Suchergebnisse

Summary of the round table held on 7 November 2007 by the French Foundation for Political Innovation on 'The EU's energy requirements: the importance of the Black Sea region'. Participants included Andreas Schockenhoff (Bundestag member and Vice-President of the CDU-CSU group), Agnija Rasa (member of the cabinet of the European Commissioner for Energy) and Alexandre Vulic (Deputy Director of the Office of East European Affairs at the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs). Adapted from the source document.

The article examines the main themes of the work of Régis Debray, one of the most important French philosophers and writers of our time. Debray is familiar to Russian readers primarily as an associate of Che Guevara and a theorist of the Cuban revolutionary movement, as well as the author of works on mediology – a science he himself created on the study of the transmission of ideas and sym­bols. Central to his mature and late work are the ideas of sacred in human com­munities, the conditions of the emergence, transmission and disappearance of re­ligious, national and other forms of sacrality, and the related evolution of world civilizations. Debray is recognized by his peers as one of the most perceptive an­alysts of French political culture, and his article, Are you a Democrat or a Re­publican?, written in the year of the bicentennial of the French revolution in 1989, anticipates the processes that will unfold over the next thirty years. Debray describes these processes as a gradual desacralization of the Republic, the emas­culation of its basic principles and its transformation into "a common Anglo-Saxon democracy". As a result, the "one and indivisible secular Republic" is falling apart into communities, each of which establishes its own shrines. The dissolution of France's particular republican model is taking place in the background, and as part of a more global process of the decline of European civilisation and its dissolution into Western Atlantic civilisation.

As he comes to the end of his first term, French President Nicolas Sarkozy chose Politique Internationale to review his foreign policy over the last five years and reaffirm his guiding principles. From Tbilisi to Tripoli, from Lebanon to the Ivory Coast, France has stepped up everywhere that human rights were being trampled, wherever freedom was threatened. French diplomacy took a firm stance with Iran and Syria. And it extended a helping hand to the Arab peoples who were trying to shed dictators. But Nicolas Sarkozy has above all been active in the European sphere in recent months. Faced with a serious economic crisis, he was able to convince his partners to-at last-set up the economic government needed by Europe, and bolster the integration of countries in the euro zone. In the final analysis, he concludes, over the last five years France has remained faithful to its values, by refusing to be a victim of History, but rather to help write it... Adapted from the source document.

How can we begin to explain the reasons behind the "Arab spring", the wave of protest and revolt that has rocked the Arab world to varying degrees, from the Maghreb to Syria and including the Gulf States? Yet the region had appeared irremediably destined to remain in the clutches of dictatorships in power for decades. In this extensive interview, historian Jacques Julliard spotlights several decisive factors, starting with the instinctive desire for freedom common to everyone, the Arab peoples being no exception. Another key element is virtually instantaneous access to the Internet and Al-Jazeera, enabling the rapid spread of information on events in the countries where the uprisings began. Not to be overlooked either is the frustration of the younger generations, who had only known the rule of aging dictators. While the uprisings might not necessarily result in model democracies being established overnight, they testify to the Arab peoples' desire to take control of their own destiny -and that can only be welcomed. Adapted from the source document.

The political use of political sciencePolitical scientists claim for science and for themselves, as scholars, a maximum of independence in their dealings with government and Parliament. At the same time, science finds itself so inextricably bound up with the actual political process that it has become an "establishment" as strong and formidable as religion was in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Liberal political scientists put themselves into a contradictory position when they demand for themselves, in the pursuit of their task as scholars, a political status which would protect them from the scrutiny of the elected representatives of the people, a condition which, they would refuse to grant to any other social group, and yet simultaneously in their teaching and writing set themselves up as the ardent defenders of representative and responsible democracy. What must one sacrifice, science or democratic responsibility? Is it necessary to aim at excluding science from the democratic process, at the risk of seeing our society regress towards a pre-industrial age, or should one regard representative and responsible democracy as relevant to questions of minor importance while significant issues which concern the present and future of society are to be dealt with by other political methods?