The other globalization: violence (Libération)

What will be the aftermath of the World Trade Center’s apocalypse ? Everyone tries to understand. Libération reviews it. In "La puissance américaine condamnée à la modestie" Bertrand Badie, 51, the director of the high cycle of international relations in Sciences-Po, tries during an interview to fix the main change in perceptions that the collapse of the Twin Towers from New York has brought to us so brutally.

“The shock is that this enormous mass of violence which structures the international life is no longer concentrated in the South but tends to scatter”, he explains. And he adds that this violence “is no longer caused by States but by individuals or groups of individuals, or even by entrepreneurs specialized in violence. In brief, we have entered a world where the market of violence is completely deregulated.”

This situation results in the need to have a new strategic way of thinking which takes into account this other part of globalization , the globalization of violence. From now on, the United-States has to think about its role to face these new forms of conflicts and to redefine the shape of a weakened power. This don’t necessarily lead to isolationism but to revise their implication in international conflicts in a more modest way, Bertrand Badie remarks, quoted by Libération.

The conclusion: to avoid isolationism and to try to solve the flagrant problems which hit the poor “south”. By utilitarianism, even beyond any humanitarianism. “Tomorrow we will be hit by a sanitary risk in Africa”. And finally, a golden rule will become an essential point of international relations: aspiration after equality. (../..) Globalization increases inequalities but raises up an aspiration to equality as never before. Because everyone is now able to compare oneself to others.”