Contenu du sommaire

For an European history of social protection, Michel Dreyfus. The second industrial revolution, the improvement of material conditions of existence and the progress of democracy gave, from the 1880s, a new relevance to the issue of prevention and brought about the birth of national mutualist institutions. The first International Congress of Mutuality, held in Paris in 1900, followed by the birth of the International Federation of Mutuality in 1906, were the first steps in the internationalization of the movement, parallel to that of the worker's movement; the debates where influenced by the German model and the role of the State in social protection. Although the results were limited in 1914, the movement conti-nued after World War I, in a context transformed by the birth of the League of Nations and of the International Labour Organisation. The international institutions then created were challenged by the depression and the war. They nevertheless opened the way for the International Association of Social Security (1947) and the International Association of Mutuality (1950).

The mirage of social Europe. International social policy associations at the beginning of the 20th century, Rainer Gregarek. At the end of the 19th century, at a time when the rise of nationalism was blocking diplomatic initiatives, it was in "private" international associations and meetings that the embryo of a social Europe was conceived. The Permanent International Committee of Work Accidents (1889), the International Association for the Legal Protection of Workers (1900-1901) and the International Association for the Fight against Unemployment (1910) were among the most important of these pioneering institutions. They tried to use their international character to get around the hesitations of businessmen and governments to set up policies of social protection and started to reflect about harmonization on the European scale. The lack of official status, the persistence of internal tensions among national groups and among social groups led to failure. They nevertheless represented an original network of meetings and exchanges which facilitated the dissemination and transfer of models among European experts.

Mutuality and social security: a tense couple, Bernard Gibaud. It took several years for mutualist circles to rally to the social security regime instituted by the French ordinance of October 4, 1945. Their hostility to the principle of compulsory insurance, inherited from the 19th century, came partly from their fear of losing the preponderant place that the laws of 1928-1930 on social insurance had given them. The 1945 clash was strong also because the proponents and the opponents of the unified regime were convinced that it would rapidly lead to the decline of mutualism. Pragmatism won however over principles. As early as the 1940s, it was within the new regime that the modernization of mutualism was designed with the civil servants' mutuals providing the impetus. The resuit of difficult negotiations, the 1947 law on the social protection of civil servants opened the way to the progressive affirmation of the mutuality-social security link as one of the principal guarantees of the solidity of the French System of social protection.

"Tropical nazism" in Rwanda? Image or logic of a genocide, Jean-Pierre Chrétien. The massacres in Rwanda between April and July 1994 were not synonymous with a spontaneous and uncontrollable "ethnie" outburst. On the contrary, prepared by previous ethnicist propaganda, organised by a corrupt political regime, the killing directed against — but not exclusively — the Tutsi minority had the features of a genuine genocide.