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Autrice de plus de 30 romans, d'une dizaine de pièces de théâtre et tout autant d’essais sur la littérature, le colonialisme et l’esclavage, Maryse Condé est morte dans la nuit de lundi à mardi, à l'âge de 90 ans.

Countries wanting to ease the Israeli blockade of Gaza have for weeks been taken by the private initiative of fledgling company Fogbow. The brand-new extreme logistics company is currently touring the world's capitals to present its private project to create

French experts have for the past few days been training around 10 Polish image interpreters in satellite imagery at France's

Air services conglomerate Terminals Holding was until very recently virtually unknown in Abu Dhabi. But after recently signing a flurry

The president of Vietnam is booked for an official visit to France in October for the Francophonie Summit in Villers-Cotterêts.

The resumption on 27 March of the foreign interference commission chaired by Quebec judge Marie-Josée Hogue appears to be a

Intelligence Online has learned that a group of former System 360 senior managers have opened a new intelligence firm in

Businessman Gani Bekenov had a front row seat at the Warwick Qazaq Ball, a Kazakh community event hosted by the

Don’t underestimate the world’s second-biggest economy.

America can do more to create stability and foster democracy.

Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party suffers worst electoral defeat in more than two decades of power.

Sommaire

Actualité :
- Algérie : quel avenir pour les exportations de gaz naturel ?
- Le Rwanda et la RDC

Dossier :
Génocide du Rwanda 30 ans plus tard
- Les faits, rien que les faits…
- Assassinat du président Habyarimana : l’enquête interdite
- Un non-lieu qui pose bien des questions…
- Ces Tutsi qui accusent le FPR d’avoir assassiné le président Habyarimana


Editorial de Bernard Lugan :
Génocide du Rwanda : 30 ans plus tard
Il y a trente ans le 6 avril 1994, était assassiné le président hutu Juvénal Habyarimana, attentat qui, selon le TPIR (Tribunal pénal international du Rwanda) fut le déclencheur du « génocide du Rwanda » ou « génocide des Tutsi du Rwanda ».
Depuis, les médias répètent l’histoire officielle écrite par le régime de Kigali, à savoir que ce génocide fut « programmé »  et « planifié » par les « extrémistes » hutu. 
Or, ce postulat a volé en éclats devant le TPIR. Ce tribunal créé par le Conseil de sécurité de l’ONU et qui siégea à Arusha, en Tanzanie, de 1995 à 2016, a en effet, et dans tous ses jugements concernant les « principaux responsables du génocide », que ce soit en première instance ou en appel, clairement établi qu’il n’y avait pas eu « entente » pour le commettre. 
Si ce génocide n’était pas programmé, c’est donc qu’il fut provoqué... Aujourd'hui nous savons que ce qui le déclencha ce fut l’assassinat du président Habyarimana. 
Or, spécialement créé pour juger les responsables du génocide, le TPIR fut interdit par les Etats-Unis et par la Grande-Bretagne de rechercher les auteurs de l’acte terroriste qui en fut la cause !!! Ce faisant, Washington et Londres protégèrent donc de facto ceux qui assassinèrent le président Habyarimana. 
Quant à la justice française, la seule ayant véritablement enquêté sur cet attentat, après 21 ans d’enquête, paralysée par d’incessantes interventions et manœuvres politico-médiatiques, elle a finalement renoncé à en identifier les auteurs. Certains prétendent que cela aurait pu être sur ordre du pouvoir politique français...
De fait, la France courtise  le régime de Kigali qui n’a pourtant jamais cessé de la vilipender et qui a effacé le français au profit de l’anglais. 
Cela n’a pas empêché le président Macron de faire nommer à la tête de l’Organisation de la Francophonie, une des plus proches du président Kagamé… 
A telle enseigne que, de reniement en reniement et de lâcheté en lâcheté, en Afrique, la France est quasiment considérée comme l’alliée du Rwanda… Ce qui n’est pas pour rien dans le mépris dont elle est aujourd’hui l’objet sur le continent…
Pour un bilan de la question on se reportera à mon livre : Rwanda : un génocide en questions et à mes expertises devant le TPIR (Tribunal pénal international pour le Rwanda).

Météo-France a placé lundi soir la Saône-et-Loire en vigilance rouge pour risque de crue, alors que la Côte-d'Or et l'Yonne restent en rouge. D'autres départements du sud-ouest et du sud-est demeurent en vigilance orange, dont les Bouches-du-Rhône.

Young people have been paying attention to Tik Tok for a long time… lawmakers are rushing to catch up.

There are two main reasons why Tik Tok has become increasingly controversial. First, because Tik Tok’s parent company has strong ties to the Chinese government- this presents a privacy risk for Americans who wish to avoid the CCP’s prying eyes. Second, because of the threat posed by allowing a potential foreign adversary influence over the content viewed by young Americans.

In truth, these matters are only made acute due to long-standing shortcomings in American policy regarding privacy and civic education. American lawmakers have the ability to put to bed the most pressing issues posed by Tik Tok by passing regulation addressing the upstream causes rather than the downstream consequences.

Yes, Tik Tok does violate the privacy of its users in a way that goes beyond the “new normal” established by Facebook’s and Google’s privacy agreements. Not long ago, it was revealed that Tik Tok had access to users “front facing cameras”. The data collected through the front-facing camera, reportedly, was being used to further hone the app’s algorithm. Additionally, there is ample evidence that the sort of content directed towards Chinese youth is of a seriously different nature than the content that is generated for young Americans. While young Chinese netizens are shown a regular stream of athletic and scientific accomplishments, young Americans are presented with, in the best case scenario, dance trends and practical jokes.

Only by looking at the issue directly can policymakers determine how to apply the scalpel rather than scissors.

Legislators might begin by protecting citizen’s online privacy a priori- in a way that has nothing to do with Tik Tok specifically. For example, policy makers might follow the guidelines put in place in parts of the EU, ensuring that Americans own the trackable data they produce online. 

Such a policy would –ban– Tik Tok in a way that has nothing to do with China in particular, but instead focuses on protecting the rights of American citizens.

In this way, Americans will not only be protected from the risk posed by Tik Tok, but also by the same security risks that will come from the next hip app that originates from an untrustworthy source.

In the same sort of way, Americans would be better protected from misinformation, on Tik Tok or elsewhere, through improved civic education rather than through state action. This is especially true when the forced sale of Tik Tok could, in the lowest light, be understood as censorship disguised as industrial policy. Even for those with less confidence in the wisdom of the average American citizen, surely there is a more Liberal way to address the threat posed by propaganda than simply prohibiting the material. After all, each of us has the opportunity to promote civic wellbeing through having healthy, well moderated, conversations about political issues with our friends and colleagues both young and old.

These hypothetical measures promoting privacy and civic education should be strictly enforced, and if Tik Tok, or other similar apps, violate these terms, consequences ought go beyond a simple fine.

Forcing the sale of Tik Tok is something like Sun Tzu’s “the worst is to storm a walled city”- it is the clumsiest and costliest way of addressing an important problem. Instead, legislators should look to more elegant solutions- guaranteeing the privacy rights of all Americans through appropriate legislation, and promoting civil wellbeing both through their own example and through promoting civic education in public spaces like schools and libraries. Perhaps if our educational system focused more on reading, writing and arithmetic with a bit of civic learning thrown in, this issue might be self correcting. 

Parents and friends have a similar role to play- even if legislators fail to act, we have a social obligation to steer our fellows away from platforms that waste their time and pollute their intelligence.

In a healthy society, legislators would pass laws protecting the common rights of citizens, and citizens would make the most of those rights by educating themselves and participating in political life. Some might say that we do not live in such a society, and that as a consequence, the best option is to address the problem of insecurity and disinformation with a blunt legislative instrument.

Fine, it might be better to apply the blunt instrument than to suffer Tik Tok’s continued use. Taking this route, however, moves the United States further away from its foundational Liberal values and makes a passive concession to Autocratic regimes that might look to censor American media. My proposed policy approach will take time and might be somewhat aspirational. Unfortunately, this leaves policy makers with a difficult choice between civil liberties and continuing today’s unfortunate state of affairs.

Even as I have personal confidence in the intelligence of the average American, the evidence suggests that high profile officials in American media lack that same belief. Whether it comes in the form of NBC’s hiring and quick firing of Ronna McDaniel, or Elon Musk’s decision to can Don Lemon’s show on X, it is not obvious the powers that be have an appreciation for a more challenging Socratic discussion.  This sort of self-censorship is, in the clear majority of cases, a self-inflicted wound. To propose that sunlight is an insufficient disinfectant is to suggest that the audience is to stupid to know Good from Bad.

Many suggest that Tik Tok’s focus on short form content is one of the app’s most dangerous features. American policy makers need to avoid this same trap. Tik Tok poses a serious problem, only by taking out the roots with precise public policy can the problem be solved over the long term.  Maybe it is time to relook at our foundation before we attempt to solve the problem top-down.  

—

 

Peter Scaturro is the Director of Studies at the Foreign Policy Association

Fin mars 2021, une expérimentation à grande échelle du cannabis thérapeutique était lancée en France, permettant à plusieurs milliers de patients souffrant de maladies graves d'intégrer cette drogue à leur traitement. Alors que ce test a pris fin le 27 mars et que les autorités sanitaires envisagent désormais une mise sur le marché en 2025, certains reviennent sur leur expérience.

Chaque année, les Français consomment en moyenne sept kilos de chocolat par personne. Produit réconfortant et gourmand, il n'est pas toujours très écologique. Sa production est à l’origine de la déforestation dans plusieurs pays, notamment au Ghana et en Côte d’Ivoire où les producteurs ne sont pas toujours rémunérés au juste prix. Mais le chocolat, c'est aussi une histoire de tradition en France. Depuis près de quatre siècles, les artisans chocolatiers français cultivent un savoir-faire d'excellence.

by Ana E. Juncos, Bristol University and Sophie Vanhoonacker, Maastricht University

EU Strategic autonomy: different trajectories in security and external economic relations

Global shifts in power distribution and successive international crises have challenged key ideas and policies underpinning European Union (EU) external action and led to the formulation of a new narrative in which geopolitical considerations have come back to centre stage. One of the main ideas put forward to deal with the increasingly unstable international environment is strategic autonomy (SA), understood as the capacity of the EU to act independently in realizing its strategic objectives and defending its interests and values. Although the SA concept was born in the security domain, it has gathered pace in the field of EU external economic relations. Puzzled by these different trajectories, our recent JCMS contribution  seeks to get a better understanding of why an idea originally born in the area of security and defence has become more embedded in the field of trade and external economic relations. We aim to solve this puzzle by researching the role and power of ideas and how they enable actors to push for policy change in a context of geopolitical uncertainty.

Using the analytical lenses of discursive institutionalism, we examine how policy entrepreneurs took advantage of international developments such as the Presidency of Donald Trump, the Covid-19 pandemic or the war in Ukraine to transform both the cognitive and normative beliefs of actors, and to what extent they have been translated into new EU policies. In a comparative analysis in the domains of EU security and external economic relations, we focus on three dimensions of ideational power: power in, power through and power over to understand the different trajectories of SA in these two policy areas. We argue that the ability of ideational entrepreneurs such as the Commission to push for this idea, supported by the coercive power derived from its exclusive trade competences, facilitated the adoption of this concept in the form of ‘open strategic autonomy’. By contrast, French President Emmanuel Macron was unable to persuade others to move towards a more sovereigntist conception of SA in the area of security and defence. Only in the case of defence capability development, where the Commission enjoys budgetary power and competences in industrial policy, has SA been able to take hold.

Hegemonic discourses – Power in Ideas

As a first step, we look into how the SA concept relates to prevalent hegemonic ideas at the EU level. While our analysis of EU strategic documents shows that the SA discourse indeed has challenged the predominant philosophies on how to best guarantee the Union’s prosperity in a rapidly changing geopolitical and geoeconomic context, it is still too early to speak of a paradigmatic change. The deeply ingrained neoliberal paradigm and the continuing controversies between Atlanticists and Europeanists have proven to be quite resilient. For instance, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has been perceived by Atlanticists as clear example of the continued need to rely on NATO for defence and to maintain the close political and security ties with the US. By contrasts, the Europeanist camp has argued that the war in Ukraine has drawn attention to the weaknesses and dependencies of EU member states in matters of defence and the need to address those by strengthening SA. Hence, the ambiguity surrounding the concept remains.

Discursive Entrepreneurs – Power through ideas
The launching of new ideas is always accompanied with discursive interactions and struggles about the definition of problems and their possible solutions. In security and defence, we argue that the French President Macron, who has been the key discursive entrepreneur, did not manage to persuade others to follow a more sovereigntist understanding of SA. In line with French strategic thinking, President Macron has repeatedly emphasized the need for the EU to strengthen its capacity to defend itself and to act independently from others. Yet, other member states, particularly Central and Eastern European countries, have rejected this notion. This is well illustrated in the 2022 Strategic Compass with its emphasis on partnerships, but also explicitly noting that NATO ‘remains the foundation of collective defence for its members’. By contrast, in the area of trade, the European Commission has been more successful. Although the member states were also divided in the field of external economic relations, DG Trade cleverly coined the term Open Strategic Autonomy (OSA). This helped to build a bridge between those favouring a more protective EU approach and the so-called ‘friends of the internal market’.

Authority and Competences – Power over Ideas

As a third step, we examine the coercive capacity of policy entrepreneurs, i.e. the resources and/or competences that those actors have within a particular institutional context. Here our comparative analysis shows that in security and defence, where supranational institutions are relatively weak and every member state is a potential veto player, it has been more difficult to impose new ideas than in external economic relations, where national capitals have delegated competences to the EU. Despite several discussions at the highest political level, the member states did not manage to reach consensus on what to understand under SA in the security field. In the area of external economic relations on the contrary, a well-resourced  DG Trade did not only develop a new Trade Policy Review (2021) but also managed to move ahead with developing a whole range of new trade instruments aimed at promoting sustainable value chains, supporting the EU’s regulatory impact, enforcing trade agreements and ensuring a level playing field.

What have we learned?
Our comparative analysis shows that to understand the different success rates of the SA concept in the area of security and external economic relations, it does not suffice to merely study the external drivers of the EU’s geopolitical turn. We demonstrate that it is also important to pay attention to internal factors, such as the role of ideas. The study of discursive struggles about dominant paradigms, the role of policy entrepreneurs and their authority and competences is indispensable to better understand the EU response to the rapidly changing international context.

We conclude that although the debate about the reformulation of security and external economic policies took place in parallel, over time we have seen a ‘security logic’ being transposed to the EU’s external economic policies. Whilst the convergence of the two debates could positively impact coherence, it also brings risks. If one of the biggest defenders of free trade and multilateralism is increasingly reverting to a sovereigntist discourse and a policy of relative gains, this may negatively impact the openness of the global trade system and the EU’s international influence.

Ana E. Juncos is Professor European Politics at the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies at the University of Bristol. Her primary research interest lies in European foreign and security policy, with a particular focus on EU conflict prevention and peacebuiding.

 

 

Sophie Vanhoonacker is Professor in Administrative Governance at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Maastricht University. Her research focuses on the institutional aspects of EU External Relations and administrative governance in the area of foreign and security policy.

The post The ideational power of strategic autonomy in EU security and external economic policies appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

Trois départements, la Côte d'Or, l'Yonne et la Saône-et-Loire, restent en vigilance rouge ce lundi soir. La décrue de la Vienne a commencé dans la même journée à Chinon (Indre-et-Loire), où la population avait été appelée la veille à évacuer en raison de la montée des eaux. Sept autres départements restent en vigilance orange. Un kayakiste demeure toujours recherché en Haute-Vienne.

Az olasz légierő istranai bázisán a napokban búcsúztatják az AMX típust. A brazil-olasz fejlesztésű könnyű csapásmérő gép valahogy mindig kívül maradt a fősodorból. Csekély érdeklődés övezte, és ha láttuk is a különböző gyakorlatokon és repülőnapokon, a MiG-29-esek, F-15-ösök, F-16-osok, Tornadók elvitték a showt előle. Ezért amikor 2008-ban észak-olasz bázistúrát szerveztünk, úgy döntöttünk, hogy Aviano előtt benézünk Istranába, az AMX-eket üzemeltető 51. ezred fészkébe. A típus kivonása kapcsán ezt a látogatást idézem fel.

Istrana nem éppen a legismertebb olasz város, a térképen Velencétől 30 kilométerre, északnyugatra kell keresgélni, hogy rátaláljunk. Mielőtt belépünk a város északi szélén létesült bázisra, fussunk át röviden az 51. Stormo (ezred) második világháborúig visszanyúló történetén. Az 51-esek 1939. október elsején alakultak a római Ciampino repülőtéren. Feladatuk a főváros és Nápoly légterének védelme volt, amihez Fiat CR.32 és G.50 típusokkal rendelkeztek. Később Észak-Afrikában, a Balkánon, Szicíliában, Szardínián és Oroszországban harcoltak, de akkor már Macchi MC.200, MC.202 és MC.205 repülőgépekkel. A harcok során 270 igazolt és 102 valószínű légigyőzelmet írtak a javukra. A második világháború után, 1947-től amerikai és angol típusokkal, P-47 Thunderboltokkal, P-51 Mustangokkal és a Spitfire IX-esekkel repülve működtek tovább. Istranába 1953. február elsején költöztek és folyamatosan álltak át az F-84G Thunderstreak, F-86K Sabre és Fiat G.91 típusokra, majd 1963-tól az F-104 Starfighterre.

[...] Bővebben!

The EU's easing of green agricultural policy conditions as a response to farmers' protests has sparked controversy. Critics fear that short-term quick fixes are not a solution for the sector, while others cite a CAP-Green Deal gap.