 Hello, welcome everyone. I'm Anne-Sécile Sibué, since April I'm the president of ITM. I'm French based in Norway, in Oslo, the director of Black Box Theatre. On behalf of the board of ITM, I wish you all a very warm welcome to this plenary meeting in Brussels. It's very beautiful to see all of you here in a stormy weather, in stormy political time, you all made it and we wish you a very big welcome. This ITM meeting is the biggest ever with 900 participants from 49 countries. So it gathers an amazing diversity of countries and people and we'll hope you lifetime to find each other and get to know each other. Probably like this high attendance tells something. In this complex and challenging political time, it probably indicates the need of togetherness. A need for collective space like this one where not only we are together, but we can become together, activating transformations together. And we believe that your hospitality mindset and the generous vibes of ITM members and participants will generate a stimulating space for discussion and encounters. Before passing the mic to Nanvan Hutter, secretary general, I would just like to introduce for you the board members. So the board members sitting, can you stand up and show who you are? I see Cathy Boyd here, Barbara here, Tony. I would like also to introduce the advisory committee. Now we are all getting a bit dark, but the advisory committee. And then the team. The team is probably working. So you'll find them around. Yes, they've been working hard. Thank you all for being here, and we wish you a great meeting. Thank you. Yeah, thank you. I will speak on behalf of the team that is indeed all over the place to facilitate this huge meeting, 900 people. It's amazing. We wish you a very warm welcome in our city, even in our house. My name is Nanvan Hutter, secretary general of ITM, and it is for four and a half years now that I live in this city. Brussels, Brussels, Brussels, capital of Europe and capital of the federal state of Belgium, a complex but somehow functioning country. Brussels capital is a paradox with its powerful institutions fighting to keep the European project going, and a myriad of governmental layers of 19 municipalities of six police forces and all the problems that come with that. But also it's a very welcoming city, not so much for the people with disabilities, and we feel very sorry for you. But it's a city without false pretensions. It's a city of arrival, it's a mixity, it's a vibrant and anarchistic city. And not to forget, it's the capital of contemporary performing arts and cultural discourse. That vibrant arts life is well represented in this meeting, not in the least by our dear partners, KaiTheater, Charles RoaDance, Sifas, Lavalé, Kunstepunt, Vallounis-Brusel, Theatredance, Beurs-Raubeur, and many others. I take advantage of this moment to draw your attention to our new publication which maps the current Belgium performing arts scene written by Sylvia Botella and Ingrid Francken because we have to have a Vallonne, a Flanders, and a Brussels part, and this mapping will be online next week. We also commissioned several articles asking Belgian professionals to reflect on the theme of this meeting. They are commissioned by HowlRound, our media partner, and are online already in our resources page linked to this meeting on the website. As I said, Brussels is a creative, not a center of innovative creation in Europe, and actually the contemporary performing arts have lived some of their most exciting moments in this very house, KaiTheater. KaiTheater was also one of the founding members of ITM so long ago during the 80s. In those days that our contemporary performing arts started to blossom thanks to undisputed public spendings. When I took over this position during the Dublin plenary in 2013 dealing with the team trust, I stated that contemporary performing arts were facing bad weather, meaning it would become harder to be first in line during a financial crisis, shifting the focus from public spendings towards growth, profit making, and reaching huge audiences. And indeed performing arts all over the globe faced budget cuts since. These cuts inspired two of our recent publications that will be put online today. One is the Popular Fund Finder, an update of this list of potential funding opportunities at national, regional, and local level in Europe and beyond, and the Survival Guide for Performing Arts Practitioner, which we published in collaboration with the union networks FIA and Unimai. You can download both publications from now on from our website. So while financial precarity was to be expected four and a half years ago, could I also have expected the steep downfall of trust in the European projects, the rise of European governments trying to silence critical forces, and the coining of the arts as the domain of the elite paid for by the normal citizens? Should I have foreseen politicians creating alternative facts, fake news, and rewriting history? Did I already know that the big multinationals were facilitated by our democratic governments to rule the world, to escape taxes and environmental regulations? This meeting brought its title, Can We Talk from Joris Leerendeig, a Dutch author and journalist currently writing for The Guardian. In the running up to last Dutch national elections, he opened a platform for discourse on politics in an attempt to leave his own bubble and himself utterly frustrated by the current state of democracy and the European politics. He interviewed people who were planning to vote for Geert Wilders, our extreme right politician, asking for their motivation. It resulted in a revealing insight in the multiple reasons, the diversity in backgrounds and the clear argumentation of those interviewed. It is also Joris Leerendeig, who in a recent article reacted on the Paradise Papers by stating that it's clear that it's not only the electorate of populist and nationalist rights that are victims of globalism, we all are. So what is the role of the arts in all this? Might it be? We also have to step out of our bubble, open our ears without judging, like Leerendeig did. Maybe we can restore some trust with only the trust in our own ability to rethink the system, to reach out to those that lost all trust and have reasons to do so. Let's start our four-day reflection and debate on the positioning of art in the age of populism. We wish you an enriching experience and please don't forget to share your impressions with us on social media using our hashtags ITM Brussels. Before I pass the mic to our dear partners, I want to thank our funders. The European Commission, Creative Europe Programme, the Flamsegemeinschop, Flemish Community, Région Bruxelles Capital, Bruxelles Hofstädelge West, Fédération Wallonie Bruxelles International, Imaïs de Bruxelles Imor Imaro Bruxelles, Constipant Flanders Arts Institute, Fédération Wallonie Bruxelles Théâtre et Dance, Visit Bruxelles and Stott Bruxelles Ville de Bruxelles. And now, a warm applause for our wonderful partners. Charles Rois-Dance, represented by its director, Annie Bosini, and Kai Teater, represented by Key Capents. Annie, you're first. Thank you. Hello, hello everyone. So I'm Annie Bodzini. So I'm the new director of Charles Rois-Dance. You must know that Charles Rois-Dance is located on two sides. One is in Charles Rois, as we say, it's 60 kilometers away, and the other one is in Molenbeek. Here we are. The team of Charles Rois-Dance and Kai are delighted to welcome you to these ITM meetings at La Raffinerie in Molenbeek, just a few meters away from here. During this meeting, there will be plenty of talk about populism, understands that we, as people working in art and culture, should adopt regarding the phenomenon that is spreading across Europe today. It would be up to you to find the best definition in the relation to the situation being faced and to remove any confusion that persists around those ideas today. These events have been organized so that we can meet, exchange ideas, and try to understand one another. By way of introduction, I wanted to share a personal experience with you. I'm French, as you can hear. I came to Brussels ten months ago. Before starting at La Raffinerie in Molenbeek, I had heard comments made by French journalists and media about the attacks and the involvement of people from Molenbeek. Molenbeek was mostly referred to as a Brussels suburb. In French, the term for suburb, bon lieu, has a negative connotation. For Paris, it means the city's outlying district. Located on the other side of the périphérique, the ring road around the city that acts as a mental barrier. The bon lieu are often considered lost territories for the republic. When I arrived, I was aware that Molenbeek, where I go every day now, was not a suburb, but one of the 19 communes that make up Brussels. The semantic simplification adopted by most French and doublest most European medias has played a large part in stigmatizing a commune that is famous all over Europe today for being a hotbed of terrorism. It was certainly not the journalist's intention to stigmatize it in this way, but that it certainly, in that way, happened and we have to deal it every day and we have to face it every day. This example taken from life, from my life, shows how the simplification of language with doubt through laziness or to make yourself better understood by the people can lead to developed forms of populism. Journalists have a huge responsibility in the explosion of populism, but our responsibility is also significant. It's up to us to be aware of it all the time and to remain vigilant even after those meetings are over and I'm sure we'll do it. I would like to conclude by hoping you have some successful meetings and exchanges of Heidi. I invite you to go over the canal tomorrow. Cross is this imaginary border and come to La Raffinerie in Mullenbeck where we look forward to seeing you. So welcome to Brussels. Welcome to Mullenbeck. So, welcome to Kai Theatre. He happens, director of Kai Theatre. Welcome to Brussels. Welcome to this ITM meeting. It took only 36 years to organize a plenary meeting of ITM in Brussels. Indeed, since its foundation in Paul Verigie in 1981 and although the ITM office was here ever since, there was never a plenary in this city. There was a forum once, but a plenary is the first one. So, we're of course very pleased that it finally worked out that it's going to happen thanks to a close collaboration of a lot of cultural organizations here in the canal area. But let's go back for a moment to 1981 and the birth of ITM. As you know by now, the theme of this meeting is art in the age of populism. And I think we can say that the roots of the overwhelming wave of populism that we are living through today can be found somewhere in 1981. There's nothing to do with ITM, but as far as I know, it was the end of what we called the L'étrante Glorieuse, the somewhat 30 glorious years after the Second World War when the European welfare states were developed in which the European Union was set up. And at the end of the 70s in the beginning of the 80s, the economic base for this model was fading amongst other things because of the oil crisis. This model became more and more under pressure. And we could say that a long period of global deregulation started and power was shifted slowly from the political sphere to the economic sphere. And ITM was founded in the summer of 1981, but in January 1981, Ronald Reagan became President of the United States. It was also not related. And a year before, Thatcher became Prime Minister of Great Britain. And together they were the founding father and mother of what we call today, neoliberalism. So when in 1989 the Berlin Wall fell, Western euphoria was everywhere. We won. And we meant in this case our liberal capitalist market system. But this largely, in my opinion, inappropriate euphoric frivolous and even arrogant reaction quickly turned into a nightmare. The clash between what Benjamin Barber called Jihad vs. McWorld became more and more violent. The ecological crisis with climate change and its most frightening excess became more and more tangible and showed how careless that perfect market system was. And finally in 2007 and 2008 the so deeply trusted economic and financial system itself crashed. Maybe handing over the power to the economic sphere had not been such a great idea. And re-regulation by democratic political processes was urgently necessary to avoid even worse. But how to move power back in the direction of politics and how to use it well. So the world today has become even more complex than it was in the late 70s and in 81. So back then that complexity had led to a simplified reaction. We replaced politics by the magic wand of the global market. Why would politicians react in a better way than complex problems that they did than they did 40 years ago? Well so far they didn't really. That's where populism comes in. And that's also where I stop my amateur analysis of European political history. Populism may suggest simple solutions but the word itself isn't simple at all. What does it exactly mean? What about right wing and left wing populism? What about the role and the responsibility of intellectuals and other elites? There's a lot of questions that will be addressed in the coming days in umpteen working groups. But before we start that process we thought that it was worthwhile to present you with an overall frame for this thematic light motive of ITM Brussels. And therefore we invited Eric Coren. Eric is Professor of Urban Studies at the Free University of Brussels. He was the founder of the Cosmopolist Research Institute, co-founder of the Brussels Studies Institute and is currently the director of the Brussels Academy. But most of all Eric Coren has been a very active and activist participant in the development of a vibrant civil society in Brussels and in the rest of the country. And in that perspective he always collaborated closely with the cultural sector. Eric has been for the last 30 years our most engaged and most critical academic ally. He stepped out of his academic ivory tower and injected us the sector, the cultural sector with his activist energy and confronted us over and over again with our responsibility to make city, to make society. And I'm very sure that he will do that again in his speech today. So Brussels has recently been called a hellhole, a no-go zone a kafkin bureaucratic protectorate a reservation for terrorists and that's only by people who have never been here. Of course it's all true and lucky to live in the age of fake truth. But we compensate all that by our artists and therefore we present you not only with discussions and working groups but also with a vast program of performances in a lot of different cities different theaters all over the city. So we hope that you also attend those. So I wish you a very interesting IETM here in Brussels make the most of it because the next one will be in 2053 and I now give the floor to Eric Karel. Thank you, he. Thank you for inviting me. I've been to an IETM plenary in Athens after having written something on rescaling the world rescaling Europe and how arts had to fit these kind of new scales. And today I'm asked to give you an introduction on the theme of your gathering art in the age of populism. In the age of populism would that be is that a phrasing of your choice? Did you really accept that notion from the start? Or is that giving in to the dominant framing of established politics and media? Populism as a proxy for demagogic postures, unrealistic proposals, manipulating public opinion, extremism, all bad things to be rejected. How can we make sense of a notion that is used in so many occasions in so different ways? A container concept with hardly any common meaning. And in the many writings I have done about that subject in fact at the end I propose to reject it and in my language I am interested in anti-systemic movements which is another type of way of looking at what is socially happening. The critical comments directed towards populism is that it advocates the possibility of expressing the voice of the people the will of the people that it speaks for the unheard and that without the mechanisms of representative democracy. The main criticism is that it is an anti-democratic way to replace the existing parliamentary democracy as a way to constructing what is called the general interest. Following different steps, debate, elections in which individual voters compose groups of political representatives that then make majorities, governments and decisions. The whole system of representative democracy. True, populism pretends to speak in the name of the people expressing what would be a general opinion or feeling something that is not represented in the existing order something that is repressed excluded hidden. And in that sense, I do share the criticism. Deep people do not exist as such. They are not a given. They are the product of a political process that exactly constructs the will of the people. Builds it, makes it. All those pretending speaking in the name of the people do speak in the name of their own search of the population and in most cases a very partial perspective an ideological viewpoint of what the people should be. And thus from a theoretical point of view, populism as a means of directly without intermediaries expressing the political will of the people is very doubtful and is in many cases related to a very authoritarian view of representation. The leader the furor the father of the nation the charismatic, mythological sometimes mystical expression of the people. And yes, in that sense, populism is generally not at the side of democracy. And that explains why the popularity of the term is related to the rise of extreme right combining a frustration with the existing order with the perspective of strong state of dominant leadership and sometimes in direct relation with fascist movements in the thirties. And so you could ask yourself why don't we call it their right name? Why are we mitigating and giving to the extreme right racist sometimes fascist parties really the name of populists which is a friendly name in fact for them. So and even if we can say that most extremist movements have been mostly kept out of power we also witness a growing tendency towards authoritarian forms of government with leaders that do refer directly to the people as opposed to their own institutions or constitution or form of populism from above. See Putin, Trump, Erdogan Duda in Poland Orban in Hungary Duterte in the Philippines Netanyahu and even Macron sometimes speaks in the name of the people without intermediaries. So you see populism has nothing to do with the popular nor do populists originate in the ranks of the most popular strata of society. On the contrary most of them come themselves from elites from rather wealthy or mighty groups and circles. Also in that sense the concept is rather fuzzy and does not allow for clear-clad political analysis. As you can see I am not a great fan of the concept. So let us examine in some more depth the context the societal changes that have affected the rise of populism as a form of criticism to the existing democratic order. So populism as a symptom of the crisis of representative democracy. In the first place it might be good to refer to the DNA, to the original structure of the modern democratic state. Let's agree that this form originated in the long and broad process of the Enlightenment and then the Industrial Revolution to give birth to the modern state. Democracy is then based on the idea that human reason and human action in mundane affairs should preside over religion and the representatives of God on earth. It is the direct result of a pacification of the long religious wars by separating the state from religion departing from one state religion to freedom of religion in a modern state. So the basic idea is that people can live together in a society even if they don't share the same religion. An idea that is not necessarily adopted by the majority of humanity at this moment. Yet one of the basic conditions for democracy, freedom of thought, freedom of expression, open debate, etc. But once you decide that power does not derive from God and is not naturally embedded in specific human beings being the nobility or clergy once you leave these ideas of the ancient regime then you have to define what exactly is the people that legitimate power who is member of the people. The population is no longer subject of the king or of the emperor the population becomes the source of legitimate power through citizenship. But who is a citizen? Is it only the people paying taxes? Is it only people? Is it only men or also women? Is it only adults people and then from what age? Is it also people with illness or imprisoned people? In short, never. Everybody seems automatically a citizen with political citizen rights. And so historically you see there is an ongoing discussion on membership on belonging or not. Not the whole population has ever been the people to be expressed in a collective political will. And here it is important to already point to two characteristics interesting for our debate that is in fact the debate on democracy. The divide between democracy and ethnos and the national bias of democracy. So let me take the first point. Let us take the French revolution as the most clear cut expression of the transition from Ancien regime to modern state. There the people have been defined as partners in common law and common parliament. No membership of status groups, no subjects participants. That is the republican approach building a dimos holding a rather universalistic approach to what is membership to humanity. In the republic membership is only determined by accepting the values of the republic. The law is the law of the soil, the Romantic vision is opposing such contractual vision. The nation cannot be the result of free choice, of free will of a social contract. You do not choose the people you belong to. Society exists before the individual. It has a history, an identity a collective soul a volksgeist a way of life a particular culture and the people are an ethnos. They are bound by kinds of original bonding by blood ties. Universal republicanism versus particular nationalism. Every conception of democracy wevers between the two poles. There is today no society in the world that really accepts the universal republican standards. Even France if you look at the debates thinking that everybody can become French but under certain very regulated cultural conditions. And that debate has been partially oriented or resolved in Europe here 15 kilometers south of Brussels at the battle of Waterloo. Napoleon exporting the republican ideas with destructive armies was defeated by a coalition of the reactionary forces in Europe. And the congress of Vienna organized the new Europe basically on the principle of nation states. Maybe not with a state religion maybe with some freedoms but anyhow with a state culture. The principle was one people, one language one culture, one history. That's the basic idea that Europe has been organized on and that has been exported through colonialism to the rest of the world. The modern democratic state has a national identity. Nationality is the basis of citizenship and nationality has a cultural format. And thus democracy becomes part of what we call a multiple society paradigm. If you ask you to what society you belong hardly anybody will spontaneously answer I'm part of humanity. Most people will indicate a country as if that is the primal identification. And even after four generation we still call the people of Molenbeek, Moroccans. We don't have other means of determining a cultural way of life a cultural difference than but to refer to countries, to nation states. There is no model of a global democracy. Democracy is based on sovereignty of the people which is the people of a country narrated as a nation with a cultural identity. We see the central position given to a certain form of culture, a certain form of arts. A country is told to have a common history and that history produces a tradition an identity and it is that common narrative that has to be represented both in the parliament and in politics but also in musea, theaters collections and the arts. Here we see what representation means what building the idea of a nation means. Here we can understand how some populists can express the people without ever asking them without membership or participation because they are speaking in the name of the idea of the people the nation the historical, political subject. That is why populism is always related to some form of essentialism. People are determined by something outside themselves their religion, their nation their culture but something that we can see without asking people without asking the individuals. So common history produces identity and tradition and that can be represented and all that is territorially bounded a country has clear cut borders and those borders, those countries after the war have gone through an economic boom that could then support a social welfare state a widening of democracy to social inclusion but social inclusion within the country within the nation state for members of the national community. And here we are that is not the world we are living in anymore we are now in the era of globalization the world has become one one big market it apparently all started in 1989 he referred already to it with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the implosion of the blocks of the first the second and the third world. Some like Fukuyama thought it was the end of history the inclusion of the whole planet in one liberal system in fact it started earlier with the election of Thatcher and Reagan in 79 and 80 and the shift away from welfare politics in favor of monetarism and austerity or even earlier in 1974 the big economic crisis called the oil crisis the first generalized recession in global economy and that marked and that marked the end of the golden 60s we do not have the time to analyze this globalization process in detail but let me just point out some essential features that will enlighten our discussion first the globalization process has been instructed by neoliberal market policies based on liberalization flexibility of labor markets privatization and deregulation it is a big operation of deconstructing social bonds in favor of free individuals free individuals contracting with each other it is a very particular form of globalization we could have other scenarios in mind of a good form of globalization the market emancipated from state regulation no individual country has been capable of maintaining the market within its borders and thus regulation and regulating it alongside their own national guidelines the market economy and finance becomes global but democracy, culture and representation remain national the government shifted also from regulating economy in function of social goals to regulating society in function of global competition parliament submitted to their governments governments submitted to their management principles regulating national policies in favor of the global market and so we have witnessed an overall decline of democratic control an overall depolitization of society some of my colleagues I do not agree with them but some of them my colleagues call that the post-political condition that we are in a second big feature is that globalization is also urbanization in the beginning of the 20th century only 10% of the human beings lived in cities now more than half and in most developed countries, continents three quarters cities have grown bigger also in 1950 there were only there were only two cities bigger than 8 million inhabitants today we have numerous cities multi million inhabitants and cities contain also the new post-industrial economies so cities have become the nodal points of the new world system and the new world system does not function anymore in territories but in networks the world system is not interested in a planet full of countries interested in a network of metropolitan areas and alongside these networks people are migrating fleeing from poverty war or oppression moving towards a better life and they arrive in cities adding to an already super diverse population yes the world system is now structured totally differently than in the 19th century which governs the space of flows while democracy only deals with national territories and here we are again a city is not a country here in Brussels two thirds of the population does not have belgo belgian references here in Brussels we have more than 180 nationalities multi-religion with many languages spoken and above all with different forms of mixity 61% of our households are multi-lingual and our national state stops to offer one integration model organizing the federal state in three communities of which to operate in this city so to imagine social cohesion to imagine the people we cannot refer to a common history to common roots if you have to do that in Brussels we fail before we start because everybody comes from elsewhere we don't have common roots urban citizens do not share the past cities are places of arrival and what we have to do does is imagine a common future a destiny a project and such an urban project has no clear cut identity let alone a tradition repertoire or repertoires in general do not help us a lot languages spoken do not necessarily refer to the same cultural reference no urban images are urban images are hybrid mixed, composed the best expression for Brussels is the Zinnike parade every two years and the day after we are all happy and we don't know what the real image was so we immediately understand that classical representative democracy is even more in crisis in cities cities do need more participation more participatory democracy and that is why the crisis the crisis of representative democracy is felt in all cities of the world and a set cities in cities networks are more important than territories and even more the old world the industrial 20th century has delivered us three planetary man-made challenges and if we do not take them on they will destroy our system will get over tipping points tipping points of no return and leave us with an irreversible new situation we know them one our relationship with nature is perverse we have exploited nature as a resource without considering its sustainability our ecological footprint is way too high we need a number of planets to sustain our way of life and our economies and the most urgent is of course climate change but also reducing our ecological footprint caring for biodiversity developing healthy food production et cetera so we have to radically change our relationship with nature second global social inequality 70% of humanity has to survive on 3% of the wealth while less than 10% of humanity owns 80% of the wealth what is this world when 8 people own as much as half of the world population this is an ethical challenge but it is in the first place an economic challenge because a financialized economy with too much private money and above all too much debt delivers a financial volcano in my view even more dangerous than global warming if there is a financial crisis going on and if you see urban life today most of the cities do not have a food independence of more than 2 days if something happens really in the interaction of the global system we will have starvation within the week if that is not a tipping point and then third element there is migration super diversity cultural mixity living together on the basis of difference we can no longer maintain our model of the 19th century building societies on the basis of one established national community and we have learned that in Brussels where two thirds of the population has foreign origins and the Belgian state is so friendly to offer two types of national integration both of them are in the minority if you arrive here they offer two trajectories of becoming citizen one in Flemish and one in French and it's not just a language difference it's also a difference of conception and of contents so we will live in cities with multiple communities it is not the community that is the basis of society and see nation states and international agreements do not deal sufficiently with these global challenges but in cities they have a sense of urgency today's cities are not sustainable if we want to save these big cities if we want to make cities livable we need to solve very concrete questions land use water management food production, air quality traffic congestion, housing population densities, you name it and most of our cities are coastal cities and if we don't do anything to climate change and we don't do anything to climate change then we will have sea level rise and we will have sea level rise millions of people will be on the move in this century and for those thinking that an arrival of 200 refugees of Syria is already a wave I can tell them you ain't seen nothing yet so if we want to keep our cities together we have to deal with social inequalities that deliver a social geography if we want the tourists to come to visit our Grand Place which is fake news in fact it's not medieval anymore but don't tell it because otherwise the tourists will not come back but we have to pacify of course Molenbeek which is less than 500 meters from those city centers and so with the increase of structural and employment and poverty our redistribution mechanism will not suffice it's not sufficient to tax people and then to redistribute money to make it possible for people to survive in the market especially when our rich people refuse to pay their taxes and as you see in cities the emergence of new forms of solidarity in commons, in shared economies in new forms of exchange and these commons do not do not like privatization basic resources like water seeds or knowledge cannot be privatized we have to launch a fight a global fight to resist the privatization of these common goods and in cities we have to reset the place of culture in a super diverse context education media, arts, community centers they all need to be reset and thus rethought the old regime is dying the new society has still to be put in place so what to do? how to imagine a society how to deliver an inclusive image and a project how to reinvent democracy because everybody has to accept now the diagnosis that existing models are not inclusive our globalized economy does not need all the people there is a renewed debate on who is member and who is not and with one goal to have the less inclusion possible to legitimate the less inclusion possible just outside of the text I want to tell you I was interviewed this week on what happened in Brussels and the journalist asked me how come you are thinking that the general opinion has moved so much to the right and I said in my long life when refugees arrived here fleeing the military dictatorship or when the Vietnamese boat people arrived here we accepted them there was not one argument in the press to say do they have the right papers do they come from the right boat do we have to accept them we accepted those people today you have a discussion with every refugee arriving whether he still needs to be helped whether he is rightful here and that is a big shift we try to expel to exclude people and the mainstream opinion in society is accepting that more and more that we do not need to be inclusive that some people are equal but some are more equal than others so our globalised economy does not need all the people and so the still hegemonic neoliberal answer to the global system is entrepreneurial who can be member of the people all those who actively contribute and can sustain themselves their own living they can stay and we will give them rights of access but overall society can be in welfare without a contribution individual contribution so no rights without plight and thus there will be exclusion societies cannot include everybody that's the dominant hegemonic neoliberal position today hence a big discussion on who is in and who is out and then you get these essentialist arguments in favour of natural rights of organic membership of the people as an ethnos as I explained here we enter the populist era when you start from the idea that not all inhabitants not all humans can be in you have to determine criteria and that is why new nationalism or Islamophobia or racism or other forms of extreme right populism try to restrict the definition of the people and to legitimate exclusion and even expulsion that is also why new forms of authoritarian leadership and the return to protective states want to define reasons for inclusion you see that all these right-wing new leaders start with defining who should not be on the territory overall this era is characterized by a struggle between a certain idea of the people and the globalized elites Le Pen Macron that was the choice no other choice inclusive democracy is thus under threat he referred already to Benjamin Barber who defied globalization as jihad versus macworld and the essence of his book was two sides of the same coin and both are not interested in democratic rule nor the global market nor fundamentalism are interested in organizing society in a democratic way so the era of populism combines two characteristics a restricted view on access and membership with increased conditioning and a restricted domain for political action in the field of economy production consumption production of life and survival politics should not interfere in the way we produce and reproduce our lives and that is why resistance has to take different forms we have to reinstate basic democratic principles to start imposing human rights universal human rights as an unconditional for all all the members of humanity human universal human rights are not under discussion you have them as a member of humanity and that is the first inclusive principle the rule of the people wherever they are and wherever they come in the name of humanity and the planet democracy needs a demos and cannot derive from the ethnos and that is also why we are in a very profound transition even if the 19th century idea of the modern state as a nation state was inclusive for many localized communities and national culture as a means of integrating a lot of local cultures and dialects nationalism to date is at the site of exclusion and more and more of expulsion and more we see how cities and the urban way of life is in opposition with national policies urbanity as a post national type of society and resist by nature to closing borders and closing minds so yes we have to reinvent and reinstate the people as the sovereign as the source of legitimate power is then a progressive a progressive an emancipatory form of populism possible or even necessary some authors like Chantal Mouff say clearly yes but then it may not be a discourse of an already constituted of an already existing people of an essential core that serves as integration reference of an imaginary that is already shared by some categories and where other categories have to be educate the people to become the actors of the new democracies have to be produced yet they are not already there they are the product of identification of a transnational counter hegemony of a new narrative to be told alongside new practices and solidarities and these people the new political subjects the new citizenship live in a multi-scalar world in networks around the globe with totally different forms of membership and alienation they do not just live in one territory and that is why politics can no longer be just national and then international they have to become really multi-leveled at a global and a continental scale also at the network metropolitan scale the national scale might survive but it may not be in our mindset the main and only access to the world the main scale of citizenship countries do stand between us and the world we need global democracy and regulation we need to build a new society within metropolitan multi-cultural context and if the countries want to survive they have to find a place in such a construction between us the cities and the planet and finally here we are what then about the arts in the era of populism in my view the arts and artists take a central position in rebuilding a collective vision a new inclusive narrative a reinvented democracy why? education and other existing forms of socialization still work within the old models within the welfareist and industrial ideas of the 20th century they are part of the old world they have to be remodeled and remodeling the imaginary proposing forms of imagination and symbolic expression is that not the profession of artists? arts and research are in my view at the heart of the knowledge society are in the in the heart of reinventing reinventing society but then they themselves have to also depart from the old forms and thoughts and that has been partly the process of deconstruction in the era of postmodernism but now it is time for reconstruction not for deconstruction anymore for recombination and thus for a new cultural contract between the arts and society not submission not instrumentalization but not isolationism either embedding in a moving context being part of the edges in transition the sustainable transition to good equality and solidarity the urban commons living together on the basis of diversity the new cosmopolitanism etc art and artists need to develop a new reference system a new repertoire to help us the people making sense of our lives in transition and to help us finding the courage and the passion even to resist the forces at work art can help us giving ways of imagining like imagine all the people thank you okay I'm not gonna ask the questions we have not so much time anymore so it's for you to ask questions to Eric we have a few mics so if you want to ask a question and please ask a question to yourself and we then do two-three questions and then we combine them so make it short and shortly present yourself also if you are having a question so who wants to go first thank you so much that was great I'm Eleanor Bauer and I'm an artist I was wondering do I have to speak louder is that what that means I can put my face closer to the microphone also I appreciate your emphasis on the multicultural and multi-layered multifaceted nature of cities and city dwellers but I wonder if an over-emphasis on cities as the model or as the node of the network just reinforces one level of exclusion that populism already preys upon which is the exclusion of the rural or the agrarian populations that usually are the ones whose feelings of being underserved or excluded from a more metropolitan elite are mobilized in populist more authoritarian fascist argumentations we're going to have two more questions and then we'll combine them it's a good question because we're also addressing it in one of the working groups as you know, interview Red, the brochure we have detailed already so who wants to go next thanks for your interesting lecture Eric here, can you see me your genealogy of nation-state you have omitted an element that is the monopoly of violence so I'm just wondering with your suggestion of global network of the cities wouldn't there be a need for city armies or militia to resist the oppression of the states can't hear you okay for those who haven't heard question is there an ideological framework for what Eric has been saying with the question for instance a Marxist framework so Eric, three questions maybe starting with the one on the exclusion of the rural yes, the rural I think if we want if we want the rural to survive we need the cities the states are destroying the rural industrial agriculture is destroying the rural today don't make it a romantic view what you have today around Brussels every year 30 farms are closing and being integrated in an industrial way of producing food and we know what industrial food production involves today and so in fact what I really think is that to make the rural to give the rural a place we have to have in that change in our relationship with nature to have an inclusion of the built and the open environment everything that is said about urban agriculture about food plants about changing our ways of life in that sense will give a place to the rural but to the real rural and not to the industry in the periphery in most cases in fact we speak about the rural but in reality it's about big industry in the periphery violence yes violence is of course and the monopoly of state violence will probably be mobilized operate sometimes what I do think is that we will not need urban armies because let's say protection in cities has an other nature and I think that's one of the great advantages of thinking alongside metropolitan networks because it is very difficult to consider territorial wars in these in such a model I really think we have to think about that which is about policing about community policing etc but not in terms of the army and then the question of well in general I would like to favor an ideology but I don't have it anymore so if you refer to Marxism it remains one of the instruments of analysis but not I think an ideology with a project if not the critical project the attempts made in the name of Marxism during the last during the last century and of which the balance sheet is not what I do think is that there is a shift from the idea of a radical change by overnight in a revolutionary way what new movements what you see appearing once is at the same time to have movement but at the same time also to have policies and so to combine movement action with management and that means I think that politics and especially become much more pragmatic and there also I see a big difference between let's say mayors and ministers the national governments operate in a much more ideological way in general than cities that are dealing with solving problems and so I do think let's build the new ideology on the basis of solving problems and not on the basis of abstract utopias to have been realized we have enough problems today and if we don't solve them there is no good future before us so I think it is in the pragmatics in solving the immediate problems that we will redevelop an ideology or a plan okay a few more who yeah there's two people on that side yeah cute in terms of imagining a new future I think you said that the arts is better place to do this because education and media are in the old models of welfare and industrialization and I just wondered if you could talk a bit to that I'm wondering if the arts in terms of our institutions are also in that model okay there's another one there hi hello my name is Yaniv it's just a few thoughts I'm not sure I will manage to make a question out of it but it sounds a bit for me what you suggested is the future to become like cities a bit going back maybe you can say how it's connected in your head maybe to tribalism like to become a bit smaller groups instead of bigger groups just to relate to it and also I could not understand you relate to this of how we define ourselves that we don't have any other way to say instead of like Norwegian or countries and if you have any solution for this or my question is can we ignore this how can we as a species how can we ignore it because I feel it's very hard for me even if I want to be open and I think about these cities as instead of nationalism we will have like a city or something like that yeah okay and then the third one there okay great so thank you very much for a very inspiring talk and your vision of a more inclusive future is obviously very welcome to me in order to get to this inclusive future how will the white male able-bodied and straight person prepare himself okay shall we start Eric to prepare ourselves maybe the let's go chronologically the first one was what about education and media in the old regime but what about arts institutions are they not also still in the old regime well that question formulated like that is an empirical question of course you have art institutions, art practices in the old regime why do I focus so much on art and artists because they have a great advantage they can be irresponsible it is not for real and so the big difference between an educator and an artist is that the educator is already on the civilized position he knows what the end product is and he brings uncivilized people to that level his or her level the artist just suggests another way of looking another form another way of making sense of things and then steps back in a certain way and becomes part of the public he is not responsible for the end product he is responsible for proposing for proposing ways of seeing ways of making sense reorganizing imagination and that is a different position and of course you have artists and artistic institutions that are educators basically that reinterprets repertoires that showed the same thing in another direction that try to socialize alongside known lines I am focusing on arts that is produced in context that is also changed that is not produced in the workshop and then shown in the market so this is a whole field I think where art has a role to play you were actually interested in us because you could be then irresponsible so the second question was about tribalism groups can we ignore our real sense of belonging that is what I hear there we all have a real sense of belonging we don't have we never have to ignore what is so I am not pleading for ignoring my city's model is not a model it is not a political philosophy it is just an empirical data what happens if the majority of world population is living in cities that these cities become bigger and bigger and that you have numbers of people living with one million together and then seeing that you cannot solidarize those one million people that is in Brussels at least not the case alongside the educational or the political representation models offered and so what I am just saying is a city is not socialized alongside one cultural or linguistic core and thus socialization has to be inter-religious inter-cultural in-between and that's all I don't even have a model I am just pleading for pragmatics but at least pragmatics being de-centered of any essential let's say project and then we see what happens that is my approach the periphery will be integrated so I am not making a new system as opposed to the system of nation-states I am saying let's deal with urban cities it's urbanity urbanity as a post-national form of culture and then we have to see it does not exist as such it has multiple forms but it is we are proud to be hybrids in Brussels and not pure so we have to stop purification to stop to develop one little core and so it's trans that's what it has to lead us so the last question was about let's call it male innocence does white male innocence play a role in this are we really part of this necessary change or are we excluding ourselves maybe the question so I can assure you the white old male here is going to die very soon so don't make it a big problem in fact we just contributing a number of ideas we now have to leave even the session and we leave the discussion to everybody to do what is useful or not so I would analyze further and I'm at the side of all oppressed to change that of course oppressors are not part of the emancipation of the others the emancipation of the working class that Marx has to be done by the workers themselves so the emancipation of the other oppressed will have to be done but be assured I will not be in the way that's the okay thank you very much Eric Eric is a good speaker he's also asked in other places so he has to go to Antwerp to speak there so that's why we were a little bit in a rush but thank you again for this I think very good start of this 3-day ITM 4-day ITM meeting and if you have time in the next days to join us at one of the sessions you're more than welcome so thank you very much