Let’s move now to the global level, let’s consider the world as it results from this manipulation, this stronger and stronger political manipulation of identities. What is the impact of this identity manipulation on the global order? How can we consider the world now in this atmosphere of emergence and development of the identity factor? The identity factor as structuring the new world order. The problem is that conceding an important role, an important political role, to identity is probably a source of a new instable order. I will try to point five figures of this new order, new when it is strongly affected and structured by these identity strategies. First we can consider this identity strategy as an instrument of a political strategy, and then we have to consider three kinds of figures. The first one will be using identity for governing, that's to say for strengthening a government order which seems to be weak or unable to reach its own goals. For instance, when the Rwandan president Habyarimana tried to mobilize the Hutus against the Tutsis. The idea was to use the Tutsis as a scapegoat able to mobilize Hutus around himself and to strengthen a weakened power. This was as you know the starting point of this terrible genocide which took place in 1994 in Rwanda, this genocide which probably made something like 800 000 or even one million people dead, was caused by a manipulation of identities in order to strengthen a political order which was weakened by a lack of legitimacy of president Habyarimana. It’s exactly the same now in Syria where the present president Bachar al-Assad tries to mobilize minorities, Alawi minority but also Christian minority for trying to tackle a support in the present Syrian civil war. That’s why it is a very common but also a very dangerous and often a very bloody strategy for reinforcing a political order which is not able to work and to work correctly. The second particular use of identities is to be found in the protest, organizing protests inside authoritarian systems. Inside authoritarian systems, identities, and especially religious identities, is the best way for expressing a deviant vision, a deviant voice against the power which is settled and which is contested. The Iranian revolution was mobilizing religion and religious identity for fighting against the Shah regime which didn’t tolerate any kind of political opposition. Identity has to be used and manipulated as a substitute of lack of political opposition. The third one will be to use also the identity for fighting against a deficient political and institutional order, in which identity is conceived as a possible substitute to a social contract which would be contested inside a society. This is a very common manifestation, a very common construction of identity in the present world order. The second one will be to try to territorialize identity. Territorializing identity is one of the main strategies which are used for questioning the political geography and the political organization of the international arena. But this territorialization should be, for being successful, an enforced territorialization, that's to say it implies ethnic cleansing and even more genocide, as it was the case for instance during the Yugoslavian war. But as it is also the case in many other parts of the world in which grouping individuals identifying themselves to the same group would imply to reject all the others who are coexisting with them. And this is the problem of Caucasia this is also the problem in Kurdistan. If Kurdish people wants to build up a Kurdish state, it has to clean up the territory, and to reject population who are not Kurds inside the Kurdish supposed territory. The third expression of this identity manipulation will be found in something which is a grave danger, which is jeopardizing our international order, that’s to say ghettoization, It’s the contrary of territorialization. Ghettoization means to confine a group, an identity group, which is rejected, in a territory in which it is shut up. That was the case of the black majority in South Africa during the Apartheid period, but it’s also the case of Palestinian people now which are enforced to settle in kinds of ghettos inside Cisjordania or in Gaza, that’s to say without any chance of contact with foreign countries and with other people. This ghettoization is also one of the characteristics of the Dayton agreement in 1995, when the Dayton agreement tries to reshape Bosnia according the identity similarities, and it was resulting in a very complex and sophisticated map in which the chance of communication and of coexistence was very low. We have to take care of this trend which is jeopardizing the spirit of the world order, that’s to say if every identity is shut up in a ghetto what does the international coexistence and international order would mean? And we can easily imagine how these ghettos are producing violence, feeling of revenge, and many kinds of strong and negative reactions are coming from the frustrations of the concerned people. The fourth figure of this ethnicization of the world would be the growing influence of new ideologies, ideologies which are no more based on political vision, on a political project of building up a new city, but ideologies which are deriving, which are coming from the apology of an identity and the willing to build this identity as a finality of the political action. This is true for instance of this new radicalism that we can find in Judaism but also in Islam but also in Christianity, which area kind of apology of these identities without taking into account the global order of the world and the project of creating a new politics. But there is also another derivation which is concerning now populism. Populism is this kind of ideology which is widely coming from identity and manipulating identity without being concern by the main trends of the new political issues and the new political goals. We can commonly find this kind of populism in many countries which are really impacted by the identity issues, I mentioned for instance many countries in Central Europe and especially for instance the evolution of Hungary in the present context. And finally the fifth figure of this ethnicization of the world is conflictualization of identities. It is something like a back clash of Samuel Huntington thesis. When Samuel Huntington considers that there was an essence of antagonism in each civilisation, it’s exactly the contrary that we can observe. That’s to say the more we use identity as a political instrument, the more identities are evolving to a conflictual project and to a very risky and dangerous competition. And now more and more the present world today is made of this competition of identities and so is conflictualizing the identity rivalry and the identity competition. So these are the five main features of this ethnicization of the world. You can observe that this ethnicization of the world at each level is really jeopardizing the international order, that’s to say threatening peace, threatening respect, tolerance, coexistence. And that’s why the main challenge of the present world order is to contain the political instrumentalization of identity in order to contain the risk of making it so dangerous.
