Voices of anger and resistance are heard all around the world. What do desperate American miners, bankrupt Greeks and Islamic terrorists have in common? Israeli journalist Nadav Eyal – author of the book Revolt: The Worldwide Uprising Against Globalization – thinks that they are all participants in an ongoing revolt, and listens to them with hope.

Paulina Wilk: I feel like I’m one of the people you write about in your book. The world is falling apart and I’ve no idea what to hold on to. When did this crisis of confidence start?

Nadav Eyal: It’s impossible to point out precisely. That’s not a comforting answer, I know. But if I were to choose a single event, I’d point to September 11, 2001. It was a moment of reckoning: in just one moment, we all understood that Francis Fukuyama’s narrative about the end of history, about the victory of liberalism and democracy, was only a fantasy. We saw that some forces in this world are determined to disrupt the liberal global order. For the West, that event was like a black cloud obscuring the sky. Beliefs that the whole world will embrace modernity and secularism, that it’s all going to be dandy, fell down just like the two towers.

Does this mean that ideas die when we stop believing in them?

There were always people advocating for resisting global liberalization. Take, for example, Jean Baudrillard or Abdullah Yusuf Azzam [a Palestinian theologian, co-creator of the theory of global jihad; he also had a hand in the creation of al-Qaeda – ed. note]. However, the middle classes in various parts of the world were infatuated by a vision of prosperity, by all these slogans coming from Washington. Only when wages stopped rising did people suddenly understand that the promise of progress and happiness wasn’t going to be fulfilled. After 9/11, the Americans lost their long-standing feeling of security. The US participated in two world wars and many other conflicts, but up until 2001 no American child was, say, scared to go out to a shop and buy herself a Popsicle, even if her father was at the very same time fighting in France or in Vietnam. In Poland or Israel, it was a different story – here, children knew what it meant to fear for one’s life. 9/11 brought fear to America, and fear drives politics.

You write that with the collapse of the World Trade Center towers came the end of the ‘age of responsibility’ – the end of an era shaped by the generation of leaders who lived through World War II and wanted to build a secure, stable world. This ‘new order’, begat by fear, but also by hope for a better tomorrow, is now coming apart and will not survive. But was it at all rational?

I don’t know if it was rational, but there was an attempt to introduce rationality into the public sphere. Unlike many historians, I don’t see many differences between the leaders of the Western and Eastern Blocs. Both sides had seen the war;