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Showing posts with the label Liberal Order

The Defeat in Afghanistan — a Watershed in the Cycle of Atlantic Decline

In crises and wars there are events which leave their mark on history because of how they make a decisive impact on the power contention, or because of how, almost like a chemical precipitate, they suddenly make deep trends that have been at work for some time coalesce. This is the case of the defeat of the United States and NATO in Afghanistan, which is taking the shape of a real watershed in the cycle of Atlantic decline. For the moment, through various comments in the international press, it is possible to consider its consequences on three levels: America’s position as a power and the connection with its internal crisis; the repercussions on Atlantic relations and Europe’s dilemmas regarding its strategic autonomy; and the relationship between the Afghan crisis and power relations in Asia, especially as regards India’s role in the Indo-Pacific strategy. Repercussions in the United States Richard Haass is the president of the CFR, the Council on Foreign Relations; despite having ...

Socialism and Nationalism in the History of France

The collapse of French socialism at the outbreak of the First World War is considered by many historians to be the most significant case of its kind. We must go back in time to find its origins. The dramatic repression of the Paris Commune in 1871 was followed by a decade of shootings and the deportation of tens of thousands of revolutionary militants. Reactionary monarchical legitimism attributed the decline of France to the Revolution of 1789, but by then the nouvelles couches sociales , the new classes produced by capitalism, as Leon Gambetta defined them, demanded a politics free from economic, social and clerical ties. The Radical Party, a turning point of French politics, was its expression. The same taditional Catholic Judeophobia dating back to the Middle Ages — according to Michel Dreyfus’, research director at the CNRS in Paris, Anti-Semitism on the Left in France [Paris, 2009] — gradually transformed into the image of the Jews associated with money and modernity who des...