La force d’être juste

Although there are a thousand reasons to take issue with the world as it is today, to act as though the brutal 20th century had never happened would be to condemn ourselves to make the same mistakes and live through the same horrors again. With this observation as his starting point, Jean Birnbaum, managing director of the publishing house “Le monde des livres”, makes an impassioned plea against all forms of fanaticism, which leads to the exclusion of the [...]

Fractures dans l’Occident

In this essay on Donald Trump’s second term as President of the United States and the consequences of this for the European Union and the world, Nicole Gnesotto observes that the American crisis is the “tip of the iceberg of a major crisis of Western democracies, the three pillars of which are breaking into pieces: liberalism and economic openness, representative democracy and the primacy of law” (our translation throughout). Taking “their place and [...]

Chroniques européennes

Renaud Denuit, the author of the excellent editorial pieces published by Bulletin Quotidien d’Agence Europe, has just brought out a three-volume set of articles published in various organs, particularly the Revue générale (a French-language Belgian publication) and theBeacons section of the BQE, plus a few transcripts from the author’s conference addresses. All quotations are translated by us.

The first volume of these Chroniques européennes, entitled Contre [...]

Pour aujourd’hui et pour demain

This book, published to mark one hundred years since the birth of Jacques Delors (1925-2023), is a compilation of transcripts of the most emblematic speeches made by the man who shaped a community that became European Union in the course of the ten years (1985-1995) of his presidency of the European Commission. These texts, put together and introduced by Sébastien Maillard, dating back to an earlier period, as long ago as the 1960s, and some from the [...]

Esprit de l’Europe, Europe de l’esprit

Europe the scapegoat is endlessly on the receiving end of criticism from our contemporaries: it is opaque, bureaucratic, far removed from the realities of everyday life and the aspirations of its citizens, it lacks the breath that fills the lungs of nations. It has no soul and is destined to disappear. None of these criticisms is entirely false, but none of them is absolutely true. And Hegel’s beloved Geist is necessarily an active force in the [...]

Hezbollah

French journalist of Algerian origin Mohamed Sifaoui begins his book by retracing the long history of the Shiite militia from its foundation in 1982, more than 40 years ago. Next, he goes on to debunk a myth that endures: that of a respectable political organisation plus a breakaway terrorist group, as if there were no connection between the former and its “military” wing. Finally, the author analyses the consequences of the Israeli operation of autumn 2024 and the fall of [...]

L’Afrique contre la démocratie

In this essay, Senegalese journalist Ousmane Ndiaye sets out to unpick the discourse amalgamating decolonialisation, pan-Africanism, anti-Westernism and the rejection of democracy. For, he explains, military regimes are no less corrupt than civilian ones. Because democracy is a universal aspiration and has existed in many different forms in Africa, well before the days of colonisation.

“The more the movement against ‘imperialism’ has gained [...]

L’heure des prédateurs

This work, recently published by Gallimard and penned by the novelist Giuliano da Empoli, former political adviser to Matteo Renzi, author of the best-selling Le mage du Kremlin, which bagged him the Grand Prix du Roman of the Académie Française in 2022, takes us behind the scenes of international politics and lays bare the world of today as it really is. He shows us its unreconstructed autocrats, its disheartened democrats and tech gurus who are prepared to [...]

Vatican secret

In this book, Loup Besmond de Senneville, deputy editor of the French daily newspaper La Croix, takes us with him into the heart of the Holy See, where he spent four years as the newspaper’s Permanent Special Envoy from August 2020. The author, who completed a work placement with us at Agence Europe as part of his studies, nearly 15 years ago now, sets out various highs and lows of Pope Francis’ pontificate, to which he was a front-row spectator, without ever departing [...]

Europe, as-tu une âme ?

The question asked by this book (the title of which translates as ‘Europe, do you have a soul?’) inevitably reminds the older ones among us of the calls made in the 1980s by the former President of the European Parliament, Simone Veil, to give it one. The most direct response is ‘no’, as Veil’s calls led to nothing. Under this title, the author, who is clearly an assiduous reader of the Bulletin Quotidien Europe, serves up a tome nearly 500 pages long, [...]