Towards a Transmodern Transformation of our Global Society: European Challenges and Opportunities

For the first time in its history, Humanity is confronted with the real possibility of a collective suicide, if we do not change radically our economic and political governance. This fact is the powerful motor of the transformation Humanity is going through. As a consequence, the modern patriarchal, industrial and capitalist paradigm in which we currently exist is coming to an end, because it appears incapable of providing us with a solution for our survival. Patriarchal values are also in a deep crisis, because they cannot provide a value frame for our survival. Transmodernity is an entirely new matrix of values. Politics and economics are changing below the surface. In politics the EU is a new transmodern political paradigm since It has created a new concept of nonviolence between States. The EU concept of non-violence between States is functioning so well that it has become self-evident. This means that Foreign Policy, Defense and Security policies have to be, and are reinvented by the EU every day. But those new policies are not always understood by the States inside the Union, nor by our US allies. The EU is also innovating in Knowledge Economy ("Lisbon Strategy"). This "knowledge society" represents a 180(circle) shift in which everything changes: trade, measurements, tools of production, management, structures of power, basic concept of growth and progress. It is a post capitalist society. Religions are also returning to the political stage. An important congress organized by the European Commission in 1998, in Brussels concluded that the main clash is NOT BETWEEN religions but rather between conflicting paradigms INSIDE each religion and each culture.