Volume 17, numéro 3, 1986

EN :

Anachronism is one of the most common distorsions of history by which we circumscribe the past with our own mental universe. That is what the modem West has done and continues to do as regards Islam - a society almost without distinction of time or space. Thus today the encounter between Western Christendom and Islam is commonly seen as essentially negative, having been reduced to the military - religious conflict of the Crusades during the ll,h and 13,h centuries. Of course, it was at that period of time that took shape a Catholic view of Islam as a religion obnoxiously stereotyped, a view which would spread across Europe and which, much later, would give rise to a truly different form of racism, still around to day. Such an overall despising attitude tends to cover up the positive aspects of what had been the encounter between Islam and Christianity. Y et, those were many and they have been invaluable in the development of the Western thought and sciences. Far from being only a region of conflict, at that time the Mediterranean was also a zone of cultural symbiosis to which the modem West owes much. Europe would do well to remember this today that its supremacy is already part of a past which is definitely over.

EN :

Our understanding of the Soviet defence burden remains woefully inadaquate. The official Soviet defence expenditure figure is not helpful. It is not inclusive. There is no concensus on what or how much is covered by other budget accounts. Soviet statistics do not allow independent calculation. Official Western estimates, on the other hand, are equally dubious. They reflect more on Western political dynamics than on Soviet reality.

The Soviet defence industry is not immune from the vicissitudes of the economy at large. The Soviet military do not enjoy carte blanche. They contribute extensively to civilian needs, both in terms of goods and services. But, in turn, they extract benefits from a wide range of civilian endeavors.

The military-political culture, rooted in an older Moscovy, and reinforced by Lenin's Clausewitzian leanings, is quite different from that which prevails in the west. There is no military-industrial complex threatening the Soviet State. In the USSR the military is OF the State, integral to a wider establishment.

The military burden cannot be specified, for much is inextricably fused with the burden of State, and culture. It is systemic. It will be sustained. Because it is OF the System. Western debate is ethnocentric. We need new research, new under standing.

EN :

The debate which has been going on for many years now among governments of the member countries of NATO on the ratification of the Additional Protocol I to the 1949 Geneva Conventions, signed in 1977, focusses mainly on the effects of such an instrument on deterrence and nuclear strategy. It is the fear of these effects that France has used to justify her refusal to become part of Protocol I. At the time of the signing of Protocol I, the US and Great Britain made the declaration that the new regulations as introduced by Protocol I "are not intended to have any effect on and do not regulate or prohibit the use of nuclear weapons". It appears that, for a reason which has nothing to do with atomic weapons, the Reagan administration intends not to ask the Senate for ratification of Protocol I. The governments of Italy and Belgium who ratified the Protocol in February and May 1986 respectively, have supplemented their ratification with a declaration similar to that of the two powers. As for the legality of the use of nuclear weapons, the answer must from now on rely on the combination of Protocol I and the "nuclear clause" from the declaration of the two powers and their allies. Hence the status of nuclear weapons in international law is comprised of three elements : a) The first use of nuclear weapons is not, in itself prohibited. - b) This use is subjected to the regulations of the common law of war, as has been "reaffirmed" by Protocol I, and which applies both to conventional and nuclear weapons. - c) The bans and restrictions, as provided for in these regulations, and which mark out the thin bounds which allow for the use of atomic weapons, pertain only to the use of these arms and not to nuclear deterrence.

EN :

Bateson's "Eurêka" has been his application of Russell and Whitehead's theory of types to the social sciences. They had postulated a discontinuity between the levels of the members of a class and a class of classes and so on. Hence a class may not be a member of itself. The cat scratches and the word "cat" does not bite. Confusion between levels, or the signifier and the signified, or the map and the territory, or the menu and the meal, is a sign of disorder.

Having been introduced to Bateson's ecology, Anthony Wilden has formulated a theory of contexts, already present in "System and Structure". In order to avoid simplicity through the flattening of social and organic levels into inorganic levels of matter-energy, the theory of contexts suggest the organisation of constraints, complexites, or levels of reality into levels of logical types, using the rule of extinction. It goes on to suggest the use of the rule of commutation to eliminate spurious similarities and inappropriate symmetries which lead to oppositions and Imaginary "contradictions".

It is suggested to use Korzybski and Hayakawa's rule of communication in order to get over conflicts due to misperception.

To illustrate all of this, we propose to dismanthe the processes which have led to the misunderstanding behind the first Indochinese war of 1946-1954. From one misunderstanding to another, the VPA (Vietnam People's Army), in the 1980's, mobilised at the Kmer-Siamese border, at the door of Thailand who since 1939 has claimed to be the land of the Thais and heir to the Champa empire which was established in 192 and, soon after 1471, was dissolved by the "gnawing" of the Vietnamese peasants in their "long march" towards the South.

The most revolting of working, conjugal and international disputes is that which emerge from misperceptions where each party is convinced of its own good will and of the foul bad will of the other. A mutual consent regarding the context, that of metacommunication, may lead to a common signification (consensus) of beings, events and objects.