The protection of property and people has changed in scale and goes far beyond the strictly territorial dimension. The new security takes care of flows rather than limits.
The pathetic construction of new walls is ineffective in stopping the flow of immigrants or terrorist penetration. For borders no longer make it possible to distinguish between the inside and the outside. The confusion of spaces questions politics on new issues that are much more complex than those previously dealt with in the cenacles of international law.
Most of the current conflicts can no longer be understood within a simple territorial framework. In a world without an outside world where technology makes it possible to overcome distances and borders, defence, armament and security issues take on a different nature. The world scene is becoming more complex, relations between States are changing, new forms of regionalization are being organized, new collective responsibilities are emerging in the humanitarian field or in the field of the right to interfere.
● Politicians can no longer be satisfied with simply asserting their monopoly on a given territory. It is up to them to invent new coherences in multiple spaces. It must seek new balances to overcome conflicting territorial logics.
This dimension of the politics of complex societies is unprecedented; it forces us to adopt a different logic of reasoning. Politics now evolves in spaces with multiple levels of territoriality, spaces that are mobile, dynamic, interconnected, extremely sensitive and reactive. Spaces that need to be reinvented, that allow membership of multiple communities and require a policy that is sufficiently plastic to adapt its form to the reticular configurations of realities.
In this fluid logic, the politician will have the immense task of generating respect. In the framework of society first of all, by making the social cement rest on listening, compromise and freely consented opinion. In the framework of international relations, too, by preferring to implement an infinite set of micro-decisions rather than imposing an artificial or abstract balance.
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