, evading serious solutions to the problem, because they would call for economic or military means incompatible with their strategy of caution. Since the end of the Cold War, therefore, we can see an uncomfort able divorce between, on the one hand, a greater stirring of conscience and ever more sophisticated legislation and, on the other, an equally strong incapacity for action. The only development that will probably be difficult to reverse is the breaching of state sovereignty. From Kurdistan to Rwanda via Somalia, change is unquestionable. But it is very evident that this change is not free of serious dangers. We are left with the strategy of expertise. It too is not immune to ambiguity or ambivalence of interpretation. Faced with problems of meaning or fundamental questions the expert is as lacking in weapons as is the state or the citizen. Expertise thus claims to make fundamental decisions that have, in a certain way, lost their foundation.

9 Can Japan provide meaning?

For the world, and particularly for the West, there is today a ‘Japanese problem’. As the only non-Western state in the world to have made a complete success of its modernization, and because it manages to compete with the West in nearly all fields of economic competition without having had to abandon its own identity, Japan is making waves in the organization of the Western world. Through its ability to become westernized without denying its own self, a triumphant Japan in a way symbolizes the end of the westernization of the world. By the end of westernization we do not mean the beginning of the Spenglerian decline of the West, so often announced or feared, and so often renounced. Neither should we see in it a sort of Asianization of the world, in preparation for a hypothetical taking over from the West. Asia has never been so integrated into Western modernity as it is today. The end of westernization in fact symbolizes the triumph of the West. From the moment the West became a widespread synonym for modernity, it was modernity which became the reference point and no longer the West itself. If a meaning is needed for the emergence of Asia, it should be sought in this ambiguity rather than in a quick, clear and convenient distinction between the ‘Western world’ and the ‘Asian world’. The strength and significance of the westernization of the world is that it is used not so much as a reference point, to be sought after with pride, but rather as a common point of departure for each actor as, unrestrained and without an external guide, it tries to differentiate itself. Westernization is therefore today too widespread to be claimed by the West alone. This almost paradoxical observation provides a better starting point for understanding the processes of regionalization of the world and of meaning, than the facile, schizophrenic dichotomizations about the end of the Cold War, viewed sometimes from the angle of Western triumph, sometimes from that of the nonWestern cultural ‘renaissance’. It seems appropriate to start from the same observation when considering Japan in the post-Cold War world, not only as a diplomatic or strategic actor, but also possibly as a purveyor of meaning in a world searching for symbolic signposts.

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Domination and hegemony In order to understand clearly the challenges faced by Japan over the problem of meaning, it is perhaps necessary to start with the difference between domination and hegemony, which in everyday speech are wrongly used as synonyms. In one way, domination is the mechanical expression of power. In its most brutal or exaggerated form it can be translated as the search for unilateral advantage by whatever means, including coercion. It is then a sort of tug of war between reinforcing one’s own interests and letting others preserve theirs: ‘it’s them or me’. Of course, hegemony is an inherent part of the principle of domination, but its driving force is different: it is less a question of brutally imposing views or interests than of making the domination legitimate in the eyes of others. It is based on producing values that prop up the domination.1 In such a system the dominant power is considered by other players to be the one which provides security and stability to the whole group of actors in the world game. To differing degrees the United States and the Soviet Union were hegemonic powers, as their power of domination was never based solely on political or military coercion. Both the United States and the Soviet Union were purveyors of values, purveyors of meaning. If we examine the Japan of today, however, there is an unquestionable gap between the growing material power it possesses and the real difficulty it has in converting this power to persuasion. In its case there is indisputably a divorce between power and meaning. Japanese power is clearly in the ascendant. But its hegemonic quality remains to be seen both because we have yet to discover Japan’s end-goals and long-term objectives, and because its power is not yet accepted as natural by others, whether in the West or in Asia. Only the Arab Muslim world seems fascinated by Japanese power, which achieved a radical modernization without renouncing its authenticity. In this respect, it is interesting to note how successful the Japanese television series Ochine has been in Iran and Egypt. The series has as its heroine a working-class woman, who clambers up the social hierarchy by gaining wealth, but without renouncing her past, her values and her culture. Ochine is broadcast in Iran, where the broadcasting of Dallas would be unthinkable.2 Compared to American television series, which symbolize the inaccessible dream, Japanese series spontaneously produce a reaction of familiarity, of similarity: the linkage between ‘modernity’ and ‘tradition’ is constantly present, and, at the end of the day, successful. ‘In following Ochine, the viewer is not dreaming but meditating on his or her own fate’, writes Dina El Khawaga. For the viewer, Ochine is just the Zeinab of an Egyptian village in the 1930s. Her dedication to work revives the symbol of the oppressed servant. Her veneration of marriage and above all of her husband awakens cherished memories of the submissive or at least docile woman no longer

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seen. Her long clothes, traditional chignon and shyness almost make her a veiled woman. Egypt and Japan seem to share the same values. Far from screening the American ‘dream society’ environment, this soap opera allows viewers to understand a society as poor as their own, but one which has detached itself from poverty while remaining attached to its traditions. There is a mirror-image effect which encourages the revival of earlier values that had been rebuffed. The fidelity of Ochine to her rural family, the constant help she gives her (alcoholic) father and her (macho) brother, the affection of the Japanese for the earth and for rice-growing, the traditional marriage, the resistance of certain female characters to the westernization of their hairstyles are all elements which Egyptians recognize in their own relationship with Western values. At the same time, the soap opera is part of the good old tradition of the ‘universal’ melodrama. By highlighting the theme of perpetual combat between good and evil, it allows Egyptians to renew their links with a ‘dramatic language’ they had internalized, produced and venerated between the 1940s and the 1960s. Ochine does not fight her adversaries, does not fear strangers, is not vengeful against the bad. She merely works, maintains her values and loves those close to her. It is always an extra-human force, a divine will, or even destiny that allows her to triumph, without the least negative thought crossing her mind. This patient but worthwhile docility comforts Egyptian viewers, tired of new home-grown or imported products that evoke solitude, individualization or, in contrast, excessive willpower, with which they cannot yet identify. The world is constructed according to clear, fair rules where the good always finishes triumphant. What could be better for sustaining hope, particularly when faced with socioeconomic problems, or with the confusion of the definition of self, the Other and the future as a consequence of economic and media globalization?3 Japan’s role is to be not so much a reference as an analogy. The very superficial cultural fascination is sometimes matched by a mad desire: to see it counterbalance America, as the USSR used to balance the West. An idealized image of Japan therefore has a meaning in the eyes of the Arabo-Muslim world. But the survival of this image is strong only because of a lack of historical, cultural and political proximity to Japan itself:4 it is always easy to idealize the unknown. By exploring this cultural hypothesis we might find some answers to the problem of the meaning of Japanese power. There is always a risk in resorting to cultural explanations of international phenomena. Neither societies nor cultural systems are stable or closed. Their identity is constantly being renegotiated. Japanologists have blown apart purely cultural explanations of Japan and its success.5 It is the very example of a society which, for more than a century, has had a considerable ability to absorb, digest and filter external influence. Japanese

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society has at the moment an incomparably superior knowledge of the Western world than Western societies have of Japan, despite there no longer being any reason for this asymmetry of knowledge. In fact, at a time when the idea of a closed and protectionist Japanese society is gaining ground in the West, the Japanese are showing themselves to be singularly sensitive to the external world and the imperatives of globalization. In Japan today, internationalization is a watchword widespread throughout society. In a post-ideological world, culture is tending to become the natural sanctuary of all essentialist simpliflcations and the intellectual prelude to the construction of ideologies founded on radical difference. The adversary is culturalized after having been ideologized.6 This culturalist diversion is lying in wait for the West. But even Japan will not be saved from it. At several points in its history it has endeavoured to systematize its differences with the Other, whether the Other is Western or Asian. The country has a whole historical tradition—the famous nihhonji-ron—which values, perhaps to excess, Japanese uniqueness and its radical difference from the rest of the world.7 Even today, while simultaneously complaining of being stigmatized as different, the Japanese authorities are keen to claim their special characteristics as soon as too strong a pressure is put on them to open up their markets. Thus they recently drew attention to the special nature of Japanese blood and Japanese intestines, as well as that of Japanese earth and Japanese snow.8 In a post-ideological world where competition, particularly economic competition, is becoming extremely tough, there is a reciprocal and almost natural temptation for international actors to instrumentalize cultural differences for political ends. That said, there is nevertheless little question about one factor: the recurring difficulty for Japan to produce values that could make its power acceptable to others. The universalist deficit of Japan The first and most fundamental of these handicaps stems from what could be called the universalist deficit of Japan. By this is meant the difficulty in producing values that could be widely adopted by all or part of the world. The universalist claim is based on the will, desire or ambition to reduce the gap between one’s own values and the values of others. Historically, the West’s domination over the world was based on a combination of material power and the claim to provide meaning. Though tending to die out, this propensity for universalism has not yet disappeared from the Western political arena. Historic powers such as the United States, Great Britain and France still choose their actions partly in relation to their aspiration to provide meaning. The bicentenary celebrations of the French Revolution were an opportunity for France not only to lay claims to its universalist inheritance of the Enlightenment, but also to emphasize the subtle ‘competition’ between Western powers on this symbolic issue.

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In July 1989 Margaret Thatcher, invited to the Summit held at the Arche, west of Paris, and to the ceremonies for the 1789 bicentenary, did not hesitate to bring the French down a peg or two by claiming to Le Monde: ‘No, human rights did not begin in France. The Revolution was a fantastic turning-point but also a reign of terror. One is horrified when one rereads the history books.’ Human rights, for Thatcher, were obviously invented by the English, inaugurated by the Magna Carta of 1215, the writs of habeas corpus in 1679, the Bill of Rights in 1689. Suiting the action to the words, Margaret Thatcher presented François Mitterrand with a rare and sumptuously bound edition of a particularly unkind book for descendants of the Jacobins, A Tale of Two Cities, by Dickens. A good sport, President Mitterrand acknowledged that in France, ‘one always tends, for reasons of fairly legitimate national pride, to attribute all the good things to oneself. I try to avoid these very natural shortcomings and, it must be said, the English did show the way several centuries ago.’ Curiously, he added, forgetting the Declaration of Independence in 1776 and seven other American Bills of Rights: The Americans also showed us the way on this. The Massachusetts constitution, three years before 1789 [actually 9 years earlier], was an admirable definition of rights.’ Clearly, however, the French surpassed America. As important and remarkable as the Massachusetts constitution was, ‘it did not make world news’, whereas the ‘events that took place in France […] certainly did make world news. It is widely known today, everyone recognizes that. To each his universalism.’9 When President Reagan defined the role of the United States as a mission ‘to preserve and spread the sacred fire of freedom’, he was agreeing with General de Gaulle, for whom France had sealed a secular pact with freedom. Although the universalist ambition has been expressed in various historical contexts, taken on highly varied forms, and been interpreted in multiple ways across the world, it nonetheless has its source in precise historical contexts that do not allow us to interpret it as a pure and simple form of words, designed to justify its domination. When the United States lectured China on the question of human rights, it never lost sight of its own economic interests. But it would be absurd to think that the question of human rights was a pure and simple dressingup designed to mask economic or strategic interests. For America, and perhaps even more for France, the universalist message has in some way become inseparable from the political existence of these nations. Universalism was from the start the condition for survival of the French Revolution—before in fact becoming that of the Soviet revolution in similar circumstances. The same was not true in America. However, the assertion of a universalist claim steeped in references to God was very quickly associated with the very structure of American institutions.10 It is not difficult to see a strong link between the message of George Bush on the new world order and that promoted over seventy years earlier by Woodrow Wilson, in the year of the Russian Revolution. The counterpart to Woodrow Wilson, who vigorously proclaimed that ‘if God wills, America will have another chance to show the world she was born to serve

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humanity’, was a messianic George Bush, for whom ‘we are Americans: our sole responsibility is to work for freedom.’11 The universalist claim can only operate in the international system if its promoters show themselves capable of converting their discourse and their truth into terms that are accessible and comprehensible to others. To do this it is essential to call on symbolism, on a certain conceptualization of an experienced or hoped-for reality. The claim to universalism necessarily requires a disposition for conceptualization. We have engaged in this detour because Japan is in an extremely weak position precisely on this issue. On the one hand, it does not know how to move spontaneously towards others. On the other, it is incapable of conceptualizing reality, objectifying it. Two examples, clearly demonstrated by Japanologists, are useful for understanding Japan’s frequent problems in producing a meaning for the universalist claim: its linguistic style and its ecological style. The Japanese language absorbs but does not donate What is surprising about the Japanese language is the contrast between its ability to absorb and its ability to donate. Japanese is stuffed full of loan words of foreign origin, but the inverse is not true. The Japanese language is absorbent but not ‘megalomaniac’. Even in countries such as Taiwan or Korea, where there has been a long-standing Japanese presence, the penetration of words of Japanese origin has been very weak.12 This finding reflects perfectly what one author said of this country: a country afflicted with atrophy of its emitting antenna and a sort of hypertrophy of its receiving antenna.13 Japan knows how to capture but finds it less natural to give. This considerable power of absorption nonetheless obeys a strict structural code. In the Japanese language there are four alphabets (more accurately three syllabaries and one alphabet): Chinese ideograms, which include —and not by chance—all abstract ideas; hiragana, which in brief ensures the morphological and syntactical articulation of Chinese characters in Japanese speech; katagana, which provides a transcription of words of foreign origin; and finally Roman characters which are written as such, generally for recent foreign words.14 Everything is symbolic, as if the language—and society with it— borrowed much that was foreign without ever totally obliterating the line between itself and the others. In this language the use of abstract concepts is rare. In contrast, the use of onomatopoeia, which in our eyes is the opposite of conceptualization, is both common and valued. ‘When I say “bang!”,’ writes Augustin Berque, ‘I don’t carry out the same mental operation as when I say “explosion”: I conceptualize less.’ Yet, where Europeans would prefer to use the concept, generally given more value than the concrete term, the Japanese take the inverse step. They give greater priority to the immediate perception, the closest sensation to the raw fact. Popular speech prefers the experience of the concrete to general or abstract conceptualization.15

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This cultural determinism is reflected politically in what is loosely called Japanese ‘pragmatism’. In the context of hegemony, this charac teristic is unquestionably a handicap since it prevents Japan from asserting in international affairs ‘grand principles’ that might find an echo overseas. According to this theory, Japan would find it difficult to establish itself as a promoter of a theme such as ‘the new world order’ for example, a theme which is by definition general, abstract and universalist. Its weight in the world, like that of any major power, could never be reduced just to material strength. This is why any debate on Japan that neglects these factors is susceptible to unavoidable misunderstandings or too mechanistic a vision of international relations. That does not mean Japan will restrict itself to a purely economic management of its interests. On the contrary, an essential division remains: assertion of autonomous power and hegemonic power. In other words, asserting that Japanese power will be increasingly autonomous does not contradict the fact that it is not hegemonic. Being autonomous is to define one’s conduct according to one’s own interests. Being hegemonic is to make one’s conduct an example for others to follow. The imbalance between the great capacity of the Japanese language to absorb and its weak power to expand, as well as its tendency not to conceptualize, should be seen in relation to a third property: its resolutely contextual nature.16 While in French ‘moi’ (me) and ‘je’ (I) can be used in any situation, in Japanese ‘moi’ will never transcend the relationship with the partner to the conversation. When the partner is not there, not present, the Japanese ‘moi’ remains indefinite. ‘It is the context, the circumstances which give meaning to “moi”.’17 Here again, there is unquestionably an analogy with the international arena, because it strongly confirms what is said about international discussion in Japan: it does not confirm anything or claim anything. Rather, it is limited to reappropriating to itself the dominant themes of the moment. Thus, when Japan speaks about the defence of human rights, it is less from principles it has defined, targeted or formalized, than from the need to adapt to the discourse of the other powers. It leads to the West’s perception of Japan as an opportunist country, without principles, whose lack of a ‘transcendental project’ further aggravates its economic aggressiveness. In terms of asserting general principles, Japan will remain in the position of a follower, despite its increasing strength on the international scene. For example, since the 1973 oil embargo, the Japanese have recognized their interest in being present in the Middle East and not cutting themselves off from the Arab world, and have sought to establish a policy of their own that fits their search for a secure energy supply. In this region Japan has an autonomous policy. But it has not sought to translate this behaviour into political or diplomatic terms. The delineation of an autonomous position in this region was not incompatible with the predominant position of the United States. In this way Japanese autonomy does not necessarily lead to hegemony. It is also for this reason that the autonomization of Japanese external policies does not necessarily translate into confrontation or rivalry with the United States.

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Japanese authors in fact point out that their country suffers from an additional handicap where human rights and the export of democracy are concerned. While in other Western democratic states the issue of human rights has, as we have seen, become part of the political culture, the same is not true in Japan. Democracy is fundamentally perceived in endogenous terms. Imposed originally by the Americans after the Second World War, it appears today like a form of political regulation that protects the country against any new adventurist external policy. The defence of democracy is therefore in a certain way perceived in Japan as a principle that is antithetical to any idea of political proselytizing. The defence of democracy is not an act of universalist faith. It is almost a guarantee against oneself.18 The linguistic style implies there is a conceptual deficit in Japan. However, language is only one aspect of Japan that we can observe. The relationship of the Japanese to space and in particular to nature confirms its real weakness in objectifying reality. An architecture without a sense of purpose In Japanese urban planning, we find an absence of a sense of purpose around which reality could be ordered decisively. The Japanese town mirrors the Japanese language. It is made up of collages and juxtapositions, in which differentiation and harmony are supposed to go together. To Western eyes a Japanese town seems muddled, a collage of the ‘ancient’ and ‘modern’, in which the need for coherence plays little part: for the Japanese, the form of the town’s boundary, the role played by the facades of buildings to shape and symbolize the centre, to define its contours, is not important. A Japanese town should be seen close up and not from afar. It does not seek to provide a meaning, to give an image of itself before being fully discovered, as exemplified in Barthes’ famous remark about Tokyo: ‘city centre, empty centre’. The city I am talking about [Tokyo] demonstrates a particular paradox: of course it has a centre, but this centre is empty. The whole city revolves around an area which is both forbidden and indifferent, a residence masked by greenery, defended by moats, inhabited by an emperor who is never seen, which literally means, by we don’t know whom…. One of the two most powerful cities, in terms of modernity, is therefore built around an opaque ring of walls, water, roofs and trees, whose centre is itself no more than an idea that has evaporated, and subsists there not to radiate power, but to give all urban movement the support of its central emptiness.19 (emphasis added) Augustin Berque explains this emptiness in two ways. First, he emphasizes that the whole idea in urban planning is to try to abolish the frontiers between town and suburbs, centre and periphery, between nature and culture. The centre melts

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into the whole. Second, Japanese urban planning repudiates the idea of developing around a central monument that might enlighten the world. The Japanese town is the opposite of Le Corbusier’s ‘radiant city’. It would be difficult to look at a monument, a square, a site and conclude that it symbolized Japan. The Japanese are less concerned with monumental creations that give a global and total meaning to reality than with the part-complete. On this aspect they can be differentiated not only from Europeans but also from the Chinese. In place of the grandiose and symmetrical they prefer the incomplete and asymmetrical.20 Since they give priority to what they can perceive directly, the Japanese dislike giving value to what could seem over-expressive, visible without reason, excessively conspicuous. Since in their eyes reality is made up of a broken and infinite emission of signs that are almost equivalent, they will always hesitate to impose a meaning, as in erecting a monument, setting down an order of meanings, drawing a line dividing what provides meaning from what does not. The signs are too diffuse to be ordered around a ‘principal meaning’.21 Just as in modern communications, where the proliferation of images and information obstructs our natural inclination to classify and order them, Japanese society is characterized by what could be called controlled hypertrophy of signs which, in a certain way, obstructs or makes pointless the search for meaning, which might implicitly purvey a certain transcendence. How does Japan succeed in providing meaning? Having said that, we can hardly think of stopping there. We might deduce, falsely, that the emptiness of Japanese power is definitely so great that the burden of meaning will still lie on the shoulders of the West. We need to ask whether the rise in Japanese power might signify a real transformation of the conditions of the production and export of meaning; whether, far from being an unusual example of a power lacking in meaning, Japan might, despite itself, be initiating a new type of meaning whose attraction would lie precisely in its unadvertised or unconfirmed claim to universality.22 On the basis of this hypothesis, several situations could be explored. The first is that of market globalization. Through its market and financial strength Japan has hauled itself up to the summit of power. Japanese companies are the most ‘multinational’ of all global companies in their territorial distribution. The accumulation of financial surpluses means that eight of the top ten banks in the world today are Japanese. The massive scale and speed of this growth in Japanese power is so well established that we need dwell on it no further. However, it is important to note that, through its material and financial power, Japan has become the largest exporter of modernity. This ability to spread modernity is the most important meaning for that country today, although it is becoming difficult and almost useless to decide what constitutes Japanese modernity and what Western modernity. The fashion for personal stereos is almost

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symbolic in this respect. This extreme example of Western individualization was designed by Japan, generally designated as a society incapable of considering the individual outside a group. Yet the personal stereo is the very example of a cultural product through which the individual escapes from the group. There is in fact a long tradition in Japan of designing products that do not find a spontaneous or natural use within that country. Through its ability to adapt to the needs of others, through its total absence of universalist evangelizing, through its indifference to a need to see others in its image, Japan has created a meaning which responds to the needs born of modernity. The absence of its own and preconceived point of view of the world is an advantage, because it facilitates the design of products adapted to the needs of others. When Japanese car manufacturers send their representatives to American families to immerse themselves for several months, so they have a better understanding of their needs, their relationship to space and their close relationship to their car, they give their approach to design a radically different perspective from that of Western manufacturers, who are tempted to design first ‘a good product’ that they hope then to sell to potential users. Behind this difference lies not just the contrast between Japanese actors concerned about their customers’ preferences and Western actors wanting above all to sell products already designed, but also a fundamentally different topography of meaning. Meaning can no longer derive from a hierarchical relation ship between a central provider of a principal meaning which radiates its knowledge onto others. The production of meaning is based on a more interactive principle, where the gap between ‘the one who knows’ (the producer) and ‘the one who doesn’t know’ (the consumer) is less clear cut. This principle reduces the time required to fill this gap, this distance. If Japanese companies have made compression of time one of their strategic advantages in global competition, it is not just the result of technical work. It is also because the gap that separates the designer from the user is much narrower, because the distance between them—symbol of authority—is much weaker from the start. This negotiated and interactive relationship with meaning can be found at the heart of what industry calls the Japanese model of ‘just in time’.23 It can also be expressed too through the global fashion for karaoke, the single major Japanese cultural product that has really been exported. It consists of a video machine allowing customers in a bar to take turns at the microphone to sing, supported by the video backing tape. Karaoke contains within it a symbol of meaning. It provides support for expressing the nostalgia of the past, of a time when there was greater closeness between people, stronger conviviality. Karaoke is not a teacher, it is not there to guide us, give us the note, strike the rhythm for us to follow, but it allows us to act in unison by creating a collective emotion. It is in the alliance of the suggested image and its own expression that the significance is forged. It is interesting to note that the word karaoke results from a blend of ‘okesutora’ (orchestra) and the key word ‘kara’ which means ‘empty’.24 Karaoke therefore mirrors this new issue of meaning, which is built less on a full centre

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than on an empty support structure onto which one’s own explanations and preferences are grafted. The ability of Japan to diffuse the signs of modernity by adapting itself to the needs of the rest of the world, rather than by irrigating the latter with preestablished explanations, constitutes a powerful system for diffusing Japanese meaning. A second ability is grafted onto the first, and derives almost naturally from it. In a world where the universalism of the Enlightenment is running out of steam, Japan’s reluctance to make an issue of the future of the world seems almost an advantage. In the global context, where the major intellectual and political structures are hampered by complexity, Japan’s diversity, as well as its distancing itself from ‘ready to use’ systems, and its principle of part-completion and collage, stands out as special. Japan could therefore be seen as a country that allows practical solutions to be found for concrete problems. It could be the source of inspiration and possibly advice in areas where its performance is undoubtedly superior to that of other countries. The Japanese influence would be less dramatically political, because it would not be based on ‘reducing to a common denominator’ the fields in which it operates. We could not say, for example, that the economic penetration of Japan in Asia is accompanied by a project to Japanize Asia culturally.25 Politically, this absence of an ideological challenge behind the meaning of Japan is ambivalent. It may strengthen the Japanese presence by making it more tolerable since it is, in a way, less constraining. But at the same time, the purely ‘instrumental’ character of Japanese influence makes Japanese power vulnerable to a more truly political challenge.

10 The regionalization of meaning

Reconciling meaning and power In all probability the major reference in the world system of tomorrow, the unit of account of international competition, will be the region. It is probably at regional level that new collective itineraries of meaning will emerge, able to take account of the three main demands of the global social system: the demand for security, the need for identity and the search for legitimacy.1 It is in the regional domain that meaning and power have the best chance of being reconciled. We must therefore consider the different ways this alliance might be achieved. Depending on the region, and to a greater or lesser extent, this important process will reflect and magnify three forces: the decentralization of power; the desire of states to find a new domain for the regulation and legitimization of their actions in the face of national ‘downsizing’; and the confused and contradictory demand for meaning voiced by societies concerned about the combination of globalization and proximity. Regionalization is thus simultaneously a state of the world, a desire, and a collective expectation. Regionalization, or the decentralization of power Regionalization primarily reflects one simple fact: there is a tendency worldwide for centres of wealth to shift down a gear. It is the economic expression of the end of a certain Euro-American centrality. The United States, which at the end of the Second World War represented over 40 per cent of ‘Gross World Product’, now produces no more than 23 per cent, equal to that of the European Community. Japan, which produced only 5 per cent of the world’s wealth in 1965, today produces 17 per cent. This regionalized distribution of power is even more noticeable in the financial sector, where strictly speaking we are seeing less a distribution of power than a swing towards Japan from the United States. In 1970, the six largest banks in the world, as measured by their financial assets, were American; in 1993, none of the top ten banks were American and the seven largest were Japanese. The largest American bank was ranked 20th and the Bank of America, which took

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top place worldwide in 1970, was reduced to 47th.2 There is a similar development in the flow of investment. At the start of the 1960s, multinational American companies accounted for three-quarters of the world’s foreign investment. This proportion fell to 50 per cent at the start of the 1970s and to 25 per cent at the start of the 1980s. The changes are just as remarkable in trade. In just ten years (1980–90), Asia’s share of world trade rose from 14.4 per cent to 21.4 per cent. And while the share of the United States and Europe remained stable, this stability belied the growth in exporting centres in sectors like high technology products. Between 1968 and 1988, the United States’ share of world exports of these products fell from 29.2 per cent to 18.5 per cent, while that of Japan rose from 8. 5 per cent to 17.5 per cent.3 Certain Southern economies now have a significant share of this wider distribution of centres of technological power. In 1968, Mexico, Brazil, China, Malaysia and South Korea accounted for only 0.8 per cent of the volume of high technology exports; by the mid-1990s, this proportion was close to 10 per cent.4 In basic research, which is the ‘upstream’ component of world competition, the diffusion of power is just as obvious, at least at the heart of the Western world (United States, Europe, Japan). Of the thirteen technologies of the future which are the object of fierce global competition today, the balance of power between the three great regions is divided in the following way: Europe leads the United States and Japan in two sectors; it is equal with them in six sectors, and behind in five others.5 Each region has its trump cards in some things, and is disadvantaged in others. But none has an absolute, irreversible advantage over the other two. For instance, the automotive sector, which throughout the 1980s symbolized the irrepressible economic vitality of Japan and its increasing strength compared with Europe and America, now offers a much more subtle picture of the balance of power.6 The gap between Japan on the one hand and Europe and America on the other has shrunk considerably. Despite becoming tougher, world competition is also tending to become more fluid. Power is less a matter of managing and protecting an asset, and more like placing a series of ‘technological bets’ where speed plays a fundamental role. Since the key to competition is techno logical innovation, and since the innovation market is now global, profits do not increase with the number of participants. The ‘first to the tape’ wins, so that even those who try to imitate the winner are unsuccessful: the innovation will already have been distributed and no revenue will be generated from spending devoted to catching up a competitor.7 Therefore, despite the development of economic interdependence, the classic trick of the hierarchical system (to come first) remains fundamental. In other words, the transformation of the conditions of competition has no impact on the relevance of the idea of power. Quite simply, the latter is defined in terms which are more fluid than static, benefiting flexible nations or areas (America, Asia) to the disadvantage of rigid nations or areas (Europe). The spread of global power has been expanded ‘statistically’ by recent methods of evaluating global wealth. In simple terms, it consists of taking the

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parity of purchasing power into account. It thus re-evaluates wealth according to the purchasing power within each country rather than to what it could buy in the rest of the world. Since currencies of poor countries are weaker than those of rich countries, measuring power in such terms automatically leads to a re-evaluation of the wealth produced. As a practical example, a tonne of rice produced in Korea is worth more than this same tonne exchanged on the world market. Using this method of calculation, the developed countries’ share of world production is reduced to 54 per cent while that of developing countries moves up to 34 per cent.8 The effect of decentralization of power is thus reinforced. At the heart of the latter group is China which, taking its territorial size into account, gains most by it: it becomes the third largest world power behind the United States and Japan. This re-evaluation of the measure of economic power could be seen simply as an academic exercise. In reality it is more significant than that. In the first place, it magnifies the international impression of power. Thus, for French and British business leaders, China is seen as the most serious long-term competitor to Europe.9 This perception is probably exaggerated, but it is particularly revealing about the way in which power and global competition are increasingly perceived. The ‘threat’ does not come just from the ‘strong’. It results from actions by the ‘weak’, who transform certain weaknesses (for instance, low wages) into strengths, while at the same time pursuing a conventional strategy of catching up technologically The process of globalization seems to facilitate a technological catching-up without a parallel social catching up. The whole question thus revolves around knowing whether this gap is purely transitional (as the historical examples of Japan and Korea suggest) or whether the speed at which technologies are now entering Southern economies will, paradoxically, slow down the social catching-up. If this hypothesis is true, the South could in certain cases catch up the North without bringing equality in the social conditions of its development. The hypothesis seems all the more likely in that globalization is continually extending towards countries of the South that same process of economic growth without job creation already being experienced in the North. Wealth may grow, but job creation will not be proportional to growth, precisely because of the extension to the South of a technological strategy that creates few jobs.10 This structural deterioration of job creation and security will hold back the ‘social catching-up’ of the South, which the North wants because it guarantees its own security, since ‘a growing army of reserve labour’ would inevitably reduce the pressure on employers in the South to raise wages. The evolution imposed on us by globalization would thereby overthrow the traditional rule that proletarian nations catch up rich nations. In a certain way it highlights the delegitimization of a Western model in which collective prosperity necessarily brings a corresponding growth in consumption and individual wellbeing. For all that, the spectre of a massive economic delocalization from Northern countries towards the South is totally erroneous. In the medium term the process of

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delocalization will meet two types of restriction already at work. The first stems from the fact that wage costs are a declining part of the general structural costs of production. The second results from the development of the transformation of production structures and in particular from the development of ‘low stock systems’ which require the production floor to be based near component suppliers. These two trends towards a more flexible system—that is, the declining share of variable costs for unskilled labour in total production costs, and the increased importance of proximity—consequently militate against the extension of ‘delocalized’ production to developing countries. Of course, the potential attraction of low-wage production sites for companies from Northern countries has not completely disappeared. But there is instead a trend towards setting up regional rather than global supply networks, as borne out by world data on the geographical destination of exports of American subsidiaries overseas. Delocalization, while still continuing, is increasingly taking place within the major regions—from the United States to Mexico, from high-wage European countries to Ireland, Southern and Eastern Europe or Northern Africa—rather than between these regions.11 Regionalization as a demand A product of globalization, regionalization is also one consequence of the end of the Cold War. Solidarities inherited from the past are gradually being eroded around the world. None of them escapes a need for redefinition. The decline of geostrategic alliances means that nations need to situate themselves in the global arena, to reconsider their relationship to the region, quite simply because there is hardly any other intermediary between the national and the global. The return to region is being considered and organized in various ways, including as a single entity, as in Europe. For Central Europe, rediscovering Europe means reestablishing links not only with the past but also with Western modernity—a modernity which Sovietism had blocked to some extent, as Milan Kundera in Destins Trahis correctly remarks. For the countries of Northern Europe the movement is similar, but its meaning is certainly not. Regionalization here is not positive in character. It seems purely instrumental, guided by fear of economic exclusion or political isolation. Finland, paradoxically, felt less isolated when potentially threatened by the USSR than it does today. Norway probably feels somewhat the same. Where collective security is concerned, we are forced to recognize that the globalization of issues will remain without effect or abstract, apart from the definition of general principles. However much economic, social or cultural interdependence develops across the world, we will never significantly increase China’s interest in Rwanda or Europe’s in Haiti. As it happens, the Yugoslav crisis showed eloquently the extremely divisible nature of international security, not just because the United States was only moderately interested but also because the European states managed to give their inaction a

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theoretical justification. How in such circumstances could solutions be ‘globalized’—through the UN for example—when even on a regional scale the perception of problems seems so fragmented? Regionalization will only very rarely imply a sort of rejection of the links of the past in favour of the solidarity of the future. More simply, it expresses the confirmation of a certain domination by the region, the internalization of the regional constraint on any action. Thus, while Great Britain is certainly not thinking of loosening its ties with America, it will less often consider its transatlantic relationship outside the framework of Europe, with which it has increasingly strong ties.12 Japan is certainly not thinking of forsaking its relationships with America. But this approach can no longer be at the expense of closing itself off, politically, culturally or economically, from Asia.13 Australia is certainly not seeking to break with Europe. But to survive it needs to think in terms of Asia. France has no reason to abandon Africa. But the clientelist policy it has followed for several decades there no longer allows it to ignore the European imperative. The recent symbolic devaluation of the Central African franc (CFAFr) bears witness to this change.14 It marked the first stage in the decomposition of what Jean-François Bayart calls ‘the historic Franco-African bloc’.15 Parallel to the states’ need to reconsider their relationship with the region, regionalization is becoming for them the preferred source of revitalizing their role in the context of market and social globalization. Globalization, with all that it implies in terms of the extension of the market place into social relationships and for international competition, creates demands on the state, either to protect ‘exposed sectors’ in the market or to increase the chance of withstanding this competition. In Europe, bringing the continent up to a competitive level with the United States and Asia means an increasingly dynamic role for states in transport infrastructure, energy and education.16 A similar process is under way in the United States through a return to mercantilism in world trade regulation. In Asia the strategies of ASEAN (Association of South East Asian Nations) and APEC (Asian Pacific Economic Conference) are leading to a growing involvement of states. Equally, American trade pressure on Japan has led to a reintroduction of the state into the market place, insofar as it is the Japanese state which has responsibility in Washington’s eyes for forcing Japanese companies to import more American products.17 The revival of state activism on a regional scale does not mean it is being used to oppose private, non-state actions. Quite the opposite, because regionalization is becoming a potential source of relegitimization for the state not for regaining ground lost to private-sector actors but for redeploying its action in a sense which would make conflict between public and private null and void. The reconstruction of meaning is taking place through a redefinition of the role of the state, and through the state taking responsibility for new demands expressed on a regional scale. Regionalization is an opportunity for national states, perhaps the last one.

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Regionalization as expectation Finally, for societies, regionalization responds, though in a confused, varying and contradictory way, to two aspirations. The first expresses the need to escape from the supervision of the nation-state, to experience the multiplicity of its identities without having to make a damaging choice, to widen the range of its preferences, tastes and attachments. Probably one of the strongest ways in which this demand for a pluralist and transnational identity will be expressed is through ethnicity. In North America the integration of Mexico into the American region will undoubtedly be facilitated by a certain ‘hispanization’ of America. In Asia the play of ethnicity and of the market are strengthening Chinese identity across the diasporas. Helped by the end of the Cold War, Chinese people living overseas feel less and less pressure to choose between allegiance to Beijing and allegiance to Taipei, or between allegiance to China and allegiance to their country of adoption.18 The second aspiration expresses the need to experience a latent requirement for universality in a practical way. Europe is the only ‘horizon of meaning’ available today for the continent’s young people. It is the only source of meaning capable of reconciling proximity and universality, even though this quest remains highly problematic. In Asia the fragmentation of national space is such that the region seems to be a method of gaining power rather than a method of gaining meaning. If Japanese or Chinese citizens aspire to more freedom, or seek a more comfortable standard of living, they will look to globalization—to the West in effect—rather than to the region. In the previous chapter we saw that the Japanese were still far from thinking of themselves as Asians. The Chinese really seem fascinated only by the West, and in particular America, as shown by their almost infantile attachment to the technological feats of America during the Gulf War. In China, watches are Japanese, Taiwanese or Korean, but in the mind’s eye they actually show San Francisco time. The whole of educated China is convinced of the victory of market democracy, more strongly than even a decade ago and almost violently. They even have a sort of disdainful dislike of those around the world who insist on ignoring such an obvious fact.19 However, this reality is not immutable. The westernized Asian elite and those integrated into the world (business people, top civil servants, academics) are, almost paradoxically, supporters of an Asianization of Asia, of a regionalization of the continent on the basis of its own identity. These are the people behind the development of all the new forms of regionalization in Asia. Nevertheless, though the region spontaneously forms the natural intermediary space between a deflated nation-state and an unformed globalization, its construction in a legitimate space will be slow and full of contradiction. Even

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though it may seem a sort of reasonable middle point between the too small and too large, regional space will need to overcome the immense gap found in most social fields between the vague, general recognition of the validity of a principle or a fact—the region in this case—and its emergence as a legitimate reference point. The crisis of meaning is also this difficulty we have in giving substance to ideas or realities we believe have become inevitable or indispensable. In other words, it is not sufficient for regionalization to appear to be the ‘natural’ space for exercising power for the region to turn itself rapidly into the space of meaning. If we accept that regional spaces are required less to fight globalization than to organize it in their own favour, the dominant regional spaces will be those which quickly create a regional identity with least costs, whether political costs (in finding a definition of a ‘common regional good’ over and above the nations which make it up), economic costs (in ensuring that the construction of a regional space does not lead to a downturn in the economy) or identity costs (ensuring that the demand for regional identity is experienced as a reassurance of identity rather than its mutilation). These challenges need to be analysed and understood within the three great spaces for meaning emerging after the Cold War: European space, Asian space and American space.

11 Europe as meaning

For Europe there is hardly any middle way or half-way step between meaning and power: a Europe of meaning will end naturally in a Europe of power. But a Europe of power will never see the light of day if it does not first manage to offer meaning to its inhabitants and the rest of the world. The strong dialectic liaison between meaning and power is a source of extreme vulnerability, since the slightest loss of meaning is regarded as a weakening of power. Meaning thus magnifies the representation of power, positively when ‘a meaning’ is proposed, and negatively when it seems to be slipping out of reach. The dominating perception of Europe today is that of a space diminished in three ways: in security, identity and legitimacy. This perception is undoubtedly exaggerated, when we realize the extent to which Europe remains an extraordinarily privileged space: with 6 per cent of the population on 1.3 per cent of the world’s surface it accounts for 22 per cent of the world’s GNP. But the fact that the loss of meaning has such a strong effect on the representation of power is, as we said earlier, a distinctive characteristic of this continent. It would be far better to take account of this fact and overcome it, rather than evade it. In Asia economic integration is infinitely less advanced than in Europe; as for political unity, in Asia it is simply not on the agenda. And yet Asia can seem a powerful space, on its way up, since it has absolutely no need to provide meaning in order to become organized and to make progress. The North American space is in a very different situation. Meaning is a key question there but, because the weight of the United States is such a determining factor in any regional construction, the equation of meaning is relatively simplified. Europe therefore needs to overcome two constraints specific to itself: first, the need for meaning to provide a foundation for its power but, second, the division of its space into national spaces of meaning, which, for all that they are in crisis, are still collectively incapable of transcending this representation. The need for meaning to be translated into political terms in one way or another is all the more necessary in that Europe, in contrast to America and Asia, does not have the ‘right history’ for considering its future in anything other than political terms. While ethnicity could become a potential springboard for power in America or Asia, it would be more difficult to use it as a source of meaning for Europe.

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If we accept that meaning and power are tightly dovetailed, and if we recognize that its fragmentation into national spaces is a practical reality, Europe will provide meaning only through a combination of approaches at two levels: conceptual mobilization and political action. Conceptual mobilization not carried through to the political arena would be more like idle intellectual reflection. Collective political action that was not inspired by new principles of thought and action would not increase the social comprehensibility of Europe one iota. The mobilization of European conceptual capital It is usual when discussing conceptual issues to contrast the pragmatic AngloSaxon tradition with the more conceptual continental tradition. In reality the configuration of Europe is both more complex and more simple. It is more complex in that, in comparison with Anglo-Saxon tradition, continental traditions are very diverse and somewhat contradictory. It is more simple in that the balance of power between Anglo-Saxons and continentals is distinctly unequal. In the construction of the single European market there has not been a confrontation between two philosophies; the hegemonic liberal system has prevailed, amended at times by national conceptions that strive to contain this hegemony (France), to bypass it or to adapt it (Germany). The dichotomy between pragmatism and conceptualization is just as unsatisfactory. The advantage of the Anglo-Saxon tradition is that it is built on ideology, concepts and practices; and especially on ideology when it asserts the clear supremacy of the market as the optimal means of organization. In doing so, it tends not only to mistrust any political construction which might dominate market construction, but especially to see the construction of Europe not as a political end-goal, but as an economic means of adapting to the world market. On this view, Europe would disappear as it became more integrated into the world market. In the best-case scenario it would become like a ‘deregulation watchdog’ similar to those set up by Britain after the Thatcherite privatizations. Europe would thus be an ‘Office for Services’, and its meaning would be the meaning of the market. The strength of this ideological perspective is that it is sustained by a considerable conceptual potential whose common point is to consider extending the market sphere to the detriment of the political sphere. Among thousands of other examples, the privatization of crime control is the most revealing. In this extremely sensitive area of state sovereignty, Anglo-Saxon thinking is the most inventive. It is also the most prepared to concede that transferring the tasks of protecting public order and fighting delinquency from the public sector to the private sector (private prisons, private police) is more a matter of efficiency than of sovereignty.1 There is no lack of resistance to the deployment of this philosophy. But it is a negative resistance, not a positive or alternative resistance. The paradox of this situation is that in Europe neoliberalism has won the battle of ‘the general

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interest’, even though it has always been wary of this notion. Ideologically and conceptually, the empirical nature of Anglo-Saxon logic demonstrates great vitality each time a new practical problem emerges in Europe. The ‘strong appeal’ of the liberal viewpoint stems of course from the state of the world balance of power. Without the existence of the United States, British neoliberalism would not have the magnetic power of attraction it currently has in Europe. It is also explained by the cultural hegemony of the market over the whole social field. Tribes are not afraid of the market Though it is an essential factor, this explanation is insufficient. Its strength comes from the fact that it manages to make us believe and accept that, though ‘the market is supreme’, it does not seek to dictate. In other words, the logic of liberalism is to affect the organization of power without affecting the meaning. Its ideological hegemony is based on the fact that, paradoxically, it rejects any idea of total hegemony over society. Liberalism presents itself as a natural state and not as an ideology, thus making a step-by-step questioning of its principles difficult. Of course this dichotomization will appear illusory to non-liberals: how can it be claimed that the market is not everything when it forces its way into all social fields? But the illusion is attractive at a time when utopias are in decline, since it does not claim to undermine symbols of identity. In England neoliberalism does not appear to be destructive of identity. In England itself, the minority ethnic communities do not feel concerned about the debate on the benefits or ill-effects of liberalism. They note that liberal theory treats communitarian theory with respect, and that it works for the greater good of Islamists around the world. For the Islamists, who have made London their intellectual stronghold, whether neoliberalism is ideological or doctrinal is basically not very important providing it does not undermine communitarianism. Communitarianism has no reason to challenge the market and its logic, since the market is not involved in community organization and does not push forward a statist definition of identity. Tribes are not afraid of the market. Along this line of thought, the French model seems more ‘authoritarian’, more all-encompassing because, while challenging the ‘market is everything’ position, it also challenges the view that ‘the community is everything’. This example alone highlights the political plasticity of liberalism which basically suggests a de facto linkage between meaning (community identity) and power (organization by the market). Thus neoliberalism can, without contradiction, unite under one banner the supporters of a dogmatic, largely symbolic national sovereignty, the followers of ethnic or religious communitarianism, and the secularized, radicalized partisans of the market at any price. Its political strength today therefore goes very considerably beyond the limits of the economic field. In its own way, this approach can provide a meaning, and its main political advantage in the current European debate in that it is not based on any exercise

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of will or activism: both the pure market and communitarianism already exist in some way throughout Europe. They will prevail effortlessly if things are just allowed to happen. It is therefore those who reject this evolution who have the responsibility of finding the arguments. How will they do it? They could reactivate the conceptual potential of Europe around its three great traditions, the British, German and French traditions. These three intellectual traditions continue, but they are currently little disposed to converge. Taking the first example, people tend automatically to identify British thought with neoliberal thought. Yet there is one fertile tradition in Great Britain today which considers the market not as an absolute but, on the contrary, as the sum total of historical institutions which reflect individual trajectories. From this proposition it draws a highly political conclusion about Eastern Europe: the application of neoliberal logic can lead only to a dead end. The Social Market Foundation, which spearheads this debate, says the market is a construct and not a model and, that being so, it is possible to borrow fragments of other people’s experience without having to import the whole construct.2 It is very interesting that this British approach is very close to that of the German school of Ordoliberalismus which gave birth to the social market economy in Germany after the Second World War. The French tradition on the state could easily conduct a dialogue with these two traditions. From this base a European conceptual platform could be born, bringing together British tradition on the market, French tradition on the state and German tradition on subsidiarity. In order to ensure an effective convergence of these three traditions, we should try, not to find an abstract or consensual hypothetical median point, but to delineate a convergence issue. Thus each great tradition must be encouraged to go deeper into what it knows best, which will lead each of them in a certain way really to take stock of the limits inherent in their own thought. In other words, it is not a question of requiring the English to think less about the market and the French to think less about the state, but of encouraging the English to reflect on the limits of the market and the French on the limits of the state. Each of the great traditions needs to consider and to renew its links with what it knows best, while at the same time accepting that its contribution to the European debate will be measured in terms of its capacity to consider itself more in terms of a footbridge than a hegemony. Therefore the methods of consensual convergence will be as important as its content. Thanks to the English tradition of market, the French tradition of state and the German tradition of subsidiarity, Europe has the advantage of a considerable potential which is held back by three fundamental factors: the segmentation of thought between the nations, the ‘statization’ of the European debate, and the deep-seated doubt nurtured within each of these traditions over its own future. The non-liberal British tradition suffers from neoliberal hegemony and the excesses of Keynesianism. The German tradition is faced with the collective doubt of Germans over their future as well as over the durability of their own model in a globalized competitive environment.3 Finally, the French tradition is

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up against a massive delegitimization of the state, seemingly accentuated by the paradoxical increase in—unsatisfied—demands on the state. Now is the time to take advantage of this historic moment, when no national model in Europe wants to be or considers itself to be triumphant, to let a convergent European model gently emerge. This approach not only would allow a meaning to be given to Europe, but would also avoid the European debate recrystallizing around the question of German hegemony.4 The mobilization of the European conceptual potential around the central themes of state, market and subsidiarity could enable the Europe of meaning to be reborn at the end of the twentieth century. This conceptual convergence can be born and can develop only outside the context of states, not in order to construct a fanciful stateless Europe, but so it can be set into a long-term perspective that is capable of resisting the hazards of inter-state game plans. Research foundations and centres could have a central place in this perspective. Europe is suffering, not from a conceptual deficit but from not developing its conceptual potential. Goethe said that Germany’s inability to stop was what made it great. Today, Europeans’ inability to get going constitutes their greatest handicap. Beyond the ‘dilution-exclusion’ dilemma In parallel with the mobilization of its conceptual potential, Europe needs political mobilization based on a simple but fundamental imperative: thinking of itself as a geopolitical space capable of delineating its borders.5 The European Union is not a regional organization. It is a political community, founded on close or common history and values. From this simple, general statement flow certain principles of action requiring a partial rupture with community practices put in place by the European Union during the last few years. Because the European Union constitutes a historical and cultural community as well as a political one, non-European states could not become members. On the basis of this principle, neither Russia nor Turkey—which are not totally European—could join. The coincidence between common values and history would moreover provide a simple explanation of why even states sharing the values of the European Union might not find a place in it. Russia joining Europe would be an absolute nonsense, unless the political construction of the continent were completely abandoned. It is hard to see what symbolic or political content a Europe stretching from Brest to Vladivostok could have. The case of Turkey raises the same type of question. How can a nation be admitted to Europe that is only marginally geographically in Europe? Turkey’s decision on Europe is above all a decision of the elite groups, who have always had problems contriving a place for their country in the region. Not without reason, they think that Europe’s reluctance to open its doors to Turkey has a purely cultural explanation: the Turkish population is Muslim. The collapse of the USSR made little change to this analysis. The Turks see the support of the West

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for their participation in Central Asia as a means of diverting them from Europe. Here again their analysis is probably well-founded. Nevertheless, the end of the Cold War has indeed led to a reformulation of the relationship between Turkey and Europe, for reasons more to do with identity than with geopolitics. Like many other nations around the world today, Turkey hopes to renew acquaintance with its history without at the same time cancelling out the political and economic benefits of Kemal Ataturk’s reforms. This renegotiation means Islam is no longer seen as a systematic obstacle to modernization and westernization, but as a value that enhances political identity, independent even of the election results of the country’s Islamists. In the Muslim world Turkey is the only nation likely to make practical progress beyond the politically reductive and destructive debate between those who see Islam as an obstacle to Western modernity and those who say that modernization would thwart the ‘reign of Islam’. However, its membership of Europe could strengthen the perception of this cleavage, first within a large section of Turkish public opinion for whom the Bosnian affair revealed and revived the complexity of the relationship between the West and Islam by way of Turkey; second, within the Muslim world, for whom membership of Europe would be perceived as a symbol of the ‘betrayal’ of the Umma; and, finally, within Europe, where Turkey’s membership would reinforce latent Islamophobia. In these conditions the challenge for Europe is to escape the ambiguity, perhaps along the following lines: Turkey has no vocation for entering Europe yet the cost of its non-membership should be reduced to a strict minimum. Europe must find a way of proposing a group of measures on economic, political and military cooperation that are sufficiently attractive to make the question of formal membership to the European Union almost pointless. Turkey is currently the political actor best equipped to bring into being a Muslim space of meaning that could maintain a less ‘tormented’ relationship with modernity and the West. Even for states that are ‘fully’ European in geographic terms, membership of the European Union can no longer be considered as a right. On this basis there would be no great contradiction between membership of regional organizations such as the Council of Europe and non-admission to the European Union. Contrary to what is generally believed, the definition of a European identity does not necessarily imply a homogeneous and coherent definition of Europe. It simply assumes that the meaning and objective of multiple Europes are clarified. Nothing prevents Europe from thinking of itself as political, market and cultural Europes without having any necessary intention that they should unite or converge. Membership of the European Union can no longer be regarded as what it has become: membership in order to increase living standards, essentially economic in its nature. The membership threshold should be raised politically. One means of raising this membership threshold would be membership of a defence policy. Apart from its contribution to raising the membership threshold, the inclusion of a ‘security section’ would allow certain countries of Eastern Europe to become

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members of the Western European Union (WEU) without first passing through NATO. This approach would offer a dual advantage in dealing with Russia: dissuading Moscow without challenging it. Raising the membership threshold has one enormous advantage: it would avoid the dilution of the meaning of Europe. On the other hand, it has a nonnegligible disadvantage: it would generate huge political frustration on the periphery of a stable, prosperous Europe, which would have a considerable destabilizing effect. Russia, North Africa and Turkey would be its first ‘victims’. This objection is fundamental but not insurmountable. To bypass the major political dilemma between dilution and exclusion, the European Union must as a priority depenalize non-membership of Europe. By ‘depenalizing nonmembership’ should be understood the invention of partner-state status, more selective but with much greater ambition, whose exclusive beneficiaries would be Russia, Turkey and North Africa. This partnership would involve putting in place a triple mechanism: • a mechanism for regular political consultation between the European Union and partner states; • a mechanism for economic cooperation, instituting a customs union with the European Union, without total freedom of circulation but guaranteeing partner states a sort of preferential clause in most domains, including immigration and business ventures. The political basis of this ‘preference’ would moreover give Europe a sounder justification for using certain forms of selective trade protection against Asia; • a mechanism on security, whose central objective would be to prevent the rise of representations based on ‘the threat of the South’ or ‘the new threat from the East’. It would be essential to associate partner states in WEU military manoeuvres as well as organizing military cooperation between the European Union and partner states. The whole challenge of political partnership with Russia, Turkey and North Africa is for Europe to go beyond the dichotomy between dilution and exclusion and, especially, to move out of the middle ground it currently occupies. Through lack of will, the refusal to choose leads simultaneously to de facto dilution and de facto exclu sion. The European Union is presenting an image of itself as a diluted and excluding power, whereas it would be better to prevent dilution, and at the same time dilute the exclusion felt by those who are knocking at the European Union’s door. The polarization of the political debate between dilution and exclusion merely exposes a political deficit, whose sole purpose is precisely to provide an escape route from binary or reductive choices. The ability to go beyond the logic of binary choices is precisely what is lacking in Europe but which in contrast is Asia’s strength.

12 Asia, or regionalism without a goal

Asian regionalism can be summed up with one simple but decisive fact: in the year 2010 this continent will be the source of 35 per cent of the world’s wealth, against 18 per cent for the United States and 17 per cent for Western Europe.1 The breakthrough by Asia is all the more remarkable in that it is tending to spread across the whole continent. In 1970, Asia’s success was limited mainly to Japan; three-quarters of Asian wealth was concentrated there. In 2010 Japan’s share will fall to one-quarter in favour of China, Korea and the ASEAN nations.2 To think of Asia as a space controlled only by Japan is already an anachronism. The meaning of Asia is above all a meaning of prosperity, a prosperity which is increasingly shared.3 In addition we must note the originality of Asia’s approach towards regionalism, its flexibility, its ability to escape the dilemmas of European construction, such as defining borders, seeking an end-goal, or the imperative of political unity. The meaning of Asia is also that of informality. Asia does not have to define its borders, for a simple morphological reason: it is a largely maritime space, which has existed and prospered as a place of confluence rather than as a geopolitical entity. Strictly speaking there is no ‘political right of entry’ to Asia, because the dues are paid economically and socially. But the fluid borders and the informality of procedures that delineate Asia make entry difficult for non-Asians. The regional concepts of Asia-Pacific or Southeast Asia are moreover very recent and of European origin.4 Admittedly, there are in Asia political and administrative elites who are currently working to give the construction of Asia a progressive goal on European lines. This is the meaning of Malaysia’s approach, which is very much Western-inspired, despite its sometimes appearing hostile to Western interests.5 But despite that, it remains in the minority, the project not being taken up politically by the great regional powers of Asia. The meaning of prosperity Today, to be part of Asia does not mean having to claim to have a vision of the Asian world or a collective project. It means primarily to participate, in an active and pragmatic way, in its vigorous strategy of economic growth and

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development. For this reason, being close geographically has become in essence less pertinent than being close economically to the most prosperous Asian countries. India today still seems out of step with ‘Asian time’ because its ability to catch up with the pace of Asian prosperity is not yet proven. Thus we can think about Asia without referring to India, whereas it would be impossible to discuss Asia without referring to Singapore.6 Russia could come within Asia on political or military grounds—because of the Korean crisis, for example. But it will participate in Asian time only when its Far East region has passed through one of the three gateways it could have to Asian prosperity: the ‘Japanese gateway’ (Sakhalin-Hokkaido); the ‘Korean gateway’, which has to go across the Yellow Sea until Korean unification creates a geographic continuity between Korea and Russia; and the ‘Chinese gateway’, which will be along the Russian-Chinese border once Chinese prosperity is no longer purely coastal. To be part of Asia today primarily implies belonging to a space-time and not only to a region.7 Certainly, the primary desire to integrate with a prosperous entity is not limited to Asia: many states hope to become members of the European Union precisely because it symbolizes and exudes a certain wealth. But the comparison stops there. Whereas the paths to European membership are carefully codified and politicized, the access routes to Asia are much more informal than institutional, more social than political. This informality does not exclude a certain vision, or even medium- to long-term planning. However, the starting point is generally highly empirical and linked to economic imperatives. Thus, to understand the long-term strategy of Japan in Vietnam, it is perhaps less necessary to refer to the conventional speeches of the Ministry for Foreign Affairs than to read closely the Mitsubishi company’s recent text on the automobile industry in Vietnam. Starting with a narrow study focused on a particular sector this document goes on to discuss the wider implications of the country’s economy, the organization of its infrastructure, and the setting up of an industrial and technological base.8 If Burma, Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia join ASEAN in the next few years, it will be because informal economic integration with the prosperous core countries will be well under way. This can be seen even in a ruined and underclass country like Burma, which has practised autarky for some decades. Today it is progressively joining the strategy of prosperity through informal and gradual measures, and through historic trading networks where all types of traffic and political aims easily mix. Burma serves both as an entry point for Japanese products destined for China and as a potential base for military expansion for China in the region.9 It is simultaneously integrated with Chinese space through the reactivation of river and mountain trade and with Thai space to the South, thanks to infrastructure improvements in Thailand.10 (What Burma can achieve within a prosperous Asia, Albania would not know how to begin to tackle within the European Union.) Asia’s economic integration is in fact taking place less through states than through sectors straddling several states. There is today in Asia a multiplicity of economic zones, of growth triangles, which the strategy of

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prosperity is expanding. For example, there is much talk about the growth triangle of Johore which brings together southern Malaysia, Singapore and the island of Batan in Indonesia.11 These triangles allow the three sources of prosperity to be combined: capital investment from the more prosperous countries, potential markets located in the largest or most solvent country, and a workforce located in the least advanced and therefore least expensive country On the basis of the same principle, people talk about a second transnational triangle bringing together southern Thailand, part of Malaysia and northern Sumatra. Finally, we could mention a new triangle on the Chinese island of Hainan, which would bring together Chinese from the mainland, Hong Kong and Taiwan in an operation to penetrate Vietnam and the rest of Southeast Asia.12 This transnational process is leading to a real remodelling of China. Thus, the provinces of Guangdong and Fujian have many more links with Hong Kong and Taiwan than between themselves, even though they are formally part of the same political space.13 While in Europe we wonder if the strengthening of the Visegrad group as a group will delay the entry of Eastern Europe into the European Union, this type of decision would be purely academic in Asia. What is important there is to integrate into an existing economic process and not to decide a priori on an institutional model. In Asia regional integration means primarily to jump on the bandwagon, not to make an existential choice. As a result, there is no reason in Asia for a debate on subsidiarity, because integration is being built up from the base. In the West, it is hard to imagine a Europe constituted from cross-border agreements. The Committee of the Regions is an institution set up by the Maastricht Treaty, that is, organized from above. Three essential factors combine with this informality to create the strength of Asia. The first stems from a concept of sovereignty which, even though it has ended up conforming to the Western model of the nation-state, has never abolished the more traditional forms of sovereignty based on allegiance rather than territorial control; the willingness of economic agents and social actors to cross borders is natural to it. This tendency is encouraged because here as elsewhere the end of the Cold War has reduced the need for security between states imperative in classic territorial sovereignty. Borders are porous because they are less and less well guarded. The second engine for this informality lies in the decisive role of the diasporas and in particular of the Chinese diaspora. Thanks to its 50 million people and 231 billion dollars of financial assets, the Chinese diaspora plays an integrating role in three ways: by its participation during the last 15 years in the unprecedented take-off of the economy in coastal China; by developing an economic network between all those Asian countries where there are communities of Chinese origin; and by integrating Asia increasingly into the world economy as a result of its ‘financial strike force’ acquired by its western diaspora. It is thanks in particular to the presence of Chinese in Vietnam that Taiwan very quickly became the leading investor in that country.14 The diaspora thus exerts a triple function of integration: integration

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between the Chinese themselves, integration between Asians, and integration of Asia within the world economy. It must be admitted that the Chinese diaspora is not a homogeneous whole. But this diversity is far from being an obstacle to the emergence of a Chinese space. On the contrary, it allows prosperity to be diversified and diffused throughout coastal China. Thus the province of Guangdong owes much to its closeness to Hong Kong, while that of Fujian owes its prosperity to the Taiwanese.15 Furthermore, the more the world becomes aware of the importance of the diaspora, the more the Chinese modify their consciousness of being Chinese. A consciousness of belonging to the Chinese world is being forged progressively through the way the non-Chinese see the Chinese. The diaspora thus contributes economically and symbolically to the constitution of a space of Chinese meaning. It is based on the gaunxi (network) and qougshi (common consciousness). The creation of an Asian space is therefore being generated by transnational economic agents and social processes whose action is one step ahead of the political actors. Hence the absence of political end-goal given to integration projects in Asia; hence the absence of a strong involvement by the major Asian states in debates on regionalization. For the time being, it is smaller states such as Singapore and Malaysia which are in the lead on questions of regional integration. Neither China nor Japan nor Koreas seem to have made a strategic choice between a Malaysian view, which promotes an Asian Asia from which white powers such as the United States and Australia would be excluded, and an Australian view, which seeks precisely to oppose this vision. But here again, and in contrast to what we observe in Europe, the strategic indecisiveness of the major states on the optimal form of integration is not considered to be at all politically unviable or economically damaging. The sensitive question over loss of sovereignty which so burdens Europe is not on the agenda in Asia. Certainly there are many Asian states which see their control over their populations or regions weaken daily: China is the most obvious example of this. But the problem is seen more in terms of authority than of supranationality Through its ability to transcend negotiations that tend to be seen as antagonistic in Europe, Asia is finding its meaning today However, it would be wrong to think that this experience is transferable or is exempt from problems. The main difficulty stems from the uncertainty of the relationships between political forces in Asia and in particular from the fact that the inter-state game remains important. While Europe realizes more clearly each day that its future lies in superseding the logic of states, Asia is only starting the maturing process of inter-state action. Now the Cold War is over and the system of external protection is starting to weaken, Asian states are finding themselves in some ways left to their own devices. They reveal their ambitions when they seek to mark out their territory.

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Japan in the face of the emergence of a space of Chinese meaning The greatest uncertainty is about the evolution of the relationship between China and Japan. Their historic and natural rivalry is basic, because it is fundamentally only the matrix of three issues. The first refers to the constitution of a space of Chinese meaning based on three Chinas: a territorialized China, where the Chinese are in the majority (mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore); expatriate China, known in Chinese as huaqiao, or overseas Chinese; and a symbolic China, that of the journalists, economists or academics —usually from Western countries, as it happens—who consider and theorize the Chinese world and who have a considerable influence on the image that Chinese people have of themselves.16 The second refers to the capacity of Japan to become Asian other than through the Japanization of the continent; the third, to the increasing interplay of third parties to this rivalry, such as Korea and the ASEAN countries. If the evolution of relationships between China and Japan is expected to structure Asia’s future, it is not only to satisfy a desire for grandeur by these two giants, but to bring to an end a historic anomaly maintained by the Cold War: the relatively weak involvement in Asia of China and Japan in comparison with their power. China needs Asia in order to relaunch its global ambition, an ambition that communism did not allow it to achieve. It needs to become involved in the evolution of Asia in order to have access to the world, whereas Maoism had claimed to be able to take the opposite route: presenting itself as a world power in order to influence the destiny of Asia.17 On an exclusively economic basis and with a more obviously striking success, Japan followed a similar path: it built up its world power over thirty years by superbly ignoring Asia. For both sides, there is no sense in continuing this approach, as the coordinates of world time have changed radically. The end of the Cold War and the rise in Asia’s economic power have put this continent at the centre of the world more than ever before. China and Japan have therefore been forced to locate themselves in relation to this Asian centrality to which they contributed decisively though indirectly. Decisively, since it is now the Sino-Japanese binomial that structures Asian power. Indirectly, since neither Beijing nor Tokyo has really sought to construct this Asian centrality in political terms. Only now does each side find itself confronted with taking responsibility for this reality, for the need to give political meaning to a space of power. From Japan’s point of view, the return to Asia, the return to what Karoline Postel-Vinay calls the ‘agora’,18 responds to two major factors which have emerged over the last decade, since the beginning of the end of the Cold War. The first factor is of an economic nature, although its political substructure is fundamental. It stems from the endaka, in other words the revaluation of the yen imposed on Japan by the United States in 1985. The endaka happened in the same

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year that the United States, for the first time since 1914, passed from the status of creditor country to debtor country. This was the crucial turning point, which marked the start of a far-reaching redirection of Western and American policies on Japan. This redirection is based on a simple but fundamental principle: political solidarity with Japan, born of the Cold War, can no longer cover up the conflicts of economic interest between the United States and Japan. Japan ceased to be protected by the West: it even started to be contained by it. By imposing currency revaluation, the United States engaged in economic containment. The reaction of Tokyo was not long in coming. For if the rise in the yen held back the penetration of Japanese trade in the West, it increased, for that very reason, the volume of Japanese investments available in Asia in particular.19 Less than ten years after the start of this offensive in Asia, the results were significant: in 1985, trade with the United States was worth one-third more than trade with Asia. But in 1992 the trade surplus of Japan with Eastern Asia was almost equal to the latter’s trade surplus with the United States. This double surplus could have two consequences: it constitutes both a margin of economic safety, which would allow Japan to give in to American pressure more easily, and a potential source of crisis with Southeast Asian countries dissatisfied with the imbalance of their trade with Japan. The dynamism of Asian growth in contrast with the slowing-down of growth in the West has, since the end of the Cold War, accentuated Japan’s economic hold over Asia. As a result, the profitability of Japanese investment in Asia has now reached 5 per cent, compared to 3.2 per cent in Europe and −0.9 per cent in America.20 This Asianization of Japanese economic power is moreover indirectly encouraged by the United States, since the more it seeks a revaluation of the yen, the more it stimulates Japanese companies to broaden a strategy which has previously been marginal: the delocalization of their operations to Southeast Asia. Over the next five years, delocalization will cost Japan one million jobs and will make this country a net importer of consumer electronics.21 Thus, paradoxically, the Asianization of Japan will certainly not cause it to withdraw to its garden to cultivate its difference, but will make the constraints on its power commonplace. The regionalization of Japan in Asia must therefore be seen as a new form of its globalization rather than as an alternative to it. The second interpretation of the regionalization of Japanese power is of a political nature. With the end of the Cold War Japan can no longer continue to think of itself as an American protectorate. On the three major security problems that will potentially affect it (Korea, the Kurils, China), the role of the United States could be decisive only in the case of Korea. But, even on this issue, the differences between Japan and the United States will probably deepen, for at least two reasons. First, Japan has everything to fear from a rise in extremism which, paradoxically, would awaken Korean nationalism on an anti-American, and therefore a necessarily anti-Japanese, basis. Second, Japan is of all the Asian countries the one which has most to gain from maintaining the status quo in Korea, and the least to gain from seeing political unity achieved there. In the

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short term this unification could naturally be of considerable economic benefit to Japan. But in the long term the rise in power of Korea, coupled with that of China, would put Japan in a particularly difficult geopolitical situation: it would need to confront two major actors in the Asian game with a deeply rooted desire for revenge, even if they use only peaceful means. In addition the economic gap between China and Japan would be reduced. In the long term it is therefore reasonable to think that, except in the case of a break-up of China, Asia would offer fewer opportunities to Japan than it does currently. Hence Japan needs to plan an anchorage in Asia on bases that are not exclusively economic, so as to build a space of meaning which is more than a market. It does not benefit from any diaspora. It would be at this moment that Asia would find itself confronted by problems of integration comparable to those of Europe today. It would mean envisaging methods of organization that would preserve the advantages of economic interdependence, while at the same time channelling geopolitical competition between rival historic entities. Despite its super-powerful influence in economic and financial terms, the Asianization of Japan has in no way been achieved, precisely because this power is only power and not hegemony. In order to succeed in anchoring itself in Asia, Japan will need to overcome several handicaps: the first stems from the highly asymmetrical notion it has of its relationships with the rest of Asia.22 It will need to adjust this image through a much greater opening up of its internal market, through a more generous policy of technology transfer and through a greater respect by its companies for environmental constraints. In addition, the pressures brought to bear on it will be all the stronger, in that Asian countries will in the long term find it increasingly difficult to compensate for their trade deficit with Japan with a surplus with the United States, taking into account North America’s potentially introvert nature. If Japan does not signal a new type of relationship with Asia, it will remain in the uncomfortable political situation it is in today: that of a country whose aid is perceived as a right and not as a favour, and whose political influence is interpreted as suffering from a structural legitimization deficit Towards China, for example, it will always need to do both more and less: more on the economic front to make its presence tolerable, or even desirable, less on the political front to make its influence less explicit. The second handicap stems precisely from the illegitimate nature of Japan’s influence in the region in the eyes of most Asian countries. It is not by chance that the exclusive ally of Japan in Asia is Australia, a ‘white’ country that is seeking a sort of regional recognition, which feels the need to be consecrated by ‘yellow’ countries. In order to overcome this problem, Japan is hesitating between two options that internal power games and the pressure of public opinion prevent it from clarifying. The first would consist of legitimizing its return to Asia in classic terms: that of a major power serving world peace. Within this perspective, Japan would become a major power, but the instruments of this power would be put,

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for example, at the service of promoting democracy and human rights. The region’s dread of Japan would thus be attenuated by a dual anchoring within the principles of democracy and the principles of collective action (participation in peacekeeping operations). The attempt to link Japanese aid to respect for human rights as well as the participation of Japanese forces in UN operations in Cambodia could be inspired through this approach. The second would in contrast refer to a more regionally based strategy of action. To establish its legitimacy, Japan would offer itself as a benevolent protector of an Asia confronted by the infiltration of the West economically (opening of markets), socially (social chapter) and politically (respecting human rights). Japan’s ‘No’ to the West would in a way be put at the service of the whole of Asia. On these grounds Japan would be a clear competitor to China. It should not be expected that Japan will actually proceed to clear-cut decisions on this issue. But it is not certain that a strategy of hesitation between these two options will allow it to conquer its ‘Asian flu’. To escape from it, the whole of Japanese society—and not just the economic and political elite—will need to rethink its cultural relationship with Asia.

13 America as a ‘social power’

Of all the transnational spaces of meaning in the process of being born, the American space of meaning will most certainly emerge the fastest. Naturally, there is a geographical reason for this: the American continent is a well-defined area. But a geopolitical factor can be added which is perhaps even more determinant: whatever its future architecture, this continent will necessarily be dominated by a super-powerful actor: the United States of America. Despite ample discussion on the matter, Mexico’s membership of NAFTA has a symbolic rather than an economic dimension, taking into account the imbalance of power between the two countries.1 Mexican GNP accounts for hardly more than 4 per cent of American GNP. For Mexico, this membership translates a desire to break with Latin America and to secure itself definitively within North American space, even if this aim is taboo, ‘unmentionable’, throughout the Mexican political class.2 For the United States, it expresses the desire for a regional recentring after forty-five years of planetary activism. The particulars of regionalization are therefore far simpler than in Europe. Shortly before the end of the Cold War, the position and future of American power in the world gave rise to a lively debate between theorists of ‘decline’ and theorists of ‘revivalism’. Spearheading the former was Paul Kennedy.3 In support of his hypothesis there was a simple and recognized fact: the United States was the first modern world power to be in the position of a net debtor in peacetime, in other words, to live beyond its means without being able to cite an ‘exceptional burden’ such as war.4 Hence Kennedy perceived a growing and menacing gap between its ‘global over-exposure’, induced by strong geopolitical requirements, and its need to withdraw inside its borders to clean up its public finances, reduce consumption in favour of investment, and guarantee increased income for its inhabitants. Paul Kennedy feared in addition that, like Spain in the seventeenth century, the United States would be tempted to increase its global exposure to check its decline, to make the defence of its ‘reputation’ an absolute priority, given the size of internal obstacles to national economic and social reform. On this point, he established a parallel between the United States and the Spain of the seventeenth century, of which the Marquis of Monteclaros declared in 1625: ‘The lack of money is serious, but maintaining our reputation is more serious still.’5

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At this juncture came the end of the Cold War. In an initial stage, it seemed be the crowning glory of the victory of the West over communism and, moreover, of the ideological triumph of the United States and the liberalism it incarnated. Suddenly the theme of decline lost its intensity, even its relevance. How could one talk of the American decline when almost everyone in the East was starting to venerate America? The Gulf War, which closely followed the end of the Cold War, confirmed not only the strength of the United States’ military power, but also its ability to get the international community to endorse the defence of its interests. The fact that the financial burden of this conflict was borne by the Arab oil kingdoms, Europe and Japan gave substance to the thesis of a ‘mercenary power’ intervening in the world ‘for payment’. But comparisons are odious: a mercenary power acts only on behalf of the other; it does not have any aims of its own apart from pecuniary ones and it assumes on the other hand that its purchasers are able to make their particular political motives prevail. Yet in the Gulf War only the United States had a clear vision of its objectives. And although the Europeans financed the war effort, it was because the United States did not leave them much choice. It is understandable that, in this context, the thesis of a ‘unipolar world’ was able to deceive us—at least for a time. Today, several years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, neither the mechanistic thesis of decline nor that of a unipolar world seems useful for understanding the place of the United States in the world, for reflecting on its structural power in the post Cold War. If the ideas of decline and unipolarity co-exist in the debate, it is because these two terms capture elements of the truth while at the same time not managing to take into account all the issues. The theme of the decline, as Kennedy defines it, remains pertinent for understanding the need for choosing between internal and external priorities. But it is seen to be scarcely operative if it is used in a mechanistic (short-term) way rather than a dynamic (long-term) way.6 For almost symmetrical reasons, the thesis of ‘unipolarity’ offers similar advantages and disadvantages. It allows the pre-eminent place of the United States on the world stage to be demonstrated, by taking account of the inertia of its potential competitors: there would thus be a sort of ‘American unipolarity by default’. But this idea in its turn is grossly insufficient for understanding the international reality because, since the end of the Cold War, the conditions for insertion into the global system have been overturned by globalization. Thanks to the interaction between economic interdependence and cultural interpenetration, the world has ceased to resemble a game of billiards in which each ball is a nation-state. It is instead more like the sum total of globalized, fluid social processes (such as drugs, trade, environment, financial markets, media), which nation-states are no longer in a position to dominate totally ‘from start to finish’, but which they seek to control in the way most advantageous to them. In this increasingly complex social system, the idea of a world architecture loses value. It is no longer a question of constructing a sort of ‘planetary Meccano’ using prepared plans drawn up in detail by embassies, but rather, and at best, of regulating the globalized social processes in which states, companies, organized

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social groups and individuals intervene. This explanation is why it was possible to state that the United States will be the last superpower in the world, if by superpower we understand the ability of a nation to link planetary ambition with increasing collective wealth and a reinforced social cohesion. The end of planetary ambition Behind the idea of planetary ambition we used to find a desire for territorial or symbolic conquest. The aims of conquest were territories or souls. There was thus a sort of distance to cover between a transmitter and a receiver. Globalization overturned this reality for at least three reasons. The first stems from the fact that states have a less important role to play in the diffusion of political, social, economic or cultural processes and that, as a result, the ambition of a state to ‘bear’ a message to others has been reduced: a technology of American origin no longer has American ‘meaning’. The second is explained by the rapid acceleration of the processes of diffusion, so that political actors can—at best— shape, channel and influence them, but not resist them: the world presence or power of CNN, for example, is only marginally dependent on American political power. The third stems from the fact that globalization is evident everywhere and that the priority for states now is not so much to bear its message as to regulate it in order not to have to submit to it totally. Even for such a powerful player as the United States, globalization is too large a process to be controlled. In trying to do so, the goal has become far more defensive: it is no longer a case of cutting an empire to the size of the state in an environment that can be shaped, but of redefining state territory in a globalized social system. For the United States as for other powers, it is not so much a case of defining its sphere of influence in the world as delineating its role in a globalized space. Globalization is a wide and encompassing process which in a certain way quashes a state’s political pretensions to play a world role. It is here that the theme of decline ceases to be operational, since the linear and irrepressible need a state thought it had, to project itself in the world to fulfil a role there, now has less meaning. America as a social power The second factor that contributes to destroying even the concept of a superpower stems from the divisible character of power. Previous chapters have mentioned the uncoupling of military power and economic power. This train of thought should be taken further to explain another, just as decisive, uncoupling: that between economic power and social cohesion. In effect the intensification of international economic competition today is such that it forces social choices on almost all developed societies, in the form either of technological flexibility which leads, as in Europe, to an increasing tolerance of unemployment, or of social flexibility, which is reflected in the disappearance of guaranteed employment, assured increases in incomes or even ‘satisfactory’ incomes.7 In

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American society these problems are leading to a loss of horizon, as shown well by sociologists such as Bellah and Wolfe and anthropologists such as Newman.8 Americans now see themselves as an enormous middle class whose upward mobility will be blocked for the foreseeable future.9 Low unemployment levels in the United States have been achieved only by more precarious employment, lower revenues and an increasingly fragile welfare system. From this problem flows a necessarily more fragmented and increasingly circumspect view of power. In the case of America, the very idea of power in the world takes on a paradoxical character. In the medium to long term, the most powerful vector of influence of the United States will be not its economic power or its military strength, but its social model. The diffusion of this model, particularly in Europe, is paradoxical to the extent that it does not depend on the political will of the United States. The advance of the communitarian model of identification, in parallel with the intensification of social atomization, the breaking up of social links, the ‘mercantilization’ of social relationships, and tolerance of inequality, are the most relevant elements of the Americanization of the world, even independent of the intrinsic political power of the United States, its desire or not to maintain troops in Europe, to take part or not in problems of international security. If American power continues to have meaning, it will therefore be less as a political-military power, as was the case during the Cold War, than as a social power, with all the ambivalence that this term implies: on the one hand, factors of flexibility and mobility; on the other, elements of social disintegration.10 Globalization has heightened the blurring between ‘positive influence’ and ‘negative influence’ and is the final step in breaking the subjective link established in the past between influence, progress and modernity. This process of social influence allows us to underline and understand how much it is changing the traditional rules of political influence, international power games and the introduction of foreign models. Whereas thirty years ago a party organized on American lines was almost inevitably a ‘pro-American’ party (in 1965 Jean Lecanuet led in France an ‘American-style campaign’ in the name of a claimed political closeness to America), today this correlation no longer has any meaning. The political concept ‘pro-American’ has lost much of its significance even though the influence of the American partisan model has never been so great. In other words, leading an American-style electoral campaign has no longer any political connotation. There has been a dislocation between the influence and the meaning. Turning to another social field, that of inner-city areas, the decoupling of social influence and political influence is even stronger. The organization of young people in European inner cities on the model of American ghettos naturally has no political significance for the young. The American inspiration is both social and cultural, but not at all political. As it happens, the America to which we refer is that of the underclass and those excluded from ‘American power’.

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America between universalism, predation and precaution Beyond the social dimension of its influence the United States will continue to exercise its power through more traditional channels. On this score the debate between ‘activism’ and ‘isolationism’, to which American policy is too often confined, serves little purpose. If globalization means, for the reasons we have stated, that the practice of planetary activism has little advantage for America, it means, for diametrically opposite reasons, that isolationism is completely unrealistic. American policy, like that of other powers—and on this issue America will be increasingly less distinct from other nations in the world—will be based on a ‘collage’ of three major strategies, though they will not produce a collective meaning that is sufficiently mobilizing to halt the declining cohesiveness of American society: first, a residual pretension to universality, which the multicultural nature of American society will allow it to maintain or even revive; second, a ‘predatory temptation’ imposed by the comparative reduction of the American economy in the world economy; and third, a strategy of ‘precaution’ imposed by the combination of economic constraints and the pressure of public opinion, which considers that external commitment accentuates internal imbalance. The pretension to universality is, as we have seen, a constituent part of American policy. A universalist attitude can be adulterated or instrumentalized in numerous political contexts. Nevertheless it cannot be reduced to a ‘veil’, modestly covering signed and sealed practices of realeconomik. Questions about human rights and about pluralist democracy will necessarily remain present in American policy and in the political vision of its citizens. It is in a certain way the least adulterated ‘source of meaning’ in American policy, especially since, in America more than anywhere else in the world, these values are unlikely to become subject to ‘political confiscation’ by the state. In contrast to France, where the state would not necessarily react to the mobilization of public opinion, if the state thought it went against its interests (as with Bosnia, for example), the position in the United States would probably be more complex. The permeability of the state to the complex forces in society is stronger there than in France, on international matters at any rate. This universalism could be revived in the future by the multicultural character of American society. Admittedly, the term ‘multicultural’ is polysemous (it has too many meanings), and is too hackneyed to be employed dispassionately,11 and the facts to which it relates are complex and largely contradictory. If we take the ‘black issue’ for example, it would be difficult to see it as positive evidence of successful multiculturalism. Despite undeniable social differentiation within the black community, the latter sees itself increasingly as a separate community, independent of the social level of its members.12 In other words, social mobility is not a factor for integration into a multiracial American society where the barriers are only of an economic nature. Moreover, with the end of the Cold War

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economy, the two main sources of social mobility for black Americans (the professional army and the industries linked directly or indirectly with military power) have dried up.13 The racial system seems thus to feed off the social system, rendering the transformation of an American multicultural model into a universal model highly problematical. All the same, the American reality is far from being univocal (having only one meaning). The social success of a large section of the population of Asian origin and the real mixed-race character of Florida and southern California constitute trump cards for dealing with the two most natural spaces for its regionalization: Latin America and Asia.14 And the fact that these two spaces are also spaces of economic growth, whether real (Asia) or virtual (Latin America), is to the credit of an American space of meaning. Even though it sometimes works through a certain communitarianism, multiculturalism could help America to revive its claim to universality by making it more concrete, in closer relationship to the realities it is living. In this regard, it is not impossible that the political ‘complacency’ which America seems to show about the ‘Islamic forces’ in the Muslim world is related to a political vision more naturally in line with ethnic or religious communitarianism. And contrary to what is generally believed, the hostility towards Iran stems less from the religious bases of the Teheran regime than from the anti-American political stance of the mullahs.15 The second main strategy of American policy is based on what has been called its ‘predatory tendency’; in other words, the search for economic advantage based on unilateral gains and principles.16 America’s demands for its markets to be opened to its products take a one-sided view of the matter.17 In other words, for the United States, an ‘open market’ is not a market which respects universally accepted international principles, but one which above all authorizes the penetration of American products. A market can therefore be characterized as ‘closed’ simply because American products have shown themselves to be less competitive there. Conversely, a market is qualified as ‘open’ if it allows American products to enter, even if it discriminates against products from other countries.18 This approach will be applied increasingly to the two main competitors of the United States: Japan and Europe. In confronting Europe the United States will take advantage of the fact that Europe is not a single political actor with the classic attributes of a state. The Commission in Brussels has a mandate to deal with trade issues only, while the American representatives benefit from widespread powers. Without the creation of instruments of economic dissuasion similar to those of the United States, Europe is in grave danger of succumbing to this predatory system. In facing Japan the situation is different but the American advantage seems just as strong. The political inhibition of Japan towards the United States remains significant, regardless of the number of speeches or writings on the international assertiveness of Japan.19 Japan is not always able to get the international community to accept that the United States’ demand for quantified access to the

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Japanese market contravenes the principles of world trade defended by the United States itself. As for the size of the Japanese trade surplus, it reflects more the surplus of savings held by Japan than the closed nature of its markets. In the seven high-tech markets judged to be crucial (scientific instruments, aeronautics, communication equipment, electrical products, computer equipment, pharmaceuticals, chemical products), the penetration rate of foreign goods in Japan and in the United States is approximately the same.20 In this domain, American power will continue to benefit for a long time from the combination of three inertia effects: the inertia of its own power used for ‘manipulating’ the world agenda (for example, experience, diplomatic savoir-faire); the inertia of a powerless Europe barely broken away from the constraints of the collective game; and the inertia of inexperienced Asian countries which are still politically and diplomatically inhibited about using their power. Thus, even in a world where the rules of the world game have been overturned, the classic constraints of power remain alive and kicking, since there is no functional substitute for the state in international relations. Europe is beginning to realize that more every day. Finally, the third force of American power relies on precaution, or avoidance. American commitments will become uncertain and unpredictable not only because the influence of public opinion can be shown to be decisive, but also because the political determination of the United States cannot manage to express itself or be put into practical effect, except in the most classic situations that put it into conflict with nation-states. Yet these traditional conflicts (with Iraq, for example) will probably be less and less numerous in tomorrow’s world. They will be usurped by internationalized social conflicts in which the strictly geopolitical dimension will be less present and in any case less crucial for the United States. However, of these three forces of American power, this last is without doubt the most uncertain and the most damaging to the image that America wants to present. Unable to construct a new world order, American policy will therefore try to ‘reinvent its difference’, to mark out its own space. Within this perspective, regionalism could seem to be an intermediate option between an impossible planetary over-commitment and an unrealistic isolationism. America has ceased to be a superpower, because it has met its match: globalization—a globalization which, moreover, it helps to promote despite not managing to master totally its meaning.

Conclusion The post Cold War, a world of its own

Rupture and exhaustion The post Cold War will be like all the post wars that preceded it: it will be sui generis; it is already becoming a world of its own. Every day that passes defines it more closely in relation to what it is than to what preceded it. This effect is reinforced as time goes on by a realization that the rupture with communism was less significant than the exhaustion of the Enlightenment. In the same way that the post Second World War was a new world, which brought political, economic and cultural renovation, and not a world merely ‘binding up its war wounds’, the post-Cold War world will necessarily produce new values, even if they cannot conveniently serve as a basis for meaning. This post Cold War, constructed on the basis of new values and of new relationships between forces, we call ‘world time’. However, the process by which multiple and emerging meanings will eventually join into a new horizon of expectation will probably take longer than it did after 1945, and in large part is unknown. Though the post war of 1945 had seemed like a break with the pre-existing political order, it was the post Cold War that consecrated the exhaustion of a historical process. The difference between rupture and exhaustion is fundamental. In 1945 there was a clear break with the old order. People wanted to ensure peace between nations (United Nations organization), protect citizens more effectively against the social uncertainties of economic change (welfare state) and ensure that nations were protected from the excesses of ill-controlled liberalism (Bretton Woods). But essentially the Enlightenment inheritance was not only still fully accepted but also encouraged by the collapse of Nazism. Thus there was an inheritance to be developed, a store of available meaning to be exploited—to use Ricoeur’s term—and, in so doing, a new horizon to explore. The whole difference with the contemporary world is, precisely, that there is no longer a source of meaning. To define oneself by contrast with communism no longer has any meaning. And it would seem really difficult to claim the Enlightenment inheritance. The construction of a new negative identity poses a problem because specifying a new enemy is insufficient for refounding an identity. In other words, it is not by

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substituting Japan or the Muslim world for the Soviet Union that Western societies will find new answers on identification. The Soviet challenge had an identification function, because it provided meaning not only along the geostrategic dimension, but also along political, ideological, social and even cultural dimensions. There is no enemy today that is sufficiently significant to take on responsibility—even negatively—for the complex identity of nations. The ‘new enemies’, which no longer have this global function, arouse fears but do not forge new identities. Today we face ‘diffuse threats’, which develop more by the spread of ideas than by the declared ambition of states, making it difficult to construct a collective mobilization, even though the danger is not by nature any less great. Besides, one of the central challenges of the post Cold War is that the most destabilizing threat probably comes less from states with hegemonic pretensions over the world or over a region than from the rapid circulation of certain values. The exhaustion of the Enlightenment model has another major consequence. It has stimulated, in a way that is only slightly paradoxical, the resurgence of the theme of a return to roots (nationalist, religious, ethnic), because the channels for transmitting identity are, in some ways, broken. The profound doubts that contemporary societies harbour about their capacity to transmit their values or inheritance forces them to find refuges, sanctuaries for their identity, which almost always refer back to realities that are outdated, worn out or frozen, as though in order to guarantee the transmission of identity they would need to abandon transforming identities or the world. If in Western societies the social and political forces which claim to be the paradigm of the transformation are in crisis, it is precisely because identity transmission and social transformation seem disconnected. Transmission is thought old-fashioned (nationalism) and transformation destructive (globalization), whereas transmission ought to be made positive and transformation protective. A dual updating of the notions of transformation and transmission could therefore overcome the crisis of meaning in which transformation is perceived as destructive of identity—in the widest sense—and transmission reduced to a refuge, a turning-back to values that are stable only in appearance. In this way there would be a hope of reconciling not only competition and protection but also nation and Europe. Work and war But then an essential question would arise: on what basis, and on what founding principles could meaning be reconstructed? Here the hypothesis of ‘autotranscendence’ proposed by Jean-Pierre Dupuy is valuable, because it encourages us to consider meaning not in relation to an external final goal but by reformulating the challenges and institutions that were exhausted, in a way, with the end of the Cold War.1 According to this perspective, the two great goals of the post Cold War might be constructed from a thorough redefining of our

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traditional relationship to work and to war. Work and war were in effect the two great providers of identity for societies (work) and for states (war). Work was the factor which encompassed almost the whole process of social integration. It conferred identity, security and hope on people: identity through a trade, security thanks to full employment and, finally, hope through the interplay of mobility and redistribution. Today, as a result of the acceleration of technological progress, a surplus of work is no longer indispensable for creating a surplus of wealth: more wealth can also be created with less work. This process is accelerating and globalizing. There is in a way an exhaustion of the straight-line model which said that, by working more, one became even richer. Work therefore no longer has that synthesizing function it used to exercise. So there has been a slow, gradual recognition that work could no longer be an end in itself, capable of ‘taking on the burden’ of the whole social identification of the individual. As Robert Sue said, work is no longer the ‘dominant social time’ that commands all other social times.2 Moreover, social identity today needs to be constructed on the basis of qualifications that are no longer narrowly professional. In other words, though we are nothing without work, work is no longer everything. There is thus a demand for meaning which emanates both from those who have work and from those who do not. So, just at the very moment the question of employment becomes really critical, work is losing its all-encompassing function of structural identification as well as its capacity to integrate economically all those looking for work. This coincidence can seem paradoxical. But the paradox is one only of appearance. If we reflect on the redefinition of the role of work in societies, it is clear that work can no longer mechanically absorb and integrate those who demand it. Its social, economic and ideological centrality is exhausted. War (or the preservation of peace) played an identical role for nations. By waging war or making provision against it, great and small nations created themselves through History. The potential recourse to war and thus the possession of a military instrument guaranteed the security of nations. To use Raymond Aron’s expression, it was the classic game of ‘the soldier and the diplomat’ that allowed states to take part in the world game. For nations, the end of the Cold War undoubtedly hastened a decline in the likelihood of classic war between nations. In democratic countries great pitched battles between national armies are almost certainly destined to disappear. There is thus a need for a redefinition of national identity outside the classic relationship of war and peace. It is one of the goals of Europe. It is also one reason why the memory of ‘inter-state wars’ can no longer play a serious role in mobilizing the identities of young people towards Europe. However, the risk of war is at the same time proliferating throughout the world. From a strategy of inter-state war we have simply passed to a strategy of ‘civil wars’, which are increasingly uncontrollable. Thus at the very moment the resources for classic warfare of the inter-state type are exhausted historically, the risk of international deregulation through war is growing. The consequence of the changes in the

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relationship to war, therefore, is the patent difficulty states will have from now on to ensure the security of nations, to identify peace with security, and war with insecurity. Insecurity is no longer necessarily linked to the likelihood of war, even though when war exists it reinforces insecurity Thus, in the same way that work no longer guarantees identity and the security of those in work—even though it is a necessary condition for it—states can no longer guarantee the identity and security of nations, even if the weakening of states accentuates the loss of identity and security of these same nations. The challenge is thus not to imagine a world without work or a world without a state, but to accept that both these symbols have exhausted not only their role but also their function as the exclusive supplier of identity and security. Here again, it is less a matter of a rupture with work and war, in the sense of social phenomena, than the exhaustion of traditional identification functions exercised by these two central vectors of modernity. As a result of the exhaustion of the classic model of work the entire social linkage is at stake. As a result of the exhaustion of the synthesizing model of classic war between states, the global social linkage between nations is called into question. The regulation of the global social system For that reason, if work and war refer us back in terms of meaning to similar ideas, it is not only because of the analogous positions of these two ‘values’ but also because of the emergence of a global social system. The international system that referred only to the world of states is being replaced by a global social system structured by the states, the changing forces of economic interdependence and the flows of interpenetration between societies. The idea of a new world order changes its meaning profoundly under these conditions. It is no longer a matter of constructing a stable architecture of world relationships capable of ‘lasting a thousand years’, but of regulating processes that are in perpetual movement, in permanent transition. It is why the failure of the new world order must be thought of not as a gigantic political blunder but as a real historical misunderstanding. There will be no more new world order. On the other hand, one must not despair of the emergence of a new global social system. These post Cold War years have taught a vital lesson: the reconstruction of a meaning of a global world that is universalist, abstract and goal-directed is very difficult to envisage. But, at the same time, collective dissatisfaction, when confronted with a ‘withdrawal of meaning’—or of the identification of meaning with significances that are changing, adaptable and mutually conflicting—is probably not a passing phase. How can meaning be given to realities and processes that are in permanent motion, and whose development cannot be incarnated, metaphorized by a given actor, identifiable in space and time? In addition the talk is more about the logic of fluid situations than the logic of identifiable actors. The logic ‘of the current situation’, so-called, now prevails

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over the logic of actors or of systems. The debate on meaning cannot therefore be reduced to an argument between universality against particularity It must also take account of the equally essential question of fluidity: fluidity of situations, of opinions, of the issues. Without roots in a given space (concrete universalism), or indeed in a given period of time, universalism like particularism will be experienced exclusively on an emotional plane. It is necessary therefore to revive the regulating ideas that would allow a perspective to be set out while at the same time associating it with present reality. The improbability of a return to a ‘synthesizing force of meaning’ will make all abstract attempts to reconstruct the world on the basis of philosophical, religious or political principles almost useless. By definition, that limits the success of grand theological reconstructions just as much as that of grand supranational political reconstructions, even though the need for symbols and global security is real. According to this way of thinking, the various crises that have shaken the world since the end of the Cold War give us two reasons, at least, to keep a clear distance from grandiose projects for recasting world order, under the United Nations umbrella. The first is that the projects are based on what we have called ‘designer strategy’, which no longer matches the reality of the current world. The second is that this globalized management seems too vast to take root permanently in people’s individual consciences. Appeals to take note of the ‘globalization of problems’ will increasingly be made in a vacuum unless, each time they are made, they propose some institutional or social mediation that can place them in a territorial context. To consider globalization effectively it is therefore necessary to get rid of a certain ‘globalizing’ discourse. Otherwise, globalization will be regarded more as something to be feared than as a value. Entities of meaning and power must be found that ensure mediation between the universal and the particular, between the need for accelerated change and the need for security. Regionalization looks as though it is the preferred entity of reason to organize this mediation. It seems—especially in Europe—to be the prerequisite and the basis of a collective search for meaning. On this road towards the reconquest of meaning, three fundamental obstacles rear their heads: the first derives from the economic, social and cultural hegemony of market forces and the unprecedented devaluing of all forces that try to escape their grasp; the second is the climb to power of the ‘emergency’ as a central political category; and the third is the unprecedented delegitimization of words that might have been able to constitute symbolic departure points for collective action. These three issues might appear to belong to very different orders of things. In reality they are profoundly implicated in each other, because they all stem from the deep penetration of the market principle. The market principle tends in effect not only to asphyxiate the nonmarket sphere, but also to sanctify immediacy, instantaneousness and therefore urgency and emergency It tries to make the present the nodal point of all possible experience, a value that absorbs the past and the future. Only the present moment

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is awarded social or political recognition. It makes the long-term appear futile, perspective an illusion, patience useless, versatility indispensable. It is as striking in the social sphere, where actors live in relation to instantaneous time (‘I want, I need, I make, I take’), as in the global political sphere, where states have lost all sense of horizon. It leads to the undervaluing of any idea of political perspective and the very rapid devaluing of the collection of words used in association with an event or situation: a rich term like that of ‘subsidiarity’ will be eliminated from public debate as quickly as it was introduced. From this point of view, it would seem fairly futile to try to contain the hegemony of the market in the social field if at the same time we did not take account of the fact that this same hegemony is making emergency the central political category. Instantaneousness, emergency and fluidity tend thus to maintain each other. Moreover, they are the only great processes today that have managed to link themselves together and almost to make a system. There is a need to break this linkage by acting at three levels: by redefining the relationship between market sphere and non-market sphere; by breaking away from the emergency strategy; and by enriching—by putting them up for debate—words which one might then recognize as having a stable meaning. The demarcation of relationships between market and non-market spheres cannot be disassociated from the redefinition of the value of work. It is by giving more value to social, non-market activities that the non-market sphere will be better valued and protected. However, it will be hard to put this rebalancing into effect because, though we are at a stage in time when the social revaluing of nonmarket activities seems indispensable, the cultural hegemony of the market is more dominant than ever. In addition, it is often the social groups who most ask for state protection who demand that the state responds to their expectations with an instantaneousness that resembles the market. It is on this issue of social protection that the revaluing of the state is most subject to growing demands on the national and international scale, and where state action seems most indispensable to the regulation of the global social system. The repudiation of emergency action is the second issue of meaning in the post Cold War. It is largely an issue for states, on which falls the duty of rehabilitating a determination to act, or to prohibit action, if the action is not in keeping with their long-term goals. This principle is as valuable for internal affairs as for external affairs. If a lesson could one day be drawn from the Yugoslavian drama, it would be this: if the emergency policies put into effect were nowhere followed up with actions on the more fundamental problems, it was because emergency action is not a neutral technique but well and truly one way of representing and managing world time. The good faith of the actors involved in that strategy in no way alters the reality. A break with emergency policies will remain futile in its turn if it is not accompanied by a process that enriches the vocabulary of collective debate. It is shocking to see how rapidly words that might mean something fade out. From

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this point of view, the post Cold War resembles a gigantic semantic cemetery where words, scarcely having been used and popularized, lose their meaning and then fall into obscurity: new world order, solidarity, democracy, market, universality, subsidiarity all suffered exceptional erosion, a substantial loss of meaning, within a few years. For this reason, any attempt to facilitate a discourse on representation, to find the exact manner in which to speak about a situation or an issue, comes up against a sort of instant obsolescence of words and symbols. Yet, without a modest collective and lasting debate on key words such as ‘globalization’, without the possibility of putting them into the context of a final goal, any collective project remains futile. There is no task more urgent than the grounding of the simplest and the most common words in a collection of stable, collective meanings. There is no task more urgent than the reconstitution of a symbolic separation between the sphere of daily experience and the tracing of a new horizon of expectation.

Notes

Introduction: the divorce of meaning and power 1 J.Derrida, L’autre cap (Paris: Minuit 1991), p. 23. 2 See G.Nivat, ‘Russie liberée, Russie brouillée’, Lettre internationale, autumn 1992, p. 70; P.Behar, Une géopolitique pour l’Europe. Vers une nouvelle Eurasie (Paris: Desjonquères 1992), p. 120; M.Mendras (ed.) Un Etat pour la Russie (Brussels: Complexe 1993); and H.Ragsdale (ed.) Imperial Russian Foreign Policy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1994). 3 J.-L.Domenach, ‘La crise de la culture chinoise’, La Croix, 1 October 1992. D.Apter has written a very illuminating article on the link between nationalism and communism in China, ‘Yan’an and the Narrative Reconstruction of Reality’, Daedalus, spring 1993, pp. 207–32. On the loss of meaning, see P.Link, The Old Man’s New China’, New York Review of Books, 9 June 1994, pp. 31–4. 4 M.Malia, ‘Another Weimar?’, Times Literary Supplement, 25 February 1994, p. 4. 5 R.Jervis, ‘The Future of World Politics’, International Security, winter 1991–2, p. 41. 6 For this essential difference, see the work of J.-L.Nancy, Le sens du monde (Paris: Galilée 1993), as well as J.Baudrillard, L’illusion de la fin (Paris: Galilée 1992). 7 R.Koselleck, Le futur passé. Contribution à la sémantique des temps historiques (Paris: Editions de l’Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales 1990), p. 314. 8 ‘The recommendations made by the Church to defend Man against himself seem an intrusion into the sphere of individual liberty,’ declared His Grace Joseph Duval to the bishops’ plenary council, Le Monde, 28 October 1992. The idea is presented in more formal terms in the excellent work of D.Hervieu-Léger, La religion pour mémoire (Paris: Cerf 1993), p. 245: ‘What is questioned today—a trend that might be irreversible—is the possibility that an authority could be imposed socially, which, by claiming to guarantee the truth of whatever faith, would exercise exclusive control over the statements…of that faith.’ See also P.Michel, Politique et religion (Paris: Albin Michel 1994). On the limits to a return to religion, see the results and comments of the enquiry ‘Les Français et la croyance’, L’Actualité Religieuse Dans le Monde, 15 May 1994, pp. 16–51. 9 D.Shayegan, Sous les ciels du monde. Entretiens avec Ramin Jahanbegloo (Paris: Felin 1992), p. 164. 10 R.Paxton, ‘Fascismes d’hier et d’aujourd’hui’, Le Monde, 17 June 1994.

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11 See F.Adelkhah, La révolution sous le voile. Femmes islamiques d’Iran (Paris: Karthala 1991), as well as F.Adelkhah, J.-F.Bayart and O.Roy, Thermidor en Iran (Brussels: Complexe 1994). 12 This excellent analysis is thanks to O.Roy, L’echec de l’Islam politique (Paris: Seuil 1992). It may seem surprising to refer to the failure of political Islam at a time when Islamic pressure is mounting in the Muslim world. It would be like saying the USSR had failed at the time of its intervention in Angola, Ethiopia and Afghanistan. The analogy with communism is interesting. In fact, in Islamic regimes as in communist ones, it is not the moderates who supplant the radicals, but the politicians who supplant the ideologues. In other words, when Olivier Roy notes that the religious, in the strict sense of the word, are not the best represented in the Iranian political system, he provides an analysis which could be applied to the USSR: from the start, the theorists were kept at a distance from power. Nevertheless, if Mr Rafsandjani is not religious in the same way that Mr Brezhnev bore no resemblance to a great Marxist theorist, should we necessarily conclude that the Iranian regime is not religious and that the USSR of Brezhnev was not communist? Herein lies the problem. 13 The concept of world time was initially coined by W.Eberhard in Conquerors and Rulers. Social Forces in Medieval China (Leiden: Brill 1970). By world time, he meant the existence of an ‘international climate’ which influenced political or social choices at any given moment. Eberhard notes, for example, that Japan’s economy was able to take off at the end of the nineteenth century in a context in which sometimes brutal social changes could be imposed on a whole population even when they did not lead to an improvement in its fortunes. Yet, notes Eberhard, it is impossible to retranscribe and repeat this Japanese experience today precisely because of a world time characterized by a better circulation of values at the international level. Methodologically, the idea of world time ought for W.Eberhard to mean a close comparison cannot be made between periods or experiences which are historically far apart. The idea of world time was then taken up by I.Wallerstein in Le système du monde du XVe siècle à nos jours (Paris: Flammarion 1980), and by F.Braudel under the term ‘world’s time’ in Le Temps du monde. Civilisation matérielle, économie et capitalisme XVe-XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Armand Colin 1979). T.Sckocpol also refers to this in Etats et révolutions sociales. La révolution en France, en Russie et en Chine (Paris: Fayard 1985). All these authors associate world time with the international context which influences national events, without succeeding in conceptualizing this expression. In truth the very idea of world time is necessarily polysemic—has multiple meanings—because of the polysemy of the concept of time, as clearly demonstrated by K.Pomian in L’ordre du temps (Paris: Gallimard 1984). Throughout this book, we shall come across three notions when referring to the term of world time:

• The notion of the founding moment at which the relationship of time and space is renegotiated in new terms by the various social players. It is the moment when an intersubjective perception that ‘nothing will be as before’ develops. This idea of a ‘founding moment’ is discussed remarkably well by G.Steiner in connection with the French Revolution

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in 1789. In Le château de Barbe-Bleu. Notes pour une redefinition de la culture (Paris: Gallimard, ‘Essais’ 1973) he demonstrates how the revolution not only helped accelerate the pace of history, but also overturned the relationship of individuals with time, history and, above all, politics. • The notion of planetary simultaneity, which means that individuals, companies or states communicate with each other or experience international events in real time. This idea in its turn raises two trains of thought and research for our examination. The first concerns the question of time in international relations and notably in economic competition. The reduction in geographic constraints means that the challenge has become a compression of time. Among the numerous works on this subject—to which we refer throughout this book—figures the excellent thinking of R.O’Brien, The End of Geography. Global Financial Integration (London: Pinter 1992). The second refers to the overall process of local reappropriation of ‘signs’ that have come from the rest of the world. ‘Media events’ or televised series broadcast on a world scale feature prominently here. Sociology of communications has helped us understand that, in becoming globalized, the original signs, symbols and values are reworked, ‘encoded’, locally. Daniel Dayan notes, for example, that the visits of the Pope around the world ‘pay for their historical impact by minimizing their religious dimension’. ‘Presentation du pape en voyageur’, Terrain, October 1990, p. 28. For a recent use of the concept of time, see J.-F.Bayart (ed.) La réinvention du capitalisme (Paris: Karthala 1994), pp. 12–19. • The third notion to which the concept of world time can be linked is ‘the dominant issue with claims to legitimacy’, the idea being that the triumph of ‘market democracy’ leads it to be defined as ‘a state of the world reputed to be necessary’ (Hermet). World time would thus produce values and standards, forcing all actors in the international system to use it as their reference point. See Z.Laïdi, ‘Sens et puissance dans le système international’, in Z.Laïdi (ed.) L’ordre mondial relâché (Paris: Presses de la FNSP 1992), pp. 37–44. 14 M.Featherstone (ed.) Global Culture. Nationalism, Globalization and Modernity (London: Sage 1990), p. 17. 15 H.Nowotny, Le temps à soi. Genèse et structuration d’un sentiment du temps (Paris: Editions de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme 1992), p. 48. 16 This is the ‘unwanted utopia’ of which H.Jonas speaks in Le principe responsabilité. Une éthique pour la civilisation technologique (Paris: Cerf 1991), p. 43; and the end of the ‘time of promise’ mentioned by Emmanuel Levinas, Le Monde, 2 June 1992. 17 A.Touraine, Critique de la modernité (Paris: Fayard 1992), p. 390.

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18 U.Muldur, Le financement de la recherche. Développement au croisement des logiques industrielle, financières et politique (Brussels: Programme Fast, EEC (5) 1991), pp. 24ff. 19 To understand the phenomenon of multinationals within a historical perspective, see A.Teichova, M.Levy-Leboyer and H.Nussbaum (eds) Multinational Enterprise in Historical Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press and Editions de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme 1986). 20 L.Kreiger-Mytelka (ed.) Strategic Partnership. States, Firms and International Competition (London: Pinter 1991), p. 40. 21 J.Hagedoorn and J.Shakenraad, The Role of Interfirm Cooperation Agreements in the Globalization of Economy and Technology (Brussels: Programme Fast, EEC (8) 1991), p. 18. 22 The compression of time as a fundamental factor in economic competition has been clearly demonstrated in research by MIT on competition in the automotive industry. See J.Womack, D.T.Jones and D.Roos, La machine qui va changer le monde (Paris: Dunod 1992). The challenges of the relationship between time and competitiveness have been summarized remarkably well by G.Stlak and T.Hout in Vaincre le temps (Paris: Dunod 1992). 23 The question of the categories and rhythms of social time has been raised in particular by G.Gurvitch, in Déterminismes sociaux et liberté humaine (Paris: PUF 1963). More recent works—among many others—are E.T. Hall, La danse de la vie. Temps culturel, temps vécu (Paris: Seuil 1984); G. Prouvost, ‘Introduction’, in ‘Le temps dans une perspective sociologique et historique’, Revue international des sciences sociales 107 (1986); D. Mercure, ‘L’étude des temporalités sociales. Quelques orientations’, Cahiers internationaux de sociologie 67 (1979); and E.Zerubavel, ‘The Standardization of Time: A Socio-Historical Perspective’, American Journal of Sociology 1 (1988). This relationship between meaning and technique is clearly expressed and supported by V.Scardigli in Les sens de la technique (Paris: PUF 1992). It is why the projection into world time under discussion here should not be understood to have only technical constraints, although these remain fundamental. But, in addition, most technological projections thought to be inescapable are generally found to be contradicted by events. It was claimed that the industrial system would lead inexorably to the birth of an economic world where producers would unilaterally impose their preferences on consumers. This ‘implacable logic’ has now been seriously shaken by the transformation of economies into service industries, and above all by the post-Taylorian transformation of production systems that emphasize the consumer’s preferences. For these same reasons, the extremely important works of J.Ellul, starting with Le système technicien (Paris: CalmannLévy 1977), do not really gain full support. 24 D.Harvey, The Condition of Post-modernity. An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Oxford: Blackwell 1989), p. 35. 25 The question of collective renegotiation of the relationship with time and space has been clearly demonstrated by the work of S.Kern on the end of the nineteenth century and the start of the twentieth, when the telephone was born, the first cars were developed and world time emerged. See The Culture of Time and Space, 1880–1918 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1983).

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26 See the excellent essay on the post-Cold War period by P.Bruckner, La mélancolie démocratique (Paris: Le Seuil (Points) 1992). See also S. Chalvon-Demersay, Mille scénarios. Une enquête sur l’imagination en temps de crise (Paris: Métailé 1994). In this work devoted to the study of television scenarios, the author writes: ‘Because a return to the past is not envisaged, because the rise in individualism seems irreversible, and because no hope of its regulation is appearing, we have come to a dead end. We are slipping from knowledge to impotence, from impotence to pessimism’, p. 156. This lack of perspective can be found in architecture in which, C.de Portzenparc says, there is a lack of ‘ideas that might enable a clear advance’, Le Monde, 3 May 1994. Finally, the problem of projecting ourselves into the ‘great wide world’ can be found in French literature, according to F.Nourissier: ‘It is certain our literature…does not face towards the great wide world. We see nothing planetary, legendary. There is a shortage of grand motivating, exalting images’, La Croix, 19–20 September 1993. 27 See J.-J.Servan-Schreiber, Le défi américain (Paris: Denoël 1967). Concerning multinational societies, Anthony Giddens correctly notes that although ‘they have acquired a material power superior to most states, they have not sought to control two attributes, which are territoriality and the monopoly of legitimate violence’, The Consequences of Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press 1990), pp. 70–1. 28 ‘The inability of neo-classical theory to give a valid account of the role of technology is naturally one of the main reasons why it is currently seriously questioned’, notes the OECD report, La technologie et l’economie. Les relations déterminantes (Paris: OECD 1992), p. 277. See also W. Ringrok, Paradigm Crisis in International Trade Theory (Brussels: Programme Fast, EEC (FOP 221) November 1991). 29 This point is clearly established by the historians of ideas and in particular by P.Rosanvallon, when he notes: ‘It is because we now think of modernity as relative and historic that we can understand this connivance between liberal utopia and socialist utopia’, Le libéralisme économique. Histoire de l’idée de marché (Paris: Le Seuil 1989), p. 228. Isaiah Berlin develops a similar point of view in Eloges de la liberté (Paris: Presses Pocket 1990), when he writes: ‘At first sight, nothing differs more from liberal reformism than marxism, and yet they share a certain number of fundamental postulates’, pp. 72–3. 30 See B.Perret and G.Roustang, L’économie contre la société (Paris: Le Seuil 1993).

1 The meaning of the Cold War 1 R.Ingelhart, Culture Shift in Advanced Industrial Society (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 1990). 2 J.Brun, Philosophie de l’Histoire. Les promesses du temps (Paris: Stock 1990), p. 29. 3 J.Gaddis, The United States and the End of the Cold War. Implications, Reconsiderations, Provocations (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1992), p. 112. 4 The linkage between mass production and mass culture has helped to give coherence overseas to the American model, and to facilitate, so to say, a point-by-

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5 6 7

8

9

10 11 12 13 14 15

point comparison. See the essential work by D.Harvey, The Condition of PostModernity. An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Oxford: Blackwell 1989). This essential point concerning the American case is highlighted by T.P.Hughes, in American Genesis. A Century of Invention and Technological Enthusiasm 1870–1970 (New York: Penguin 1989), and V.de Grazia, ‘Mass Culture and Sovereignty: The American Challenge’, The Journal of Modern History 61, March 1989. See also M.Teich and R.Porter (eds) Fin de Siècle and its Legacy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1990); and D.Noble, America by Design. Science, Technology and the Rise of Corporate Capitalism (New York: Knopf 1977). E.Tyler May, Homeward Bound. American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books 1989), p. 17. W.Rostow, Les étapes de la croissance économique (Paris: Le Seuil 1962), pp. 127– 8. This effect of symmetry is clearly reflected in speeches on development aid in the United States. See R.Pakenham, Liberal America and the Third World. Political Development Ideas in Foreign Aid and Social Sciences (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 1973). In Le cycle de la dissuasion (1945–1990). Essai de stratégie critique (Paris: La Découverte 1990), A. Joxe highlighted how technological progress characterized by the development of precision weapons made it difficult to maintain the doctrine of massive reprisal. John Gaddis notes however that parallel progress made by the two sides in military intelligence contributed to reciprocal neutrality and reinforced the stability of the bipolar system. See The Long Peace. Inquiries into the History of the Cold War (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1987), p. 237. This latter point is also raised by W. McNeill, La recherche de la puissance. Technique, force armée et société depuis l’an mil (Paris: Economica 1992), p. 416. Nevertheless, there is today an American ‘revisionist’ school for whom dissuasion has delayed rather than hastened the end of the bipolar conflict. See R.N.Lebow and J.G. Stein, We All Lost the Cold War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 1994). See also H.W.Brands, The Devils We Knew. Americans and the Cold War (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1994). Pierre Hassner has demonstrated clearly how much the views and theorizations on Soviet totalitarianism were imbued with the contemporary geostrategic perception of the USSR. He also emphasizes that the geopolitical advances of the USSR at the end of the 1970s led to a ‘rediscovery’ of totalitarianism, leading to the retrospective perception of the Cold War as a moment in time based on stable representations. See ‘Le totalitarianisme vu de l’Ouest’, in G.Hermet et al, Totalitarismes (Paris: Economica 1984), pp. 15–37. G.Steiner, Les Antigones (Paris: Gallimard 1986), p. 11. Tyler May, op. cit., p. 18. E.Morin, Penser l’Europe (Paris: Gallimard 1990), p. 144. I.Berlin, Eloges de la liberté (Paris: Presses Pocket 1990), pp. 108–9. J.Leca, ‘Préface’ to Z.Laïdi (ed.) L’URSS vue du tiers monde (Paris: Karthala 1984), p. 13. R.Boudon, L’idéologie ou l’origine des idées reçues (Paris: Le Seuil 1986), p. 34. See also J.B.Thompson, Ideology and Modern Culture (Cambridge: Polity 1990).

NOTES 159

16 Z.Laïdi, ‘Contraintes et ressources de l’espace cardinal’, Revue française de science politique, December 1986, pp. 753–7. 17 See R.Wade, Governing the Market Economy. Theory and the Role of the Government in East Asian Industrialization (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 1990); S.Haggard, Pathways for the Periphery. The Politics of Growth in the Newly Industrializing Countries (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press 1990); and J.L.Margolin, Singapour 1952–1987. Genèse d’un nouveau pays industriel (Paris: L’Harmattan 1989). 18 The link between the internal and external in India is striking. The Third-World rhetoric of the Indian government, backed by its geostrategic alliance with the USSR from 1971, allowed Indira Gandhi to consolidate the secularist direction of her regime by depriving the Hindu opposition of Jana Sangh of the two elements it sought to play on: aggressive nationalism and ‘social populism’. See C.Jaffrelot, Les nationalistes hindous. Idéologie, implantation et mobilisation des années 1920 aux années 1990 (Paris: Presses de la FNSP 1993), pp. 269–77. 19 See M.Hogan (ed.) The End of the Cold War. Its Meaning and its Implications (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1991). 20 M.Heller and A.Nekrich, L’utopie au pouvoir. Histoire de l’URSS de 1917 a nos jours (Paris: Calmann-Lévy 1982). 21 A.Grosser, ‘Le rôle et le rang. Note sur la politique militaire de la France’, Commentaire 58, summer 1989, p. 364. 22 R.Du Boff, Accumulation and Power. An Economic History of the United States (Armonk: Sharpe 1989), p. 97. 23 Ibid., p. 98. 24 Ibid. See also, despite his excessive claims, D.Horowitz (ed.) Corporations and the Cold War (New York: Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation 1969). 25 A.O.Hirschman, Deux siècles de rhétorique réactionnaire (Paris: Fayard 1991), p. 187. 26 It is necessary to remember that between 1945 and 1973 the link between economic liberalism and state interventionism was thought of in complementary terms rather than as radically antagonistic. The link between internal economic Keynesianism and external trade liberalism was at the heart of the Bretton Woods compromise. It was only at the end of the 1970s that this compromise was shattered, leading to a re-ideologization of the debate on the linkage between internal and external, state and market. This point was clearly highlighted by J.Ruggie, ‘International Regimes, Transactions and Change. Embedded Liberalism in the Postwar Economic Order’, International Organization 36 (1982). The power of compromise explains why ultraliberalism started to be exported by the Americans only at the end of the 1970s. See Z.Laïdi, De l’hégémonie à la prédation. Hypotheses sur la transformation de la puissance américaine. Cahiers du CERI 1 (1991). 27 L.Ferry, Philosophie politique (2). Le système des philosophies de l’histoire (Paris: PUF 1984). Ferry notes that ‘Theodicy is opposed to praxis because any project for improving the world is intrinsically absurd from the moment that the perfection and rationality of the universe and its history are accepted’, p. 66. 28 Ibid., p. 148. 29 E.Cassirer, La philosophie des Lumières (Paris: Fayard 1970), pp. 64–5. 30 G.Steiner, Dans le château de Barbe-Bleu. Notes pour une redefinition de la culture (Paris: Gallimard 1973), p. 23.

160 NOTES

31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39

40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48

49 50

Cassirer, op. cit., p. 57. K.Papaioannou, La consécration de l’histoire (Paris: Champ Libre 1983), p. 8. H.-I.Marrou, Théologie de l’histoire (Paris: Le Seuil 1968), p. 28. Ferry, op. cit, p. 28. R.Koselleck, Le futur passé. Contribution à la sémantique des temps historiques (Paris: Editions de l’Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales 1990), p. 323. Papaioannou, op. cit., p. 17. E.Cassirer, L’idée de l’Histoire (Paris: Cerf 1988), p. 54. St Augustin, La Cité de Dieu, Books I–IV (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer 1959), p. 66. M.Daraki, Une religiosité sans Dieu. Essai sur les stoïciens d’Athènes et saint Augustin (Paris: La Découverte 1989), p. 206; and M.Gandillac, Genèses de la modernité (Paris: Le Cerf 1992), p. 16. Papaioannou, op. cit., p. 41. Ibid., p. 45. Marrou, op. cit., p. 52. A.Touraine, Critique de la modernité (Paris: Fayard 1992), p. 81. Harvey, op. cit., pp. 35ff. Hughes, op. cit., pp. 250–1. Ibid., p. 188. G.Monnier, Le Corbusier (Besançon: La Manufacture 1992), p. 112. According to C.de Portzenparc, Libération, 29 January 1993. On the relationship between ‘meaning’, end-goal and architecture, see in particular the interview with Jean Nouvel in L’Express, 21 October 1993. Le Corbusier, Quand les cathédrales étaient blanches. Aujourd’hui aussi, le monde commence (Paris: Denoël-Gonthier 1983), p. 244. M.Schneider, La comédie de la culture (Paris: Le Seuil 1992), p. 146. On the Sovietization of culture, there are analyses of the same kind in L’Etat culturel. Essai sur une religion moderne, by M.Fumaroli (Paris: De Fallois 1991), pp. 42–3. See also the excellent analysis of these two works by P. Urfalino, ‘La philosophie de l’Etat esthéthique’, Politix 24 (1993), pp. 20–35.

2 The fall of the Wall: the end of the Enlightenment 1 R.Koselleck, Le futur passé. Contribution à la sémantique des temps historiques (Paris: Editions de l’Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales 1990), pp. 320–1. 2 ‘For Hegel, the State is the very essence of historical life. It will be the alpha and the omega. He denies that we can speak of historical life beyond the State or before it’, E.Cassirer, Le mythe de l’Etat (Paris: Gallimard 1993), p. 356. See also E.Weil, Hegel et l’Etat. Cinq conferences (Paris: Vrin 1985). From this point of view, we could say the post-Cold War world is well and truly a post-Hegelian world. 3 L.Dumont, L’idéologie allemande. France-Allemagne et retour. Homo equalis II (Paris: Gallimard 1991 (new edition)), p. 20. 4 Ibid., pp. 44–5. 5 International Herald Tribune, 16 April 1992; and Financial Times, 28 May 1993. 6 On the Arab world and the democracy question, see E.Picard, ‘Le Moyen-Orient après la guerre froide et la guerre du Golfe’, in Z.Laïdi (ed.) L’ordre mondial

NOTES 161

7 8

9 10

11 12 13 14 15

16 17 18 19 20 21 22

23

24 25

26

relâché. Sens et puissance après la guerre froide (Paris: Presses de la FNSP 1993 (new edition)), pp. 121ff; also G.Salamé, ‘Sur la causalité d’un manque. Pourquoi le monde arabe n’est-il pas démocratique?’, Revue française de science politique, June 1991, pp. 307–41. International Herald Tribune, 20 October 1992. F.Jullien, La propension des choses. Pour une histoire de l’efficacité en Chine (Paris: Le Seuil 1992), p. 216. See also J.-L.Domenach, ‘Chine: la longue marche vers la démocratie’, Pouvoirs 52 (1990), p. 63. Jullien, op. cit., p. 212. ‘The word democracy seems at one and the same time a solution and a problem,’ writes Pierre Rosanvallon in ‘L’histoire du mot démocratie à l’heure moderne’, Situations de la démocratie, p. 28. P.Ricoeur, interview in Le Monde, 29 October 1991. R.Rorty, Objectivisme, relativisme et vérité (Paris: PUF 1994), p. 197. ‘Towards a liberal utopia’, An interview with Richard Rorty, Times Literary Supplement, 24 June 1994. M.Meyer (ed.) La philosophie anglo-saxonne (Paris: PUF 1994), p. 429. Under the pressure of NGOs in particular, the World Bank has modified the conditions of access to its internal documents, thought to be lacking in transparency. ‘World Bank approves greater transparency’, Financial Times, 28 August 1993. This questioning of established institutions naturally affects the major blue-chip companies, which based their actions on the idea that their position was unassailable. On this theme see P.Carroll, Big Blues. The Unmaking of IBM (London: Crown Publishers 1993). Journal de Genève, 11 July 1993. C.Michelangeli, ‘L’infirmière, de la gratitude a la reconnaissance’, Etudes, March 1993, p. 325. See F.Acker, ‘La fonction infirmière. L’imaginaire nécessaire’, Sciences sociales et santé, June 1991. Interview with C.Martelli in Le Monde, 20 October 1992. See D.Woods, ‘The Centre no Longer Holds: The Rise of Regional Leagues in Italian Politics’, West European Politics, April 1992, pp. 56–76. Ibid., p. 70. On the constructed nature of Lombardian identity, see C.E.Ruzza and O. Schmidtke, ‘Roots of Success of the Lega Lombarda: Mobilization, Dynamics and the Media’, West European Politics, April 1993, pp. 3–4; and G.Bocca, ‘Que veut la Ligue lombarde?’ Libération, 6 December 1993. E.Mingione, ‘Italy: Resurgence of Regionalism’, International Affairs 69 (2), April 1993, pp. 305–8. See also F.Maiello (1993) Révolution à l’italienne, Paris: Editions de l’Aube,. P.McCarthy (1995) Italie: la fin du régime de guerre froide, Paris: Presses de Sciences Po. D.Calleo, ‘Rejuvenating America’, World Policy Journal 10 (1), spring 1993, p. 42. For a theoretical interpretation of the relationship between costs and state legitimacy, see the analysis on it by Jean Leca using the American example: ‘Gouvernement et gouvernance a l’aube du XXIe siècle’. B.Stern (ed.) Guerre du Golfe. Le dossier d’une crise internationale (1990–1992) (Paris: La Documentation française 1993), p. 24.

162 NOTES

3 Out of step with time 1 R.Koselleck, Le futur passé. Contribution à la sémantique des temps historiques (Paris: Editions de l’Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales 1990), pp. 311– 12. 2 The idea of the disordering of the relationship with time is discussed in the philosophical reflection of S.Mosès, L’ange de l’Histoire, Rosenzweig, Benjamin, Scholem (Paris: Le Seuil 1992), p. 11. 3 J.-L.Nancy, Le sens du monde (Paris: Galilée 1993). ‘We should therefore think this: it is the “end of the world” but we do not know its meaning. It is not only the end of an era of the world and an era of meaning’, p. 15. 4 G.Nivat, ‘Y a-t-il un programme d’avenir pour la Russie?’, Esprit, September 1991, p. 40. On the crisis of values and the search for meaning in Eastern Europe see, among others, the report dedicated to the youth of central Europe by La Nouvelle Alternative, September 1993, pp. 3–43. 5 J.Sgard, ‘L’utopie libérale en Europe de l’Est’, Esprit, September 1991, p. 73. 6 V.Garros, ‘Dans l’ex-URSS. De la difficulté d’écrire l’Histoire’, Annales ESC 4–5, July–October 1992, pp. 986–1002. 7 See K.Rousselet, ‘Les ambiguïtés du renouveau religieux en Russie’, in G. Kepel (ed.) Les politiques de Dieu (Paris: Le Seuil 1993), pp. 121–37. See also S.Averintsev, ‘L’âme russe entre l’enfer et la grace’, La Croix, 20–1 June 1993. 8 G.Hermet Les désenchantements de la liberté (Paris: Fayard 1993), pp. 212ff. 9 G.Mink and J.-C.Szurek (ed.) Cet étrange post-communisme (Paris: Presses du CNRS-La Découverte 1992), p. 10. 10 C.Offe, ‘Vers le capitalisme par construction démocratique? La théorie de la démocratie et la triple transition en Europe de l’Est’, Revue française de science politique 42 (6), December 1992, p. 928. 11 The Economist, 9 July 1994. 12 La Croix, 1–2 November 1991. 13 Mink and Szurek, op. cit., p. 143 and B.Farago, ‘La transition en Hongrie’, Lettre Internationale 31, winter 1991–2, p. 27. 14 Offe, op. cit, p. 938. 15 See D.C.Martin (ed.) Sortir de l’apartheid (Brussels: Complexe 1992). 16 See P.Virilio, L’horizon négatif. Essai de dromoscopie (Paris: Galilée 1984). 17 This is the meaning of the preliminary ground studies carried out in Morocco and Egypt by the Group ‘Temps mondial’ at CERI. 18 See J.-P.Dalloz, ‘Voitures et prestige au Nigeria’, Politique africaine 38, June 1990, pp. 148–53. 19 A.Gauron, ‘L’annonce d’un temps nouveau’, Lettre Internationale 29, summer 1991, pp. 7–8. 20 P.Ricoeur, Temps et récit. Le temps raconté, Vol. III (Paris: Le Seuil 1993 (new edition)), p. 389.

4 Universalism runs out of steam 1 C.Taylor, ‘Les sources de l’identité moderne’, in M.Elbaz, A.Fortin and G.Laforest, Identité et modernité au Quebec (Sainte Foix: Presses universitaires de Laval 1994).

NOTES 163

2 P.Pithart, ‘L’identité tchèque: nationalisme réel ou séparatisme régional’, in E.Philippart (ed.) Nations et frontières dans la nouvelle Europe (Brussels: Complexe 1993), p. 210. 3 E.Hobsbawm, Nations et nationalismes depuis 1790 (Paris: Gallimard 1992), p. 63. See also the ‘cult work’ of B.Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Kent 1983); and W.Connor, ‘The Nation and its Myth’, International Journal of Comparative Sociology 1–2, 1992, pp. 49ff. 4 M.Lazar, ‘Pour comprendre la Ligue’, Revue française de science politique, December 1993, pp. 1022–7. 5 S.Labat, ‘Islamismes et islamistes en Algérie. Un nouveau militantisme’, in G.Kepel (ed.) Exils et Royaume. Les appartenances au monde arabomusulman aujourd’hui. Etudes pour Rémy Leveau (Paris: Presses de la FNSP 1994), pp. 44ff. 6 D.Woods, ‘Les Ligues régionales en Italie. L’émergence d’une représentation régionale indépendante des partis traditionnels’, Revue française de science politique, February 1992, p. 52. 7 G.Laforest, De la prudence. Textes politiques (Montreal: Boréal 1993), p. 21. 8 N.Elias, Engagement et distanciation (Paris: Fayard 1993), pp. 127–8. 9 O.Roy, ‘L’Asie centrale entre soviétisme et nationalisme’, Group ‘Temps mondial’ (Paris: CERI 1994), pp. 14–15. 10 M.Ignatieff, ‘Bosnie’, Transeuropéennes, spring 1994, p. 72. 11 P.Reddaway, ‘Russia on the Brink?’, New York Review of Books, 28 January 1993, pp. 32–3. See also Pithart, op. cit, p. 206. G.Laforest, taking up de Torqueville, speaks of the ‘paradox between cultural convergence and search for recognition’, ‘Intégration, fragmentation et Reconnaissance’, Transeuropéennes, spring 1994, p. 25. 12 International Herald Tribune, 22 October 1992 and 29 October 1992. On the challenge of Quebec, see also M.Ignatieff, Blood and Belonging: Journeys into the New Nationalism (London: Chatto and Windus, BBC Books 1993). 13 D.Woods, The Centre no Longer Holds: The Rise of Regional Leagues in Italian Politics’, West European Politics, April 1992, p. 73. 14 The expression of M.Glenny, The Fall of Yugoslavia: The Third Balkan War (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1993). See also M.Ignatieff, ‘The Balkan Tragedy’, New York Review of Books, 13 May 1993, p. 3. 15 S.Freud, Essais de psychanalyse (Paris: Payot 1925); quoted in J.-P.Dupuy, Introduction aux sciences sociales (Paris: Ellipses 1992), p. 240. 16 Ibid. 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid. 20 Y.Lacoste, ‘La question serbe et la question allemande’, Hérodote, winter 1992, p. 35. 21 On the relationship between nationalism and universalism, see the very enlightening article by J.Leca, ‘Nationalisme et universalisme’, Pouvoirs 57 (1991), pp. 33–42. See also Hobsbawm, op. cit., pp. 209–38.

164 NOTES

22 Le Monde, 23 December 1993. 23 C.Jaffrelot, ‘Nation hindoue, territoire et société’, Hérodote, winter 1993, p. 109. 24 A.Varshney, ‘Contested Meanings: India’s National Identity, Hindu Nationalism and the Politics of Anxiety’, Daedalus 122 (3), summer 1993, p. 232. 25 Ibid., p. 231. See also C.Jaffrelot, ‘Le nationalisme hindou: de la construction idéologique à la normalisation politique’, in G.Kepel (ed.) Les politiques de Dieu (Paris: Le Seuil 1993), pp. 236ff. 26 Amartya Sen’s emphasis is persuasive in ‘Menaces sur les traditions laïques de l’Inde’, Esprit, August–September 1993. ‘It is very difficult’, he writes on p. 50, ‘to find any trace of the division between “two-nation” Hindus and Muslims in Indian culture and literature. The heritage of contemporary India mixes Islamic influences with other traditions…. It is important not only that many major contributions to Indian culture are due to Islamic writers, musicians and painters, but also that their works are inextricably mixed with those of the Hindus.’ 27 Declaration by M.Simecka to the newspaper La Croix, 3 February 1994. On the theme of identity misunderstanding, see also T.Draper, ‘The End of Czechoslovakia’, New York Review of Books, 28 January 1993, pp. 23–4. 28 Ibid., p. 24. 29 I.Diamanti, La Lega: geografia, storia e sociologia di un nuovo soggetto politico (Rome, Donzelli 1993); quoted in M.Lazar, ‘Italie: pour comprendre la Ligue’, Revue française de science politique, December 1993, pp. 1024–5. 30 W.V.Harris, ‘Italy: Purgatorio’, New York Review of Books, 3 March 1994, P. 39. 31 F.Maiello, Révolution à l’italienne (Paris: Editions de l’Aube 1993), p. 150. 32 A.Brunberg, ‘Not so free at last’, New York Review of Books, 22 October 1992, p. 56. 33 Ibid., p. 58. 34 Ibid. 35 O.Roy, op. cit., pp. 10–12. 36 On this question see the excellent synthesis by G.Hermet, ‘Le retour du nationalisme’, Revue française de science politique, December 1992, pp. 1042–7. See also G.Delannoi and P.-A.Taguieff (eds) Théories du nationalisme: nation, nationalité, ethnicité (Paris: Kimé 1991). 37 See K.J.Lank, ‘Germany at the Crossroads: On the Efficiency of the German Economy’, Daedalus, winter 1994, pp. 57–82. 38 M.Falbrook, ‘Aspects of Society and Identity in the New Germany’, Daedalus, winter 1994, p. 232. See in the same issue the article by A.-M.Le Gloannec, ‘On German Identity’, pp. 129–8.

5 Europe and the crisis of meaning 1 The French Conseil d’Etat correctly reminded us that, as well as being a trading area, Europe is more importantly an area of complex rules designed to guarantee the free circulation of people and goods. Rapport public, 1992, Paris: La Documentation française, 1993. 2 E.Morin, Penser l’Europe (Paris: Gallimard 1990), p. 154.

NOTES 165

3 F.Jullien, La propension des choses. Pour une histoire de l’efficacité en Chine (Paris: Le Seuil 1992), p. 236. 4 F.Jullien, in Figures de l’immanence. Pour une lecture philosophique du Yi-King (Paris: Grasset 1993), extends his line of thought by writing: ‘[For the Chinese], the ability to take off can be found in oneself and not in transcendency. In oneself rather than in something else. It is immanent and not transcendent’, p. 60. 5 Interview with Mireille Delmas-Marty, Le Monde, 25 May 1993. 6 H.Méchoulan, Amsterdam au temps de Spinoza (Paris: PUF 1992), p. 74. On ‘Hollandization’, see J.Mueller, Retreat from Doomsday. The Obsolescence of Major Wars (New York: Basic Books 1989). 7 H.Mendras and D.Schnapper (eds) Six manières d’être européen (Paris: Gallimard 1990), p. 48. 8 P.Koslowski (ed.) Imaginer l’Europe. Le marché européen comme tâche culturelle et économique (Paris: Cerf 1992), p. 27. 9 Ibid., p. 89. The contradiction between freedom and truth, between freedom and meaning, is today at the heart of all thinking about creation, therefore beyond the strictly political or institutional field. Concerning the disappearance in the world of art of the notion of a reference point, which could be likened to the principle of truth, Michel Schneider notes that: ‘without constraints, open spaces would be limitless, but empty. This is inanity: an absence of meaning resulting from the equivalence of all possible meanings’ (emphasis added), La Comédie de la culture (Paris: Le Seuil 1992), p. 118. 10 J.-P.Faye, L’Europe unie. Les philosophes et l’Europe (Paris: Gallimard 1992), p. 36. 11 Ibid., p. 38. 12 See A.Toynbee, La religion vue par un historien (Paris: Gallimard 1964). 13 R.Koselleck, Passé-Présent, pp. 25–6. 14 E.Kantorowicz, on p. 186 of Les deux corps du roi (Paris: Gallimard 1989) reminds us of the very ancient origins of this French universalism which goes back to the Crusades: Accentuating the cultural and educational mission of France became the fashion…at a time when even foreigners recognized that it was to France’s credit that it had almost monopolized the studium.’ 15 J.-L.Quermonne, ‘Existe-t-il un modèle politique européen?’, Revue française de science politique, August 1990, p. 197. 16 Conseil d’Etat, op. cit., p. 36. 17 J.-L.Bourlanges, Le diable est-il européen? (Paris: Stock 1992), p. 52. 18 This ambiguity is revealed clearly in the polls carried out by the European Union. Public opinion favours European construction (the act of membership), but is indifferent about whether the European Union is abandoned (weak internalized membership). In 1990, the feeling of indifference about the death of the Union still applied to 34 per cent of those questioned in the (then) 12 Union countries, just 2 per cent less than in 1973. See Eurobaromètre. Trends, 1990, pp. 110ff. Similar results in the French case can be found in the article by A.Percheron, ‘Les Français et l’Europe. Acquiescence de façade ou adhesion veritable’, Revue française de science politique, June 1991, pp. 382–406. 19 ‘I have never been in doubt that this process would one day lead us to a United States of Europe, but I do not even try to imagine what the political framework will

166 NOTES

20 21

22

23

24

25 26

27 28 29

be. There is probably no precedent for what we are preparing’. J.Monnet, Mémoires (Paris: Fayard 1976), pp. 615–16. See L.Cohen-Tanugi, L’Europe en danger (Paris: Fayard 1992), p. 42. On subsidiarity, see F.Lamoureux, ‘Subsidiarité: mode d’emploi’, Les entretiens de l’après-Maastricht, 6 February 1993, Paris: European Movement, introductory report; also C.Millon-Delsol, L’Etat subsidiaire (Paris: PUF 1992). This idea has been developed convincingly by P.Thibaud in J.-M.Ferry and P.Thibaud, Discussion sur l’Europe (Paris: Calmann-Lévy 1992), p. 48: ‘To be a European citizen would be to declare: my destiny is a Europe in which my former country is only subordinate. As this is too difficult to say, we dream, we try to make up for it with the pliable idea of belonging. […] We make it a comfort factor.’ Regarding the relation between rights and duties see also J.Rovan, Citoyen d’Europe: comment le devenir? Les devoirs avant les droits (Paris: Laffont 1992). On the relation between teleological deconstruction and the end of History, see S.Mosès, L’Ange de l’Histoire, Rosenzweig, Benjamin, Scholem (Paris: Le Seuil 1992). See also the remarkable summary of debates on this problem by P.Bouretz, ‘Histoire et Utopie’, Esprit, May 1992. One merit of this article is that it takes seriously the theses of Fukuyama on ‘the end of History’; in other words, it treats them philosophically and not just politically, or even polemically. The basic argument of Fukuyama is correct: the end of the Cold War marks the end of teleological and Hegelian history founded on a promise carried by the State; the author’s naivety on ‘market democracy’ does not change this strong intuition. On the notion of History stopping, read F.Proust, L’Histoire à contre temps. Le temps historique chez Walter Benjamin (Paris: Cerf 1994). O.Mongin, ‘Une mémoire sans histoire? Vers une autre relation à l’histoire’, Esprit, March–April 1993, p. 103. In Les lieux de mémoire (Paris: Gallimard 1993) Pierre Nora establishes in the case of France the relationship between the ‘end of the national romance’ and the reactivation of memory. Teleological issues which led to choices in the past in order to establish perspectives for the future are said to be opposed to the archeological process, which emphasizes more the weight of the past, reputed to be stable and authentic. See P.Ricoeur, ‘Dialectique et téléologie’, in De l’interprétation, essai sur Freud (Paris: Le Seuil 1965), as well as D.Poulot, ‘Le patrimoine culturel, valeur commune de l’Europe’, Relations Internationales 73, spring 1993. See P.Choay, L’allégorie du patrimoine (Paris: Le Seuil 1992), and P. Thibaud, ‘La Nation désoeuvrée’, La Lettre Internationale, spring 1993. B.Genton, ‘Une Europe littéraire?’, in L’Esprit de l’Europe, p. 309. This notion of recycling of memory as opposed to history is tackled by J. Baudrillard in L’illusion de la fin ou la grève des événements (Paris: Galilée 1992). P.Legendre, ‘Ce que nous appelons le droit’, Le Débat, March–April 1993, p. 109. See J.Demorgan, L’explanation interculturelle. Pour une pédagogie internationale (Paris: Armand Colin 1989). The notion of a European public space is discussed in the work edited by J. Lenoble and N.Dewandre, L’Europe au soir du siècle. Identité et démocratie (Paris: Esprit 1992). The difficulty in moving from a space made up of juxtapositions to a European public space is reflected in the most powerful driving factor of European construction: law. While being sui generis, European Union law remains after 45 years of existence a law which juxtaposes national legal systems

NOTES 167

30 31

32

33 34

35

36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44

45 46

rather than a true hybrid law. In addition, it persists in not converting the legal process into a constraining political force. The legal harmonization of Europe— more advanced today than that which links the American states—contrasts with the weakness of common European policies or the absence of real powers of sanction against states which contravene community standards. The legal sophistication, primarily aimed at strengthening the free circulation of goods and persons, is not a sign of a European public space. See Conseil d’Etat, op. cit, pp. 42–3. B.Genton, ‘Une Europe littéraire’, in L’Esprit de l’Europe, p. 310. See D.Woods, The Centre no Longer Holds: The Rise of Regional Leagues in Italian Politics’, West European Politics, April 1992; C.E.Ruzza and O.Schmidtke, ‘Roots of Success of the Lega Lombarda: Mobilisation Dynamics and the Media’, West European Politics, April 1993; and E. Mingione, ‘Italy, Resurgence of Regionalism’, International Affairs (69) 2, April 1993. ‘The liberal position deriving from the tradition of contract theories considers the expansion of legally guaranteed freedoms as the essential point of focus for political ethics…. For its part, the communitarian position, linked to the political doctrines of the ancient Greeks, maintains that all successful political forms of common life are dependent on the presence of commonly shared values.’ A.Honneth, ‘Les limites du libéralisme. De l’éthique politique aux Etats-Unis aujourd’hui’, Rue Descartes (5–6), 1993, p. 146. J.Rawls, Théorie de la justice (Paris: Le Seuil 1988), as well as Individu et justice sociale. Autour de John Rawls (Paris: Le Seuil (Point) 1988). J.-P.Dupuy, ‘John Rawls, théoricien du multiculturalisme’, in M.Gauchet, P.Manent and P.Rosanvallon (eds) Situation de la démocratie (Paris: Hautes Etudes, Gallimard-Le Seuil 1993), p. 243. Ibid., p. 244. For a wider discussion than Europe but equally applicable, see the strong comments made by M.Sandel, ‘Morality and the moral ideal’, The New Republic, 7 May 1984. On the lines of separation between ‘communitarians’ and ‘libertarians’, as seen by the ‘communitarians’, refer to C.Taylor, ‘Cross-purposes: The Communitarian-Liberal Debate’, in N.L.Rosenblum, Liberalism and the Moral Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1989). C.Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1992), p. 41. Ibid., p. 52. Ibid., p. 38. See the very enlightening account of Taylor’s work by J.-F. Spitz, in Critique, ‘L’individualisme peut-il être un ideal?’, May 1993, p. 259–81. R.Rorty, Contingence, ironie et solidarité (Paris: Armand Colin 1993). Ibid., p. 76. Ibid., p. 78. Ibid., p. 89. See A.Wellmer’s excellent placing in perspective of Rorty’s ideas in ‘Vérité, contingence et modernité’, Rue Descartes (5–6), 1993, p. 186. This problem has been clearly highlighted by C.Millon-Delsol in Le principe de subsidiarité, Paris: PUF, 1993, p. 98. L’Australie blanche a fini de rêver’, The Age, quoted in Courrier International, 27 May 1993. See also M.Turnbull, The Reluctant Republic (London: Heinemann 1994). O.Paz, ‘Eloge de la negation’, Le Monde, 10 October 1992. Le Monde, 29 May 1993.

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47 E.F.Hansen, ‘En route pour la Scandinavie’, La Lettre Internationale, spring 1993, p. 10. See also, in the same issue, P.O.Enquist, ‘Perdu dans notre maison’. 48 R.Schwok demonstrated clearly on Switzerland that the splits which appeared during the European debate were already present and as a result were ‘independent of the agreement on the EEA (European Economic Area)’. ‘Causes et consequences du refus de la Suisse d’adhérer à l’espace économique européen’, Relations Internationales, spring 1993, p. 101. 49 Ibid., p. 11. 50 A.Ara and C.Magris, Trieste, une identité de frontière (Paris: Le Seuil 1993), p. 14.

6 The loss of the link between nations 1 G.Simmel, Le conflit (Saulxures, Circé 1992), p. 20. 2 B.Perret and G.Roustang, L’économie contre la société (Paris: Le Seuil 1993), p. 40. 3 C.Schmitt, La notion de politique. Théorie du partisan (Paris: Flammarion 1992), p. 84. 4 Ibid., p. 64. 5 The following argument owes much to the ideas of Jean Lévi, which he willingly shared during a presentation to the CERI seminar at Paris on ‘L’ordre mondial relêché’, 9 February 1993. 6 Quoted by J.Lévi, in Les fonctionnaires divins. Politique, despotisme et mystique en Chine ancienne (Paris: Le Seuil 1989), p. 95. 7 Ibid., p. 148. On the main legalist writings, read J.Lévi, Strategies du pouvoir IVeIIe avant J.-C. Dangers du discours (Aix-en-Provence: Alinéa 1985). 8 The question of the obsolescence of war in the relations between democratic states has been and will continue to be the subject of a considerable number of articles and works. Among the most salient are: M.Shaw, Post-military Society. Militarism, Demilitarization and War at the End of the 20th Century (Cambridge: Polity Press 1991); E.Luard, The Blunted Sword. The Erosion of Miltary Power in Modern World Politics (London: Tauris 1988); S.Cimbala, Force and Diplomacy in the Future (New York: Praeger 1992); and above all, J.Mueller, Retreat from Doomsday. The Obsolescence of Major Wars (New York: Basic Books 1989). For Mueller, the obsolescence of war between democratic nations goes back to the end of the First World War. For him, the decline of war is comparable to the decline of fighting duels or slavery. As with these two processes, war has gone through three stages of questioning: it first became controversial, then became unusual, and finally fell into disuse. The theses of Mueller have been widely discussed and never seriously challenged. See C.Kaysen, ‘Is War Obsolete? A Review Essay’, International Security, spring 1990; A. Majeed, ‘Has the War System Really Become Obsolete?’, Bulletin of Peace Proposals 22 (4), 1991. The incompatibility of war and democracy has, on a more philosophical front, been brilliantly discussed by M. Doyle, ‘Kant, Liberal Legacies and Foreign Affairs’, Philosophy and Public Affairs 12 (3–4), summer-autumn 1983. See also B.Russett, ‘Democracy and Peace’, in B.Russett, H.Starr and R.Stoll (eds) Choices in World Politics (New York: Freeman 1989). For a more recent report on this issue refer to ‘Democracy

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10 11

12 13 14 15

16

17

18

19 20

and War: Research and Reflections’, the special edition of Interactions, 18 (3), 1993. See A.Hirschman, National Power and the Structure of Foreign Trade (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press 1945); M.Gasioruski, ‘Economic Interdependence and International Conflict’, International Studies Quarterly 30 (1), 1986, p. 36; and H.Milner, ‘Commerce mondial. Une nouvelle logique des blocs?’, in Z.Laïdi (ed.) L’ordre mondial relâché (Paris: Presses de la FNSP 1992), pp. 139–40. Financial Times, 25 October 1993. Mueller writes: ‘An idea becomes impossible not because it is reprehensible and so is rejected, but when it stops being considered as a conceivable option…. In other words, peace can create habits and habituation’, op. cit., p. 240. See K.Rousselet, L’Eglise orthodox russe et la politique, Paris: La Documentation française, 18 September 1992, PPS (687). Financial Times, 19 May 1993. G.Couffignal, ‘Le système interaméricain après la guerre froide’, in Z. Laïdi (ed.), op. cit., pp. 225–6. The internal political developments in Mexico and the prospect of signing a free trade treaty between the United States and Mexico form the most representative symbols of this development. The conversion of almost the whole Mexican intelligentsia to the idea of a treaty with the United States is revealing. See the article by C.Fuentes, ‘Un pari sur l’Alena’, Libération, 30 August 1993. There is in addition the considerable effect of structural adjustment policies initiated in this region by the IMF and World Bank since the start of the 1980s. On the development of Latin America and its integration with world time, read J.Castañeda, Utopia Unarmed The Latin American Left after the Cold War (New York: Knopf 1993). Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Du contrat social, Book I, quoted in P.Hassner, ‘Paix et guerre’, in P.Raynaud and S.Rials (eds) Dictionnaire de philosophie politique (Paris: PUF 1996). P.Anderson, L’Etat absolutiste (Paris: Maspero 1978); S.Rokkan, Un modèle géoéconomique et géopolitique de quelques sources de variants en Europe de l’Ouest (Paris: AFSP 1976); C.Tilly, ‘War Making and State Making as Organized Crime’, in P.Evans et al., Bringing the State Back In (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1985); K.J.Holsti, ‘L’Etat et l’état de guerre’, Etudes Internationales, December 1990. ‘To the extent that a common enemy helps maintain or even create solidarity, and obliges joint effort, war has, throughout history, been the most effective stimulant for cohesion between states’, p. 14. S.Andreski, Wars, Revolutions, Dictatorships. Studies of Historical and Contemporary Problems from a Comparative Viewpoint (London: Frank Cass 1992). See also M.Shaw, ‘War and the Nation-State in Social Theory’, in D.Held and J.B. Thompson (eds) Social Theory of Modern Societies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1989). See K.J.Holsti, op. cit.; M.Howard, La guerre dans l’histoire de l’Occident (Paris: Hachelte-Pluriel 1988); J.Keegan, A History of Warfare (London: Hutchinson 1993); and R.Leng, Interstate Crisis Behaviour, 1816–1980: Realism versus Reciprocity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1993). G.Hermet, Culture et démocratie (Paris: Albin Michel-UNESCO 1993), p. 228. See for the case of Cambodia the analysis of Christian Lechervy, ‘Le Khmer rouge: homo bellicus versus homo economicus’, Cultures et Conflits 8, winter 1992–3. For

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a more general theoretical viewpoint of post-Cold War conflict, see the excellent article by D.Bigo, ‘Les conflits post-bipolaires: dynamiques et caractéristiques’, Cultures et Conflits 8, winter 1992–3, pp. 3–14. 21 International Herald Tribune, 14 January 1993. 22 E.Becker, ‘The Guarantors Should Help Protect Cambodia from the Thais’, International Herald Tribune, 19 May 1993.

7 Global social links (1): conflicts without identity 1 R.Mundell and A.Swoboda define a system as an ‘aggregate of diverse entities united by interaction according to a form of control’: R.Mundell and A.Swoboda (eds) Monetary Problems of the International Economy (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press 1969), p. 343. See also G. Modelski, Long Cycles in World Politics (London: Macmillan 1987). 2 Not enough attention is paid to the fact that the fundamental factor in globalization is primarily the reduction in information and transmission costs, even independent of any ‘economies of scale’ achieved. Thus the cost of a computer with a power of 4.5 megabytes a second will drop from 4.5 million dollars in 1980 to 10,000 dollars in the year 2000: M.Morton, The Corporation of the 1990s. Information Technology and Organizational Transformation (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1991), p. 9. 3 United Nations, World Investment Report, 1993: Transnational Corporation and Integrated International Production (New York: United Nations 1993), p. 160. 4 J.-M.Ferry, Les puissances de l’expérience (Paris: Cerf 1991), p. 18. Globalization naturally raises other questions about meaning which we can only touch on here, but will in future structure a large part of the thinking on international relations. Among the more essential is the link between sovereignty and territoriality. This link is at the heart of discussion among economists, especially those considering the following questions: does the ‘national’ character of ownership still have any real meaning? Is the localization of a company on national territory the condition for national autonomy? Does the nationality of shareholders have an impact on the company’s decisions? Can competition between national companies be distinguished from competition between nations? There is evidently no clearcut answer to these questions. And, from this point of view, it cannot be said that scientific or para-scientific thought on the subject would be free from national subjectivity. Generally speaking, Japanese literature tends greatly to underestimate the national question. For Kenichi Ohmae, the prophet of globalization, the national question no longer has any economic meaning. But it can legitimately be asked whether this interpretation is, consciously or not, serving Japanese economic interests, which are very globalized but also ‘immunized’ from any foreign control. See K.Ohmae, The Borderless World. Power and Strategy in the Interlinked Economy (New York: Harper Business 1990). This same type of ambiguity can be found in the writings of R.Reich, in L’économie mondialisée (Paris: Dunod 1992), on the American example. For S.Strange, who is interested in the relationship between companies and the state in international relations, the major goal of interstate relationships is that of attractiveness. It is no longer about acquiring territory,

NOTES 171

but about attracting to one’s territory investment that will produce added value. See ‘State, Firms and Diplomacy’, International Affairs 68 (1), 1992, p. 7. In Global Financial Integration. The End of Geography (London: Pinter and RIIA 1992), Richard O’Brien has clearly demonstrated in his study of financial markets the limits to ‘deterritorialization’. He emphasizes that even in the most volatile and non-material domain (finance), localization plays a non-negligible role: ‘There is still a strong incentive for stock exchanges to be close to the location of the operations of the companies whose stocks are traded on the exchange’, p. 77. See the excellent report of the Group of Ten, International Capital Movements and Foreign Exchange Markets. A Report to the Ministers and Governors by the Group of Deputies 1, April 1993. See the supplement to The Economist, 27 June 1992. More generally, there is a mass of literature on the issue of sovereignty. First, there are studies by law specialists, which encourage us to think about the problem of sovereignty, based on the founding work of Jean Bodin. A return to Bodin is indeed indispensable if one wants to update his discussion. Bodin identifies sovereignty as the ‘absolute character of the power of command (of the state) without any superior level’. Yet de facto (economic and financial globalization) and de jure (the Maastricht Treaty), the sovereignty of states is more shared than ever. That this sharing is by consent and not imposed does not detract from its reality. Throughout the world the state is in a situation Bodin described as ‘monstrous’; exactly that of sharing sovereignty, of being limited by other actors, of the frangible character of its unity. Certainly, Bodin is looking at the idea of sovereignty in an internal context: he refuses to envisage limits to the plenitudo potestatis of the sovereign. But the international dimension of the problem is implicitly contained in his analysis. When he asserts that ‘the King of France is emperor in his kingdom’, he makes a clear contrast between this absolute sovereignty in a national, territorial framework, and an imperium, a dominus mundi, founded on allegiances as wide geographically as they are weak legally. Nevertheless it would be too simple to see in this deterritorialization, which is also denationalization, a linear process with one single meaning. First, because the actors eroding state sovereignty are not claiming, wholly or consciously, to replace it or to propose a collective meaning. Second, and no less real, the erosion of the inter-state logic within the global system is far from being total or irreversible. In the same way that it took several centuries for European states not only to rid themselves of papal authority but to construct mutual links founded on principles other than that of belonging to the same Christian community, a long time will elapse between the erosion of the inter-state system of world relationships and the organization of these same world relationships outside a system of states. Among the works on Bodin, we can refer here to J.H.Franklin, Jean Bodin et la naissance de la théorie absolutiste (Paris: PUF 1993); S.Goyard-Fabre, Jean Bodin et le droit de la République (Paris: PUF 1989); S.Goyard-Fabre, Les fondements de l’ordre juridique (Paris: PUF 1992); G.Mairet, Le Maître et la multitude. L’Etat moderne entre Machiavel, Shakespeare et Gorbatchev (Paris: Editions du Félin 1991); and B.Kriegel, La République incertaine (Paris: Quai Voltaire 1993). The internationalists are not being left behind in this debate. We can cite, among others, R.B.J.Walker and S.Mendlovitz (eds) Contending Sovereignties. Redefining Political Communities (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner 1990); C.Navari (ed.) The Condition of States. A Study in International Political Theory (Philadelphia, PA:

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5

6 7 8 9 10 11

12

13 14

15

Open University Press 1991); L.J.Blake, Sovereignty. Power beyond Politics (Shepherd, Walwyn 1988); and J.A.Camillieri and J.Falk (eds.) The End of Sovereignty. The Politics of a Shrinking and Fragmenting World (London: Elgar 1992). In French, the best introduction to the subject is in B.Badie and M.-C. Smouts, Le retournement du monde (Paris: Dalloz-FNSP 1992). An opinion poll in France showed that the fear of unemployment is very unevenly distributed. Seventy-nine per cent of public sector employees said they were not afraid of losing their job in the short term as opposed to 57 per cent of private sector employees. La Croix, 22 September 1993. M.Bon, Les attitudes devant le travail (Paris: Institut de l’Entreprise 1993), p. 14. Ibid., p. 16. Journal de Génève, 1 August 1993. La Croix, 12 October 1993. On ecumenical disillusionment, see the article by M.Kubler on ‘oscillations in Christian unity’, La Croix, 6 August 1993. This shift has been excellently described in P.Rosanvallon, La nouvelle crise de l’Etat-Providence (Notes de la Fondation Saint-Simon, September 1993). On the relationship between meaning, work and identity, reference should be made to the excellent discussions in the journal Echanges et Projets, and especially its edition of March 1990, which included contributions from B. Perret, P.Viveret and J.-B.de Foucault. See also J.Danzelot (ed.) Face à l’exclusion. Le modèle français (Paris: Esprit 1991). On the analogy between internal exclusion and international exclusion, see Z.Laïdi, ‘L’exclusion planétaire’, Libération, 16 July 1991. On the development of the secessionist movement in the provinces of Rio Grande do Sul, Paraná and Santa Catarina, see ‘Trying to head off a Brazilian breakaway’, Financial Times, 3 November 1992. B.Perret, ‘Feu le parti des salaries’, Libération, 1 March 1993. ‘Le mal démocratique’, interview with Marcel Gauchet, Esprit, October 1993: ‘From a religious economy which was the product of the outside and of human desire, we have shifted to an economy which functions between people and people themselves caught up in society’, p. 70. This idea of the threat shifting towards the interior, towards the interior of societies and the individuals which compose it, can be found in several social fields, confirming its scope and reality. F.Ewald, in Le problème français des accidents thérapeutiques. Enjeux et solutions, (Paris: Ministry of Health and Humanitarian Action, La Documentation française 1992), links this internalization of threat to a rereading of progress: progress is no longer considered as linear, but more and more ambivalent, even ambiguous: ‘The bad is not what contrasts with the good, it accompanies it, even overtakes it’, p. 45.

8 Global social links (2): actors without a project 1 It is clearly shown by the recent discussions on the ‘social clause’ that preceded the creation of the World Trade Organization. The dangers of this approach and of this evolution were emphasized by J.Bhagwati in The World Trading System at Risk (London: Harvester 1991), p. 21.

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2 The theory of action based on the control of processes is at the centre of the analysis in L.Boltanski and L.Thévenot, De la justification. Les économies de la grandeur (Paris: Gallimard 1991). Here we have merely extended it by analogy to the international field. The need all social actors now have to act in several worlds is shown in the long critical analysis of Boltanski and Thévenot’s work by N.Dodier in Critique, June–July 1991, pp. 427–58. 3 For the methods by which armed forces have adapted to the post Cold War, see the excellent synthesis by A.Baer, ‘Quelles armées dans un nouvel ordre international?’, Défense nationale, March 1992; as well as the comprehensive report by J.-M.Boucheron, Paix et défense (Paris: Dunod 1993). The implications of these changes for inter-force cooperation is synthesized in Y.Dujardin, ‘La coopération inter-armées en France’, IEP mémoire, 1993. 4 This consideration of the linkage between meaning and military power owes much to the work of Philippe Delmas, who kindly shared it in his presentation on ‘Le sens de la puissance militaire’, seminar on ‘Ordre mondial relâché’, CERI, Paris: 9 November 1993. 5 This problem is explained in a very persuasive manner by C.Gilbert in Le pouvoir en situation extreme. Catastrophes et politique (Paris: L’Harmattan 1992). He emphasizes the difficulty the political authority has in managing natural or technological catastrophes, because it no longer has any means of distancing itself from these crises. ‘It is not confronted by crisis, it is caught up in the crisis’, p. 247. Here again, the analogy with the international field seems very clear. 6 See the sober, critical and detailed account of the UN intervention in Somalia drawn up by Africa Rights, Somalia: Operation ‘Restore Hope’. A Preliminary Assessment (London: May 1993). Mario Bettati emphasizes, not without reason, that ‘abolishing humanitarian diplomacy would add nothing to classic diplomacy’. ‘Action humanitaire d’Etat et diplomatie’, in Mélanges Merle. Les relations internationales à l’épreuve de la science politique (Paris: Economica 1993), p. 272. 7 C.Geerz, ‘The uses of diversity’, cited by A.Nehemas, ‘La marque du poète’, in J.Bouveresse et al., Lire Rorty. Le pragmatisme et ses conséquences (Paris: L’Eclat 1992), p. 112. 8 On this process of economic progress which no longer allows deviance, see S.Ostry, The Impact of Globalization: Convergence or Conflict—Towards Technoglobalism (Paris: OECD 1990), p. 7. 9 More and more economists agree, for example, that a positive or negative trading balance has not in itself any significance, even though governments continue to display their monthly statistics on external trade like bulletins of victory (or defeat). Charles-Albert Michalet sums up the argument in the following terms: ‘In a company’s view, it matters little whether its consolidated results are the result of its own exports or sales by its subsidiaries located abroad. To estimate the competitiveness of a national economy, we would need…to add to export income and import expenditure, the buying and selling by subsidiaries. Subsidiaries of national companies sell on their home markets and often export to third countries…. The aggregate of all these transactions provides the best evaluation of the industrial competitiveness of a country.’ GEMDEV Conference, Paris: February 1993, p. 7. 10 This difference between property and control has been well explained in the American case by T.H.Moran, ‘The globalization of America’s defense industries.

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11 12 13

14 15

16

17 18

19 20 21 22 23

24 25 26

Managing the threat of foreign dependence’, International Security, summer 1990, pp. 57–99. Financial Times, 30 August 1992. Ibid., 10 May 1993. On the topic of fungibility of power, see J.Nye, Bound to Lead. The Changing Nature of American Power (New York: Basic Books 1990). See Z.Laïdi (ed.) L’ordre mondial relâché (Paris: FNSP 1992), p. 19. See C.Layne, ‘The unipolar illusion. Why new great powers will rise’, International Security, spring 1993. R.Gilpin, War and Change in World Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1987), p. 125. In The Shape of European History (1974), W.McNeill reminds us, moreover, that in the ‘pre-modern’ world economically advanced societies were often destroyed or exploited by less advanced societies. It is thus modernity that has established a link between economic power and military power. See M.Kaldor, Problems of Adjustment to Lower Levels of Military Spending in Developed and Developing Countries (Washington, DC: World Bank 1991), p. 5; F.Chesnais (ed.) Compétitivité internationale et dépenses militaires (Paris: Economica 1990), p. 17; and OECD, La technologie et l’économie. Les relations déterminantes (Paris: OECD (TEP programme) 1992), p. 274. See Die Gezähmten Deutschen (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlagsanstalt 1985). Asked which country they would want to model themselves on, 40 per cent of Germans replied Switzerland, 29 per cent Sweden. The United States, France and Great Britain received 6, 8 and 2 per cent respectively. It is interesting to connect this answer with another: ‘With which country would you like better or closer relationships in the near future?’ Russia came first. Financial Times, 4 January 1991. J.-M.Boucheron, Paix et defense (Paris: Dunod 1993), p. 529. Ibid., p. 332. See on this point the work of L.Boltanski, La souffrance à distance. Morale humanitaire, medias et politique (Paris: Métailé 1993). François Ewald, interviewed in Le Monde, 21 April 1993. F.Ewald, Le problème français des accidents thérapeutiques. Enjeux et solutions (Paris: Ministry of Health and Humanitarian Action, La Documentation française 1992), p. 45. It is not emphasized enough that Ewald’s ideas on the state, and especially on the themes of ‘precaution’ and ‘vulnerability’, are most salutary for all those who think of the field of international relations not as a ‘territorialized discipline’ but, on the contrary, as a discipline whose interest is in producing a ‘viewpoint on the world’ by ‘desectorizing’ itself. Financial Times, 15 February 1994. A.Markusen, ‘Dismantling the Cold War economy’, World Policy Journal 9 (3), summer 1992, pp. 389–99. On the UN financial crisis as the dominant powers’s alibi for the international system’s lack of political will to work through the UN, see Financial Times, 19–20 June 1993; The Economist, 12 June 1993. See also the excellent article by S. Hoffmann, ‘Delusions of World Order’, New York Review of Books, 9 April 1992. See too ‘L’ordre neuf du president Bush’, Esprit, June 1991, in which M.C.Smouts reveals very clearly the limits to ‘the new UN world order’, even at a time of ‘unipolar euphoria’. See also, for an evaluation of the UN’s future, G.Evans,

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27

28 29

30 31 32

Cooperating for Peace: The Global Agenda for the 1990s and Beyond (Sydney: Allen & Unwin 1994); and B. Urquhart, ‘Who can police the world?’, New York Review of Books, 12 May 1994, pp. 29–33. S.Islam and M.Mandelbaum, Making Markets. Economic Transformation in Eastern Europe and the post-Soviet States (New York: Council on Foreign Relations 1993). Financial Times, 27 May 1993. J.Gray, Post-Communist Societies in Transition: A Social Market Perspective (London: Social Market Foundation 1994). This short text offers the best contribution to the debate on the issue of a reference model for Eastern Europe. P.Hassner, ‘La guerre et la paix’, in S.Rials and A.Renaut, Philosophie politique (Paris: PUF 1995). M.Delmas-Marty, Pour un droit commun (Paris: Le Seuil 1994), p. 274. Financial Times, 13 July 1994.

9 Can Japan provide meaning? 1 A hegemonic power is characterized by a capacity to produce ‘public goods’. Thus, even if it used its power to impose an order that constrained the collection of actors in the international system, it would simultaneously provide compensation for these actors that outweighed overall their participation in the maintenance of the hegemonic order. Hegemony would function as an ‘international public service’, a system of ‘world social security’ maintained by the dominant power, that would benefit the ensemble of ‘insured persons’ whatever the cost of their initial contribution. This latter hypothesis encompasses two important ideas. The first is the need for domination to be founded on the consent of the dominated rather than on the brutal repression of their autonomy. The second emphasizes that any asymmetry delineates ‘spaces’ for the dominated in terms of sovereignty or of prosperity. On this question see R.Rosencrance and J.Taw, ‘Japan and the Theory of International Leadership’, World Politics 42 (2), 1990. The theory of hegemonic stability is presented generally and discussed in the writings of C.Kindleberger, The World in Depression 1929–1939 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press 1973); R.Gilpin, US Power and the Multinational Corporation (New York: Basic Books 1975); R.O.Keohane, ‘The Theory of Hegemonic Stability and Changes in International Economic Regimes’, in O.R.Holsti, R.M. Silverson and A.L.George (eds) Change in the International System (Boulder, CO: Westview 1980); and S.Krasner, ‘State power and the structure of international trade’, in P.Katzenstein (ed.) Between Power and Plenty. Foreign Economic Policies of Advanced Industrial States (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press 1978). However, this ‘theory’ exists more in the similar assumptions of various authors, and the group critiques to which it has been subjected, than from common, coherent hypotheses. Thus, in ‘Hierarchy versus inertial cooperation’, International Organization, autumn 1986, p. 845, Charles Kindleberger goes as far as declaring a preference for the term ‘stability’ to that of ‘hegemony’. 2 On Ochine, see F.Adelkhah, ‘Ochine en Iran’, unpublished article (Paris: CERI 1993); and H.Mowlana and M.R.Mahdi, Japanese Programs on Iranian

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3 4

5

6

7

8 9 10

11

12

Television. A Study in International Flow of Information (Washington, DC: The American University 1990). D.El Khawaga, ‘Le feuilleton Ochine vu par les Egyptiens’ (CERI, Group ‘Temps mondial’ 1994 (unpublished)), pp. 2–4. The Algerians, who seem—for obvious reasons to do with identity—fascinated by the Japanese experience, have twice had the chance to measure the political hardness of Tokyo on international affairs and the illusory nature of its thirdworldism. Japan unhesitatingly used the classical sources of power to impose its candidate at the head of the World Health Organization against an Algerian candidate supported by Europe and America. In another, more economic order of things, Japan, Algeria’s principal creditor, was the most reluctant about a massive rescheduling operation of Algeria’s debt. See P.Dale, The Myth of Japanese Uniqueness (London: Croom Helm 1986). For a recent, reasoned critique of culturalism, refer to the work of J.-F.Bayart (ed.) La réinvention de capitalisme (Paris: Karthala 1994). ‘Culturalist reinterpretation’, he writes on p. 24, ‘changes quickly to pub talk, even though its holders are often very erudite.’ See also E.Wilkinson, Japan versus the West: Image and Reality (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1991), as well as H.Yoichi and C.Sautter (eds) L’Etat et l’individu au Japon (Paris: Editions EHESS 1990), p. 36. This approach has recently been illustrated in a caricature-like way by S. Huntington in ‘Class of Civilizations?’, Foreign Affairs, summer 1993. This interpretation aroused wide opposition, which Foreign Affairs reported in its autumn 1993 issue. See also my reply to Huntington, ‘La guerre des cultures n’aura pas lieu’, Libération, 28 September 1993. See the excellent dossier on this theme in the journal Commentaire, summer 1994. The nihhonji-ron is defined as a school of thought and literature specializing in exploring Japanese specificity as opposed to other nations. Among the titles of Japanese works deriving from this school of thought are: N. Kanji, L’individualisme européen; I.Bendasan, Les Japonais et les Juifs; H. Toyota, Ma vision de la culture japonaise; M.Joji, Les Japonais: autoportrait d’un oeuf sans coquille; Y.Schichihei, La vision japonaise de la vie; K. Shösaburô, Pour une âme japonaise avec une technique japonaise. For a general presentation of the theme of nihhonji-ron, refer to the article by J. Pigeot, ‘Les Japonais peints par eux-mêmes’, Le Débat 23, January 1983, as well as P.Akamatsu’s article, ‘Histoire et nihhonjiron’, in J.Cobbi (ed.) Pratiques et representations sociales des Japonais (Paris: L’Harmattan 1993). J.-M.Bouissou, ‘Le Japon en quête de légitimité’, in Z.Laïdi (ed.) L’ordre mondial relâché. Sens et puissance après la guerre froide (Paris: FNSP 1993), p. 80. D.Lacorne, ‘Le débat des droits de l’homme en France et aux Etats-Unis’, Revue Tocqueville 14 (1), 1993, p. 6. See E.Marienstras, Les mythes fondateurs de la nation américaine (Brussels: Complexe 1992), as well as D.Lacorne, L’invention de la République. Le modèle américain (Paris: Hachette 1991). This profound continuity of the American discourse on the new world order between Woodrow Wilson and George Bush was emphasized clearly by B.Bayart, Woodrow Wilson et George Bush: le nouvel ordre mondial (Paris: IEP 1993). P.Akamatsu, ‘Pouvoir absorbant de la langue japonaise’, in Les langues mégalomanes (Paris: Le Genre humain 1990), p. 83.

NOTES 177

13 Tado Umesao, quoted in Monde Europe. Repère et orientations pour les Français 1993–1997, Commissariat Général au Plan (Paris: La Documentation française 1993), p. 49. 14 See on this point L.Vandermeersch, Le nouveau monde sinisé (Paris: PUF 1986), pp. 145ff. 15 A.Berque, Vivre l’espace au Japon (Paris: PUF 1982), p. 36. This limited tendency to verbalize caused a Japanese author to write: ‘I do not want to say that traditional Japanese thought makes little use of words, but it seems more conscious of its powerlessness.’ D.Takeo, L’endroit et l’envers (Paris: Philippe Picquier 1993), p. 38. 16 A.Berque, Du geste à la cité. Formes urbaines et lien social au Japon (Paris: Gallimard 1993), p. 142. 17 A.Berque, Vivre l’espace au Japon, op. cit., p. 47. See also C.Garnier, ‘Le triangle Je-Tu-Il: l’expression de la personne dans le groupe familial’, in J. Cobbi, op. cit., pp. 72ff. 18 M.Tamamoto, ‘Japan’s Search for a World Role’, World Policy Journal 7 (3), summer 1990. That is why the debate on the change to the constitution, and more especially on article 9, raised so much difficulty, the idea of democracy being so intimately related to the absence of foreign commitment. This point is very well noted by C.Johnson, ‘Japan’s Search for a “moral” Role’, Policy Paper, Institute on Global Conflict and Co-operation, University of California, July 1992, p. 24. On the historic constraints on Japanese foreign policy, see too P. Katzenstein and N. Okowara, ‘Japan’s National Security: Structures, Norms and Policies’, International Security 17 (4), spring 1993. 19 R.Barthes, L’empire des signes (Geneva: Skira 1970). 20 A.Berque, ‘J’en ai rêvé, c’était Tokyo’, Annales ESC, p. 2. 21 This point is emphasized well by S.Trinh, Il n’y a pas de modèle japonais (Paris: Odile Jacob 1992), p. 205. 22 On the basis of Barthes’ theme of Japanese ‘empty space’, Catherine Russell finds convergent interpretations of the Japanesese melodrama. She sees in the Japanese cinema the sign of a culture which values expression more than reading, emotion more than meaning. She deduces that meanings escape the realist modes of representation and are not accessible to non-Japanese (p. 114) But the success of Ochine would tend to emphasize that a Japanese cultural product manages to provide meaning in the rest of the world even though not based on a clearly decodable message. See ‘Insides and Outsides: Cross Cultural Criticisms and Japanese Film Melodrama’ in W.Dusnayake, Melodrama and Asian Cinema (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1993). 23 On this topic of time in economic competition refer to the now classic work of J.P.Womack, D.T.Jones and D.Roos, La machine qui va changer le monde (Paris: Dunod 1992); see also G.Stalk and T.Hout, Vaincre le temps (Paris: Dunod 1992). 24 Berque, op. cit., p. 162. 25 C.Morrison, ‘Japan’s Role in East Asia’, Business and the Contemporary World, spring 1993, p. 183.

10 The regionalization of meaning

178 NOTES

1 The notion of an itinerary of meaning has been demonstrated in research on the sociology of religion, notably by D.Hervieu-Léger, La religion pour mémoire (Paris: Cerf 1993), as well as by P.Michel, Politique et religion. La grande mutation (Paris: Albin Michel 1994). It seems to me that this theme can be extended to the field of international relations, and applied to regionalism. 2 The Economist, 25 July 1992. 3 Financial Times, 24 February 1994. 4 World Bank, Global Economic Prospects and the Developing Countries (Washington, DC, 1992). 5 Commission of the European Communities, La recherche après Maastricht: un bilan, une stratégie. Communication from the Commission to the Council and to the European Parliament, 9 April 1992. See too CEE, Science, technologie et société. Priorités européennes. Summary report, 1989. 6 Financial Times, 23 February 1994. 7 CEE, Le financement de la R & D au croisement des logiques industrielle, financière et politique (Brussels: Programme Fast (5) 1991) p. 83. 8 The Economist, January 1994. 9 Financial Times, 24 February 1994. ‘In France and Great Britain, China is seen as a much greater threat in the long term than the United States or Japan.’ 10 PNUD, Rapport mondial sur le développement humain, 1993 (Paris: Economica 1994), p. 40. The report notes that world GDP will increase to 205 in the year 2000, from a base of 100 in 1975, but the increase in jobs would not go above 147. In other words, not only does employment trail behind growth, but in addition the gap between them continues to grow, at the expense of jobs. Even more disquieting is the appearance of this gap across most of the world, notably in countries with high demographic expansion potential such as Southeast Asia. 11 C.Oman, Globalisation et régionalisation (Paris: OECD 1994), p. 101. 12 W.Wallace, ‘British Foreign Policy after the Cold War’, International Affairs 68 (3), 1992, pp. 426ff. On the Europeanization of Great Britain, see also F.de la Serre, H.Wallace and J.Leruez (eds) Les politiques étrangères de la France et de la Grande-Bretagne depuis 1945: l’inévitable ajustement (Paris: FNSP and Berg 1990). 13 K.Postel-Vinay, La révolution silencieuse du Japon (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, Fondation Saint-Simon 1994), p. 83. On the historic relationship of Japan to Asia, via the place of ‘orientalism’ in Japan, read the essential work of S.Tanaka, Japan’s Orient, Rendering Past into History (Berkeley: University of California Press 1993). 14 On the economic, political and symbolic aspects of the devaluation of the Central African franc, see S.Michaïlof (ed.) La France et l’Afrique. Vademecum pour un nouveau voyage (Paris: Karthala 1993), pp. 461–71. 15 See J.-F.Bayart, L’Etat en Afrique (Paris: Fayard 1989), pp. 248–9. 16 This is exactly the point of the Delors plan. On the creation in Europe of ‘information superhighways’, see Financial Times, 21 February 1994. 17 See J.-M.Bouissou, G.Faure and Z.Laïdi, L’expansion de la puissance japonaise (Brussels: Complexe 1992). On the chances of renationalization of Japanese foreign economic policy, see too the article in the Financial Times, 5 July 1993. 18 The link between the end of the Cold War and the ‘rediscovery’ of the importance of the Chinese diaspora is confirmed by the ‘institutionalization’ of international

NOTES 179

conferences of the Chinese diaspora since 1990. It is also confirmed by the growing role played by Singaporeans in the political organization of this diaspora, those who in the past made a clear choice of Taipei over Peking. 19 J.-L.Domenach, ‘Le relâchement de la Chine’, in Z.Laïdi (ed.) L’ordre mondial relâché. Sens et puissance après la guerre froide (Paris: FNSP 1993), p. 163.

11 Europe as meaning 1 Council of Europe, Privatisation du contrôle de la criminalité (Strasbourg: European Committee for Problems of Criminality 1990), p. 119. See too, for differences in conception, Rosenthal and Hoogenboom, La privatisation et la commercialisation du contrôle de la criminalité: quelques questions fondamentales au égard notamment à l’évolution des Pays-Bas. Report for the 18th conference of criminological research of the Council of Europe, PC-CRC (88) 31, as well as R.Ford, Une conception rétrograde de l’avenir? Observations relatives à des propositions de privatisation des prisons. Report for the 18th conference of criminological research of the Council of Europe, PC-CRC (88) 4. 2 J.Gray, Post-Communist Societies in Transition: A Social Market Perspective (London: Social Market Foundation 1994). This text is a follow-up to two earlier publications from the Social Market Foundation: The Social Market Economy, by R.Skidelsky, and Responses to Robert Skidelsky on the Social Market Economy, both published by the Social Market Foundation. 3 On the weaknesses of the German economic model and the imperatives of a new Ordnungspolitik in the face of globalization, see the excellent article by K.J.Lank, ‘Germany at the crossroads: on the efficiency of the German economy’, Daedalus, winter 1994, pp. 57ff; and also Rapport du gouvernement fédéral sur la sauvegarde du site ‘Allemagne’ à l’avenir, Federal Government Press and Information Office, Foreign Department, September 1993. On the capacity of the ‘German model’ to bounce back, see D.Goodhart, The Reshaping of the Germans’ Social Market (London: Institute for Public Policy Research 1994). 4 It is interesting to note that for British supporters of the social market economy, such as those who developed the Social Market Foundation (see Note 2), it is ordoliberalismus, as conceived by the Frankfurt School or by German social catholicism, that appeared best adapted to transition towards the market in the East, even if this same Social Market Foundation rejects the very concept of a model. See J.Gray, op. cit., p. 19. The risk of a German neo-hegemony exists, based on both German power and that country’s very strong conceptual potential. But it is more by cross-cutting multiple intellectual references than by intellectual sanctuarization of each European nation that this risk will be contained. On Germany’s advantages in the search for a new meaning for Europe, one could read with profit the work of B.Nuss, Les enfants de Faust. Les Allemands entre Ciel et Enfer (Paris: Autrement 1994). The author talks of the German ability to be at ease ‘as much in the domain of abstraction as that of concrete things’, p. 23. It is precisely the search for a linkage between the symbolic and the concrete that causes the problem in Europe. 5 See J.Attali, Europe(s) (Paris: Fayard 1994).

180 NOTES

12 Asia, or regionalism without a goal 1 Financial Times, 9 March 1993. 2 Ibid. 3 According to the felicitous expression of J.-L.Margolin, ‘Extreme Orient, the meaning of prosperity’, in Z.Laïdi (ed.) L’ordre mondial relâché. Sens et puissance après la guerre froide (Paris: FNSP 1993), pp. 180ff. 4 On the role played by Westerners in the definitions of Asia and of the Pacific, see G.Segal, Rethinking the Pacific (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1990), p. 367. On Asian and Pacific regionalism the available literature grows constantly. We can refer, among others, to F.Bergsten and M. Noland (eds) Pacific Dynamism and the International Economy System (Washington, DC: Institute for International Economics 1993) (American viewpoint); R.Higgott, R.Leaner and J.Ravenhill (eds) Pacific Economic Relations in the 1990s: Cooperation or Conflict (Sydney: Allen & Unwin 1993) (Australian viewpoint); and L.Fu-Chen and S.Kamal (eds) The Challenge for Asia-Pacific Cooperation (ADRT, Institute of Asia and the Pacific 1987) (Malaysian viewpoint). 5 That is precisely what F.Godement does in La renaissance de l’Asie (Paris: Odile Jacob 1993). 6 We owe much to the new generation of French geographers for the reformulation of this notion of space-time. See M.-F.Durand, J.Levy and D. Retaillé, Le monde: espaces et systèmes (Paris: FNSP and Dalloz 1992). 7 International Herald Tribune, 13 July 1993. 8 Ibid., 8 November 1993 and 26 November 1993; and The Economist, 23 January 1993. 9 ‘South-East Asia miracle makers’, Asia Inc., supplement, November 1993. 10 The Economist, 25 September 1993. 11 ‘Asia’s growth circles’, Asia Inc., supplement, February 1994. 12 See G.Segal, China Changes Shape: Regionalism and Foreign Policy (London: IISS 1994). 13 ‘Asia’s growth circles’, Asia Inc., supplement, February 1994. 14 There is a wealth of literature devoted to the Chinese diaspora and to its construction of a Chinese space of meaning. We simply cite here those that appear best to demonstrate the linkage between meaning and power. N.Mineo, ‘Les trois Chines et le nouvel ordre asiatique’, Cahiers du Japon, special issue, 1993, pp. 40ff; P.Duara, ‘Re-constructing the Chinese nation’, The Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs 30, July 1993, pp. 1–26; ‘La diaspora chinoise en Occident’, special issue of Revue Européenne des Migrations Internationales 8 (3), 1992; Yu-Sion Live, ‘Chine-Diaspora: vers l’intégration à l’économie mondiale’, Hommes et Migrations, May 1993; G.T.Crane, ‘China and Taiwan: not yet Greater China’, International Affairs 69 (4), 1993, pp. 705ff; Leng-Chi Wang, ‘Roots and changing identity of the Chinese in the United States’, Daedalus, spring 1991, pp. 181ff. 15 International Herald Tribune, 27 May 1993. 16 On this topic of the three Chinas, see the illuminating article of Tu WeiMing, ‘Cultural China: the periphery as centre’, Daedalus, spring 1991, p. 12.

NOTES 181

17 J.-L.Domenach, ‘Le relâchement de la Chine’, in Z.Laïdi (ed.) L’ordre mondial relâché. Sens et puissance après la guerre froide (Paris: FNSP 1993 (new edition)). 18 K.Postel-Vinay, La révolution silencieuse du Japon (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, Fondation Saint-Simon 1994), p. 121. 19 See F.Gipouloux, ‘Réasianisation du Japon ou Asie nipponisée?’ in J.-M Bouissou (ed.) L’envers du consensus (Paris: FNSP 1994). 20 Financial Times, 11 January 1993. 21 Ibid., 16 February 1994. 22 J.-M Bouissou, ‘Le Japon en quête de légitimité’, in Z.Laïdi (ed.) L’ordre mondial relâché, op. cit., p. 83.

13 America as a ‘social power’ 1 On the gap between the symbolic and the economic in the American debate on the agreement on free trade with Mexico, see the excellent article by P.Krugman, ‘The uncomfortable truth about NAFTA’, Foreign Affairs 72 (5), 1993, pp. 13–19. 2 J.Castañeda, ‘Can NAFTA change Mexico?’, Foreign Affairs 72 (4), 1993, pp. 66– 80. 3 P.Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of Great Powers (New York: Random House 1987). 4 The only similar historic example is that of France on the eve of the 1789 revolution, ibid., p. 527. 5 P.Kennedy (ed.) Grand Strategies in War and Peace (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press 1991), p. 96. 6 ‘The trajectories of economic power and military power are never parallel’, as Paul Kennedy rightly reminds us. Interview with L’Express, 16 May 1991—in full ‘unipolar’ illusion. 7 This is the ambiguity, even ambivalence, of a comparison between Europe and the United States, and thence the difficulty of borrowing from a foreign model. Between 1980 and 1992, employment grew in the United States by 18 per cent, but simultaneously the real level of salaries fell by 8 per cent. Financial Times, 24 February 1994. 8 This loss of horizon is linked, according to Katherine Newman, to the considerable reduction of social mobility in the American middle class. On this subject she talks of ‘downward mobility’, in other words, ‘negative mobility’. See K.Newman, Declining Fortunes: The Withering of the American Dream (New York: Basic Books 1993). On the loss of a central core of values common to Americans, see A.Wolfe (ed.) America at Century’s End (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press 1991), pp. 464ff. On the loss of social links (‘institutional life’), see R.Bellah (ed.) The Good Society (New York: Vintage 1992). A resurgence of debate on the question of meaning (‘politics of meaning’) can be seen in the United States, which is echoed by the liberal Jewish journal Tikkan. See International Herald Tribune, 25 May 1993. This questioning about ‘collective meaning’ is magnified by the fragmentation of American society. See the very good synthesis of debates on this theme by P.Briançon, La fragmentation de la société américaine (Paris: Notes de la Fondation Saint-Simon January 1993).

182 NOTES

9 Eighty per cent of Americans consider themselves as middle class today against 44 per cent in 1964. N.Lemann, ‘Mysteries of the middle class’, New York Review of Books, 3 February 1994, p. 9. 10 It is very revealing to see in American internationalist literature the shift from geostrategic analysis towards social analysis. See on this point the work of E.Luttwak, The Endangered American Dream (New York: Simon & Schuster 1993). 11 There exists an American school that is very critical of multiculturalism. Their argument is based on a vision that is implicitly nostalgic for the ‘multiculturalism’ of the period when America was overwhelmingly white. See A.Schlesinger, Jr, La désunion de l’Amérique (Paris: Liana Lévi 1993). 12 On the existence of ‘race consciousness’, despite a certain social mobility among black Americans, see the excellent article in The Economist, 10 July 1993. On the now self-sustaining character of racial and social cleavages, see T.B.Edsall and M.D.Edsall, Chain Reaction: The Impact of Race, Rights and Taxes on American Politics (New York: Norton 1991). 13 Ibid. 14 It seems very difficult to escape from the Manichean debate between those who value the contribution of these new immigrant populations and thereby emphasize the United States’ capacity for renewal, and those who demonstrate the blocking of the American migratory model. Compared to other Western countries, the United States nevertheless remains an exceptionally open country. It would seem, moreover, that even if the assimilationist model is in crisis, a willingness to assimilate to the model remains very strong in the second generation. In towns as multicultural as Miami or San Diego, more than 90 per cent of children speak English, and a very large proportion of them prefer to use English rather than Spanish. See the results of this survey in International Herald Tribune, 30 June 1993. 15 On the American position on the Algerian crisis, see International Herald Tribune, 20 May 1993. 16 For an economic and ‘non-emotional’ definition of the notion of ‘predation’, see the theoretical work of J.Conybeare, Trade Wars. The Theory and Practice of International Commercial Rivalry, New York: Columbia University Press, 1987, and Z.Laïdi, ‘De l’hégémonie à la prédation. Hypothèses sur la transformation de la puissance américaine.’ Cahiers du CERI (1), 1991, pp. 10ff. 17 See J.Bhagwati, The World Trading System at Risk (London: Harvester 1991), p. 48. 18 J.Bhagwati, Protectionism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 1988), p. 83. 19 J.Bhagwati, ‘Japan must now say no’, Financial Times, 16 April 1993. 20 See J.Bhagwati, ‘Samurais no more’, Foreign Affairs 73 (3), 1994, pp. 7–12.

Conclusion: the post Cold War, a world of its own 1. See J.-P.Dupuy, Introduction aux sciences sociales (Paris: Ellipses 1992). 2. See R.Sue, Temps et ordre social (Paris: PUF 1994).

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Index

Afghanistan 52, 95 Africa 31–2, 141; see also South Africa and North Africa aid, economic 45; see also humanitarian aid Albania 155 Algeria 2, 6, 19, 52, 105 America 3, 12, 16, 18–22, 40, 71, 92, 103, 109, 112–13, 115–16, 118, 144–5, 157– 60, 162–70; see also Latin America Angola 95 APEC 141 Arab world 32 architecture 27 Argentina 93 Armenia 3 ASEAN 141, 153–4, 158 Asia 14, 19, 32, 68–70, 82, 94, 124, 126, 137–8, 140–2, 144–59, 152, 154–61; see also Central Asia Asianization 123, 160 Australia 82, 140, 157–6 avoidance strategy 13, 110–13, 169–70

Central Asia 54, 64 centrality, loss of 4–5, 8 Chile 45 China 3, 18–19, 32–3, 53, 68, 87–91, 94–5, 129, 137–8, 142, 153–61 Christianity 69–70 Church 5, 24–5, 101 cleansing, ethnic see ethnicity collective meaning 5, 68, 78, 106, 145 common good 69, 82, 84, 94 common meaning 47 communism 2, 5, 17, 30, 35, 37–8, 40, 163, 172; fall of 3–4, 29–32, 53 communitarianism 79–80, 146–7, 165, 168 community 81 conflict 86, 91–6, 101, 106, 120 crisis of the state 7 Croatia 57–9 cultural war 4 Czechoslovakia 40–1 Czech Republic 42, 62 democracy 16, 31–7, 131; see also market democracy deprivation of enemy see enemy diaspora 156, 160

Baltic States 3 Belgium 3, 38, 42, 53, 78 Berlin wall 1, 19, 29, 32, 49, 113, 117, 163 Bosnia 31, 55–6, 59, 109–10, 120, 167 Brazil 93, 103, 137 Burma 96, 154–5 Byelorussia 3

Eastern Europe 37, 47, 50 East Germany 40, 66 East-West models 16–18, 25–7, 37 economy of the market see market economy Egypt 124–5 emergency see urgency

Cambodia 95–6, 118, 154, 161 Canada 3, 42, 53–93 194

INDEX 195

employment 8–9; see also work empty space 131–2 end goal 1, 4–5, 7–8, 12, 17, 20, 27, 35–6, 43, 48, 59, 67–8, 72–4, 79, 117, 124, 145, 156; see also telos enemy 87, 89–91, 103–4, 108 Enlightenment 1–4, 13, 22–3, 25, 29–31, 35, 39, 44, 59, 81 127, 134, 171–2 ethnicity 14, 39, 142, 145–6, 167–8 Europe 3, 47, 67–85, 97, 103, 136–7, 140– 2, 144–5, 147–52, 163, 168–9; Europe of meaning 68–70, 73, 75–8, 80–3, 85; European project 71–3, 78–9; market Europe 77–8; political Europe 78–82 European Community 69, 71–3 European Union 47, 74–5, 78, 83–4, 97, 149–52, 155 expectation, horizon of 4, 6–7, 26, 35–6, 44, 48–50, 51, 68, 70–1, 110 experience 7, 35, 50, 82 finality see end goal Finland 140 Flemish separatism 78; see also Belgium Fordism 26, 28 foundation or basis of a project 1, 13–14, 35–7, 81 France 20, 26–7, 38, 70, 72, 75–6, 92, 94, 108–9, 127–8, 141, 145, 148 French Revolution 23, 25, 44, 70, 128 friend see enemy friend-enemy 87 G8 113 GATT 100, 114, 120 Georgia 3 Germany 15, 62, 66, 71, 77, 112–49 118, 145, 147–9 global social system 4, 92, 97–8, 103, 105– 6, 111, 136, 164, 175

globalization 4–12, 14, 49, 51, 59, 66, 82– 3, 85–6, 93–3, 97, 99–100, 105–6, 112, 126, 133, 138–419 164–6, 170, 176 good see common good Great Powers 4, 16–21, 113–16 Guatemala 32 Gulf war 40–1, 109, 113, 118–20, 163 hegemony 13, 12, 146, 148 History 22–5, 27, 29, 43, 75–6 Hong Kong 155–7 Hungary 62 horizon of expectation see expectation horizon of meaning see meaning humanitarian action 19–20, 109–10, 121–2 identity 3–4, 14, 51–3, 57, 59–63, 80–7, 90, 94, 96, 99–101, 105–6, 110, 125, 136, 147, 165; demand for 59, 106–7, Lombard identity 38–9 ideology 21, 39, 56–67, 86, 145–48 India 2, 19, 49, 60–61, 94, 105, 154 insecurity 97, 108, 174 international system 4–5, 9–10, 13, 29–30, 40, 58, 61 111, 128 internationalism 6 internationalization 9–10, 12 Iran 6, 34, 124, 168 Iraq 41, 169 Ireland 139 Islam 5–6, 32, 34, 52–3, 55–6, 147, 150, 168; see also Muslim Italy 3, 38–9, 42, 52–3, 63–4, 78, 103 Japan 15, 39, 94, 103–4, 113, 115, 123–79 129–35, 137–42, 153–4, 157–61, 163, 168–9 jobs see employment Kazakhstan 3 Korea 94, 129, 137–9, 153–4, 157–60 Kosovo 55 Kurdistan 109, 122 Kuwait 120

196 INDEX

Laos 96, 154 Latin America 45, 83, 93–4 law and Europe 78, 81–2 legalism 88–90 liberal 224 liberalism 12–13, 17, 145–8, 163 Lombards 38–9, 51, 57, 60, 63, 78 Lombardy League (or Northem League) 38–9, 52, 63, 78 Maastricht Treaty 42, 73–4, 76–7, 92, 155 Malaysia 137, 142, 162 market democracy 1, 31–7, 40, 44, 47–50, 86, 92 market economy 9–13, 19, 45, 146–8 meaning: appropriation of 15; bearer of 10, 123–4; claims to 68; crisis of 1, 4, 6–7, 10, 12, 14, 27, 66, 73, 84, 104, 143, 172; demand for 18, 69–70, 74, 95, 136, 173; guardians of 27; horizon of 22, 35, 76, 142; issue of 67; loss of 2–4; 6, 8, 11–12, 54–5, 79, 86, 89, 91, 95, 100, 108, 144; monopoly of 70, 107; need for 144; negotiated 133–34; of Europe 68, 75, 85; paradox of 76; production of 24; project of 4; providing 16, 18–19, 27, 36, 40, 70, 72, 77–8, 144, 147; reconstruction of 44; reserve of 32, 106, 172; synthesis with power of 16; system of 22–3, 90; transfer of 15, 24; see also collective meaning and common meaning meaning of Europe 68–70, 73, 75–8, 80–3, 85 meaning of History 75–6 meaning of the world 43

Mexico 49, 139, 142, 162 Middle East 32, 118, 130 military, conflict or power 4, 6–7, 16–17, 113–18, 168; policy 108, 114–17 modernity 5, 16, 25, 70, 84, 125, 133–34 Moscow, coup 41 multiculturalism 79–81, 167–8 multinationals 5, 9–10, 12, 80 Muslim 150, 168; see also Islam NAFTA 162 narcissism of small differences 3–4, 57, 66 nation 3, 12–13, 39, 65–6, 70, 82, 86–7, 91, 97–8, 110–12, 119, 174 nation state 18, 23, 52, 63, 71, 75, 141–3, 156, 169 nationalism 3–4, 14–15, 52–63, 65–6, 71, 74–5, 82, 93, 159–60 NATO 151 new international order, new order, new world order 4, 14, 16, 29–30, 33, 40–1, 86, 95, 111, 117–21, 175 North Africa 83, 139, 151 Northern League see Lombardy League Norway 83–4, 140 nuclear force 15–17, 20, 93 Ochine 124–25 peace 4 Peru 32 philosophy of history see History Poland 40, 46 power 4, 8–18, 17, 71, 77; and meaning 18–21; military power see military precaution strategy 167, 169–76 progress 2, 6, 11, 13, 23–27, 30 project 7, 30, 36, 50, 52, 106–8, 110, 118; European project 71–3, 75, 79, 83–5 projection 7–10, 19, 106–10 Quebec 57, 59 reference point, loss of 30, 53, 105

INDEX 197

regions 137–8, 142 regionalism. 153 regionalization 123, 136, 139–43 rejection of modernity 5 religion 5–6, 14, 168 research 114–17 return to nationalism, return of nationalisms see nationalism Revolution, French see French Revolution ritualism 89–90 Romania 31 Russia 2–3, 16, 41, 43–5, 54–7, 60–2, 65, 91–2, 96, 118–19, 149, 151, 154 Rwanda 109, 20–2 Salvador 118 Scandinavia 83–4 secession 102–3 separatism 55–9 Serbia 55, 58–9 Singapore 155–7 Slovakia 41–2, 57, 61–2 Slovenia 42, 55–6 social ties 11 social system see global social system social ties, 98–101, 103 socialism 44 Somalia 19, 109–10, 120, 122 South Africa 32, 47, 118 sovereignty 12, 38, 72, 113, 146, 156 space, empty see empty space; see also world space Spain 45, 84, 162–3 state 6–7, 21–2, 24–5, 27, 38, 73–4, 94, 96, 141, 148, 164, 167–8, 177; crisis of the state 6–7; see also nation-state and welfare state states 13, 20, 54, 57, 72–3, 91, 96, 102, 105, 107–8, 110–3, 118–20 subsidiarity 74, 81–2, 148, 155, 177 Sumatra 155 superpowers, or great powers 4, 22 Sweden 83 Switzerland 38, 94, 115 symbolic representation 12, 18 Syria 32 system see international system;

global social system Tadjikistan 61, 64–5 Taiwan 129, 155 Taylorism 26 technologies 99–100, 137, 142 teleology 18, 23–5, 34–5, 44, 51, 67–8, 70– 1, 75, 77, 79, 81, 104 telos 4–5, 8, 23–4, 26–28, 43, 47–8 territoriality 92 Thailand 96, 155 Third World 15, 19–20, 23, 71, 105 time, compression of 10, see also world time transcendence 24, 68–9 tribes 146–7 Turkey 109, 149–51 Ukraine 61–4 unipolar world 5 United Kingdom. 92, 127, 138, 140, 146–7 United Nations, UN 41, 105, 109, 118, 161, 171 United States see America universalism 16, 18–19, 22–3, 34, 37, 51, 59, 69, 95, 128, 167–8; deficit 127; message 128 universality 100, 133, 142 urgency 9–10, 107, 110, 177 USSR 2–3, 16–20, 26, 31, 37, 40–1, 61, 91– 3, 124–5, 140, 149 utopia 11, 1, 34–5, 43, 50, 107 Uzbekistan 63–5 values 14, 77, 149 Vietnam 96, 154–6 war 87–9, 91–2, 94–7, 174 welfare state 8–9 West 2, 31, 36–7 Western European Union 151 westernization 123, 150 work 8–9, 103, 105, 174–5 world space 7–8; see also meaning of the world

198 INDEX

world time 7–9, 31–2, 47–8, 52, 59, 158, 171, 177 Yugoslavia 3–4, 19, 30–1, 41, 55, 97, 105, 109; crisis of 11, 58, 143 Zimbabwe 32