The global search for answers will draw on the attempts of different cultures to seek answers to problems of the human condition. Within each culture, the process will begin with an exploration of its own culturally specific values, ideals, concepts and stories as the way that their culture has dealt with those problems.

These can then be compared to the values, ideals, concepts and stories in other cultures so that we can appreciate similarities and differences. Different cultures have much to learn from each other. For example, Anglo-American ideology has been strong on emphasizing the importance of individuals but has tended to be weak on understanding institutions. Institutions are often reduced to matrices of interpersonal contracts rather than seen as organic wholes. This preference for individuals and lack of understanding of institutions leads to hostility towards them -particularly 'public' ones. European and Japanese cultures seem to take institutions seriously and to possess a stronger understanding of their nature. For me, this helps to review the significance of the Enlightenment.

The Enlightenment certainly, and rightly, placed the individual at the centre of legal and political philosophy. The fundamental point of the enlightenment was that institutions should serve individuals, rather than the other way around. This does not mean that institutions should be abandoned, but that the manner of their justification should be conceived -as means of protecting, realizing and furthering individual human rights.

Reinventing and recombining values as indicated above, the values of liberal democracy were formed in and for strong states. Although these values were often based on long-standing ideals found in a wide variety of cultures, that context affected the ways in which those ideals were expressed, combined and conceived as liberal democratic values (for example, the citizen-democracy of Athens gave way to the representative democracy in modern states). Constitutional values for a more global world may be variations on the values of citizenship, democracy and welfare. However, they may also be recombined in new values within new concepts that speak more effectively to the problems of globalization.

Sometimes the values will not be recombined but reinvented in a different form that may expose more general classes of value of which liberal democratic values were merely the contemporary form. It will taken one example -citizenship.

Post-Westphalia authoritarian states saw individuals as subjects. The enlightenment saw them as citizens. What was new was the idea that institutions such as the state existed to serve individuals rather than the individual in service of the state. The concept of citizenship built upon earlier enlightenment values of family, tribe and ethnic group. At each stage of human development, membership in the most socially and economically powerful groups has been seen as of enormous value. Exclusion from that group has been a very great punishment (e.g., being disowned by family, being expelled from the tribe or being outlawed from the village). The Enlightenment vaunted membership in the state, then the most significant and powerful social group. However, as the sovereign state wanes in social significance, other memberships become more crucial -including those of work. The new value may be the right to participate in the benefits of social life in the most socially significant groupings.