There is one major historic fact I retained from this conference: there were never as many new walls built in the history of humanity than since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. At the time of the conference, we were talking about some fifty walls disseminated around the world.

After the Cold War, the 1990ies saw the rise of globalization and the opening of markets, leading us to believe that immurement and compartmentalization of the minds were phenomena of the past.

September 2001 came to disturb the course of History and trigger a complex spectrum of exactions, defining a new world order of withdrawal.

Ever since, as much as the world is going global, it is closing in.