Critique internationale - Content
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[Can the Bundeswehr Be Reformed ?]
Over the last fifteen years the Bundeswehr has lived through a series of reforms and crises. Their purpose was to create a projection force for multilateral military operations in support of a security policy beyond home defense. Each reform has run into the same problems. The new security policy and its force requirements are notoriously hard to define; military expenditures have been cut continuously; the draft is maintained for political purposes only; reforms are poorly implemented. “Bundeswehr 2010”, the most recent proposal, is no exception.
[Principal, Agent and Evaluator: Explaining the IMF’s Failure in Argentina]
In 2004 the Independent Evaluation Office of the IMF published a report on this institution’s interventions in Argentina between 1991 and 2001. This document provides all the elements for a sociological analysis of an institutional failure. Three main relationships proved dysfunctional: the realist interaction between the Fund and the Argentine authorities, the hierarchical link between management and staff, and the principal/ agent relation with the G7 governments, whose representatives within the Fund should have made sure that operating rules were respected.
[Japan’s New National Defense Policy]
The end of the Cold War and the aftermath of September 11 gave Japan the opportunity to clarify its international position on security issues. Progressively, Japan has enacted new legislation to reinforce its national defense policy and has strengthened its military and technological cooperation with its sole ally, the United-States. These movements apparently do not challenge Japan’s constitutional philosophy, which forbids it from making war (article 9 of the Constitution) and orients its security policy exclusively toward defense. Increased Japanese participation in military action within the United Nations framework or in relation with military coalitions without the backing of the United Nations suggests that Japan is now more at ease as far as international security politics is concerned, after years of non-engagement in this field. It also signals a new national confidence in politicians and post-war democratic institutions.
[European Currency and Politics]
This article examines the reasons for the difficult reform of the EU Stability and Growth Pact in March 2005. The debate on the Pact resuscitated a latent tension between two opposite sets of motivations that had led to the creation of the euro in the 1980s and 1990s. From this perspective, the reform of 2005 is a dilatory solution that leaves the political game fairly open.
[FDR’s M Project: Building a Better World through (Racial) Science]
The “M Project” was the series of top-secret anthropological and ethnological studies produced during World War II by a team of social scientists for the use of President Franklin Roosevelt, who sought expert data in order to facilitate the large-scale postwar migration of millions of European refugees to Latin America. The story of the M Project reveals the role of racial thought in Roosevelt’s policy and the complexities of his humanitarianism
[US and European Market Economies and Welfare Systems]
State strategies toward work and welfare continue to differ, despite the fact that they have all moved down the continuum from faire (intervention) closer to laissez-faire . They divide into three main varieties: liberal, ‘enabling,’ and ‘enhancing,’ and are distinguishable not only by how far they have moved along the continuum but also by their mix of faire faire (state setting guidelines for market action) and faire avec (state action with market actors). Such differences are only partially explainable in terms of institutional legacies from the postwar period. Other factors such as economic vulnerability and policy preferences are significant. But most important are the political-institutional capacity to impose or negotiate change and the discourse that enhances such capacity. Using cases of advanced industrialized Western countries, the article demonstrates how different states’ trajectories of reform based on state strategies and mediating factors have been.
[The Orange Revolution in Ukraine: An Example of Post-Soviet Mobilization]
The December 2004 Orange Revolution in Ukraine that brought Viktor Yushchenko, the candidate of the Ukrainian opposition, to the country’s highest office, shows that civic disengagement is not a fatality in post-Soviet societies. More than ten years after independence, the question of a regime change in Ukraine was at stake and gave rise to a mass mobilization that can be analyzed as the outcome of the transition period and the political actors' changing strategies towards the rise of authoritarianism.
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[Anti-Globalization Activists: Transnational Actors ?]
Social forums are now some of the most salient instances of anti-globalization activism on both the European and the world scale. As such, and because they lend themselves to empirical investigation, studying them advances our knowledge of this “new cause.” This article, based on a collective multi-method study conducted during the European Social Forum in the Paris area in November 2003, describes the sociographic features of the participants and discusses two common beliefs about them. The first, popularized at the end of the 1990s, describes anti-globalization militants as “the losers of globalization.” Rather than bear this out, our survey findings point out their high level of cultural resources and strong job stability. The second, put forward mainly by North American studies, on the contrary analyses them as the cosmopolitan elites of an emerging “transnational civil society.” The article qualifies this thesis: their intense involvement in international issues is indeed distinctive, but the reasons for their commitment to fighting for “another form of globalization” and the resources they draw on derive mainly from the national context.
[The Formation of the French Anti-Globalization Movement]
Neither totally new nor simply the reconversion of existing organizations, the French anti-globalization movement is studied in this article from the perspective of four processes. The first is the transformation of French social movements during the 1990s due to the emergence of new organizations formed to fight against the increasing instability of French society. The second is the creation of various anti-globalization think tanks. The third is the definition of the frontiers separating the movement from political parties and trade unions. Last but not least is the question of the international image and impact of a movement still closely linked to the national context in which it is involved and acts.
[Anti-Globalization Organizations and the European Social Movement: In or Out ?]
The aim of this article is to examine the relationship between the Europeanization process and the anti-globalization agenda in Europe. It is based on fieldwork, observations and interviews carried out in the framework of the European research project EUROPUB (2001-2004). The emergence of a European public space generates a whole series of questions for the anti-globalization movement: how can it integrate the European level into its usual issues ? Should it gain leverage from this space of political opportunity to build gradually a broader transnational movement, or should it disregard and denounce it as a tool of neo-liberalism, like most other international organizations ? Controversies that arose inside ATTAC France about the setting up of ‘100 % alternative globalization’ lists for the European elections of June 2004 bring to light the many rifts dividing the antiglobalization movement, and perfectly illustrate the challenge European integration poses for anti-globalization activists, torn between the options of participating in the political game, acting as an opposition force, or standing back from the fray.
[Anti-globalization : The View from Morocco]
The space within which the Moroccan anti-globalization movement operates is a consequence of the contributions and the struggles between “entrepreneurs” for the appropriation of this new political label within the local context and as such it is limited by its degree of autonomy within the larger field of international development. It can also be linked to the political field and the restructuring of an alternative non-ruling left. Shaped and controlled by the state, the construction of the Moroccan antiglobalization movement reflects the evolution of an authoritarian regime, though it cannot foretell the outcome of changes observed thus far.
Antoine Vauchez, L’institution judiciaire remotivée. Le processus d’institutionnalisation d’une « nouvelle justice » en Italie (1964-2000), Paris, LGDJ, 2004, 262 pages.
Isaac Ben-Israël, Philosophie du renseignement : logique et morale de l’espionnage, Nîmes, Éditions de l’Éclat, 2004 [ 1999], 231 pages.
Rogers M. Smith, Stories of Peoplehood. The Politics and Morals of Political Membership, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2003, 236 pages.
André Kaspi, La peine de mort aux États-Unis, Paris, Plon, 2003, 250 pages.
