« At the economic level, how to produce, share and preserve ? » in «Actes du Colloque : Les valeurs, quels enjeux pour le 3ème millénaire ?», Beirut
Held few time after the September 11 attacks, the conference starts by stressing the changing and ever ambiguous place of “poverty” in the view of economy: is it a necessary or desired worry, complementary to a self sufficient economic logic or an intrinsic dimension of the practise of economy, a founding finality ?
Leaving aside the self-righteous discourses, one must recognize that the economy gives obvious answers to the questions asked. But these answers have their limits: external limits (exhaustible resources), practical limits (fragility of the institutional frameworks), internal limits (social tensions) and mainly political limits.
Values, whether considered as permanent moral facts or social products, play a subversive role in society. There is therefore a need to adapt the regulation through a double system of control and exclusion, between dominating elites and dominated groups, both in the rich and in the poor countries an between rich and poor countries; with what this implies in terms of vertical and horizontal relations. But globalization has induced the development of diagonal relations that are dangerous and potentially explosive. Terrorism and anti-terrorism are tragic manifestations of them.