The chapter considers the different levels of power, starting with the family and the extended family (the clan) and the local articulations of the state (communes, provinces, regions). The federalist state (a lively tradition in Italy, since Cattaneo) is opposed to the centralist state (the French Napoleonic model). In the globalized economy, multinational enterprises play an important role, occasionally up to the point of conditioning statal policies; the attitude towards them changes over time. State confederations, such as the European Union, and alliances, such as NATO, are also important. Political confrontations in the international arena involve different elements, from the traditional East–West opposition to the so-called clash of civilizations (i.e. religions). Migrations are also considered. The evolution of the international monetary system and the growing role of the European Union are also illustrated.

This chapter considers the wider implications of The Satanic Verses affair and the fatwa. It engages with Rushdie’s considerations of Islam, secularism, and the complexities of geopolitical leadership of the Muslim world. The chapter also explores the wider questions and implications of freedom of expression that have been raised in Europe especially at the time and structured Britain’s relationship with Iran between 1989 and 1998. The chapter examines Rushdie’s own responses to the fatwa, collected in the final sections in his essay collection Imaginary Homelands as well as considering responses from Muslim literary critics and writers, some of whom supported Rushdie, others who spoke out against him, to illuminate the wider public debates around freedom of expression, secularism, and faith, which have proved central to a consideration of Rushdie’s work.

While port cities of the Eastern Mediterranean were for a long time vilified, recent local and international interest has rehabilitated them, turning them into a projection site for nostalgia for the pre-nation state multicultural order. While simplifications and especially characterizations of the nineteenth-century port cities as a social utopia must be revoked by critical historians, the highly ambivalent and mixed Eastern Mediterranean societies nonetheless need to receive proper attention in order to counter oversimplified visions of cultural identities and intercultural clash. A complex reading of nineteenth-century port city society thus serves as a counter discourse against a Weberian sense of the Asian City or its contemporary vulgarizations, such as the worldviews propagated by S. P. Huntington or R. T. Erdogan.

The systemic crisis we face today imposes the need for a new paradigm of global order and governance that takes into account the dynamics brought by globalization.

First and foremost, the fate of mankind as a whole now faces a series of very large-scale threats. These threats require an endeavor beyond just optimizing nation-states’ self-interests, because they are of their nature transnational not international. Issues such as climate change, environmental problems, cybercrime, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and terror have now reached a scale that presents a threat to everyone, everywhere, and are becoming increasingly difficult to resolve purely through inter-state relations based on “territorial sovereignty and hegemonic geopolitics” . There is a clear need for a comprehensive new system of values in which states and concerned international civil society can participate to address these threats to humanity’s shared destiny, together with conventions based on such a system.

From this perspective in the eight chapter of the book the principal elements of a vision for a possible new global order are analysed and the author’s recommendations on a result-oriented UN reform process are discussed.