Globalisation aspects.

While surfing on OpenDemocracy.net, I came across this interview of Zygmunt Bauman a Polish born sociologist and emeritus professor of Leeds and Warsaw University. For those who are already jumping to conclusions, this is a non-practicing jewish, but I don't think that is relevant to what he's saying. I invite whoever is interested in the globalisation to read this full interview of which I'm reproducing just this 2 questions. I'm very interested in your reaction on this.



Lukasz Galecki: How do you define the borders of globalisation?
Zygmunt Bauman: Globalisation is not a process taking place somewhere far away in some exotic place. Globalisation is taking place in Leeds as well as in Warsaw, in New York and in any small town in Poland. It is just outside your window, but inside as well. It is enough to walk down the street to see it. Global and local spaces can be separated only as an abstraction, in reality they are intertwined.
The main trouble is that the globalisation we are dealing with today is strictly negative. It is based on the breaking down of barriers, allowing for the globalisation of capital, the movement of goods, information, crime, and terrorism, but not of the political and judicial institutions whose basis is national sovereignty. This negative aspect of globalisation has not been followed by the positive aspect, and the instruments of regulation over economic and social processes are not established enough to deal with the reach and consequences of globalisation.
[...]

Lukasz Galecki: The war against the west has been waged in the name of the Russian soul, the Germanic race, communism, and now Islam. But Occidentalism, as an ideology of hate against the west – and when based on religious grounds – turns into a holy war against an absolute evil. In this holy war, true believers must destroy the false god of western materialism with all the powers and means they have at their disposal. Can such a war be won?
Zygmunt Bauman : Which came first, the chicken or the egg? We are facing much more than a politicising of religion, whether Muslim or any other. The issue is the “religionising” of politics, where the normal conflict of group interests is regarded as an eschatological matter, and the confrontation of these interests as having an apocalyptic character.
This is a longing for certainty in an unstable world. It is an escape from extremely complicated problems we cannot even name. It is a longing for the “great simplification”. It is nostalgia for a lost, simple world and the elementary array of tasks within this world.
In this general cacophony – where serious debate about the state of affairs almost never takes place, in which television shows have actors in front of the footlights shouting slogans at one another and using “word-bites” as weapons – one needs some kind of certainty. It can take the form of a simple division between good and evil, in which our hearts are immaculate, and the evildoers are condemned for they have no hope of redemption.
Islam has no monopoly on this vision. Both Palestinian and Israeli radicals, amazingly, use the same sort of vocabulary. Each side presents their conflict as an ultimate clash, not between Palestinians and Israeli settlers, but between Jehovah and Mohammed. A similar kind of vocabulary is present in news coverage of the 2004 American election, although the gods being worshipped had different names. But one must admit that in this vast current of today’s Manicheism, Islam – for geopolitical reasons – has occupied a very important position.