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We need, therefore, to face the next century with humility, with the idea that beyond every human being, we have a monkey hiding. 98% of our genetic inheritance is that of the chimpanzee. Such a statement has enormous implications. For instance, chimpanzees practice many of the same behaviours as mankind.

For instance, tribalism. Here one sees a tribal celebration, but one also finds tribal aggressivety. The world had to go through two world wars, forty years in Europe, in order to overcome our tribal aggressiveness. When we take a look at certain regions of Southern Europe or other continents, we are forced to note that tribal aggressiveness still exists as in certain other continents. Thus we must ask the question : what is "post-tribalism" today ? ?

I think it is "multi-belonging". You belong to an Indian tribe because of the way you wear your hair or to the tribe of "businessmen" because of the Wall Street Journal. This is what one can call "multi-belonging". We all practice multi-belonging in the professional universe. Formerly man belonged to a tribe from birth to death, and perhaps even longer, 24 hours a day ! Now he belongs to a company 8 hours a day, excluding holidays. He belongs at the same time to a family, to a village. So we practice "multi-belonging". However, when we travel to a part of the world where there is clan or tribal spirit which is still very strong, and we take a young entrepreneur, who is making money, we immediately have 20 people coming to see him saying, "you must finance the village fair and the wedding of our cousin". These events are much more important than the equilibrium of the company and the company's duty is to use its money for " important events " , that is to say for the village fair and weddings for cousins. Thus the head of a company is pushed by his environment to transform the money of the company into private money which is contrary to our laws. Education is required in order to avoid such practices. The naive idea that we pretended to have regarding the Eastern countries of Europe or regarding the developing countries : that it was sufficient to open the market, and everyone would be efficient, has been completely falsified when we take a close look at precise anthropological behaviour.

Of course countries "are opened", as happened with Eastern Europe, as was declared in 1991..the first tribe to arise was the Mafia which is a tribal system, centred around the family that dominates the economic circuits with strength and determination,. Therefore, we are no longer in a conflict with, on the one side, Capitalism and Communism or Socialism on the other, but we are in a conflict between legal Capitalism and Mafia Capitalism. It not an easy conflict to deal with because the frontier can pass in the middle of an individual. So this new, and difficult, situation will take several years to overcome.

Let us also look at the demographic curve. The demographic scenario of the 70's was very pessimistic : explosion of the population . To the contrary , the demographic scenario for the 80's was that of a stabilisation of the population at approximately 12 billion. Nowadays, demographers are talking about a drop in fertility and at a much more rapid level than that which had been predicted with the probable scenario being indicated as is shown, where the world demographic population will reach a level above 6 billion in the year 2000 and then will increase to 8.5 billion. In the year 2100 it will then drop to something around the level of 6 billion.

For the period between today and 2040, there will be a very new phenomenon which is called the " inversion of the pyramid ". We are now in a state in many Western countries where the population with individuals of 0 to 10 years old, is very small ; this is due to a very low level of fertility for the past ten years. This phenomenon will become more prevalent to give in 2020-30 a world population of more old people than young people. This is a very new population structure and it will of course transform the relationships between the young and the old ; for all the structures that have been built were done so with a different population structure in mind.

We need to take a look at another point : in the year 2000 with a world population of 6 billion people, over one billion will have been forced to leave the world of farming to take up residence in the big cities. Take a look, for instance, at the city of Sao Paulo in Brazil, where we can see the existence of slums along with skyscrapers. At the beginning of the next century, we will not find rich countries on the one hand and poor countries on the other. We will find rich and poor at just one hundred metres from one another all over the world. In the biggest city of the richest State of the richest country, Los Angeles, we find extreme violence and extreme poverty. So this is a universal phenomenon.

We can say that two generations from now, the children born in these suburbs, will not have the technology to survive in the countryside as their fathers did. We would not be able to survive 8 days in the rift of the Omo Valley where the human species brilliantly started its career. We would not stay alive one week. So, today, ex-agricultural populations cannot return to their origins because they do not have the technology for survival in the countryside. However, they are not familiar either with modern technology because there was no school to provide them with the necessary training. They can be called " urban savages "; brought up without any possibility of survival. Such people have only one solution : consider the city as a jungle and invent new forms of survival. If such populations counted as but one per cent of the world population, the problem would be one of social control and assistance. If it is 20% of the young people, there is a structural question.

The same type of structural question existed in the 19th century. The situation can be summed up very quickly : when a new technical system is set up, it marginalizes the manpower that served the previous technical system. and so there is a rise, a slow demographic rise of exclusion in the population, at an order of magnitude less than 1% a year. In the case of Europe in the beginning of the 19th century, the explosion occurred in 1848 in the form of a European Revolution. The ruling class at the time was very surprised ; they thought that thanks to the French Revolution and the suppression of priviledges, that they had settled the problem. Then they realized the quantity of poor people, the proletariat, lived in horrible conditions in the city suburbs. Two different opinions developed : one was humanistic which concluded that the situation was " inhuman ". They were right. There was another conservative opinion which felt that the situation was becoming " dangerous ". They were right also. This ruling class thus agreed on one position : "something should be done".

My diagnosis is that we now have in front of us, at the beginning of next century, the same kind of scenario ; however it is very difficult to say when the change of strategy will occur, probably around 2020. It will lead to similar strong policies in Education and Great Public Works. Not with the education system of the 19th century but with virtual universes, not with the tools that were used for public works in the 19th century but with powerful device such as those employed to dig the Channel tunnel. It will not be the same technology, but the idea will be the same : large public works and a higher education system for everybody, in order to make the whole population familiar with new technologies.

I would say that goodwill people should reflect now on what will happen. This is what we are trying to do in my organisation, called Prospective 2100 . One can now understand that it can be of use to study how the programmes for investment for the next century might be. First of all we must sit down and study the question. The decision-makers will be obliged to decide, when the situation will turn to be critical. If the files have not been prepared, and if they file they must make a decision anyway, they will decide anything. As an ex-civil servant, I can say that "anything" is really "anything" . This means we have to seriously prepare studies for the future.

We will not necessarily have programmes like those of the 19th century, as for instance, that of the Suez Canal of the time of Jules Verne. There can also be small programmes. Take for example, Brazil and Fortaleza, a city of 2 million people with one third of the population being at the poverty level and living in the streets. These poor people are squatters, living in huts that do not belong to anyone. The municipality was fighting against such people. Then a non profit aid organisation travelled to Brazil, learned how to build with bricks, helped the squatters in their negotiations and as a result these people were able to build 50 houses for their own needs. The municipality then changed its dattitude and praised them for having launched a marvellous experiment that could be adapted to other cities of South America. A typical attitude of politicians. We need to look closely at such an example : "if the problem had only been that of giving them a house to live in", we could have imported "prefabricated sleeping boxes" from Japan, boxes which could have been slept in. However, the result would have been very different because re-appropriation of technology by the people is at least as important as technology itself. The human relationship between technology and people is more important than technology.