Mois : octobre 2017

Seen from the outside, cooperation among the Nordic countries appears as a foregone conclusion–aren’t these countries, which have so much in common, destined to cooperate with one another? However, a more nuanced analysis of their cooperation during the twentieth century reveals a series of missed opportunities, dashed hopes, and institutional false starts. If the coordination of their foreign policy appears to be one of the natural instincts of the five Nordic states, economic rivalries, geopolitical differences, and recurring disputes have complicated their relations, and often prevented their organized cooperation from reaching concrete results despite numerous attempts. 

Evoking a “European standard” for liberties amounts to examining the existence and development of legal norms applicable to all states in the area concerned. In the current state of the law, there is the clear emergence of what could be called a “continental” law, one of the essential characteristics of which is the promotion of stringent requirements in matters of liberties, particularly insofar as it is characterized by constant evolution. It nevertheless meets with active opposition, both externally and internally.

Recounting war has always played a role in European comics, whether as an instrument of propaganda, heroisation or denunciation. But it is only in recent decades that the number of stories about war has proliferated, that the range of subjects, spaces treated and perspectives has increased, and that the circulation of stories across Europe has become more pronounced. For this reason, comic books feed into a shared collection of popular narratives of war just as they fuel anti-war representations.

According to a comparison made by the first administrators of the colony, Saigon was meant to be a French Singapore. But Saigon never measured up to that British port and crossroads, the object of much jealousy, even if its location placed it at the confluence of the branches of the Mekong delta and gave it a hinterland of at least 300,000 km². Saigon was also the expression of colonial triumph: Europeans felt at home there among the grand avenues and architecture of the neighbourhoods reserved for them. In the accounts of travellers, Saigon quickly acquired the image of a lascivious city, with a joyful atmosphere, characterised by lightness and charm. The economic capital of French Indochina, it was also a city of fractures: the urban centre was European and the periphery was native. Saigon was the product of colonial history and was made by its settlers, even if the first stirrings of revolution hatched there in the 1920s and 1930s. European society was not, however, completely impermeable or homogenous.

The European Women’s Lobby (EWL) was created in 1990 at the initiative of EU civil servants, in a context of the institutionalization of feminism. Inspired by the European Network of Women (ENOW) created in 1983, its goal was to inform women’s associations and to influence European institutions in favour of women. After multiple waves of enlargement over the course of twenty-five years, the lobbying group became the largest coalition of European women’s organizations. Despite the number and cultural diversity of its members, it takes firm stances with regard to polemical subjects, affirming its pro-choice and prostitution abolitionist positions.

By thrusting Czechs to the forefront of the international stage, the Czechoslovak legions played an important role at the moment of Czechoslovakia’s birth between 1917 and 1920, especially in Russia. Their role and the difficulties they endured prompted the sympathy of Western opinion. The legionnaires subsequently held an important place in Czechoslovak society, as much by their activity within the new state, as by the construction of Czech memory of the First World War.