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For the peoples of the periphery the inevitable choice is between a national popular democratic advance or a backward-looking culturalist impasse. Undoubtedly, if the West, instead of standing in the way of progressive social transformations at the periphery, were to support these transformations, the element of "nationalism" contained in the project of delinking would be reduced accordingly. But this hypothesis amounts to hardly more than a pious wish. The fact is that the West has been to date the bitter adversary of any advance in this direction.

To acknowledge this as realistic and factual is to recognize that the initiative for the transformation of the world falls to the peoples of the periphery. It is they who, by disengaging themselves from world development, can force the peoples of the West to become aware of the real challenge. This is an observation that, since 1917, nothing has come to invalidate. But it is also to admit that the long march of popular national democracy will remain bumpy, filled with inevitable conflicts and unequal advances and setbacks.

The relatively negative judgment I have made concerning the West does not exclude the possibility of change here as well. By opening the debate on other forms of development in the West and the favorable consequences it could have for the evolution of the South, I have tried to insist on the responsibilities of the Western Left as well as the possibilities that are offered to it. A lucid awareness of the destructiveness of Eurocentrism is, in this case, a prerequisite for change.

On the other hand, the universalist ambition has nurtured leftwing ideologies, and from the outset the bourgeois left has forged the concepts of progress, reason, law, and justice. Moreover, the critique of Eurocentric capitalism is not without its echo at the center. No Great Wall separates the center from the periphery in the world system. Were not Mao, Che, and Fanon heroes of the progressive young people of the West at one time?

Obedience to the logic of the world economy demands in effect that a police force assume responsibility for repressing the revolts of the peoples of the periphery, who are victims of the system, and for averting the danger from new revolutionary advances that have the prospect of reconstructing a socialism for the twenty-first century. This function cannot be filled by any country other than the United States. The construction of a European neo-imperialism, relieving America from its guard duty, remains an impossible dream for the conceivable future. The Atlanticism that this pure capitalist logic thus implies inevitably reduces the European role to staying within the strict limits of commercial competition between Europe, Japan, and the United States, without aspiring for any kind of cultural, ideological, political, and military autonomy. In these circumstances, the European project is reduced to nothing more than the European wing of the Atanticist project dominated by the United States.

In response to this poor oudook, in which a weakened European construction would remain threatened with collapse at any moment, can Europe contribute to the building of a truly polycentric world in every sense of the term, that is to say, a world respectful of different social and economic paths of development? Such a new international order could open the way in Europe itself to social advances impossible to achieve within the strict logic of competitiveness alone. In other words, it could permit the beginning of breakthroughs in the direction of the extension of non-market social spaces, the only path for socialist progress in the West. Different relationships between the North and the South could, thus, be promoted in a context conducive to the objectively necessary popular national transition in the Third World. This option of "European nonalignment"--the form of delinking appropriate to this region of the world--is the only means for checking an otherwise almost inevitable decline. Here, I mean by decline the renunciation of a mobilizing and credible progressive social project in favor of day-to-day adjustment to outside forces.

The choice remains: true universalism that is necessarily socialist or Eurocentric capitalist barbarism. Socialism is at the end of this long tunnel. Let us understand by this a society that has resolved the legacy of the unequal development inherent to capitalism and has simultaneously given all human beings on the planet a better mastery of their social development. This society will be superior to ours only if it is worldwide, and only if it establishes a genuine universalism, based on the contributions of everyone, Westerners as well as those whose historical course has been different. It is obvious that the long road which remains to be traveled in order to realize this goal prohibits the formulation of definitive judgments on strategies and stages to pass through. Political and ideological confrontations, like those that opposed "revolutionaries" and "social democrats" in their time, are nothing more than the vicissitudes of this long struggle. It is clear that the nature of this human society cannot be predicted.

The future is still open. It is still to be lived.