Volume 28, numéro 3, 1997

EN :

The present article compares the conditions that sparked the Yugoslav conflict and the prospects for peace following the signing of the Dayton Accords. Analysis suggests that the outbreak of nationalist hostilities in Yugoslavia should he explained through a combination of underlying and proximate factors. Just as the circumstances accompanying the collapse of communism were chiefly responsible for the eruption of violence, the immediate factors associated with the Dayton Accords and, more specifically, the attitude of the political elites will determine the likelihood of a lasting peace. Although the new context arising from Dayton seems to have had peace-promoting effects, the socio historical factors that helped to spark the hostilities are still active and are keeping alive the conflict-oriented motives of the local leaders. A resurgence of violence is thus possible.

EN :

The serious economic problems that the unified Germany has to face — as must other industrialized countries - cannot by themselves account for the growing disenchantment that is perceptible in the New Länder, where the utopian dreams of the fall of 1989 have been steadily unravelling. Why is it that the people of the GDR, who had pushed aside the lethargy of politicians in order to impose a speedy unification of the two German states, now seem to be adopting a radical attitude of defiance towards the federal government ? The author postulates that, in implementing the unification process, people overestimated the capability of the West German federal model to integrate the territories of the GDR and underestimated the permanence of the political consciousness specific to East German citizens, the weight of their historical experience, and their profound yearning to assume their destiny within a unified Germany. Had an autonomous East German chamber been created, with a time-limited mandate, it might have been possible to give meaning to the collective quest for identity now being expressed in the New Länder, a quest which for the time being, and in the absence of any alternative, finds an outlet in a party incarnating the region's specificity - the PDS.

EN :

Since the late eighties, the new regionalism is the most important wave of regionalism ever experienced in the world: every continent is now involved in one or several regional integration processes. This article aims at assessing the real impact of these processes on the international System. The method consists of comparing and building typologies of the main regional integration processes which have been created out of Europe, according to four criteria: the sense of the integration, the quality of political cooperation between the member states, the degree of economic integration, and the degree of institutional and political integration. The outcome of the analysis is that, except from Europe, integration is rarely scheduled to go deep or has a real chance to go deep in the short term. Hence the ability of the new regionalism to shape the international system deeply remains quite limited.

EN :

The European citizenship and the democratic deficit are at the heart of the ongoing discussion about the European integration. Critics think that the possibility for the citizens to participate in the decision making process of the EU is not sufficient. In order to shed some light on this matter, the two concepts are examined under their different aspects. We emphasize not only their place in the larger context of the integration and the political situation in Europe but also the link between the two notions. This allows the conclusion that the European citizenship, because of its flexible and innovative character, should be the starting point in the search of an answer to the democratic deficit.

EN :

It is a truism to state today that the idealist-realist debate represents a foundational moment of great importance for the discipline of international relations that had defined and set the problematic that will occupy her latter. In those circumstances, the works of Hans f. Morgenthau occupied a privileged posture because he contributed more than anyone else to grasp what makes the originality and specificity of that « new » domain of study. The metatheoretical examination of that idealist-realist debate and of the strategic position that it occupied in the theoretical thinking of Morgenthau allowed us to enlighten anew one crucial moment in the analytical constitution of international relations. Retrospectively this kind of metatheoretical examination throws critical light on difficulties faced by theoretical activities in that discipline.