Contenu du sommaire : États de crise

This essay envisions the relationship between the representations of crisis –in this case the migration crisis– and crises of representation –notably the metaphor of the shipwreck which Hans Blumenberg investigated in 1979 in his book Shipwreck with Spectator. The main goal of the essay is to evaluate to what extent a discrepancy appears nowadays between this metaphor and the current reality, while it is still used to report on the on-going crisis. By first examining its recent uses, especially in The Endless Crisis by Myriam Revault d'Allonnes, published in 2012, we come back to Blumenberg's essay who identified the moment when the metaphor (a moral landmark for a long time) gradually became “de-moralized” when aestheticized in the 18th century. It now appears necessary to “de-artify” the metaphor, by substituting for instance its twin figure of speech –hypotyposis–, in order to no longer report on shipwrecks with spectators, but shipwrecks without witnesses.

Treason always implies the violation of an “Us” and its principles. In Israel, the use of the word traitor in public debate has gradually changed since the founding of the state in 1948. The terminological change has been accompanied by the modification and diminishing of the betrayed “Us”, the Israeli “Us”, and more people are excluded. In 2019, with the outbreak of a substantial crisis within Israeli politics, the Israeli “Us” was also in crisis as it was no longer possible to establish who was part of the whole and especially what the whole consisted of. This article seeks to examine the crisis of the Israeli “Us”, the Israeli imagined community, by closely exploring the way in which the word traitor has been used in public debate, from the foundation of the State of Israel to the present day, and consequently the definition of the “Us”.

It is often believed that the use of the concept of crisis by decision-makers and state officials serves to foster consensus around a coherent and unified public action. This article, on the other hand, explores how the diagnosis of the crisis can produce various practices and know-how among competing actors who claim their professional expertise on the matter. For the last two decades, the crossings of the Mediterranean Sea by persons in exile reaching the island of Malta at the borders of Europe has been locally interpreted as evidence of a “migration crisis”. Although the “crisis” has consolidated the prominent role of security professionals who consider migration as a national threat, it has also been the opportunity for other state actors to emerge as the experts in the “welfare” of exiles. The diagnosis of crisis, therefore, can give rise to contrasting ethos and professional knowledge among state actors in charge of managing it. However, although the respective actors disagree on the significations of the “crisis” and the required responses, they converge towards a similar understanding of the events as an exceptional matter and an emergency which restricts the scope and ambitions of their critics.

What does war do to journalism and what does journalism do to/with this paroxysmal, multi-dimensional crisis that is war? Two seasoned women reporters share their experience and their analysis of what it means to “cover” a conflict: under what conditions do they become media objects, how and why access to the field is a crucial condition for the deployment of journalistic investigation. They are also asked about how information is gathered, produced and transformed into a specific narrative. Finally, their experience is also examined through the prism of their status (as correspondents and/or freelancers), their gender and the emotions specific to this particular experience of observing a deadly conflict.

How do diplomats forecast, analyze and deal with an international crisis? The director of the Analysis and Forecasting Center (CAPS) at the French Ministry of Europe and Foreign Affairs (MEAE), a sort of in-house think tank in charge of policy planning, describes its missions in terms of decision-making assistance and crisis anticipation. He reveals the types of relationships it has, internally, with diplomats and the decision-makers in foreign policy and, externally, with the world of research and expertise. He is then asked about the impact of two recent large-scale crisis (the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020-21 and Russia's war of aggression in Ukraine from February 2022) on both the diplomatic activity and the consultancy provided by the CAPS.

Our notion of crisis comes from ancient Greek through learned medical usage, which continued into the Middle Ages and modern times. However, this continuity does not necessarily mean that the two concepts are perfectly superimposed. While the theme of rupture characterizes both the modern notion and ancient krisis, the deeper meaning of this division is not the same. Ancient krisis appears to be a sorting process that produces order and organization, whereas the rift that is the political crisis of modern times is not, since it ushers in an era of disorder. These positive meanings of ancient krisis can be observed as early as Homer, and are consolidated in a medical context, in the Hippocratic medicine of the 5th century B.C. It is rather the notion of stasis that we should expect to encounter when we seek a modern notion of crisis in ancient Greek texts.

In the “crisis” entry of his Basic Concepts in History, Reinhard Koselleck offers an archaeology of the notion and its uses, from Greek and Roman antiquity to the 20th century. Attentive to the sometimes staggered temporalities of social and linguistic change, Koselleck meticulously analyzes, chronologically, the multiple uses of the notion, the discordances and concordances in its meanings, based on a corpus mainly printed in medicine, lexicons and dictionaries, publicistics and philosophy. Analyzed as a “basic historical concept”, crisis unfolds both in time and in its multiple, competing and contradictory uses.

In these two texts, Rosa Luxemburg describes the violent and destructive dimension of capitalist accumulation. Imperialism, militarism, wars and their ravages are interpreted as consequences of the development of capitalism on a global scale. Luxemburg explains that socialism cannot support war without abandoning its struggle against capitalism. According to her, the fervor and spontaneous action of the masses are the only resources against capitalism and the wars it provokes.

The “Lyon Theses” are a unique document on the interwar European crisis and the changes in the mass parties inherited from the 19th century. The future secretary of the Italian Communist Party analyses the structural causes of the Italian political crisis, of which Fascism was the climax, and deduces the party's mission and internal organization. The national crisis is referred to the formation of the risorgimentale State, with its specific coalition of ruling classes, and then to the disconnection of the main mass parties from the social needs of the subaltern classes: the industrial proletariat of the North and the peasantry of the South. Because of the social and geographical dualism that separates them, the Communist Party is charged with the historic mission of building the conditions for their alliance, which the industrial bourgeoisie and the urban petty-bourgeoisie, hegemonic under fascism, aim precisely to counter.