Critique internationale - Content
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[The Internationalization of Child Protection: Actors, Competition and Transnational Projects (1900-1925)]
The present article examines in transnational perspective the emergence of child protection reform networks during the first quarter of the twentieth-century and their role in the creation of the League of Nations’ Children’s Protection Committee (1925). By insisting, not only on the continuities linking this organization to the reform networks that preceded it, but also on the competition to which it gave rise among rival networks, one may underscore the issues at stake in this movement to internationalize child protection as well as the tensions to which it gave rise (including models of intervention, the manner in which these should be spread, the role to be played by member organizations in this process and, finally, relations between the LON and NGO networks seeking to assert themselves as the spokesmen of global public opinion). On the one hand, this involves reevaluating the role played by the networks and technical organizations affiliated with the LON in the evolution of contemporaneous child and youth policies. On the other hand, it is a matter of contributing to the renewal of knowledge concerning the modes of institutional operation specific to international organizations by examining them as spaces in which international circulations are structured.
[The League of Nations and the Emergence of a New Network of Economic-Financial Expertise (1914-1923)]
This article examines the role played by the League of Nations’ Financial and Economic Organization (FEO) as a vector of development of a new expert network in the interwar years. By examining its origins during the First World War and its early years of operation, we will show how, through its activities and the issues they raised, the FEO engendered an expert network that was both internal and external to the LON. The creation of this network and its institutionalization were responses to international and transnational dynamics as well as to a much broader need for regulation, the counterpart to growing interdependence and economic internationalization since the second half of the nineteenth-century. While this study to some degree resembles other recent research on international organizations, it departs from this research by virtue of its structural component, which links the organization to deep movements in economic development and global finance.
[Projecting Nationhood? The Nation in Transnational Intellectual Cooperation during the Interwar Years]
How did intellectuals and politicians confirm or reinforce national categories, even when they ostensibly promoted visions of an international community? The article addresses this question through a case study of the League of Nations’ mechanisms for intellectual cooperation. After a brief discussion of institutional aspects, namely the established of League-affiliated committees and institutes in the 1920s, the article focuses on the interplay of transnational and national practices. National actors – for instance intellectuals and organisations from Central and Eastern Europe – targeted the League bodies, evoking both cultural internationalism and national interests. Furthermore, nationhood was projected at international congresses – sometimes openly, sometimes in more subtle terms – with the pronouncements of delegates from Fascist Italy providing an interesting case in point. Finally, the article discusses how individuals sought to reconcile the multilayered nature of their activities; to this end, it considers several figures who were involved in the League’s efforts to foster a ‘société des esprits’.
[The Dynamics of Internationalization: Germany and the International Labor Organization (1919-1940)]
This case study of Germany and the ILO between 1919 and 1944 allows us to ask to what extent and under what form international organizations can constitute spaces within which “the international domain is produced”. By distinguishing between two periods, it also allows empirical study of these mechanisms of internationalization in the domain of social policy. During the Weimar Republic, the mechanisms by means of which social knowledge and expertise were internationalized were active wherever the national and international scenes overlapped. There, the “German social model” underwent various forms of denationalization (though not without giving rise to tension). The Nazi period represented a return to the late nineteenth-century tradition of social imperialism. An examination of this period reveals the importance accorded by the Nazis to international organizations as instruments of propaganda as well as the way in which they sought to profit from these organizations by “twisting” their objectives.
[Negotiations on climate change: the 2009 Copenhagen turning point]
The 2009 Copenhagen Conference has been quite unsuccessful for the EU views and the general expectations generated by the agenda of negotiations. It principally demonstrated a huge change in the balance of influences between the main regions of the world. The Cancun conference in 2010 has confirmed the radical turn operated by the Copenhagen meeting. For two decades, the dominant approach has been to look for more and more stringent quantitative commitments of states in regard to their GHG emission levels, only balanced by flexibility mechanisms, with the idea of a phased-in geographical and temporal expansion of the approach. Instead, at Copenhagen and Cancun, have been laid the foundations of a bottom-up, loosely coordinated and fragmented approach made of unilateral pledges shaped by domestic agendas, just balanced by international review process, new promises of new financial transfers toward developing countries, with a particular attention given to programs against deforestation. Since Copenhagen, it is the vision of an international community taking due steps to wisely develop an appropriate common action for the preservation of a major global public good that blew up.
[Material for a Political Anthropology of the Production and Contemporary Use of Canonized Sainthood] Following his election in 1978, John-Paul II canonized and beatified more candidates than any earlier Pope. Often seen as breaking with tradition, this practice (continued by Benedict XVI since 2005) has been described as inflationist or, worse, a saint factory. It is evidence in any case of a new strategic analysis on the part of the Holy See of the Church’s place in the world, one in which appeals to sainthood play a central role as emblems and vectors of the “new evangelization” desired by Jean-Paul II. This leads one to consider the design of the Vatican system, in which canonization and beatification constitute both a form of accreditation and a means to an end. It also argues for shedding light on what these adjustments are capable of revealing about reorganizations of the contemporary. The objective here is thus to examine the sense (in terms of both meaning and direction) of the contemporary fabrication of the Elected and in this way bring together several components of the political anthropology of the present production and uses of canonized sainthood.
[The New Left and Financial Inclusion: Challenges to Microfinance in Bolivia, Ecuador and Nicaragua]
In Latin America, the first decade of the century was marked by the rise of political forces that are commonly described as the “new left”. Their rise to power nevertheless masks the ambivalent relationship of these movements to society and their difficulty in establishing a new model of development. Filling the vacuum that was created by the closure of public banks, moreover, microfinance became stronger by adopting a typically commercial form and set of practices. In the Nicaraguan, Ecuadoran and Bolivian cases, administrations formed after a handover of power share an ideologically-based mistrust of microfinance. In the absence of viable financing alternatives, a climate of coexistence reigns between governments and the actors of this sector, though it varies significantly from one country to the next in accordance with local strategic and institutional factors. Paradoxically, this tends to reinforce the most commercial and least durable structures, first of all affecting institutions that had consolidated themselves in an economically durable manner while remaining engaged on behalf of socio-economic development.
Penser et affronter les désastres : un panorama des recherches en sciences sociales et des politiques internationales
Alexandra Oeser, Enseigner Hitler. Les adolescents face au passé nazi en Allemagne : interprétations, appropriations et usages de l’histoire Paris, Éditions de la Maison des sciences de l’homme, 2010, XVIII-434 pages.
Isabelle Lespinet-Moret et Vincent Viet (dir.) L’Organisation internationale du travail : origine, développement, avenir, Rennes, Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2011, 212 pages.
John E. Mueller, Atomic Obsession : Nuclear Alarmism from Hiroshima to Al-Qaeda, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2010, XIII-319 pages.
