We do not yet have the solutions to these questions, but the awareness that we live in an endangered world is present in more and more life situations.
The world has become so complex that the idea of a power in which everything comes together and can be controlled in a centralized way is now erroneous.
Nonetheless, we continue to be obsessed with finding or inventing a European nation which, as in the nation state, guarantees homogeneity and thus an appropriate form of democracy and centralized government.
In the first instance, therefore, global terrorism created a kind of global community sharing a common fate, something we had previously considered impossible.
And it also became clear that these conditions of inequality and historical injustice have given rise to a feeling of hate in the world - a deeply felt hate that cannot easily be overcome with a few good words.
But it then very soon became clear that the response of a war against terrorism, initially conceived of in a metaphorical sense, began to be taken increasingly seriously and came to entail waging a real war.
This experience actually means the very opposite: the largest military power was unable to stop such a sensitive attack and will be unable to rule out such a possibility in the future. Precisely this is the background to the United States' military interventions.
Relinquishing apparent national sovereignty does not have to entail a loss of national sovereignty, but can actually be a benefit.
The basic assumption of the secular society is that modernity overcomes religion.
That was the first major social sciences conference at which social scientists from all cultures wanted to reach a consensus on whether we can continue to pursue a national course in the social sciences or whether we need a cosmopolitan path that also connects us in a new way.
You need education. You need subsistence protection. We need jobs and social security. These are preconditions under which it will perhaps be possible to deal with these complex circumstances.
The idea that you surrender your identity when you relinquish national powers is unhelpful. No, indeed, precisely the opposite is the case: if done in an intelligent way, you attain the sovereignty to better solve national problems in cooperation with others.
Western countries in particular can today no longer be separated from Muslim societies, because they have them within themselves. They are themselves internally globalized.
