After three decades of headlong globalisation, the world finds itself in dangerous and uncharted waters. Globalisation has fostered the illusion of intimacy while intolerance remains as powerful and unyielding as ever - or rather, has intensified, because the western expectation is now that everyone should be like us. And when they palpably are not, as in the case of the Islamic world, then a militant intolerance rapidly rises to the surface. The wave of Islamophobia in the west - among the people and the intelligentsia alike - is a classic example of this new intolerance. When I wrote a recent article for these pages on the Danish cartoons, arguing that Europe had to learn a new way of relating to the world, I got nearly 400 emails in response. Over half of these were negative and many were frightening in their intolerance, especially those from the US, which were often reminiscent in their tone to the worst days of the 1930s.
We live in a world that we are much more intimate with and yet, at the same time, also much more intolerant of - unless, that is, it conforms to our way of thinking. It is the western condition of globalisation, and its paradox of intimacy and intolerance suggests that the western reaction to the remorseless rise of the non-west will be far from benign.
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