Critique internationale - Content
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[Multi-Positioned Actors and the Construction of the Transnational: The Creation of the European Consortium for Political Research]
Given the very diverse ways in which political science has been structured at the national level and the lack of interaction among national fields, the creation of the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR) in 1970 was on the face of it improbable. This article explains the genesis of this transnational scholarly organization by reference to two phases: first, by creating the International Political Science Association (IPSA), UNESCO encouraged growth in the transnational circulation of actors and knowledge involved in the study of politics; this circulation subsequently contributed to transforming the physiognomy of European national fields and created the conditions of emergence of a subversive project for a new scholarly organization. The present article thus reveals the hybrid structure of transnational spaces in terms of the knowledge and resources that are involved.
[The Go-Betweens of the “Third Way”: Intermediaries and Mediators in the Transnational Circulation of Ideas]
A study of the circulation of New Labour ideas within the French socialist left produced two significant findings: on the one hand, it revealed the existence of “go-betweens”, secondary actors who, though less visible, play a crucial role; on the other hand, it showed that direct exchanges between the Socialist Party and New Labour were very limited in scope over the course of the period surveyed. “Supporting actors” thus prove to play a more important role than existing research on the subject would suggest and the “scenery” in which they act is not what one would have expected. On the basis of this empirical data, it is possible to rethink the concepts of “intermediarity” and mediation in complementary fashion so as to grasp both the active role played by these cosmopolitan go-betweens and the transformations that political ideas undergo when circulating abroad.
[Homology and International Conductivity: The Social State Grapples with the OECD, the EU and Governments]
An examination of the job and unemployment programs of the OECD and the European Commission in the two decades since 1990 shows that their circuit of production and homologous legitimation has been marked by the domination of governments and these organizations’ economic sectors over social sectors. Each of these institutional universes is characterized by an asymmetric relationship between the “economic” and the “social”, something that affects the content of their diagnostics and prescriptions as well as the flow of transactions between them. This article thus takes seriously the effects and actualizations of the process of isomorphic differentiation between the “economic” and the “social” that has over the long term been pursued by Western states, a process that affects the very structures of these internationalized spaces.
[Judge and Expert: The “Rueff Affair” or the Codification of the Rules of International Circulation]
The appointment of Jacques Rueff, a member of the Court of Justice of the European Communities, to the position of economic and financial advisor to the French government following General de Gaulle’s return to power occasioned much discussion in community circles between 1958 and 1962. By examining this “affair”, the present article seeks to reveal the institutional power struggles that preceded the codification of the rules of international circulation. These power struggles defined the very conditions of possibility of expertise, which depends on the accumulation of positions and sources of revenue. As revealed by press articles on parliamentary questions, the undercurrents of the “Rueff affair” thus show that international circulation does not take place without resistance.
[Experts, States and Field Theory: Learning from the Peculiar Case of Terrorism Expertise]
The study of expertise has generally been guided by an assumption that the production of expert knowledge occurs within institutionalized fields of knowledge production. This assumption has shaped both theory development and the selection of empirical cases. As a result, studies have tended to neglect the emergence of knowledge in other contexts. The situation has recently evolved, however, with the introduction of the concepts of "interstitial" and "transnational" fields. Yet these advances do not always take account of particular fields of expertise – terrorism expertise is one such – in which experts lack control, not just over the certification of their peers, but also over the very object of their expertise and the techniques for producing knowledge about it. The growing attention that has in recent years been given to other forms of expertise is the result both of the multiplication of new relations between experts and states and of the appearance of doubts concerning the “universalizable” character of assumptions regarding this particular and historical relationship – assumptions upon which older theories of expert fields were based.
[Fukushima, Crisis of a Model of Governance]
The year following the 11 March 2011 Fukushima catastrophe was a period of stock-taking, self-criticism and adjustment: a model of governance was on trial in Japan. In order to avoid widespread panic, the government chose to under-inform the population. Ye the government itself was very poorly informed and the agencies on which it depended in this domain did not possess the firsthand information or expertise they were supposed to supply. Of all the actors involved in managing the nuclear crisis, the government was no doubt the least at fault. The operator surveillance body, the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, and the operator, TEPCO, were both aware of the fact that safety standards had been neglected at the Fukushima Daiichi reactor. The various reports produced since the catastrophe have shed light on the failings of a system of governance and the Japanese government has rapidly drawn lessons from them. The doubts that were thus raised concerning the place of the nuclear sector in energy production were nevertheless shelved following the return to power of a liberal-democrat majority in December 2012.
[From Ideological Nomadism to Partisan Allegiance: The Franco-Venezuelan Worlds of the Reelection of Hugo Chavez (2012)]
Globalization via foreign media and hyper-polarization are two particularities of ongoing partisan struggles in Venezuela. By examining the various trajectories of the French-based journalists, intellectuals and experts involved in the 2012 presidential campaign, one may describe the socio-historical conditions of the emergence and structuration of (anti)Chavist involvement in the “North” since the failed coup d’état of 2002 and their uses in the Bolivarian configuration. By projecting past violence into a future that “engages” the rest of the world, these discursive circulations exacerbate a bipolarity that has gradually become disconnected from the everyday material conditions of the petro-state. This is maintained at the local level as a vector of disciplinarization within the two poles that benefits Chavist elites and their foreign partners, their ideological heterogeneity notwithstanding.
[Businesseurope beyond “Lobbying”: An Employer’s Organization Works towards European Integration]
The European employers’ union, UNICE/Businesseurope, is not here defined in a priori fashion as a “pressure group” acting on European institutions. Rather, the present article focuses on the work carried out by its personnel in the framework of aid and technical assistance programs for countries that have recently joined the European Union or are candidates for membership. An examination of the organization and content of its training sessions shows how it acts to promote European integration. Its members help employers’ representatives, not only to learn their role, but also to retain it in their country. What is at stake here is the representation of company interests before national governments and seeing to it that Community acquis are respected and implemented. Despite the upheavals to which the process of enlargement has given rise, the European federation welcomes new national employers’ organizations in order to conserve the structure of representation of employer interests before the European Union and the central place it holds in this European space for the representation of interests.
Rudra Sil, Peter J. Katzenstein, Beyond Paradigms. Analytic Eclecticism in the Study of World Politics, New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2010, XV-263 pages.
Sophie Cœuré, Rachel Mazuy (dir.) avec la collaboration de Elena Aniskina et Galina Fedorovna Kuznetsova Cousu de fil rouge. Voyages des intellectuels français en Union Soviétique. 150 documents inédits des Archives russes Paris, CNRS Éditions, 2011, 379 pages.
The Greengrocer and His TV. The Culture of Communism after the 1968 Prague Spring Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 2010, XIII-250 pages.
Sudha Rajagopalan Indian Films in Soviet Cinemas: The Culture of Movie-going after Stalin Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 2008, 242 pages.
Tejaswini Ganti Producing Bollywood: Inside the Contemporary Hindi Film Industry Durham, Duke University Press, 2012, XIV-424 pages.
Sudha Rajagopalan Indian Films in Soviet Cinemas: The Culture of Movie-going after Stalin Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 2008, 242 pages.
Tejaswini Ganti Producing Bollywood: Inside the Contemporary Hindi Film Industry Durham, Duke University Press, 2012, XIV-424 pages.
