ABSTRACT
Today the effect of unity has disappeared. As in other social fields, one strong line of conflict is being replaced by several dispersed, unstable lines of conflict. The common characteristic of these diffused or open conflicts, whatever their intensity, is that they increasingly fall outside the logic of conventional conflict between states. This loss of meaning that was provided by conflict is not restricted to the world of states. It can also be found in the world of work, a world where workers live in universes that are too fragmented for their demands or confrontations to be integrated into a unified rationale which would give them a strong, collective meaning.2 Today, the crisis in links between nations and the crisis in social links go hand in hand. The champions of ‘a new world order’ have neglected the essential sociological relationship between conflict and identity. People thought a collective identity founded on cooperation and interdependence might quickly replace an identity built on conflict. The hypothesis of the new world order rested implicitly on the existence of a complementary relationship between the-very superficial-planet-wide consensus that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall, the globalization of problems, and the universalization of the issue of ‘market democracy’. The Cold War was seen as a veil which had hidden the reality of the world; the end of the war was therefore seen as a great unveiling operation, exposing the world to the light of Reason.
