AS Ulrich Beck says, unlike other previous civilizations, we cannot attribute everything that threatens us to external causes; societies are in conflict with themselves, with the production of that which they do not desire. Explaining this characteristic contrasts with our common sense, which tends to establish net causalities, distinguishes subjects from objects, thinks in terms of hierarchy, and explains the idea of defense in terms of spatial protection. To identify and understand the nature of threats in a world that belongs to everyone and to no one, we have no choice but to make a “metaphorological” effort. I am going to suggest three metaphors to correct our habitual way of thinking about these matters. I will begin with the idea that the world can be better explained according to the properties of gases, rather than liquids; secondly, I analyze the properties and effects of the excessive exposure in which we find ourselves during times of interdependency; and finally, I maintain that our world lacks outlying areas, in the sense that nothing, in fact, remains outside, peripheral, or completely isolated, and as a normative principle, we must not consider anything absolutely exterior. Between gaseous conditions, contagious realities, and spaces without closure, our understanding of the world in which we live is at stake, an understanding that is necessary if we are to be able to create something reasonable out of this world.
A GASEOUS WORLD
Metaphors can be dangerous toys, and that is why when people launch metaphors into the world, the metaphors simultaneously illuminate certain aspects of reality and verify their own limitations. In the same way that there is never light without shadows, there are no brilliant metaphors that do not occasionally blind us, preventing us from perceiving some aspects of reality that they wanted to clarify. That is what happened to the image of a society that had become “liquid,” as the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman characterized the current world, a world of fluidity that contrasted with the rigidity of the nation-states and the traditional frameworks of government. According to this imagery, the geography establishing traditional geopolitics is modified and the central question revolves less around controlling geographic space and more around controlling liquid fluidity.
Nevertheless, no matter how seductive the metaphor of liquidity, it does not, in my opinion, adequately describe the entire reality of current social processes; this is why the regulatory attempts of national and international organizations fail, as has been repeatedly confirmed, when it comes to controlling immigration, capital flight, and the governance of climate change, to mention only a few telling examples. We are hitting the limits of what has been called “hydraulic Keynesianism.” The metaphor of liquidity—given the homogeneous character of liquid elements—is not able to account for the global dimension of media turbulences—the buzz—that is created around events. This turbulence is initially explosive but quickly goes flat. Nor does the idea of liquidity sufficiently illustrate the phenomenon of financial bubbles, economic volatility, and speculation. When it comes to choosing an image that speaks for itself, Sloterdijk’s bubbles (1998) have more explanatory strength to help us understand a world comprising phenomena that are more atmospheric than material, a world made up of hoaxes, rumors, haziness, risks, panic, speculation, and trust.
Explanatory limitations tend to be accompanied by strategic failures; inadequate theories are translated into ineffective actions. We have known for a while now that the control of the channels through which materials are exchanged does not guarantee the control of content. Even though Russia, for example, controls a significant segment of the global gas and petroleum market, its role in setting final prices in the markets of New York and London is minimal. Countries or actors that exercise no physical control over “liquid” channels of transfer have considerable influence in the setting of those prices. There is a growing disconnect between the fluidity of commerce, the fluidity of capital, and currency exchange. The weak relationship between currency exchange and the products on which it is based, the spectacular growth of options and futures markets, and economic speculation are all phenomena that have more in common with atmospheric unreality than with liquid elasticity. It is also true that there is an increasing divide between the intrinsic value of the underlying “liquid” that is circulating through tubes (gas, financial flows, information, and the like) and the use value for end users, a value that can “contract” or “explode” based on speculative oscillations.
The control of channels is not always crowned by success. This is especially evident when we try to place barriers on immigration by considering it a question of fluidity and channels, as if we had forgotten that this is an issue that depends more on general economic conditions. People do not emigrate because there are conduits between one country and another but because there are inequalities that the movement of workers tends to balance out, in the same way as the atmospheric pressures of air balance out. That is why strict border controls barely modify the final result of migratory fluidity; it is not slowed by any barrier but by decreased economic opportunities.
More than a liquid world, the process of globalization has led to a “gaseous world.” This metaphor responds better to the reality of current financial markets and the mass media world since both are characterized, like volumes that contract and expand in the gaseous state, by cycles of expansion and contraction, growth and recession, a changeable volume. A gaseous world responds better to immaterial, vaporous, and volatile exchanges. These exchanges are very distant from the solid realities that characterized what we nostalgically call the real economy and are more complex than the movement of liquid fluidity. This image is also very appropriate for describing the increasingly uncontrollable nature of certain social processes, the fact that the whole world of finance, the media, and communications is based more on “gaseous” information than on fact checking.
In the new context of this gaseous world, the ability of international states or organisms to organize processes is as desirable as it is difficult. The proposed metaphor can help us understand the reasons behind this complexity. It is more difficult to control gaseous emissions than the circulation of a liquid. The great political problem of the contemporary world is how to organize things that are unstable. To do that, it is not enough to control the containers and channels of transmission, since an increasingly large number of exchanges are realized beyond traditional pathways and their use value depends increasingly on the particular conditions imposed by the end user.
Any attempt at regulation should focus on acting on the conditions and contexts that provoke the expansion or contraction of these speculative gaseous phenomena. The fundamental task for politics is to create a market environment whose essential parameters can be governed in some way. The classic and rigid act of channeling should be substituted by a flexible configuration that works at a distance, comparable to a magnetic field with electrical particles, in order to define the limits within which movements are free and not controlled. This flexibility would allow us to bring individual freedoms in line with the regulations that seem necessary so that free movement does not destroy the conditions of possibility, the system inside which they can act without provoking catastrophic situations.
Under these conditions, the effect of attraction is as mechanical as it is functional: the fluctuation that moves from one place to another is as banal as the winds that operate between two fields that have different pressures.
UNIVERSAL EXPOSURE
Humanity’s
principal concerns today are not concrete evils as much as indeterminate threats. We are not concerned about visible dangers but about vague risks that could spread anywhere, at the most unexpected time, and against which there is not sufficient protection. Of course, there are concrete dangers we can identify, but what most concerns us, for example, about terrorism is its unpredictable nature. What is most worrisome about the current economy is its volatility, in other words, the weakness of our instruments to protect us from financial instability. In general, much of our discomfort comes from how exposed we are to threats we can only partially control. Our ancestors lived in a more dangerous but less risky environment; the poverty in which they lived would certainly be intolerable for us today, but we are exposed to risks with which they were unfamiliar. If it is hard for us to understand the nature of these risks, they would have found them literally inconceivable.
Let us consider everything that has to do with the effects of climate change, the risks of nuclear energy, terrorist threats (so qualitatively different from the dangers of conventional warfare), the fallout of political instability, the financial repercussions of economic crises, the epidemics that need only the mobility of people and foodstuffs to arise, the consequences—unknown until recently—of the financialization of the economy, the spreading of rumors, distrust, and panic, which is as swift and uncontrollable as the speed of information, and so on. With all these phenomena, we experience the most worrisome part of the general interdependence that characterizes the globalized world: contagion, chains of events, pollution, turbulence, toxicity, instability, shared fragility, universal effects, overexposure. We could talk about the epidemic character of contemporary society (Lemarchand 2003; Neyrat 2004). At the heart of our discomfort, there is a “panicked fear of fluctuations that would flood the codes,” which Deleuze and Guattari referred to some years ago and which the passing of time has done nothing but increase (1972, 164).
What is the cause of this feeling of excessive exposure and our resulting discomfort? We owe it to the reality of our mutual dependence, something that has in fact provided us many benefits. Talking about interdependence is a way of referring to the fact that we are exposed in an unprecedented fashion and do not have sufficient protection. Interdependence signifies mutual dependence, a shared lack of protection. We live in a world where “all things hang together,” or, to say it in the language of Leibniz, “all things conspire.” Nothing is completely isolated, and “foreign affairs” no longer exist; everything has become domestic. Other people’s problems are now our own, and we cannot view them with indifference or wait for them to necessarily turn to our own advantage. This is the context of our unusual vulnerability. The things that used to protect us (distance, state intervention, foresight into the future, classic defensive procedures) have become weakened for various reasons and can now barely afford us sufficient protection.
We could affirm without exaggeration that there are no longer large distinctions between outside and inside, between nature and human, between that which is ours and that which is someone else’s. Or to express it in a more unobjectionable manner, these distinctions are no longer clear and noncontroversial. “The Great Divides” that were until recently organized by our living spaces should, according to Latour, be seen as intertwined dimensions, affording some novel ways of thinking (Latour 1999). This is what Ulrich Beck called “boundarylessness”: there is no way to expel to the exterior the undesirable consequences of our actions, which will end up affecting us like a boomerang. We could call this the fundamental self-influencing of the modern world.
Perhaps we have not deduced all the geopolitical consequences that stem from these new realities and make us so dependent on one another. In such an intermingled world, not even the most powerful among us is sufficiently protected: hegemony collides with the fact that, even though those who are less powerful have never been unimportant, fragmentation and empowerment now create situations that are off-balance and asymmetrical and not always favorable to the will of the powerful. The weak, when it is clear they are not going to win, can damage those who are strong and even make them lose in the end. While each individual state created its own laws under the Westphalian model, in a world of interdependencies, the strongest is continuously held hostage to the weakest, regarding its security, its health, its economic stability, or the protection of “its” environment. Everyone is exposed to the effects of the disorder and turbulences that develop on the periphery.
When borders are blurred in such a way that it is not easy to determine what belongs to us or to someone else, when phenomena circulate and expand very quickly, when there is no action without a response, it is logical that the problem of threats and protections is considered with greater urgency, although sometimes in an unreasonable manner. In the absence of global protections and in view of the weak security that states afford, individuals search for immunological microspheres like walls, cars, the stigmatizing of the Other, protectionisms, segregation, and so on. That is why there is an entire paranoid politics that pursues borders, insists on recuperating the old distinction between the outside and the inside and the separatist insularities that try to achieve total immunity.
The problem is that certain defense mechanisms are dangerous, and they end up being potentially self-destructive when attempting to be protective. Separatist bubbles run the risk of transforming themselves into redundant protections that provoke disasters that are similar to the ones they are trying to ward off. Let us think about dangerous combinations of medications, preventive wars that are lost, walls that, rather than protecting us against evil, isolate us from good and exacerbate hatred toward the Other. Perhaps what best illustrates this paradoxical connection between overexposure and overimmunization, the logic of harmful protections, is the image of drivers who straddle two contradictory automotive realities: that double, ambivalent condition between maximum exposure and the sense of maximum immunity.
But how do we wake up from the dream of immunity? How do we protect ourselves without self-destructing? Among the risks of “immunopolitics” (Sloterdijk 1998; Esposito 2002) is the destruction of the community, of sharing, because of the asymmetry of protections. The worst inequalities are expressed in the social dualization between those who are immune and those who are fully exposed. The community destroys itself when there is no reciprocity or interaction because a community is a particular community of risks. In a society that is excessively and unequally protected, we do not have community but distinct spheres of self-protection that allow us to “place the other at a distance,” thus configuring a species of “intangible bodies” (Brossat 2003, 15).
But there is also a question of principle that reveals the paradoxes of all immunity. Anyone who wants to be protected must start by limiting the scope and extent of their security measures, if they do not want to destroy themselves in case the security measures go beyond the destruction of supposedly pathogenic elements. They must, therefore, “protect themselves against their own protection, their own police, their own power of rejection, their own isolation, in other words, against their own immunity” (Derrida 2001, 67). Total immunity, the success of protections, would, according to Derrida, be absolute evil, equivalent to self-destruction. Absolute evil is the failure of absolute protection, or in other words, its complete success.
This overexposed situation is largely unfamiliar, which is why it raises numerous interrogatives for which we do not have suitable answers. What can protections be like in this type of world?
We must, first of all, overcome the temptation to produce spheres of impenetrable security. A perfect enclosure is impossible and the dream of that impossibility demands considerable energy. We should learn from the human organism, which boasts systems of protection that are very sophisticated but less rigid than we generally suppose or would, in principle, desire. But the fact is that we owe our extraordinary survival to the flexibility of our defenses.
If ecology has afforded us the model of systematic thinking, we could consider a global ecopolitics that kept some of its properties in mind. In the first place, it is important to realize that a human being has ten times more symbiotic micro-organisms than cells of his or her own. It is even possible to say that the organism is more exogenous than endogenous. There is a true symbiosis in the case of intestinal bacteria, which are crucial for digestion. We also find that some of the micro-organisms that we tolerate play a role in our immune system. It makes no sense, therefore, to consider bacteria as dangerous externalities and the immunity of the organism as a fight to the death against everything that is different from it. On the contrary, considering immunity from the point of view of tolerance, interactions, and habitual internalization means accepting that the organism is not separated from its surroundings or absolutely protected in the face of external influences. That which we could call barriers—like skin or mucous membranes—are places that are more given to exchange than to isolation. The organism is not only capable of interiorizing external beings, but this internalization is needed for its preservation, for its normal functioning, its immunity.
Of course life is not possible without protection. If separatist bubbles are dangerous, pure exposure to everything that pops up is unthinkable. But protections are effective when they allow for a certain type of relationship and when they are integrated into processes of building common ground.
It is not strange that a vulnerable, contagious globality inevitably triggers strategies of prevention and protection, which are not always effective or reasonable and often turn into hysterical reactions, unfounded fears, and disproportionate responses. Many of our current defense strategies—whose icon par excellence could be the construction of barriers—are either literally ineffectual or awaken feelings of fear and xenophobia that end up doing more damage to us as a society than that from which we wanted to protect ourselves could do. In the age of global warming, intelligent bombs, digital attacks, and global epidemics, our societies should be protected with strategies that are more complex and subtle. We cannot continue with procedures that seem to ignore the environment of interdependence and the common exposure to these global risks.
We must learn a new grammar of power in a world that is made up of more shared opportunities and shared threats than self-interest. Self-interest has not disappeared, of course, but it is untenable outside of the framework of the communal process in which we are all implicated. While the ancient power struggle promoted the protection of that which belongs to us and indifference toward that which belongs to others, overexposure forces us to mutualize risks, developing cooperative procedures, sharing information and strategies. We must deepen the debate that points toward global governance, the horizon that humanity should pursue today with the greatest of energies. It sounds difficult, but it is certainly not pessimistic: governing global risks is humanity’s great imperative if we do not want the thesis of the end of history to be verified, not as an apotheosis of the placid victory of liberal democracy, but as our worst collective failure.
A WORLD WITHOUT OUTLYING AREAS
We may owe the first formulation of the idea of globalization to Kant when he warned that, given the spherical surface of the earth, we all end up encountering one another: human beings cannot be dispersed indefinitely, so we have no choice but to tolerate other people’s company. If the world were shaped differently, dispersion, the protection of some against others, definitive isolation, or exclusion would be possible (Kant 1968a, 6, 358). The fact that everything is connected to everything invites us to consider the world as a unified system (which does not exclude the possibility of asymmetries and malfunctions). Initiatives generate resistance in this system; the separation between that which is inside and that which is outside becomes problematic, and we are all exposed to the same difficult conditions.
In all likelihood, we owe this consciousness of sharing a common fate to the presence of risks that threaten us equally and relativize the distinction between individual and common concerns. In the same way that these undesired risks do not respect delimitations or areas of sovereignty, the shared world is constituted as a suppression of rigid differences between what is ours and what is someone else’s. The contrast between self-interest and public interest is increasingly useless, just as the contrast between here and there is disappearing. We can explain this odd juxtaposition through the metaphor of a world that has lost its outlying areas, its outer edge, outskirts, suburbs (Innerarity 2004, 119–127). A thing can be considered global when it leaves nothing outside of itself, when it contains everything, connecting and integrating so that nothing remains loose, isolated, independent, lost or protected, saved or condemned, outside. The “rest of the world” is a fiction or a way of speaking when there is nothing that does not in some way belong to our common world. In a world without outlying areas, close or immediate is no longer the only dimension available, and the horizon of references is notably expanded. The tyranny of closeness is relaxed, and other considerations come into play. This could be formulated with Martin Shaw’s precise expression: “there are no others” (1996). For Beck, globalization also means the experience of a civilizing self-threat that suppresses the mere plural juxtaposition of peoples and cultures and introduces them into a unified space, into a cosmopolitan unity of destiny (2002, 37–38). Along similar lines, David Held speaks of communities “that share a common destiny” to indicate that the globalization of risks creates an involuntary community, an unintended coalition, which means that no one is left outside of this common fate (2000, 400; see also Albrow 1996; Robertson 1992).
The suppression of the outer edge implies the end of two habitual operations that are like two sides of the same coin: assuring one’s own immunity and pushing what is undesirable toward the edges. When outlying areas existed, there were a series of operations that allowed us to make use of those marginalized spaces. It was possible to flee, wash one’s hands, ignore, protect. There was some logic to the exclusivity of one’s own possessions, one’s own practice, the good of the country. The disappearance of outlying areas, to the extent that it eliminates the distinction between interior and exterior, results in the loss of a free trade zone from which other people’s failures can be observed with equanimity. It signifies, therefore, the end of any guarantee of immunity. It makes difficult and precarious the perimeterization that, whether spatial or temporal, would allow us to protect ourselves from certain problems.
On the other hand, when we had outlying areas, almost everything could be resolved with the simple operation of externalizing problems, pushing them to the edge, outside of our field of vision, to a distant place or another time. An outlying area is specifically a place where we can simply discard unresolved problems, waste products, a garbage dump. The modern theory of the sovereign nation-state was expressly configured to move the problem of chaos to the outside: Hobbes assured internal order with a concept of sovereignty that meant “exporting” anarchy to the outside, thus configuring a competitive international system.
Perhaps the most beneficial side of the civilizing process and the advancement in the construction of spaces for the common world can be formulated through this concept of suppressing outlying areas. Without needing anyone to sanction it expressly, it is increasingly difficult to hand responsibility off to other people, to distant regions, to future generations, to other social sectors. Globalization presumes the impossibility of expelling the Other to a location beyond our reach. Our greatest progress takes the form of obliging interiorization and forbidding externalization.
This is because a world without outlying areas is a world that has been configured systemically, in other words, from the consciousness that all initiatives contain a principle of resistance, there is no action without reaction, plan without side effects, decision without protest, sovereign who is not observed. No one can be completely passive or merely a receptor. Everyone who acts in a global, interdependent world must confront the consequences of what they are doing in an especially intense manner. It is the time for cooperation, but also for reciprocal impediments. When we ask someone for cooperation, we are at least recognizing that person’s capacity to obstruct, which is the most elemental form of sovereignty.
We find the breakdown of the rigid dichotomy between interior and exterior on the basis of this rebalancing of the world. We must not forget that the collective goods for which the nation-states took responsibility have been defined as those from whose use and enjoyment “insiders” cannot be excluded while procedures existed to authorize the exclusion of “outsiders” (Olson 1971). Complex systems, on the other hand, are characterized by “overlapping memberships” and “cross-cutting affiliations.” Many of the debates that have recently arisen would not have been considered when the traditional limits between the inside and the outside were fully operable. After developing an entirely new legitimation of military interventions or humanitarian aid, for example, after the intense discussion surrounding transnational regulations or universal jurisdiction, there is even talk of a “right to monetary interference” that, considering the reality of globalization, could regulate the international credit market.
All these circumstances presume, at the same time, an extraordinary increase in what must be considered public space and a previously unknown difficulty with configuring common spaces for which we do not currently have adequate instruments. This complication stems from the most radical transformation realized by a world that tends to eliminate its outlying areas, namely, the difficulty of defining limits and establishing any strategy based on them (be it organizational, military, political, economic). In the best-case scenario, when it is possible to fix the limits, we must also know that any construction of limits is variable, plural, contextual and that the limits must be defined and justified over and over again, according to the matter under consideration. The immediate consequence is that the interior and exterior of any activity are continually confused. While we most likely have not yet drawn all the conclusions that derive from this fact, we must now accept as indisputable truth that no important problem can be resolved locally and that, strictly speaking, internal politics and external affairs no longer exist. Everything has become internal politics. The number of problems that governments can only resolve cooperatively is increasing, at the same time as the authority of transnational organizations is strengthened and the principle of nonintervention in other nations’ affairs loses legitimacy. The limits between internal and external politics have become extremely vague; “external” factors like global risks, international standards, or transnational agents have become “internal variables.” Our way of conceiving and implementing political decisions will not be up to the challenges we are facing if the distinctions between “inside” and “outside,” between “us” and “them,” are not placed into question as concepts that do not help govern within geographically unlimited areas (Grande and Risse 2000, 251).
The world is already a collection of intertwined destinies, of spaces that overlap, an involuntary implication that leads to unusual communities and spaces in which a common destiny is at stake. Our destinies are implicated to the extent that we share a common fate. Globalization is a mixture of shared goods and opportunities; it empowers us all and makes us particularly vulnerable. It is something that becomes especially painful with common problems that, like catastrophes, know no limits and stop at no barrier. Another of our most startling paradoxes is evidenced here: we have acquired a greater sense of the unity of the human race in the face of evil than in view of the good, in other words, before global problems like peace and war, security, the environment, pollution, climate change, food risks, financial crises, migrations, or the effects of technological and scientific innovations. That is why one could speak of risk as a potentially unifying factor (Habermas 1996) or of the productive and mobilizing force of dangers (Jonas 1979). The consequences of humanity’s civilizing experiment place us within a framework of dependencies that forces us to take the interests of others into account in order to protect our own interests. Although the solution to these problems is still controversial, the conflicts themselves have an integrating function, to the extent that they reveal the need to find common or negotiated solutions.
The starting point for constructing a world of common goods consists in understanding the implications of diverse spaces in a destiny that tends to be unified or, at least, getting rid of any limitation of areas and subjects, as national belief systems have always preferred. One cannot understand the current world situation without taking into account the intrinsically polemical nature of the question, who are we? Globalization is a process that makes the determination of one’s own identity broader and more complex, more permeable and interconnected with other collective destinies. In the era of globalization—in the era of interlaced destinies, of side effects that affect all of us—we again find validity in Dewey’s idea (1988 [1927]; see also Beck and Grande 2004, 63) that politics creates its own public spaces according to what is in play at any given time: political controversies do not arise in the places where decisions are made as much as in the diverse contexts where the dramatic consequences of those decisions are perceived. Be that as it may, a globalized government would then have to become something like a regime of side effects, whose scope of action does not coincide with national limits. The political arena then becomes everything that is perceived as a bothersome consequence of society’s decisions.
From this point of view, we can understand that the current economic crisis does a very good job of exemplifying the nature of globalization and the idea that we are in a world without surroundings. First off, it can be claimed without exaggeration that it is probably the first truly global economic crisis, a crisis where globality aggravated the crisis. Normally economic and financial relations tend to play a moderating role in national crises. International movements of capital and variations in exchange rates allow us to minimize the initial impact by diverting part of it toward the “rest of the world.” But in the case of a global crisis, on the other hand, there is no “rest of the world” that can perform this moderating function, and the crisis cannot help but deploy its internal logic until the end. In fact, it has already been observed that synchronized international crises are stronger and more economically costly than other crises. This is even truer for global crises, to the extent that we are not equipped with institutions capable of managing this globalization and its risks.
On the other hand, the crisis has revealed the inconvenience of distinguishing what is inside and outside, failing to note their interaction. In the financial arena, for example, banking regulation has been revealed to be ineffective given its microprudential nature. In other words, it takes into account the risk related to the insolvency of a particular banking entity, but not the insolvency of the banking system in general (which it tends, on the other hand, to provoke). The regulations have prompted a very harmful distinction between the balance of the banks and the lack of balance of products. The things that are “out of balance” have acted as if they were “outside,” and that, as we have seen, no longer functions. The banking system can be affected as much by an upsurge of internal risks to its balance as by an upsurge of external risks to its balance, once this upsurge reaches a certain breadth and acquires a systemic dimension. The search for a lesser risk at any cost, whether by overcoming the risks to the bank balance (through securitization and derivatives) or through ever-higher capital demands, runs the risk of pernicious side effects.
If this is the nature of the crisis, then the need to provide a systemic and cooperative response is clear. Financial imbalances have largely been due to regulators’ inability to exchange information, to the fact that—in the best of circumstances—states have merely juxtaposed national politics, offering no global response to the crisis. But the failure of cooperation that was the true cause of the crisis of 1929 reveals that we are now living in a new age where states are no longer in any position to pursue their interests without taking the interests of others into account in some way. States must abandon that stage in which they have had great difficulties in managing interdependencies and transnational externalities as soon as possible. The horizon of financial governance registers increasingly as an unavoidable reference, once we realize that the interstate framework is inadequate, incapable of dealing effectively with a global crisis and, more generally, of preventing global economic and financial instability.
In the end, this all leads us to a reconsideration of legitimacy as inclusion. Metaphors of garbage and immunity point toward the same demand for inclusion, the fight against asymmetries and their increasing discomfort: the spatial asymmetry between the territorial nature of the states and the global nature of many of our problems; the temporal asymmetry that advises us to adopt an intergenerational perspective when it comes to adopting certain decisions (all the decisions that have to do with sustainability) beyond the fixation on the current legislature; cognitive asymmetry that stems from the complexity of political questions and requires realizing new equilibriums between expert knowledge and the demands for participation. It is not strange that there is an intensification in the demand for a reduction in the distance between decision makers and shareholders, between those who decide and those who are affected by those decisions, in such a way that symmetry is restored between those who act and those who suffer and the connection between political geography and economic geography is reestablished.
The processes aimed at politicizing globalization have the same legitimacy as the processes aimed at political decentralization and similar goals: in all such cases, there is an attempt to allow for the possibility of including those who find themselves significantly affected by a decision. All democratizing impulses have come from the scandal of having binding decisions that not everyone has accepted. This is also the case with globalization, even if we know that the procedures for democratizing globalization will need to be more complex than the procedures that served for the configuration of nation-states. In this respect, David Held (2005, 252) formulated a criterion for drawing proper boundaries that required calculating the range of people whose life expectancies are significantly affected by a particular decision. It is safe to assume that we will have more intense discussions in the future about the appropriate jurisdiction for handling public goods, for avoiding unacceptable power imbalances during the decision-making process, or for thinking that market forces are capable of resolving these questions.