FREEDOM, WALLS AND FREE MASONS IN EUROPE OF THE 90S - POWER, TERRITORIALITY AND THE FLIGHT FROM SPACE

In Swedish, ''free masons'' are literally called ''free wall-builders' '. By putting them in opposition to each other as a pun, the author tr ies to summarize the distinction between, on the one hand, the politic al-military, territorial power - raising a wall, drawing a border line , to defend itself against ''the other'' - and, on the other hand, the economic, political and ideological, non-territorial power - operatin g as a parallel hierarchy, even inside the territorial state, controll ing flows of information and capital. The latter may operate as compan ies, as political networks, or, to use a metaphor, as ''free masons''. Their main interests are not territory - the military buffer of deep forests and mountains - but centrality, access to decisions and inform ation. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, there has been a tendency to develop new ''medieval walls'', new lines of friction - in the South between Europe and the Muslim world, in the East between European mode rnity and Russian orthodoxy - as a border line of new territorial powe r. However, there is also a tendency among European states to search f or centrality, to overcome territorial borders and perhaps even to ''a mputate'' territories - the less effective periphery of the state - as in the case of Slovakia, Serbia, Calabria or - when it comes to Europ e in general - Russia, as military power becomes more important.