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    Bombs, Booty and the Necessary Utopia
    By Jean-Jacques Roth
    Le Temps

    Saturday 29 December 2007

    The year ends in a tragic uproar. In the cauldron of Pakistan, destructive folly - eternally relentless against reason - assassinates a face of hope. Have we entered that era of hyper-violence certain theoreticians maintain goes hand-in-hand with globalization which, as it levels everything, impels us to restore our identity in rebuttal? Must we, because we buy the same jeans from Romont to Shanghai, eliminate the other to avoid sinking into the annihilation of global mimicry?

    One thing is certain: the globalized world as it yields a take-off for countries previously considered condemned to misery, is also manufacturing antibodies that become daily more virulent. Look at the out-and-out resurgence of nationalisms from Sarkozian France to Putin's Russia, by way of the Swiss Sonderfall [exceptionalism] the UDC exalts!

    Look too at the solidarities elaborated during the nineteenth century with the birth of industrialization and of the working class, solidarities so brutally and abruptly disturbed. The suspicion of abuse has taken hold to the point that it now gnaws at the redistributive system implemented after the Second World War. According to market fundamentalists, the legitimacy of taxes, even of the government itself, has been spoiled by it.

    On the other hand, the taste for wealth accumulation without hang-ups has triumphed. Encouraged by the communication and entertainment industries' celebritization, the "[ berriches," whose billions are extracted from everywhere, institute the blueprint for a caste with the same tastes and habits from one end of the planet to the other.

    Can we say, after all that, that 2007 was a green year? Emphatically, yes: today everyone agrees that human beings overexploit and overpollute their environment. The dawn of awareness has been general and spectacular: this special edition shows the scope of the movement. But how can environmental concern be transformed from a repellent machine for individual privations into the kind of collective project that arouses enthusiasm?

    The challenge is enormous, since the only solution is a global one. Yet, that solution will be the way to possibly renegotiate our tired social bonds and to regenerate that desire for the future - the key to which our wealthy but disenchanted societies seem to have lost.