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COMPOSITION OF AN IDENTITY
come from countries at war, people caught in the crossfire, from former
colonies abandoned in the chaos or in the fragmentation generated by the
artificial drawing of frontiers at the service of imperial interests; they come
from cities destroyed by bombings called preventive, oppressed by caliphates
led by mercenaries paid by governments competing at a regional level. That is
why so many faced with hunger and death, escape.
Europe has a real problem and it’s not the immigrants, but its stagnated
socioeconomic structure that is unable to include its own people. Technology
improves productivity but reduces the work force. Medicine improves the
quality and the duration of life, but cannot resolve the fiscal cost of the
elderly. The young, with their diplomas, face an uncertain professional
future. Globalization attracted millions of new consumers to the global
market, but also allowed the inflow of outsourced workers who drastically
lowered salaries. A huge financial power surged and created an unjust and
exclusionary society.
Furthermore, the fall of the Berlin Wall put an end to a century in which
Universalist ideologies evaporated. It happened with Communism, but also
with the Welfare State, that is to say social democratic governmentality.
Religious fundamentalism didn’t come out of nowhere or appear due to an
unrestrainable desire of salvation.
In the seventies, after 1967, when the Six Day War put an end to Arab
nationalism, Nasserism, at the same time the modernization cycles of some
of the countries of the region generated a migration from rural areas to the
city of millions of people.
No one assumed responsibility for this forced urbanization process with
its ramifications of misery and degradation. This abandonment was fertile
ground for the Islamic discourse.
From 1977 to 1981, Menachem Begin was elected in Israel, Karol Wojtyla
in the Vatican, Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran and Ronald Reagan in the USA. In
some way they have contributed in great measure to designing today’s world.
The end of Stalinism in its different expressions, of the Welfare State,
the collapse of the emancipatory ideologies of Marxism as well as of the
Enlightenment values that shaped progressivism, the end of the great secular
narratives as Lyotard affirmed, will give way to a ruthless capitalism and at
the same time a new boom of religious fundamentalism.
Orthodoxies are in fashion, and tribal hatred expressed as ethnic claims
and struggles for new sovereignties and territorial and linguistic autonomies
shape the international scene.
The slogan is “go back”. The return of the names of the monotheistic God,
proclaiming its exclusivity, accusing the unfaithful, stigmatizing the person
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