Former Spanish Ambassador to Albania Manuel Montobbio’s book is published by the Albanian Institute for International Studies.
TIRANA, Nov. 15 – The Albanian Institute for International Studies held an event on Nov. 15, promoting the publishing of the Albanian version of “Going out of the Cat’s Alley: The deconstruction of East and West and global governance,” a book by former Spanish Ambassador to Albania Manuel Montobbio.
The book was promoted in a ceremony at the Ministry of Culture premises, bringing together diplomats, politicians, officials and students.
Ambassador Montobbio, who in December 2010 concluded his mission as the first Spanish Ambassador to Albania, also participated in the event and spoke to those attending.
“The book is a critical approach challenging the status quo of theoretical thinking about the present and the future of the global society,” says AIIS Executive Director Albert Rakipi.
Albanian Foreign Minister Edmond Panariti, Culture Minister Aldo Bumci, U.S. Ambassador Alexander Arvizu and EU Ambassador Ettore Sequi participated in the book promotion ceremony, among many others.
A diplomat and doctor in political science with a broad multidisciplinary formation, Manuel Montobbio has developed both a diplomatic and academic and literary career. The first has led him to carry out various responsibilities in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Cooperation of Spain and to be posted in San Salvador, Jakarta, Mexico, Guatemala and Tirana. He is also the author of many books, including Gupo굩ca de Albania (Poetical guide of Albania, 2011) and “Going out of the Cat’s Alley: The deconstruction of East and West and global governance,” first published in Spanish in 2008.About the book
In the era of the information society globalization, we are all in the same boat, sailing in the spaceship Earth destination future; we are all. And nonetheless our cultures and civilizations prepare us to be an “us”versus the others. Perhaps because, unlike Valle-Inclan in his theatre plays, which in order to better capture reality submitted it to the distortion of its image before subjected the reality distortion of its image in the convex and concave mirrors of the Cat’s Alley, the technique used by civilizations to approach it seems to be the opposite: the use of convex or concave mirrors to apprehend us, to others and the world as if they were flat mirrors, in the belief that mirrors are flat. To go out of the Cat’s Alley, to overcome the tension of the formation of a global us in one spaceship Earth, lacking, however, a culture which may make its survival and reproduction possible, to face the challenge to build it, Manuel Montobbio invites us in this test to make an intellectual trip in two stages.
The first, to understand the present and the always, to understand what conditions and distorts our vision of the reality and of the World, through the visions in the mirrors of Western universality and supremacy, of Orientalism and Antiwesternism, of the “Asian values” and other alternatives. And through the assumptions and ideas which ultimately lay behind, support and shape them, support them, from the conceptions on identity or on cosmologies to the conceptualization of the international system and the classic visions on it as well as on development, democracy, culture and peace.
The second, in search of ideas and principles, new paradigms and possible elements to go out the Cat’s Alley, for the construction of sustainable development, peace and democracy in the “us”who we all are. A model to articulate global governance through the consideration:
– of new paradigms on democracy, development, culture as foundation-ideas for its construction;
– of lenses, perspectives, tools and ideas to cement it;
– of the transformations of the international system in the era of globalization, the lessons of European construction, the thesis of the clash of civilizations, and of the theories, paradigms and elements for a system global governance and of the transformations of foreign policy to achieve it.
Through this journey, this multidisciplinary and multifaceted essay, between culture and politics, unravels paradigms and keys for the comprehension of the present and the deconstruction of Orientalisms and Antiwesternisms and other categories that condition it, as well as for the construction of global governance.
