"You react to a crisis by projecting the cause of a crisis to a pseudo-concrete false figure. Of course, you say, capitalism is exploitation, financial speculation and so on, but it's not the system as such, it's, for example in the case of Antisemitism, the Jews. So you look for a concrete entity, up to a point, not quite. It's similar, and now in the crisis it will probably get worse, to pick on any foreigners, minorities, whatever. You project the crisis, the cost of the crisis, on them. I am always amused to see how, when right-wing populists attack foreigners they always use some strange mathematics where they always discover that the number of unemployed people is equal to the number of the immigrants, so that if we throw out the immigrants everyone of us would be fully employed and so on. So the paradox is that I think that this second form of mystification is a much more dangerous one, to put it this way, because it's much more difficult to undermine. And the danger I see more and more is that it will not be the old-fashioned fascism, but with growing danger we are effectively slowly, gradually approaching a kind of globalized emergency state. I don't mean there will be some kind of dictatorship in the Orwellian sense, but some level of emergency state will be accepted as normal, as is already happening in Italy, in the United States. My God, everybody today is against terror, against some threat in an emergency state. And here, I think that this delimitation against the others will become crucial. I think that if in the 1990's we celebrated the fall of the Berlin Wall, we said everything is opening, global circulation and so on, now, paradoxically commodities, products, can circulate freely, but for the people it's more and more difficult to circulate freely. So that's the paradox, that the human side of globalization is new walls everywhere. The United States wants to build even literally a wall towards Mexico. Europe, even some social-democrats now propose a formula of Fortress Europe, which is the old fascist formula. For example Pierre Bourdieu, who was the great French leftist, proposed the term Fortress Europe. His idea was, all the world is generally moving in some kind of a neoliberal wild capitalist direction. We in Europe should isolate ourselves, so that we can retain as much as possible the welfare state, social security and so on. I find this logic of self-isolation potentially dangerous. No, I'm not saying we should all drown ourselves in one big global identity or whatever. All I am saying is that paradoxically global capitalism itself functions more and more within its state as a logic of apartheid. Apartheid in the sense of different forms of closed communities, either people who are outside, who live in slums, or people on the opposite side who live in privileged gated communities and so on. This, I think, is another phenomenon which should worry us. Democracy can function relatively only if there is some kind of - now I will sound like a right-winger, but what do I care? - a basic patriotic unity that people recognize themselves as part of the same nation, but look, for example, more and more in today's United States, it's less... For example, academia. I feel much closer to an American, or Dutch, or British, or French academic than to an ordinary person in my own country. Culturally, when I went to the United States I found there is no problem in me communicating with people. It's the same culture, we watch the same movies, it's all globalized and so on. So this is what is happening. We are really, as some people are claiming, paradoxically returning to a pre-nation state, a kind of new feudalism, where it's not so much a patriotic unity of a nation state. It's more that within states and across states there are new estates, in the sense of the German Stände, estate, like guilds or whatever, which are becoming modes of identification. Again I think that what we are approaching is a globalized economy, but within relations between humans a kind of new tribalism almost. This is what the multicultural left and the conservative nationalist right-wingers have in common. They all want to assert their identity; only the multiculturalist left cares more for a homosexual, feminine identity, whatever. But there is this problem of identity, this fear of drowning yourself in some kind of universality. Some people think that the two opposed poles are today Fukuyama and Huntington. Fukuyama claims we are entering a new global society. Samuel Huntington claimed there was a clash of civilizations. But I think these are two sides of the same coin. Economically we are entering a global economy, but culturally we are entering a new era of apartheid. And I just see big clashes here."
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For example Pierre Bourdieu, who was the great French leftist, proposed the term Fortress Europe.
"You react to a crisis by projecting the cause of a crisis to a pseudo-concrete false figure. Of course, you say, capitalism is exploitation, financial speculation and so on, but it's not the system as such, it's, for example in the case of Antisemitism, the Jews. So you look for a concrete entity, up to a point, not quite. It's similar, and now in the crisis it will probably get worse, to pick on any foreigners, minorities, whatever. You project the crisis, the cost of the crisis, on them. I am always amused to see how, when right-wing populists attack foreigners they always use some strange mathematics where they always discover that the number of unemployed people is equal to the number of the immigrants, so that if we throw out the immigrants everyone of us would be fully employed and so on. So the paradox is that I think that this second form of mystification is a much more dangerous one, to put it this way, because it's much more difficult to undermine. And the danger I see more and more is that it will not be the old-fashioned fascism, but with growing danger we are effectively slowly, gradually approaching a kind of globalized emergency state. I don't mean there will be some kind of dictatorship in the Orwellian sense, but some level of emergency state will be accepted as normal, as is already happening in Italy, in the United States. My God, everybody today is against terror, against some threat in an emergency state. And here, I think that this delimitation against the others will become crucial. I think that if in the 1990's we celebrated the fall of the Berlin Wall, we said everything is opening, global circulation and so on, now, paradoxically commodities, products, can circulate freely, but for the people it's more and more difficult to circulate freely. So that's the paradox, that the human side of globalization is new walls everywhere. The United States wants to build even literally a wall towards Mexico. Europe, even some social-democrats now propose a formula of Fortress Europe, which is the old fascist formula. For example Pierre Bourdieu, who was the great French leftist, proposed the term Fortress Europe. His idea was, all the world is generally moving in some kind of a neoliberal wild capitalist direction. We in Europe should isolate ourselves, so that we can retain as much as possible the welfare state, social security and so on. I find this logic of self-isolation potentially dangerous. No, I'm not saying we should all drown ourselves in one big global identity or whatever. All I am saying is that paradoxically global capitalism itself functions more and more within its state as a logic of apartheid. Apartheid in the sense of different forms of closed communities, either people who are outside, who live in slums, or people on the opposite side who live in privileged gated communities and so on. This, I think, is another phenomenon which should worry us. Democracy can function relatively only if there is some kind of - now I will sound like a right-winger, but what do I care? - a basic patriotic unity that people recognize themselves as part of the same nation, but look, for example, more and more in today's United States, it's less... For example, academia. I feel much closer to an American, or Dutch, or British, or French academic than to an ordinary person in my own country. Culturally, when I went to the United States I found there is no problem in me communicating with people. It's the same culture, we watch the same movies, it's all globalized and so on. So this is what is happening. We are really, as some people are claiming, paradoxically returning to a pre-nation state, a kind of new feudalism, where it's not so much a patriotic unity of a nation state. It's more that within states and across states there are new estates, in the sense of the German Stände, estate, like guilds or whatever, which are becoming modes of identification. Again I think that what we are approaching is a globalized economy, but within relations between humans a kind of new tribalism almost. This is what the multicultural left and the conservative nationalist right-wingers have in common. They all want to assert their identity; only the multiculturalist left cares more for a homosexual, feminine identity, whatever. But there is this problem of identity, this fear of drowning yourself in some kind of universality. Some people think that the two opposed poles are today Fukuyama and Huntington. Fukuyama claims we are entering a new global society. Samuel Huntington claimed there was a clash of civilizations. But I think these are two sides of the same coin. Economically we are entering a global economy, but culturally we are entering a new era of apartheid. And I just see big clashes here."