The rule of the Caesars, which for 500 years held sway over an empire of 5 million square kilometres of land, today distributed among 30 states, was very different from the monarchies, such as the medieval and modern ones that are more familiar to us. Before the Revolution French kings inherited a kingdom that was their family's property; this fiction concerning family and inheritance was calmly accepted and perpetuated with astonishing ease. Roman emperors, on the other hand, had a high-risk job; they did not occupy the throne as its owner but merely as the appointee of the community, which tasked them with governing the Republic, in the same way, I am informed, as the caliphs were appointees of the community of the devout and with the same bloody conflicts each time the ruler changed.

Many people say that the world changed after 9/11 and that nothing is as it was. What does indeed appear true is that international politics has to change and come up with a new concept with new tasks and principles appropriate to the requirements of the situation.

This brief contribution aims to suggest an outline by tackling the transformation of the old concept of politics into a new politics, a politics adapted to the challenge thrown down by the events of 11 September 2001 that so shocked the world. A first draft of the tasks required will define the new principles on which these tasks are based, and will conclude with a short observation on the future political analysis of the university disciplines involved.

At the dawn of the new millennium religion is going through some radical changes: the first of these is related to the fact that the processes of secularization have had an influence on traditional religions, are doing so today and will continue to do so, starting with Christianity in its different forms, but they have not precipitated the decline of religion as an institutional and public factor and still less the decline of faith as a private phenomenon.

What we are experiencing is rather a huge process of transformation and adaptation of the religious as a private dimension and religion as an institutional factor, resulting in a profound metamorphosis of the socio-cultural situation (see Lyon, 2000). The two main elements of the change are as follows: the triumph of the mass media and consumer society and the processes of globalization (Kurz, 1995) are radically changing the very face of religion: groups and movements with a clear religious identity are involved in a relentless process that is at the same time a process of adaptation and resistance to these changes. The outcome of this process is uncertain, but there is no doubt that it is only where religions prove they are capable of using and adapting their messages of salvation to the new mass media system that they will be able to survive and maybe even spread.

Japan today projects an external image in which harmonious coherence provides a basis for technical efficiency and cultural excellence. Indeed there is much justification for this image. At the same time there are significant internal tensions which have a long history. Politics and religion have been intertwined for centuries. Political need has often been a powerful motor for religious developments. For example, the major Buddhist denominations were used to register the population and provide stability during the Tokugawa period (1600-1867). Subsequently, the political modernization of the Meiji Restoration (dating from 1868) set this aside and pushed up a new form of ideologized Shinto as a focus of national consciousness. Looking at it from the other side, religions themselves have often provided identities and loyalties, and therewith a motivation for political conflict. This applies to various forms of Buddhism, to Shinto, and to some of Japan's new religions. Thus while Japanese society in some respects appears to be very coherent, its history has frequently been one of internal tension and strife. Factionalism is strong even today, and takes both political and religious forms.

The work of those scholars who see an implicit relationship between religion and violence has of late assumed greater prominence and relevance. For example, in a recent volume entitled Religion and Violence, Hent de Vries states: ‘[v]iolence … finds its prime model - its source, force, and counterforce - in key elements of the tradition called religious. It can be seen as the very element of religion. No violence without (some) religion; no religion without (some) violence (Vries, 2001: 1). He elaborates further: ‘“religion” is the relation between the self (or some selves) and the other - some Other … “religion” also stands for the other - the Other - of violence. It evokes its counter-image, its opposite, its redemption, and critique’ (ibid., my emphasis). Similarly, Bruce Lincoln, writing of the social and political processes that underpin cultural, especially religious, groups, states that ‘“culture” is the prime instrument through which groups mobilize themselves, construct their collective identity and effect their solidarity by excluding those whom they identify as outsiders, while simultaneously establishing their own internal hierarchy, based on varying degrees of adherence to the values that define the group and its members’ (Lincoln, 2000: 411, my emphasis).

Clichés about the Orient and Oriental women, which imposed themselves with considerable force on the popular imagination, have been perpetuated in Europe since the Middle Ages. The projection of evil onto marginal or ineffectual groups within a society has always been an easy and useful method for making scapegoats. Jews in Medieval Europe were stereotyped and tried for a number of fictitious crimes such as poisoning wells, killing children for their blood and crucifying and cannibalizing their victims. Along the same lines women were associated with the devil and regarded as enemies of the Church, hence the witch-hunts that tried women for sexual voraciousness, cannibalism and consorting with evil spirits. The projection of evil onto an alien culture was also a distinctive aspect of medieval Europe's intolerance, due to its ignorance of such cultures.

The image of the cave described by Plato in Book VII of the Republic is the most frequently quoted emblematic example of the belief in the illusory nature of what sight transmits to the mind. ‘We must compare the world of the senses with the view of those who live in a prison’, says Socrates, referring to the cave in which there are men in chains who can see nothing but a wall onto which are projected shadows of objects lit by a fire behind them, and who, ignorant of the objects themselves, are inclined to give more credit to the shadows than the objects, as long as they are not free and able to rise in their souls from the visible to the intelligible world.

The whole history of human thought could be rewritten in terms of the confrontation between the eye and the mind. The immediate power, poignant charm, evocative force of the messages sent from one to the other have encouraged a bewitching abandon, internal illuminations, but also moments of deliberate blindness and destructive furies. Starting from periods of vague iconophilia, a large number of societies have moved to periods of obsessive iconoclasm in public forms of representation. From sublime experiences of divine mystical visions to the most degenerate forms of violence and pornography, it is the visual image, perceptible or mental, that imposes itself.

Iconophobia, literally the fear of images, usually occurs in proportion to the powers attributed to images by their believers and attackers. In the worst cases, these fears have led to, or coincide with, a cycle of violence that may involve the actual destruction of images (iconoclasm) and the actual destruction of human life. The distinction between the two activities is often blurred by the language we use: For instance, purging public spaces of the giant statues of Soviet leaders in the early 1990s resonates with the Stalinist purges of living people a generation before (fig. 1). The rhetoric of representation in such photographs of the subjugation and hanging of Lenin('s statue) in Romania in 1990, invokes a retaliation against the real man. The sheer number of such public statues throughout the Soviet Union and its satellites provided many communities with this opportunity for revenge. We also speak of the suppression of imagery, as of popular uprisings; or the eradication of certain beliefs, subjects in art, and even whole tribes of people.

Today it seems to be an urgent and necessary task to return to the texts by Michel de Certeau (1925-86). Not because Michel Foucault said of him that he was ‘the best, the brightest of [his] generation’, but for reasons to do with our present thinking.

Indeed, when we consider the social and political disarray of the moment, we are forced to recognize how hard it is, in periods of crisis, to clarify the changes taking place. That implies the emancipation of thought, a process that consists of an inventive interrogation of knowledge and a rigorous elaboration of understanding. This process is one that would not be subject to the dominant ideological models. In addition, thinking of the way clarification and emancipation are intertwined in the most successful intellectual constructions, some of us remember Certeau's work, whose central aim is to clarify the fundamental but stealthy transformations that abruptly emerge into the light of day and undermine the most tenacious assumptions.