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still join the discussion, accepting the dialogue as a compromise. They
could also leave the room and even blow up the building."
EK: What did the students decide?
NM: A prolonged, tense silence followed. The majority of them were
still in shock. Finally, they chose dialogue. For some of them, it was
indeed a compromise. This seemingly trivial situation mirrored the
global alternative, the essential choice: democracy or war against it.
Democracy is, in fact, an often tedious search for compromise, a
complicated enterprise in domesticating aggressiveness. Compromise is
not acceptable for everybody, as the nihilistic "messengers" proved that
morning. Their answer was crime, the urge to blast the world apart.
Democracy is not a utopian project; even religious fanatics locate
paradise in Heaven, not on earth. It's not at all surprising that one of the
obvious results of democracy is incoherence-a form of freedom, prob–
ably. For some it scorns an important achievement, for many others it
acts as a disturbing reality with which they cannot cope. The unavoid–
able contradictions and conflicts, the inequalities and frustrations of
democracy, of freedom, as well as the widespread resentment against the
"demonic" and much-envied America may explain, at least partially,
that terrible September
I I
event.
Religious, as well as many non-religious, militants keep reciting Amer–
ica's shortcomings and the disaster of future "globalization." For better
or for worse, globalization is already part of our everyday life, through
television, computers, antibiotics, exotic travel. In many underdeveloped
and poor countries, or in countries with authoritarian, oppressive rule,
quite often the resentment seems not against globalization, but against
the lack of it. Globalization doesn't mean ethnic, ideological, or political
unification, but a metageographical network with all its promises and
risks.
It
would be useful and important to debate such issues, not
to
blindly reject the concept itself with simple-minded militancy.
EK: Can we not get around globalization?
NM: In their own way, the fundamentalists are also suggesting a kind of
globalization. Not a democratic one, of course, but a totalitarian one.
The real question remains of what kind of "globalization" might be
offered as an alternative. The mystical, totalitarian patriarchy of the Mid–
dle Ages that negates dialogue, difference, dissidence? The "holy" war for
the restoration of obsolete, collectivist traditions is not only part of Islam,
