Friday, March 14, 2014
Embassy (Omni Shoreham)
This paper provides an intellectual history of the idea of Europe as a political project among French elites and international-affairs policy intellectuals during the 1980s, when French diplomatic initiatives helped to revive European integration. The prominent commentator and scholar Raymond Aron passed down an ideal of liberal Europe and a growing recognition of international society to his associates that, by the late 1980s, they would use to generate support for the very forms of European federalism that Aron had never chosen to embrace. Through this dynamic, one sees the gradual work of ideological renovation that turned the European project from a Cold War artifact of reconciliation into what later generations of elites viewed as the vehicle for Europe’s post-Cold War, post-decolonization role in the world. In the 1980s, figures such as Pierre Hassner, Thierry de Montbrial, and Dominique Moïsi re-shaped Aron’s mid-century, liberal anti-totalitarianism into justifications for integration that stressed economic interdependence and the vulnerability of Europe’s geopolitical and cultural position in the world. Their editorial guidance and commentaries in leading elite publications such as Commentaire and Politique Étrangère, and their founding of the research center the Institut français des relations internationales in 1979 contributed to the cultivation of a new intellectual consensus envisioning France’s political future within the frame of the European project.
