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Time to grow up, after 8000 years: The adolescence of mankind and how to limit its damage

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Social "development" is a concept taken from the life of individuals "unwrapping" from inexperience into responsibility. It does not always take a smooth way, but mechanisms of coping with inexperience on the social level are yet understudied. This paper aims to fill this void. After discussing the metaphors of development and individual adolescence, the paper argues that related 'end of history' ideas of the 1950s and 1990s were naïve for two specific reasons. First, they ignored the eurocentricity of 'modern' partitioning institutions that can be overcome by applying principles of non-partitioning Civil democracy. Second, they ignored the systematic nature of the European crisis 1914-15 as result of social inexperience, that can be overcome by implementing a Civil democracy manifesto to be signed as precondition for participation. Possible applications include global climate regimes, the institutionalization of transversal hegemony, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
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