Having overcome the two bloodiest totalitarianisms in its history, Nazism and the Soviet dictatorship, Europe –and the West more broadly– seemed in a position in the early 1990s to promote a new international order based on fundamental rights and human freedoms. Unfortunately, as Robert Toulemon stresses here, what has ensued has been a form of global anarchy, manifesting itself in ways that affect most countries in the world directly or indirectly.
Yet, democracy and the defence of human freedoms are objectives that seem increasingly attuned to the desires of the great majority of the world’s peoples. In fact, it is the failure of the Western powers –beginning with the EU– to agree on this agenda and gear themselves to its advancement that has proved crucial. Hence the call formulated here by Robert Toulemon for these values to be asserted and for the construction of a “global democratic order” that could express itself in a genuine foreign and European security policy worthy of the name –and also in a transformation of the Atlantic alliance into an entity that is more political than geographical. This is a call for a “cultural revolution” and for a renewal of multilateralism that could, as Toulemon argues, seize on the challenge of climate change to be its new testing ground.
