*** MIREILLE DELMAS-MARTY: Aux quatre vents du monde. Petit guide de navigation sur l’océan de la mondialisation. Editions du Seuil (25 bd Romain-Rolland, F-75014 Paris. Email: contact@seuil.com – Internet: http://www.seuil.com ). 2016, 150 pp, €17. ISBN 978-2-02-118589-8.
This book invites readers to open up their lungs and neurons to face and tame a globalisation that is currently the work of sorcerers’ apprentices who have neither ethnics nor conscience. The author points out that this globalisation is paving the way for a breathless society ‘whose spirit has been chased out by matter, with digitised reason leaving no room for dreams.’ Humanity thus finds itself caught in a trap leading to disenchantment and abandonment, to the ease of acting ‘on automatic pilot,’ which announces ‘the arrival of societies of fear and permanent control,’ governed by a raft of bans and security excesses.
Mireille Delmas-Marty has something of the prophet about her, but the author, who lectured in law in a number of French universities and held the Chair of Comparative Legal Studies and the Internationalisation of Law at the Collège de France also has the soul of a poet/sea-dog mongrel who calls on dreams to give the World new oxygen. She dares to take up the challenge in these pages characterised by profundity and elegance, so that ‘law can contribute to protecting the breath that keeps us alive without reducing life to the survival of the human race.’ She wagers that Homo sapiens, because it is changing epoch, will be capable of radically changing direction: entering Anthropocène, this time ‘of geological history when the human species becomes a power capable of interacting with other geophysical forces and jeopardising the survival of the planet,’ she wants to believe it is capable of becoming aware of its corrosive force and its share of responsibility’ to the point of leading her to launch a call for reason ‘(and why not?) for legal reason and the conceptual forces of law.’ In her view, everything should proceed from the fact that ‘the Earth, humanity’s home, is a unit characterised by interdependence.‘ This fact was cast in law at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, but it now needs to be translated into hard fact by re-writing all the economic and political governance processes, along with ‘the legal processes of construction and harmonisation of values and responsibilisation of players.’ The author thus calls for a vast endeavour, calling on ‘the conceptual forces of law’ to adapt it ‘to current social dynamics.’
In practice, Mireille Delmas-Marty proposes a dynamic approach to globalisation which, the way its being left to develop today, ‘facilitates economic growth and development but doesn’t solve the problems of destitution and migration – which it is exacerbating, just as it is exacerbating attacks on the environment.’ Her comments therefore aim to warn of the tragedy that this evolution foretells, in order to avoid Humanity being driven one day to have to make the ‘deadly choice of a totalitarian humanity or a divided humanity, a huge closing-off or a huge collapse, a perpetual peace of robots or a permanent war among the billions of human beings who now inhabit the planet.’ Globalisation seems to her to be caught up in a ‘whirlwind of winds from opposing directions,’ and she invites readers to let themselves be guided by the metaphor of breath, breathing, ‘from the Greek word ‘pneuma’ that designates both breath and spirit’ – and to therefore ‘seek the compass’ that enables dominant and antagonistic winds to be discerned, those of freedom, security, competition and cooperation, with the aim of then releasing the energy generated by these tensions to strike a balance based on the emergence and acceptance of regulatory principles. ‘COP 21 demonstrated how energy can become action,’ she argues, seeing it as proof that humanity is not condemned to remain indefinitely ‘in the doldrums, that terrifying zone in the middle of oceans, where navigation becomes impossible.’ She puts forward ideas for regulating contradictions and rendering players responsible, all traced out on the basis of a strong conviction: ‘traditional, peoples united in history and their particularisms, made declarations of independence. Today, the inhabitants of planet Earth, if they want to unite in their desires for the future, have to recognise their interdependence in order to transform it into a common destiny.’ Doesn’t this appeal steeped in humanism also sound a little like a… call to order aimed at the precursor countries that comprise the European Union? Michel Theys
*** MARIO TELÒ: L’Europe en crise et le monde. Editions de l’Université de Bruxelles (26 av. Paul Héger, B-1000 Brussels. Tel: (32-2) 6503799 – Fax: 6503794 –Email: editions@ulb.ac.be – Internet: http://www.editions-universite-bruxelles.be ). "UBlire" series, No. 43. 2016, 217 pp, €9. ISBN 978-2-8004-1607-6.
This book is described as a synthesis of research carried out over thirty years by a professor of international relations who was at one point president of the European Studies Institute of the Université Libre de Bruxelles, which did not prevent him from also lecturing at Luiss in Rome. The book’s focus is the question of whether regional cooperation is in crisis. The answers that Prof. Telò makes are ‘highly nuanced and scaldingly of the moment,’ explains his colleague Louise Fawcett of Oxford University, and are the fruit of analysis considering ‘regionalism and its crises over time’ (Prof. Lequesne, Sciences Po), which, adds Prof. Söderbaum (Göteborg University), ‘scraps the borders between European studies and comparative regionalist studies.’ In the same chapter, the author takes a multidisciplinary approach mobilising global studies, political theory and international relations to situate Europe in the twentieth and twenty-first century world. He points out and then explains the historical changes of three grand epochs in regional cooperation, viz. ‘the authoritarian and hierarchical regionalism of the 1930s and 1940s,’ then the beginnings of multilateral regionalism ‘at the time of the hegemony of the United States and the bipolar world,’ and finally the emergence in recent times of a ‘post-hegemonic regionalism.’ In the penultimate chapter, Mario Telò compares the dynamics of extra-European multidimensional regionalism (in Asia and Africa, and also in the Americas) before looking in the final chapter at the implications of the multipolar world, the global crisis that started in 2007 and inter-regional geopolitical projects that are taking form, with four alternative scenarios dotted throughout the book. Over and above the scientific nature of the research, this book is also the work of a man who makes no secret of the ‘deep convictions’ he feels ‘as a citizen of Europe and the world,’ who openly declares himself ‘persuaded that the development of social and institutional forms of more binding multilateralism is the only way to build [peace, one step at a time.’ All the same, he does not believe in the idea that the European Union can become anything other than a regional organisation, that is, a federal State. Worse, most of the scenarios he sketches out are largely negative for the Union and, more generally, for peaceful cooperation among neighbouring countries. The way he sees it, the only way of rendering the European project perennial is to boost the concentric circle architecture around the eurozone and also to boost transnational democratic legitimacy. He is not sure at this stage whether the members of the European Council are prepared to listen to him… (PBo)
*** ANTONIS KANTAS: Le petit échiquier. Editions Papazisi (2 rue Nikitara, GR-10678 Athens. Tel: (30-210) 3822496 – Fax: 3809020 – Email: papazisi@otenet.gr – Internet: http://www.papazisi.gr ). 2016, 194 pp, €10.60. ISBN 978-960-02-3211-0.
The geopolitical subsystem of the Bosphorus Strait, Dardanelles, Aegean Sea and Cyprus is still a little chessboard where the competing geopolitical powers of the United States and Russia move their pawns. The United States are active in ensuring Russia doesn’t get a substantial presence in the warm seas of the south. According to Antonis Kantas, professor of political science at Aristotle University in Thessalonica, the competing forces of Greece and Turkey are also active in this framework, with the power gap between these two nations widening in Turkey’s favour. Why? Because of stubborn facts in the one and the other, be it the economy, for instance, or research, technology or population and. above all, due to the absence in Greece of any strategic planning, political will or society’s confidence in the world of politics. According to the author, nothing realistically enables one to think that Greek society will be able any time soon to break with its history and culture, and right the helm. Especially because Greece’s efforts to acquire technology worthy of modern defence have been affected by the need to keep its American ‘partner’ happy. Therefore, hints Antonis Kantas, nothing enables one to rule out that this geopolitical dynamic will one day lead Greece to become, not to put too fine a point on it, an economic and political satellite of Turkey. In the author’s view, Greek society needs to wake up so that this nightmare doesn’t become a reality. (AKa)
*** LORETTA NAPOLEONI: Le palmier islamiste. Editions Patakis (38 Panayi Tsaldari, GR-10437 Athens. Tel: (30-210) 3650000 – Fax: 3811940 – Email: bookstore@patakis.gr – Internet: http://www.patakis.gr ). ‘Sciences sociales et politiques’ series. 2016, €10.45. ISBN 978-960-16-6160-5.
Since its creation, ‘Islamic State’ (also known in the West by its Arabic acronym, Daesh) has been developing a colossal plan of redrawing national boundaries in the Middle East and imposing Islamic law wherever it can. In this book, an economist and journalist goes beyond the headlines that present Islamic State as a violent gang: this expert in terrorism explains and analyses how this fanatical Islamic organisation is putting forward a new model for building nations. In pursuit of its traditional war of conquest to rebuild a caliphate in the beginning of the twenty-first century, Daesh uses modern technology to ensure its financing and recruits fighters from the pool of locals. The organisation emerged from the ashes of other jihadist ventures that were annihilated, but it shows that it has real understanding of the complex situation prevailing in the Middle East, such as the wars ‘by proxy.’ The world is therefore not facing a simple terrorist network, but rather a sinister enemy that adapts to and fuels the disorder generated by modernity around the world. The way Loretta Napoleoni sees it, one must remember this because ‘the proverb know your enemy is still the most important incentive for the war on terrorism.’ Fruit of profound research that separates out legend and reality in the Muslim world, this book is an ideal introduction for people who want to understand more about the historical and social aspects of the emergence of Daesh, which emerged from a version of Islam that wasn’t created from scratch but, the author says, is directly linked to the conditions that have shaped the West’s engagement in the Middle East in recent years. (AKa)
*** SPYRIDON SFETAS: La Yougoslavie titiste et la dictature militaire grecque (1967-1974). Les relations gréco-yougoslaves pendant les sept années de la dictature. Editions Epikentro (9 rue Kamvounion, GR-54621 Thessalonica. Tel: (30-231) 0256146 – Fax: 0256148 – Internet: http://www.epikentro.gr ). 2016, 448 pp. €19. ISBN 978-960-458-682-0.
The imposition of a military dictatorship in Greece in 1967 was interpreted by Tito’s Yugoslavia as a wider plan by the United States to promote US control of Mediterranean and Southern Balkans politics, which led to a freezing of bilateral relations. These relations would have to wait for the aftermath of the Soviet invasion of 1968 and the announcement of Brezhnev’s doctrine before there would be a thaw. As far as the author is concerned, who is professor of modern and contemporary history of the Balkans at Aristotelian University in Thessalonica, the main reasons for this page of history were the climate of tension in East-West relations, Yugoslavia’s fear of seeing closer ties emerging between Greece and Bulgaria, and Yugoslavia’s leanings towards the United States and China. Despite Skopje’s propaganda, Athens and Belgrade did not consider the Macedonian problem as an obstacle to the development of bilateral relations. By way of conclusion, Prof. Sfetas argues that détente and the Soviet-Yugoslav approach of 1973-1974 brought about a regression in bilateral Greek-Yugoslav relations, although Tito’s Yugoslavia did provide economic backing for the Greeks’ struggle against the colonels’ dictatorship and particularly backed the KKE, the Greek communist party, which consequently viewed the Yugoslav road to socialism as the ideal model. (AKa)