*** HUBERT VEDRINE: Le monde au défi. Librairie Arthème Fayard (13 rue Montparnasse, F-75006 Paris. Tel: (33-1) 45498200 - Email: info-fayard@editions-fayard.fr - Internet: http://www.fayared.fr ). 2016, 118 pp, €15.15. ISBN 978-2-213-70089-2.
Foreign minister for five years in Lionel Jospin's government under the presidency of Jacques Chirac, Hubert Védrine did not leave behind him the memory of a great defender of the European cause, and this short tome confirms that he is still not won over. However, it also confirms that the man, who is a diplomat by profession, remains a citizen of the world who is constantly on the lookout, seeking to discern where all the opportunities and vicissitudes of our time are likely to lead the countries of the planet. This pensum again finds him at the bedside of the global patient, drawing up a mixed diagnosis without great hope of recovery…
The author considers the world in the light of the concept of 'international community,' which he sees as simply a 'paradoxical language tic.' Initially, he starts by explaining that the concept has little meaning and is an objective that some people, Westerners, assign themselves but which is far from a tangible reality, only international elites having the weakness to assimilate it at their small gatherings. In reality, he argues, nations remain the only intangible realities, with only the West allowing itself to believe that its values were 'universal in nature and commercial globalisation 'had the vocation of unifying the world and dissolving recalcitrant identities, like vulgar kidney stones.' But it doesn't exist because the other peoples and regions of the world resist it, each in its own way. The view he has of the Russians in this connection (humiliated after the loss of Ukraine which 'had been Russian for much longer than Brittany has been French'), the Chinese and a Muslim world 'eaten away by bitterness and resentment' which only recognises the Umma community, is revealing of the pitfalls lying in wait along the path that could lead to an international community that is actually experienced as a community by one and all. Hence, in fine, his pessimism as to the possibility that this could emerge in the short-term, potentially through a 'great break' or 'creative shocks.' He doesn't believe it. He feels that only becoming aware of the crucial need to preserve the planet Earth in a habitable state for its inhabitants (human beings and all the other living beings alike) may one day lead to the miracle of a humanity anchored in solidarity.
In conclusion, Hubert Védrine thus calls for world decision-makers to shift as soon as possible 'from the geopolitical to the geo-ecological' and he makes a convincing case for this. There is an uneasy feeling, however, as some ideas about Europe voiced earlier in the book cast a shadow over his credibility, his ability to observe the world without the blinkers that some of French elite and former French diplomacy like to don. To give just one example: he praises 'some Europeans, generally the French,' who tried to get Europe, 'when finally freed of the strategic lethargy it had been cocooned in since 1945, to metamorphose into a true power,' even wanting it to be possible to at last build 'a Europe of Defence, thus reversing a seventy-year-old trend.' Writing this without pointing out that it was in fact that French National Assembly which, through the contre nature action of the Gaullists and the Communists, signed the death sentence for the planned European Defence Community in 1954, certainly comes under the category of an enormous lie by omission! Do not be surprised therefore that this man also imagines that in order to boost its legitimacy, the United Nations Security Council could be enlarged without damaging the veto rights of the 'permanent members,' asserting that greater use of subsidiarity 'within the 28-nation confederation and the 19-nation states federation (the eurozone)' would 'perhaps have made the British referendum superfluous' and calls for a 'pause in integration, apart from justified exceptions (for example, making a new, credible, Schengen).' At the end of the day, while Hubert Védrine wants to be the world's doctor, when it comes to Europe, he turns up as a bonesetter!
Michel Theys
*** THANOS DOKOS (Ed.): Le livre blanc sur la politique extérieure grecque, la défense et la sécurité. Les défis, les possibilités et les propositions politiques. Editions Sideris (116 rue Solonos, GR-10681 Athens. Tel: (30-210) 3833434 - Fax: 3832294 - Email: contact@isideris.gr). 2016, 370 pp, €30. ISBN 978-960-080727-1.
Through this 'white paper,' Thanos Dokos wanted to provide a document of high strategic value in service of Greece's role in the world by listing the objectives and constants of Greece's national strategy, the country's partners and zones of interest, its priorities and also the problems, threats, challenges and opportunities it is facing. As the editor explains (who lectures at the international and European studies department of Piraeus University, the Defence School and the National Security School, and is also research director at the Greek Foundation of European and Foreign Policy), the authors had three main objectives: 1) to describe the nature of the twenty-first century's emerging trends and security challenges; 2) to raise the current and foreseeable dilemmas, issues and potential opportunities for Greece's foreign policy and defence and security policy; and 3) to formulate pragmatic policy recommendations so that the objectives of making optimum use of national resistance coefficients can be met. Against this backdrop, the authors (all academics) of the thirty contributions examine Greece's relations with the European Union and global powers, the current and future zones of interest (the United States, Russia, China, Asia, Africa and Latin America), Greece's regional policy (taking a look at the Balkans, the Mediterranean, the Middle East and the Black Sea), the relations between Greece and Turkey and the Cyprus question. They also cover a number of special issues and foreign policy tools: the defence and security policy, domestic security, economic security, economic diplomacy, energy, Hellenism, migration, multilateral diplomacy, cultural diplomacy and more besides). The institutional framework of Greek foreign policy is also analysed and the book is permeated by a vast bibliography. (AKa)
*** SOTIRIS DALLIS, CONSTANTINOS MAGLIVERAS (Eds.): La Méditerranée, la Grèce et le monde. Hier et aujourd'hui. Editions Papazisi (2 rue Nikitara, GR-10678 Athens. Tel: (30-210) 3822496 - Fax: 3809020 - Email: papazisi@otenet.gr - Internet: http://www.papazisi.gr ). 2015, 278 pp, €18. ISBN 978-960-02-2985-1.
This fine collective work can be considered as a reflection on the memory and heritage of Mediterranean culture, as an invitation to the peoples of the Mediterranean to achieve or regain the multiple, the epic and the tragic of their immense patrimony. An invitation that comes in the wake of that of French thinker Edgar Morin, who recommended accepting Mediterranean diversity, the desire to not be led back to division but to seek to understand in order, finally, to unite. How far does the Mediterranean go? Nobody knows for certain because its borders have not been set, whether in space or time. How are they to be defined, and in relation to what? Its borders are neither historical, nor national nor ethnic. Although it's difficult to know all the Mediterranean, something inexplicable clearly always pushes us to try to remodel the mosaic that is the Mediterranean. Europe was born in the Mediterranean, in the Maghreb, in the Near and Middle East, in Judaism, Christianity and Islam in both Athens and Rome, Jerusalem and Alexandria, Constantinople and Venice and Genoa. Europe is the daughter of the dialectic, the democracy and the art of Greece, the Roman State, Roman law that stretched to the outer edges of the Empire, of ancient Arab science and many other things beside. In this book by lecturers at Greek universities, whose editors are Sotiris Dallis (senior lecturer in international relations and international politics at the Mediterranean Studies Department at Aegeus University) and Constantinos Magliveras (a professor who lectures (LU>>>>>) in the law of international organisations at the same department of the same university), it is also shown that the Mediterranean was shrunk after the rise of the Atlantic and, later, the Pacific, and it has become a big lake in a seismic zone where religions face one another, as do secularism and religion, the rich and the poor, the West and the East, the North and the South... These days, our Mediterranean hurts us all because cosmopolitan, multinational or multi-faith oases have vanished into thin air. The authors proclaim that we should nevertheless be inspired by the memory of these oases: we need to rediscover the essence of the Mediterranean, situated in opening, in communication, in tolerance. Edgar Morin invited us to find the mother substance in the Mediterranean, pointing out that there can't be fraternity without maternity. The authors of this fine tome join forces with its call for the common sea to be reclaimed as our source of life, beauty and poetry. (AKa)
*** CHARIS MYLONAS: Les compatriotes, les réfugiés, les minorités. Editions Epikentro (9 rue Kamvounion, GR-54621 Thessalonica. Tel: (30-231) 0256146 - Fax: 0256148 - email: http://www.epikentro.gr ). 2016, €18. ISBN 978-960-458525-0
What pushes a country to decide to join - or on the contrary to block - an ethnic group? Why might it decide to officially recognise it as a minority? In this study, Charris Mylonas takes an innovative look at the effect of geopolitical relations in the domain of public policies on the recognition of non-traditional ethnic groups, meaning any group of people that a country's leading elite considers as unassimilated. Using detailed research into the Balkans, this professor of comparative politics at George Washington University in Washington shows that the way a State deals with a non-dominant ethnic group within its borders is largely determined by foreign policy (given the way the status granted to the ethnic group could influence international balances in the near environment) and depending on whether the group has support (or enemies) abroad. Bridging international relations and comparative politics, this book also casts an innovative eye over the way that international intervention in ethnic conflicts beyond national borders can influence States when they have to give a status to minority populations. The book was originally published in English and won the European Studies Book Award of the Council for European Studies in 2014, and Council University's Peter Katzenstein Book Prize in 2013. (AKa)
*** PIERRE CHABAL (Eds.): Concurrences interrégionales Europe-Asie au XXIe siècle. Presses Interuniversitaires Européennes / Peter Lang (1 av. Maurice, B-1050 Brussels. Tel: (41-32) 3761717 - Fax: 3761727 - Email: info@peterlang.com - Internet: http://www.peterlang.com ). "Enjeux internationaux" series, No. 33. 2015, 393 p.. ISBN 978-2-87574-277-3.
This book emerged from Europe-Asia conferences on 'L'interrégional dans tous ses états: concurrences Europe-Asie au XXIe siècle' (interregional Europe-Asia competition in the twenty-first century) organised in The Hague in 2012 and in Almaty in 2014 by the universities of The Hague, Xiamen (China), InHa (Korea), Mongolia (MUIS) and Kazakhstan (KazNU al-Farabi). It has some thirty chapters, mostly by authors working in most of the countries covered by this plural approach, handing the microphone to analysts who carry out research in countries at the heart of the construction of regional Asia. Their collective approach aims to understand post-Cold War Asia by mixing together institutional, cultural, historical, political and economic approaches, comparing them in order to avoid two biases: ethnocentrism, which would judge Asia using assumptions typical for example of Europe, and reductionism, which would suggest seeing in regional institutions the 'essential' shape of relations and competition among the regions. In the post-Cold War period, global regions have not been part of a conjunctural dynamic since 1991 or even 1945. The 'regional dynamic' that takes over from the alliances of the nineteenth century and before has been profoundly shaping the world since the 1920s, from the Baltic Entente and the Balkans Entente to Benelux, which would go on to inspire what would soon be the European 'Community.' Over and above knowledge of the regions, the authors reflect on the significance of a multilateral, pluriregional institutionalisation that links the sub-continents up with each other, starting with interregional Eur-Asian or Eur-Asiatic summits. (PLa)