Denouncing the perspective of the clash of civilizations does not do away with the fact that globalisation brings together representations of the world whose differences become more important as they are more easily discernible and seem more immediate and consequently, if they are not understood and accepted, more threatening.

Cultural globalisation is a metamorphosis of which the structuring effects are felt in every sector and at all level of human activity. It puts in competition often dissociated and rearticulated political, economic, social and cultural systems. These processes bring the redefinition of the areas of human interaction and symbolic spaces that expand the possibilities for operating at the global level. (Geocultural spaces take on a new significance and reach.)

Globalisation is not a destiny. It is a complex process that results from human decisions and actions and therefore must be shaped by human will. We can no longer conceive and manage the local and national without taking into account global processes. Nor can we think about the global starting from the national; national or state policies can only manage the effects of globalisation, not the process itself. Accordingly, we must invent ways to devise a framework for global processes through political channels rather than bureaucratic norms or the market.

To find the politics, we must start from the fundamental question that globalisation raises in a new way: how can we interact and live together with our differences at the local, national and extranational (regional and global) level? Presented in these terms that are understood by all, the question of the governability of globalisation calls for appropriate, articulated responses at each level. It forces us to think about global governance's relationship with democracy. It brings to light the need to develop the means to elaborate a framework for global process in a world which is no longer solely defined in terms of state or national frontiers.

This is the viewpoint from which a political approach to geocultural challenges can and should be elaborated, without reducing them to elements of geopolitical and geoeconomic issues. Culture cannot be treated as an exception or in a way which renders it subordinate to the reasons of state or the market. The issue is not about protecting cultural diversity in its past or present expressions. The cultural pluralism project rather consists in defining acceptable conditions of interaction between geocultural entities. In this way, responses to cultural globalisation can be elaborated as a political alternative to the clash of civilizations perspective found.

This political project can be developed around the following hypotheses :

Is this utopia? On the contrary, realism demands that through political ways which are not limited only to the State, we find concrete responses to the challenges posed by globalisation, and in particular by its cultural dimension.

This movement could be started if some geocultural spaces - they are not simple products of history would initiate an instituting process similar to those undertaken by regional entities for other challenges. Accordingly, these spaces could experiment a body that would oversee the regime and allow for the formation of a genuine space for intercultural interactions. So doing, they would be asserting the political dimension of culture and its primacy as a constitutive process established in a voluntary way by every human community.

Thus, geocultural spaces, transnational as geoeconomic spaces, will set up spheres of responsibility, interaction and coexistence in a system that is not only international but more and more global, as a means of building Otherness and coming to terms with interdependence.

List of topics for debate :

(Translated from the French version (Jean Tardif) by Paule Herodote)

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