Catégorie : PE in english Page 7 of 11

Une sélection d’articles traduits en anglais, et en accès libre

Europe, Power and Finance

On 05/01/2023

This article is the English version of : Sylvie Goulard, « L’Europe, la puissance et la finance », published in Politique étrangère, Vol. 86, Issue 2, 2021.

The world is rapidly changing, and Europe is striving to find its place. In the debates over European sovereignty, the issues frequently revolve around diplomacy, defence and occasionally industrial policy, but only rarely finance. The most noteworthy advance in European construction was undoubtedly the single currency, but the European Union (EU) could make much better use of its strengths in the financial area. It took the global financial crisis for common regulatory rules governing finance to be adopted and for their control to be entrusted to European supervisory authorities. Even today, the domestic financial services market remains fragmented and the euro’s geopolitical role unfulfilled. Yet the strategic nature of the financial stakes is evidenced by several factors.

First, financing innovation is essential to remain internationally competitive. The climate transition alone requires massive investments, without which it will be impossible to achieve the target of reducing CO2 emissions to zero by 2050. Bridging the technology gap also requires substantial capital, in this case with a special twist: not only is finance indispensable for innovation, but innovation transforms finance. Tech companies, on the strength of their customer data, are also entering the payments market (e.g. Facebook with its Diem/Libra project).

Alongside these structural changes, cyclical factors also come into play. The COVID-19 pandemic forced governments to provide unprecedented and massive financial support…

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COVID-19 Puts International Health Cooperation to the Test

de Politique Etrangère

On 15/12/2022

dans PE in english

This article is the English version of : Didier Houssin, « La coopération sanitaire à l’épreuve du Covid-19 », published in Politique étrangère, Vol. 85, Issue 3, 2020.

Over the past months, the human race has been confronted with a new and dangerous member of the coronavirus family: following the coronavirus SARS-CoV-1, responsible for the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) epidemic that began in China in 2003, and then MERS-CoV, which appeared in Saudi Arabia in 2012, SARS-CoV-2 is responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic that was first identified in China at the end of 2019.

After about six months of transmission of a virus that has a tropism for the human respiratory tract, the toll on June 8, 2020, was almost 7 million identified cases and more than 400,000 deaths, mostly in the World Health Organization (WHO) regions of Europe and the Americas. The pandemic is still ongoing. The trajectory and intensity of the virus’s transmission may still hold surprises. However, it is possible to make a few initial observations on the management of this epidemic. The least one can say is that from the outset it has been unconducive to international cooperation in matters of health.

The epidemic caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which began in China in the final weeks of 2019, did not come as a total surprise. The zoonotic risks linked to dense human populations coming into contact with many species of domestic and wild animals, especially in live animal markets, are well known; the previous coronavirus epidemics have already demonstrated this. The WHO was first informed of clusters of cases of pneumonia of unknown cause in Wuhan, in the Chinese province of Hubei, on December 31, 2020. A new coronavirus was quickly held responsible…

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The Geopolitics of the Amazon

de Politique Etrangère

On 12/03/2021

dans PE in english

This article is the English version of : Ombelyne Dagicour, « Géopolitique de l’Amazonie », published in Politique étrangère, Vol. 85, Issue 1, 2020.

The fires that ripped through the Amazon’s forests in 2019 brought new prominence to the challenge of balancing environmental and economic needs in this contested landscape. Often described as the “lungs of the planet,” the Amazon rainforest covers an area of over 7.5 million square kilometers and is a reservoir for biodiversity unmatched by anywhere else on Earth. The world’s largest hydrological system, the Amazon basin holds 20 percent of the world’s freshwater. With climate change picking up pace, there is a risk that the Amazon rainforest’s vast stores of carbon could be released as deforestation advances. Around ninety thousand forest fires were recorded in 2019, the highest figure for over a decade. The sight of the rainforest ablaze was met with international horror, prompting criticisms of the Brazilian government in general and President Jair Bolsonaro in particular. Already, the forest has shrunk by 20 percent in the space of just fifty years, according to figures from the World Wildlife Fund (WWF). Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon has almost doubled since 2018, with industrial monoculture and mineral extraction making ever-greater inroads into the tropical belt. 

Europe after COVID

de Politique Etrangère

On 26/02/2021

dans PE in english

This article is the English version of : Clément Beaune, « L’Europe, par delà le COVID-19 », published in Politique étrangère, Vol. 85, Issue 3, 2020.

A few weeks after the groundbreaking budget agreement adopted by the European Council on July 21, 2020, it would be tempting to say that COVID-19 changed everything in the European Union (EU), in line with the oft-repeated principle: “It takes a crisis for Europe to act.” Like all clichés, there is some truth in this statement. The EU’s shared debt plan is the most important boost to European integration since the euro, and a step that would have been impossible without this crisis. This major progress owes, in large part, to a less obvious dynamic—the return of a golden triangle, which had not made such an impact since the early 1990s—the French-German partnership and an ambitious European Commission.