Catégorie : PE in english Page 1 of 4

This article is the English version of : Thomas Gomart, « Entre concentration et dispersion : le bel avenir de la puissance », published in Politique étrangère, Vol. 84, Issue 1, 2019, for the 40th anniversary of Ifri.

Far from being an absolute, power “is a human relationship”, one conceivable in both theoretical and political terms. Both an analytical concept and a policy principle, power is now understood in all its different forms, and is either celebrated or criticized in the academic on the topic. 

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This article is the English version of : Raymond Aron, « En marge des combats douteux », initially published in Politique étrangère in 1979, and again in Politique étrangère, Vol. 84, Issue 1, 2019, for the 40th anniversary of Ifri.

The French in 1954 and the Americans in 1973 withdrew from the three countries in the Indochina peninsula, now subject to parties that claim to follow the same ideology. And the wars continue, either between armies, or between an army and guerrilla forces. The withdrawal of the Western powers did not enable the people to decide on self-determination, on their desire for independence or their quarrels. Previously involved in the East-West conflict, here the Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Laotians are the subject of the rivalry between the two great Marxist-Leninist powers.

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This article is the English version of : Marie-Françoise Bechtel, « Peut-il y avoir une démocratie européenne ? », published in Politique étrangère, Vol. 83, Issue 4, 2018.

Asking whether a European democracy is in fact possible is clearly a sign of the times. Does this question, which points to a deficit by inviting us to revisit a much-criticized model, also point to a necessary objective? We might initially think not: things move fast in the early twenty-first century and, as Hubert Védrine highlights, the world does not wait for powers to constitute themselves as such if they have neither the desire nor the ability to do so.

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