One of the most popular, debated and dangerous terms in use today is “globalisation”. Against this concept and against a world which has been reduced to a single and almost undistinguishable market, the so-called “People of Seattle” have taken up arms, and it was subsequently updated according to the places and circumstances in which it “operated”, etc. etc. From the word globalisation a double neologism is derived, a word which is even uglier from a phonetic point of view, but which is semantically more charged with meaning, that is it sounds bad, but it has greater significance (irrespective of my opinion which I shall come to once I have clarified this term). And the new word is “glocalisation”, which still involves globalisation but it also involves in some unclear way the concept of “localisation”. You are not supposed to understand, but I shall briefly try to supply some explanations. Let us take traffic in Rome, for instance: if we are referring to the traffic in a specific district, or to works carried out on a specific stretch of the underground etc., this involves localisation, and localisation would also be involved if we were dealing with similar problems in a different district. But of course, if somebody is in charge of this type of problem for the whole town, he will have to keep in mind the whole mosaic, and not just the individual pieces, otherwise he would solve a problem here and worsen it over there, and make it impossible somewhere else.... Therefore Roman “glocalisation” refers to the relationship between Rome and its districts. Just imagine the same problem on a planet level: Rome’s traffic, its miasmas, its pollution, combined with the pollution of other towns, and above all of the other major cities, the pollution of the various cities involves risks for the planet, and therefore the word “glocalisation” here has to do with the relationship between the earth and its inhabitants and every single, individual city producing pollution: the risk is global, and the exemplification of the risk is local. By illustrating the concept in this way, it does not seem too difficult to understand; the problem, if anything, is of course finding a reply to the classical question “what can we do?” Let us think about “what we can avoid doing”, in the meantime. Some time ago, in the daily “Repubblica”, the much loved and supported (at least until 3 or 4 years ago) British Prime Minister Tony Blair deplored the risk run by our children (and his, first of all) on this sick planet. I thought, and said (on the radio): the hypocrite! And indeed a few days later the President of the United States, the son of a minor Bush, denounced the Kyoto international agreement for the reduction of gas emissions, as if to say “let us think of business now, we shall worry about the environment later”, precisely the opposite of what graceful Blair had claimed. And did he thunder, did he make decisions, did he say to the readers of his feared invective: “That Bush, what a rascal!”? Not a bit of it! Just think of the really lethal importance of this issue (is there any more urgent issue than the risks mankind runs on the planet?) and think of the media sensation of Bush’s strong refusal, which in fact means “Ladies and Gentlemen, I am being elected thanks to a number of lobbies, one of which is that of the great polluting industrialists, so why the hell do you think I should bother about the health of the planet, if my agreement with my Electors (sure, with a capital E) is much more important to me than the kyoto agreement (sure, with a low-case k)?”, as I was saying, this importance, this sensation could have measured the standing of Blair, who instead was much “flabbier” than Chirac and Schroeder. So, in this age of globalisation, glocalisation and wild market, wild from a technological and scientific point of view, I tell you that Blair is almost worse than Bush: at least the latter makes himself clear. Any comparison with D’Alema and Berlusconi is perfectly permissible, if you have the intellectual courage to address the problem....

(traduzione Interpres sas-Giussano)