But it then very soon became clear that the response of a war against terrorism, initially conceived of in a metaphorical sense, began to be taken increasingly seriously and came to entail waging a real war.

I held a conference in Harvard where Americans said they didn't believe in risk. They thought it was just European hysteria. Then the terrorist attacks happened and there was a complete conversion. Suddenly terrorism was the central risk.

Global conditions are far too complex to be able to imagine that they could ever be really controlled by one power.

In the final analysis, terror is also another proof of the fact that the superpower is not really a superpower. It was vulnerable.

Western countries in particular can today no longer be separated from Muslim societies, because they have them within themselves. They are themselves internally globalized.

Neither science, nor the politics in power, nor the mass media, nor business, nor the law nor even the military are in a position to define or control risks rationally.

The idea that you surrender your identity when you relinquish national powers is unhelpful. No, indeed, precisely the opposite is the case: if done in an intelligent way, you attain the sovereignty to better solve national problems in cooperation with others.