Immanuel Wallestein – "The end of what modernity?"
             The word 'modern' , according to the Oxford Dictionary has two meanings : pertaining to the current period, and the period subsequent to the Middle Ages. Fifty years ago, the term had two clear connotations. One was positive, signifying the most advanced technology. It was a fleeting modernity – what is modern today will be outdated tomorrow. The second signification was ideological and militant, the triumph of human freedom against ignorance and evil, the main values being liberation and democracy.
             The autor traces the history of symbiosis between the two modernities.
             In the first period, from 1450 to 1890, there was no distinction between the two notions, the struggle was both for technological progress and human liberation. The French Revolution made it apparent that the two were not identical. A dramatic change in mentalities had occurred. Three ideologies emerged : conservatism, liberalism and socialism.
             In the nineteenth-century, the liberal ideology had as main priorities –suffrage, the welfare state and national identity. The program was to make states out of nations, to make citizens identify with their state. The unifying institutions of the people were the educational sistem and the armed forces. What 'unites' a nation is racism, doing so at the expenses of minorities to be excluded from their citizenship rights. The official ideology poclaimed the two modernities to be identical, even though in reality they were in confict with each-other. The intent was to convince the lower classes to mute their claims to the modernity of liberation and to invest their energy into the modernity of technology.
             From 1914 to 1945, Wilson offered the self-determination of nations, but Roosvelt, Truman and Kennedy offered economic development. The Leninist progam prioritised the modernity of technology over that of liberation.
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