Decision Makers 2010   Executive Summary Conclusions Papers Program Participants Book List

				Jon Bingen On the state and civil society The challenge facing the reinforcement of civil societies is to have a legitimate, functional state with proper financial support. The civil society is not an antipode to the state or the country. Both are a dialectical unity: different kinds of civil societies imply different kinds of states and vice versa. Therefore if you want functioning civil societies you need a functioning state. State legitimacy is highly at risk even in Europe, even in Western Europe. But demography, migration, conflict-management or the creation and maintanance of privacy laws are state issues. Dangers also depend very much on managing to have an efficient state with a sufficient and legitimate monopoly on violence. I think one of the most dangerous things in contemporary society is the erosion of the monopoly of violence for the states. On the causes of war A comment on Will Wechsler's speach (LINK): It is very dangerous to mix up all kinds of dangers. I don't think that the main danger is evil. The danger occurs due to deliberate strategies out of what you perceive as legitimate needs. Your antagonist is not an evil person. He is a man forced to use force. If we accept that, than we make war something comprehensible because it's politics conducted by other means, and we should be able to contain it because we should be able to accept the enemy as somebody who has some rational end, and consider how we could make a compromise in which his ends are compatible with ours. I am scared to make all our conflicts what Clausewitz called 'absolute.' We demonize the enemy and by so doing we are eliminating the possibility of reducing the conflicts. On societies' inability to remember What is dangerous, is that no society has by nature a memory. I think the paradox of today's so-called technological revolution is actually that we reduce our capacity to have a memory, to reflect. To sit down and say we are not in a hurry. We need to think a little bit more profoundly. I think the common denominator today is Herbert Spencer and partly Adam Smith, and both are insufficient for mankind to understand the human condition. I would like to put attention to German philosophers as Kant and Hegel which are very good critics of both Spencer and Smith. We should read them and be inspired by them.
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