Contenu du sommaire : L'Europe, entre incommunications et guerres

What forms could a democratic regime take on the scale of the European Union? Beyond all the technocrats and populists talking past each other about the democratization of the EU, a question remains: what is the political legitimacy of the European venture? In contradistinction to the imaginary Rousseauian world that dominates our national democracies, Europe would need instead to be consolidated as a transnational democracy of continental scope, based on the construction of a European society and a common “spirit of law.”

Whether viewed from the perspective of participatory democracy or from that of the European project, the Conference on the Future of Europe (CoFoE) represents an unprecedented ambition for democratic renewal. The article provides a critical assessment of the CoFoE's ambitions, foundations, means, and objectives, while also revealing the limits of this exercise in innovative democracy, which seeks to make citizen participation the driving force of Europe's future.

Our view of the way in which the construction of Europe has been promoted seems to have been spoiled. This failure can be grasped in terms of the amount of disinformation that never seems to have been taken seriously. This article seeks to highlight the long-standing responsibility of actors of organized civil society in this context.

To what extent are companies responsible for protecting human rights, the environment and the climate? In this article, we review how the EU is relying on a fragmented international movement to offer a unified regulation of corporate due diligence on a global scale.

Although it may seem that each country in the European Union has its own, specific policy for asylum seekers, this is not, in fact, the case. Since 2010, the European Asylum Support Office (EASO) – which became the European Union Agency for Asylum (EUAA) on January 20, 2022 – has existed as a common agency, which oversees the harmonization of information concerning countries of origin and the laws applicable in matters of asylum. In addition, since the Treaty of Lisbon came into effect in 2009, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) has managed the harmonization of asylum laws in EU member states.

The quality of authorship has developed with the concern for the balance between protection/property of the author and the public's right of access to the work. This consideration between subjects, which implies limits to the territory of each, must inspire the configuration of the quality of being a person. As the foundation and the finality of human rights, this quality cannot be spared from the consideration of the effects on others of the extension of the rights and freedoms of each individual, at the risk of surrendering the human being to reification.

Article 17 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU) sets out how religious and philosophical organizations enter into dialogue with the EU. It is a provision that questions the potentially divergent views on the relations between temporal and spiritual powers held in different EU member states. This article takes up this question and its implications for the internal cohesiveness of the EU.

The tragedy of what Pope Francis has called the “Third World War fought piecemeal” has forced the Catholic Church to face the challenge of peace and its implications for how the Church relates to the world. Focusing on the period from the end of the Second World War to the Second Vatican Council, this study seeks to analyze the role of a sui generis political and religious actor such as the Catholic Church in the construction of the European project and on the contemporary political scene.

This article explores the relocation of exiled populations within the European Union, a process that involves a group of public policies aimed at selecting and transferring asylum seekers from one EU member state to another. For several decades, these policies have been at the center of the debate on European immigration policy. On the basis of migration research, the article shows that relocation is founded on an acommunication.

Since, in historical terms, Europe was the origin of an international system that was contrary to the nature and norms of globalization, it finds itself confronting the challenge of globalization in an especially acute way. The process of building Europe appears as an attempt to provide protection from the effects of globalization that are thought to be dangerous, instead of as adapting to this new situation. This is why the nature of European participation in this historically unprecedented process is both uncertain in nature and is likely to result in tensions and blockages.

This article draws on recent ethnographic research that addresses issues related to the feeling of being a European citizen and seeks to explore the impasses of communication pertaining to the European Union and its citizens. These issues stem principally from the attempt to superimpose European citizenship onto an existing national citizenship involving one or more countries.

Europe represents the vanguard of the movement to establish a social order based on the general application of public law, international law, and human rights. It is a territory peopled with free individuals, where different political entities do not describe themselves as isolated or as being at war with those who refuse to submit. Instead, they see themselves as delimiting a space of collective free discussion and decision-making; this space is only conceivable when heterogeneous social realities are connected in a productive manner. Its inhabitants have no place for violent aggression; that must remain outside the sphere and language of politics.

The current state of migration reveals that the divergences among European partners are so deep that they threaten to jeopardize the ability to maintain a political dialogue on the subject at the continental level. This article re-examines the efforts undertaken by the Commission both to prevent the halting of communication concerning the challenges of migration and to assure the strategic management of an unexpected political resource: the passage of time.

The pandemic has seen a return of closed borders within the European Union, in order to prevent people infected with COVID-19 from entering or leaving a national territory and thus increasing the risk of spreading the virus. Borders thus play the role of an intersection between the EU and its member states. They persist in the EU and are not merely an obstacle to be removed. Are they a new factor of incommunicability that can jeopardize the very foundations of integration?

Since the founding of the European Union, its enlargement has been presented as an historic process. Yet it is rarely a subject of public debate, and this gives rise to a structural incommunication. Even worse, this solemn act, which commits both States and peoples, is not always put to the vote of a referendum, which only serves to fuel misunderstandings.

The sudden return of tragedy had made it improper to continue to support the widespread attitude wherein the “Other Europe” is treated with a form of condescension. Viewed as “little nations with uncertain identities” and “Europe's periphery,” these countries have responded by according a superior legitimacy to their own discourse, on the basis of their having suffered and endured a tragic historical experience. The war in Ukraine has perhaps put an end to this sort of double condescension.

In the private sphere, Europeans frequently associate food with sharing and the discovery of cultural differences. However, in the mediatized continental public sphere, food is predominately envisioned in terms of competition and conflict. This paradox could perhaps fade away, as has been demonstrated by institutions such as the new Cité internationale de la gastronomie et du vin (International Gastronomy and Wine Center) in Dijon and the Cous Cous Fest in Sicily.

Have we tried to construct Europe while lacking a common culture? Images of the past do not suggest this. The “Visual Contagions” project of (the University of Geneva, the Jean Monnet Center of Excellence, and the École normale supérieure in Paris) studies the illustrated press of the twentieth century. Its computational approach has brought to light a substantial trove of visual elements in a variety of domains (philosophical, social, Christian, artistic, and advertising); these do not stand apart from the economic rationale that is often accused of having biased Europe.

Latin America is one of the most homogenous territories in the world; its geography, history, arts, languages… make this quasi-continent a territory where mutual comprehension and communication seem particularly easy. Despite numerous attempts, it has however never managed to unite. The lesson for Europe is twofold: over-emphasising convergence is neither useful for grasping the complexity of histories and cultures, nor a facilitator for achieving union.

The ideal of peace among nations that is borne by the European construction has given rise to a narrative about human rights and values in the normative production of Europe. Does this involve pure philanthropy or is it a tactic of psychological warfare used to attain strategic (and moralistic) objectives in the context of economic war? The European Union has opted to use normative power to reach its strategic objectives. This is a way of waging war by means of shared values.

Because of its multilingual and multicultural character, the European project carries a particularly high risk of incommunication, which also offers an opportunity. Today, the emergence of a vast body of historical literature based on period sources makes it possible to revisit these processes, first to question these structural European incommunications, before demonstrating that the promoters of European construction have used the concept of the market to overcome them, but without escaping its limitations.

The recovery plan that aims to breathe life into the European economy in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic has been built through the dialogical relation of communication and incommunication, which is one of the mortars that has held the European Union together since its creation. Between frugal member states that adhere to budgetary orthodoxy and intergovernmental debt and the spendthrift states of the South that propose that debt be shared among states at the EU level, opposition has been followed by negotiation. This has produced points of agreement that are sufficiently ambiguous as to allow for the creation of a notional consensus regarding the mutualization of debt and its financing.

Six years after the UK's referendum vote in June 2016, which was followed by the British government's invocation of Article 50 of the Treaty of Lisbon the following year, Brexit has become a reality, one that is increasingly being played down. Until the COVID-19 pandemic, Brexit was a central media preoccupation in all of the EU's member states. At the outset, this novel process was often viewed as one that revealed a lack of understanding, or even a calling into question, of the construction of Europe itself. Yet would it have been possible for the United Kingdom to conceive of integration into Europe other than in economic terms?

The propagation of conspiracy theories and propaganda is on the rise in Europe. For many young people, several crises (especially the COVID-19 pandemic) have undermined the credibility of European and Western institutions. Certain countries have also been weakened by the increase in pan-Slavism and nationalist ideas. Do we need to rethink how future citizens will be educated? How can reforms succeed when a country has to deal with several challenges at once?

The European Higher Education Area has become a reality that is detached from the model of the medieval university. This outcome was far from obvious when the treaty of Rome was signed in 1957. Erasmus and the Magna Carta are the cornerstones of the Bologna process, which – despite a bureaucratic governance but with the support of the EU – translates and allows the actors of the university to have a necessarily common approach to teaching and research.

Since the twentieth century, sports have developed on the basis of their “eternal values,” as set forth by Pierre de Coubertin; these values have been transmitted by the Olympic Games and have gradually become institutionalized throughout the world. By being included in programs such as Europe's Erasmus student exchange or in projects with non-member states, “sports diplomacy” has acquired a dimension that is social, cultural, political, and even “linguistic,” both within and outside the EU. This has made it a pillar of public diplomacy, one that relies on neither propaganda nor any overtly governmental influence.

Among the areas in which the European Community has intervened, culture has always been the poor relation. To understand this state of affairs, which has incited ritual protest from European cultural circles, two orders of explanation are required. The first concerns how Europe as a community has been conceived of and constructed. The second involves the determination of member states, and thus their peoples, to maintain their cultural prerogatives when confronted with encroachments from Brussels.

The COVID-19 pandemic arrived in the wake of previous crises that have put European integration to the test. Faced with an unprecedented health crisis and the many challenges triggered by the pandemic, the members of the European Union demonstrated their ability to work together and provide effective communal responses, while also launching ambitious programs for the future. Without erasing national and societal differences, the EU managed to act together and then emerge united from the COVID-19 crisis.

This article examines the war in Ukraine in terms of the project for lasting peace formulated by the Enlightenment, which was part of its view of historical progress. Universalist utopias that envision a world republic or planetary harmony have been challenged by recent history, and this article shows that their blind spot is the weight of the past and markers of national identity. These can serve as an asset or an obstacle for the construction of international alliances and the enlargement of supranational federations, of which the EU is the representative example.

In 1989, Europeans had the ambition of reunifying a continent that had been split by the cold war. Enlargement policy, peace, and political liberalism were to redraw the outline of Europe. However, the disputes that have accumulated between Europeans and Russians since then have made the exporting of European stability to its neighbors seem to be an illusory project. The war in Ukraine is the grand disillusion that signals the end of Europe as we know it.

Communication is an activity that participates in the institutional space of Europe. This article explores several significant aspects of this communication, in particular its digital dimension and the central place of social networking platforms within it. These certainly contribute to the intensification and perhaps even to the standardization of communication.

Although the war in Ukraine is turning into a long-term combat, Russia's decision to start up a conflict in the heart of Europe – which is based on an imperialism that is not compatible with the twenty-first century – has generally been well received by the Russian population. This response is frequently explained by the phenomenal power of Russian propaganda, which results from the control exerted over the country's public sphere and the introduction of a quasi-military censorship. For at least ten years, a discursive format has been preparing the population for this invasion by raising awareness of foreign affairs, especially in relation to the enlargement of NATO. In Ukraine, since its independence, political and discursive space has been fractured between pro-Western and pro-Russian forces.

The ban on Russian media in Europe, which was intended to support democracy in Ukraine, stands in contrast with the importance that democracies place on freedom of information, including partisan viewpoints. However, an examination of France's main daily newspapers shows that this discrepancy has hardly been mentioned, much less debated. The lack of response to the ban could be explained by the convergence of several factors, in particular cognitive ones, which represent a growing challenge for public debate.

Disinformation and conspiracy theories systematically threaten our European democracy. After the COVID-19 pandemic, the Russian war against Ukraine has shown that the propaganda directed by an undemocratic Putin's regime is more and more harmul. This prevents citizens from making informed decisions and undermines our foreign policy orientation, as well as the values of our society. And although the war in Ukraine has changed a lot in this regard, a significant part of EU citizens is still prone to easily succumb to massive disinformation campaigns. The aim of this text is to present how the institutions of the European Union, as well as the Government of the Slovak Republic and other official European or state authorities, are trying to reverse this negative trend and gradually expand the capacity to combat hybrid threats.