Translated from French
Today I'm going to break down globalism for you.
Why it's this, and not something else, that's eating away at the world right now. And why the word we've spent thirty years making terrifying—"national"—is precisely the one that will save the West.
Let's start at the beginning: where does globalism come from. You only fight well what you've understood.
Globalism wasn't born from malice. It was born from a trauma.
Two world wars in thirty years. Tens of millions dead. And in the end, a conclusion: if nations make war on each other, then the culprit is the nation itself.
From that diagnosis came a cure. Dissolve the national level. Build institutions above the peoples that answer to no one. Erase borders, melt cultures, hand decisions to a class of managers hovering above the ground—Brussels, Davos, supranational courts, faceless committees.
The intention was noble: never again.
The reasoning was wrong: it's not the nation that makes war, it's the absence of limits on power. We confused the house with the fire.
But an idea isn't enough. It needed an enforcer. Not a state police—an internal police, lodged in every head.
That was wokism.
Wokism was globalism's cultural armed wing. Its mission: to make any attachment shameful. To your border, your flag, your history, your dead. To teach you that your country is a fault, your heritage a privilege, your pride a crime. A people ashamed of itself defends nothing anymore. It opens up. That was the whole goal.
Except there's one thing no ideology has ever managed to silence: reality.
Communism promised abundance, it produced famines, and the famines sent their refutation. Wokism promised justice, it produced contempt, and the market sent its own.
Go woke, go broke.
Bud Light, Disney, brands that were worth decades of trust liquidated in a quarter. And in the voting booths, everywhere, the same rejection. You don't decree against the people. You don't legislate against the market. Hayek had said it: no central intelligence will ever be smarter than the sum of free choices. Wokism wanted to command demand. Demand voted. It voted against.
Remains the Trojan horse. Because that's exactly what globalism is.
It never enters saying "I'm here to dissolve your culture." It enters dressed as openness, tolerance, modernity, the sense of History. We open the doors to it. And once inside, it empties.
A nation isn't a market. It's a language, a memory, a debt to the dead and a promise to children not yet born. It doesn't get replaced like you change airport terminals. Globalism dreams of a seamless world: same cities, same brands, same opinions, everywhere. The price of that seamless world is a world without an inside. Peoples turned into a population. Citizens turned into consumers. And a democracy that no longer has a demos to govern.
And there, the masterstroke. The real one.
How do you stop a people from defending itself? You take away the word.
We took "national" and welded it, by force, to the worst hours of our History. You say "nation," people hear 1933. You say "border," people hear barbed wire. You say "proud of my country," they ask for your ideological papers.
It's a semantic sleight of hand. We fused two opposite things into one word. On one side the nation as hearth—the idea that a people has the right to govern itself, to decide at home, to pass on what it received. On the other the ultranationalism of conquest, the state that wants to subjugate others. It has nothing to do with it. Loving your house has never meant wanting to burn your neighbor's.
But we stuck them together. So that in saying the first, you're accused of the second.
And look: the dam is breaking. The most powerful man in the West today wears the word "nationalist" without blinking, and the sky hasn't fallen on his head. When a forbidden word becomes sayable again, the whole apparatus trembles.
People will tell me: you're putting on trial people who wanted peace.
That's true. Many of the architects of globalism were sincere. They wanted to end war, misery, deadly borders. Our enemies aren't bad people. They're bad ideas.
But an idea is judged by its record.
The record, here it is: democracies that no longer recognize themselves in their own cities. A continent incapable of defending its borders, naming its enemies, passing on its heritage. A youth taught that its civilization is the problem, and which discovers, stunned, that you can't build anything with shame.
And what do they do, faced with this record?
What every refuted ideology does: it doesn't correct, it doubles down. More rules from above. More managed decline, neatly. And a growing contempt for the peoples who dare say no—rebaptized "populists," "far right," "threat to democracy." Excommunication, again. The same reflex as "racist": when you have no more arguments, there's the insult left.
And let's be clear, because that's the heart of the matter: there is no secret committee.
Most of the people running this machine don't even understand the machine. The civil servant, the journalist, the NGO executive, the young commissioner in Brussels: they're not strategists. They're actors. They execute software they didn't write, whose architecture they ignore, and which they take for morality itself.
Ideas don't need conspiracy to spread. They undergo a Darwinian selection: those that reproduce best in heads survive. Globalism won the institutions not because a brain planned it, but because it offered millions of people something irresistible: the moral high ground without the effort of building anything.
You maneuver the Trojan horse without ever having seen the hull.
So let's set things right side up.
The nation isn't the enemy of the future. It's the only framework where free men have ever governed themselves and built something that lasts. Not a supranational committee. Not a commission. A people that knows who it is, and decides at home.
"National" doesn't mean 1933. It means: this is our house, and we decide.
The first Cold War was won against an external empire. This one will be won from the inside—by giving back to the peoples the right to love their hearth without apology, and the desire to build instead of managing their own erasure.
Take back the word. Take back the house.
To work.
_____
Translated from French
In my last post, I described globalism to you.
Today, I present to you its French-side architect.
Jacques Attali.
Special advisor to Mitterrand for ten years. Founder of the EBRD. Author of dozens of books that announce—and call for—a "world governance" above nations. If globalism had an engineering firm in France, his name would be on the door.
But I don't want to talk to you about his CV. I want to talk to you about a sentence. Just one. Because it contains the entire software.
Asked about happiness, Attali always gives the same answer, in his books as well as on camera: his own happiness doesn't interest him. What he seeks is to be useful. His definition of a successful life boils down to a formula he's been repeating for thirty years: that "the world be a little better after me, thanks to me."
It sounds noble. Listen a second time.
This isn't a confidence. It's a program. It's the full credo of the planner.
This man tells you, in black and white, that he doesn't take lived happiness as his compass—neither yours nor mine—but an abstract "better world" that he, from on high, takes it upon himself to define. The real happiness of real people, here, now? Too small. Too concrete. Too free. What matters is the Plan. The grand design. Humanity as a project to correct.
And that's when Hayek wakes up in his grave.
Anyone who decides your happiness for you, from the top, always ends up deciding against you. That's what Hayek called the fatal presumption: the illusion that a mind—or a committee of brilliant minds—could organize society better than millions of free people organizing their own lives. Every time it's been tried, it ends in lines, shortages, barbed wire. Not out of malice. Out of architecture.
And the key word is "useful."
"Useful" is the most dangerous word in the technocratic vocabulary. Because it turns the human into a means. Useful to what? Decided by whom? As soon as a life is worth only by its utility to the Plan, the one who isn't "useful" becomes, by design, superfluous. All the hell of the 20th century was born from people absolutely convinced they were useful to a better future.
Some will say: Attali is sincere. That's true. He is completely.
That's precisely what makes him the perfect case study. Our enemies aren't bad people; they're bad ideas. Attali isn't a movie villain. He's a brilliant, hardworking, devoted man—who carries a deadly idea in its purest form: the idea that the world is piloted from above, and that your freedom is an adjustment variable in the grand design.
And what does he do, like the entire school he embodies, in the face of the patent failure of the project?
Exactly what I described in my previous post. He never concludes "I was wrong." He concludes that the plan wasn't applied strongly enough. More governance. More institutions above the people. More "better world" decided without them. Refuted by reality, the planner doesn't correct: he doubles down.
So let's draw the real fault line of our era.
On one side, the planner. He wants to make the world better by deciding for you what's good for you.
On the other, the builder. He makes the world better by giving you tools, energy, freedom—and by letting you seek your own happiness, in your own way.
The first finds you "useful." The second finds you free.
Choose wisely. It's all there.
Back to work.
