Jacques Attali was born in Algeria in 1943. He is an eminent economic advisor and was recently nominated by French President Nicolas Sarkozy as the head of the Commission to promote French Growth. From 1981 to 1991, he was a French presidential adviser to F. Mitterand. In 1998 Attali founded the French non-profit organization PlaNet Finance which focuses on micro finance. In April 1991 he became the first President of the London-based European Bank for Reconstruction, the financial institution established by western governments to assist the countries of eastern and central Europe and the former Soviet Union in their transition to democratic market economies.

Recently, he also served as Conseiller d'Etat in Paris and has advised the United Nations Secretary-General on nuclear proliferation.

He is leader writer of "L'Express".

Attali's most recent publications include Millennium (1993), L'homme nomade (2006), Une breve histoire de l'avenir (2007).

Economist, philosopher and historian, Jacques Attali is known today to the whole world as an authoritative "expert" on French and international politics, dominated in recent decades by the problems and consequences of the globalisation phenomenon.

He provides us with a personal vision of that phenomenon in his best seller, Breve storia del futuro (A Brief History of the future), where he reminds us that globalisation is not the exclusive harbinger of perverse effects. It can offer huge, and novel opportunities for developed countries, which go far beyond the undoubtedly important opening of new markets for their products and services. Attali's insights can provide a useful tool in this context. Within the debate promoted by WWS on the subject of fear, they can help to understand the dynamics that pervade this global and globalised post-modern society. Fear, one its fundamental traits, reveals itself to us in its many dimensions as anxiety, insecurity, aggressiveness, and social effervescence.

Attali asserts that the world is going through the most pronounced phase of material growth in its history, thanks to the "mondialization" (as the French love to say) of markets and the liberalization of information and communication technology. But he also recognizes that, for the very same reasons, huge disparities and social, economic and cultural problems, which were once unknown, are now being created. As a result, we view many things as a threat, including global competition, the digital revolution, technological and industrial innovation, the computerised society, and climatic and environmental crisis. Other problems exist, too, such as the emergence of formidable new economic powers, huge migrations, the problems of multiethnic and multicultural societies, demands for new rights and new freedoms, the segmentation of society and the differentiation of needs from social demand.

However, this happens because market forces are being allowed to control the planet. We are allowing money to be the only way to gauge human interaction, with the risk of creating conditions for an elusive and planet wide phenomenon that Attali has called a "hyperempire". This would thus create commercial wealth and new groupings, enormous fortunes and enormous misery. Here, "nature will be systematically plundered and everything will become private, including the army, the police and the justice system", and "the human being will be fitted out with mechanical prostheses and become unnatural himself, and sold in batches to consumers who are also unnatural" and, "having become useless to his/her own creations, s/he will disappear". It is not surprising therefore, that we could imagine combating this scenario, and violently too, engaging in a succession of "increasingly primitive brutalities and devastating battles, which will pit countries, religious groups, territorial entities and private pirates" against each other, in a "hyperconflict" that could even cause the whole of humanity to disappear"

His suggestion is therefore not that of obstructing globalisation, but of limiting it. This means "setting boundaries for the market but not eradicating it. It means making democracy a planetary phenomenon but keeping it down-to-earth, bringing an end to the dominion of one empire over the whole world. Thus a new, limitless expanse of liberty, responsibility, dignity, progress and respect for others will open up".

This is what Attali terms "hyperdemocracy". He means a democracy that will lead us to install a democratic world government and a group of local and regional institutions. These will "allow everyone, thanks to the jobs that have will have been recreated by the fabulous potential of future technologies, to move towards gratuitousness and abundance, taking equitable advantage of the fruits of commercial imagination, preserving liberty both from our own excesses and those of our enemies, leaving a better preserved environment for coming generations, and giving rise to new ways of living and creating together, from the wisdom of the whole world".

The democracy that Attali alludes to seems more like an ideal to aim for than something to convert into everyday reality. Beyond this fairly obvious consideration, there is a warning. It is this: Fear is an unwanted and unforeseen effect of the climate of uncertainty that globalisation itself seems to generate. But like globalisation, it cannot simply be exorcised. It needs to be faced by courageously imagining new strategies and new scenarios. We have less fear from things we know than those we don't. And when we have in some way planned them, we fear them even less.