It would be advisable to weigh as precisely as possible, the following trends which come under what is generally termed as globalisation:

• dominating financial power;

• intensification of trade relations which are becoming multilateral;

• dissemination of science and techniques which should remain the heritage of humanity;

• reproduction of ways of living, wearing clothes and eating;

• penetration of mass communication;

• effects of new technological networks;

• geopolitical transformations towards a multipolar world.

These different trends work deeply on the plurality of peoples, cultures, languages, spiritual and philosophical traditions. How can then, one distinguish between:

• strained identity and cultural resistance?

• sectarian narrow-mindedness and the need to belong?

• blind ethnocentrism and the need to subscribe to a collective memory?

• reactionary addiction to the past and reactivation of the sources of diversity of knowledge?

Between "the end of history" in standardisation (Fukuyama), the "geopolitics of chaos" of an uncontrolled market (Ignacio Ramonet), the "shock of re-emerging civilisations" (Samuel Huntington), can we make way for exchanges of "our creative diversity"¹ in a productive "dialectics of civilisation"², or the ongoing work of the French sinologue François Jullien3.

Indeed, analysis and denunciation of expropriation by accumulation and concentration of capital resulting in impoverishment, destruction and alienation, remains a political, ethical and intellectual requirement. In this context, Marxist philosophy has still not become obsolete. However, we had reached the geopolitical, cultural and economic limits of enlarged reproduction about fifty years ago. As far as we are concerned, the Bandung Conference (1955) is an important date for this reversal.

Globalisation is a reductionist and unidimensional theory, the other side of the economicist and technicist paradigm that it wishes to denounce. Their obsessional clouding of the concept of crisis rather expresses the contradictions of a Euro-Latino-Mediterranean thought whose abstract universalism, either idealistic or materialistic is questioned by the re-emergence of a multicivilisational world. Indeed, the big powers have lost the third world war – or the first real world war ? – at the geopolitical level which was started in 1948 against Korea, China, Vietnam, Egypt, Algeria, Cuba, Iran, Guatemala, Brazil, Afghanistan…. The blockades against Cuba, Iran, Libya and Iraq are proofs of the limits of the expansion of the American empire, just as the defeat of the Red (Soviet) army in Afghanistan preceded the dismantling of the Soviet Empire and the fall of the Berlin Wall. Undoubtedly the tragedies suffered by the Iranians and the Algerians are consequences of the Petroleum war which they have temporarily lost, specially because of the collaboration of the Saudi petrodollar with the empire.

But over and above denunciation and geopolitical analysis, we particularly need a globalisation of victories of peoples and civilisations since fifty years. We need to know how, based on their cultural and spiritual energies, their collective creativity in myriad initiatives, a multipolar and a multicivilisational world reunites every day. For instance we need to know better and link:

• Beijing womens’ conference

• Womens’ march in Philadelphia (In 1997 more than a million African women from America came together; this event was a landmark in the history of womens’ movements);

• Guatemala peace agreements and recognition of the Mayas;

• Formation of the group D8 (8 most populated Muslim countries);

• The political and cultural originality of the Iranian revolution and the confirmation of its independence since 20 years;

• The new urban paradigm constructed in Brasilia;

• Search for new western scientific paradigms hit by the break down of materialist and scientistic paradigms;

• Generalisation of different systems of therapies and WHO’s recognition of the diversity in medicinal systems;

• Intense spiritual quest in Europe and in the U.S.A (Buddhists, Muslims...)

• The Euro-Mediterranean conference in Barcelona where for the first time in 500 years, the two shores of the Mediterranean region met without any possibility of hegemony or external interference;

• The Euro-Asian conferences (Bangkok & London), rediscovering the paths of the silk route from memory.

The ethical lesson just given (April 1998) by Nelson Mandela to Bill Clinton illustrates this reversal of relations in the dialectics of civilisations. It goes without saying that five centuries of imperialism and monologue of civilisation can not be overthrown in a few decades. The multi-dimensional interactions reorganise civilisations, from within and outside; the great complexity-diversity-fertility of the process that is under way is opening numerous degrees of liberty, which does not exclude shocks, setbacks and blocks.

The ideology of globalisation gives birth to a unidimensional analysis which seems to blind us to the growing diversity. Of course the Chinese are testing Mac Donald, but how can we ignore the expansion of Chinese, Turkish, Arab, Italian, Mexican, Brazilian, and Pakistani fast-foods in Paris, Sao Paulo, New York or Istanbul. I prefer to see the image of "our creative diversity" in the diffusion of this culinary pluralism.

1 Title of the UNESCO report on Cultures and Development, 1996
2 Anouar Abd el Malek in Dialectique Sociale p. 339, Seuil, (Paris) 1972, and Darcy Ribeiro O povo brasileiro, Schwarez (Sao Paulo), 1995
3 "A sage is without idea or the antidote of philosophy", Seuil, Paris, 1998.

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