Yet while we assert a relatively orderly process in the management of globalization, one of the striking impressions left upon me after our deliberations at Stanford is just how fluid and contrastive many of our views are, and that indeed even within the “transatlantic community” there are multiple definitions or strategies on how to approach transitions and adjustments to changing global environments. We can to a certain extent welcome this as “vive la différence!”. Yet as Rolf Hoffmann pointed out in his opening remarks, the Fulbright Commission in Berlin has had to cancel its teacher-exchange program for the first time in fifty years because German high school teachers feel that the differences between their society and the United States are just too big (e.g., religion and social issues) to allow for any results from such an exchange to be integrated into their teaching back home. Such difference thus poses not just potential, but also the danger, at least for me and I assume for those gathered here today, of a distancing if not partial dissolution of the transatlantic community.

This being said, one of the central benefits of our round table in Stanford has been to underscore the “messiness” in the transatlantic dialog about adjusting to changing global environments. Thus when we talk about “societies” we tend to think of relatively stable units, but as Helmut Anheier underscored during his presentation, our deliberations must start with a most basic and relatively open question: “what kind of societies do we want”? As Anheier made clear, societies face genuine choices here, and we are in the midst of negotiating these choices.

Or let us take the concept of “transition”, which tends to encourage the image of “orderly change” (think of the idea of the ‘transition team’). Yet as we were reminded during Roger Friedland’s presentation, transitions can involve profound uncertainty in that “institutional differentiation is an open game”, or, desired outcomes might not be the outcomes that we wind up with at all.

Making the process even more tenuous is the very act of “adjusting” and how such “movement” is taking place on moving terrain (an image might be that of societal adjustment as sharing more with surfing than skiing). As Russell Berman helped us to understand, wider global mobility disrupts existing narratives, in short, such mobility upends the very guidelines by which societies seek to undertake the adjustment process in the first place.

Finally, the image of “global environments” can be interpreted as providing relatively intact and observable entities. Yet as Detlef Pollack articulated for us in the case of religion, these environments are social constructs involving choice, and often choice from clearly different alternatives. Defining global environments can thus be a highly tricky and tenuous proposition.

Indeed, upon (short) reflection of the round table theme and the nature of our discussions in the eight workshops, four concepts distilled themselves in my effort to try to prepare some remarks for this concluding plenary session. These are displacements, contingency, readings, and perhaps oddly enough (or rather not for a transatlantic gathering), NATO.

In listening to many of the discussions, what strikes me is how the global environments about which we are deliberating often involve profound displacements in our societies, almost a form of “structural turbulence” in that change seems ongoing, increasing in both diversity and intensity, thus disrupting patterns and thereby displacing peoples’ ability to understand or to anticipate. One can argue benignly that such a condition provides an opportunity for “real change”, but one can also argue more somberly that such a condition nurtures profound insecurity. Thus change, real change, can mean the “closing” of societies as much as it can mean the “opening” of societies.

This leads me to the notion of contingency and concomitantly, agency and choice. Again, when we think of transitions and adjustments, we tend to think of “orderly change”. But I was struck during the different presentations about how the transitions before us are contingent upon so many genuine and profound choices. The “good” news is that societies are importantly “agents” of their adjustments, i.e., they have agency or power to shape their own agendas (and are not just passive players in the globalization ‘game’). The more cautious headline is that the process is in a steady state of fragility because of its very contingency.

An important part of that fragility emerges from the honest but often starkly different readings of the change happening around us. Our discussion of global environments and how to adjust to them reminds me of an earlier phase of adjustment to global environments that had to be undertaken by the United States; namely, in the wake of the French Revolution, and how the United States should react to the upheaval and transformation of Europe. Two major Americans, Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson, observed the same events and facts, and came to profoundly different conclusions. For Hamilton, the French Revolution represented chaos, the abyss, why the country needed more strong government to manage its affairs. For Jefferson, the French Revolution was an opportunity to encourage a new chapter in human affairs, to promote “real change”, to “liberate” citizens from the shackles of central authority.

I have the impression that that we are experiencing another round of “multiple readings” of similar events today as we all try to find some form of “solid footing” on which to plant our conclusions about what needs to be done so that our societies can adjust to the “matrix of mobility” we are currently experiencing. Indeed, I sometimes think that the “honest differences” across the Atlantic are not so much between Germans and Americans but rather, à la Hamilton and Jefferson, really between groups in our respective societies that have differing predilections or value-sets by which to assess change. Instead of German or American publics, for example, one could almost talk about “transatlantic publics”, i.e., progressives, conservatives, liberals (European definition) and the narratives, and resulting strategies for adjustment, which they construct.

This brings me, perhaps a bit surprisingly, to NATO. Now, I am not using NATO in its more formal sense, but as our colleague Peter Theiner introduced the concept at the beginning of our round table, namely, as standing for “No Action, Talk Only”. The organizers of our round table all encouraged us to strive for more than “just talk” and to come up with an “action plan” (more on this in a bit). I am grateful to Peter for putting this image before us, because it provided an inescapable focus for our efforts. The good news is that NATO, with an assist from the EU, can indeed be an important form of an action plan. If one is prepared to buy into, albeit briefly, the observations I made about displacements, contingency, and readings, then it becomes relatively clear that one of the larger tasks ahead for adjusting to changing global environments is the very framing of issues in a highly fluid state of affairs.