“The Great Continent” X-rays the fractures of the war in Ukraine

The review of reviews. Launched four years ago, the online journal Le Grand Continent is increasingly establishing itself as an essential place for intellectual and strategic debate. It is once again a book in the collection directed by Gilles Kepel at Gallimard, with a book compiling fifteen articles among the hundreds that have been published on its site about the war in Ukraine and the geopolitical upheavals it entails. .

Also read the review: Article reserved for our subscribers “The Great Continent” depicts a world in restructuring

“Europe was a system of consumers, flows and horizontality. It now finds itself with citizens to arm, stocks to fill in anticipation of extreme shortages in a broken and increasingly dangerous world”, write in the opening Gilles Gressani and Mathéo Malik, pillars of the review and the Study Group geopolitics from the Ecole Normale Supérieure.

This unprecedented editorial project was based on a double intuition. That of a Europe destined to become ever more global and to open up towards the east – hence the title of the review –, and that of the reality of a crisis where the old is dead and the new is n t has not yet happened, a moment of interregnum conducive to the appearance of all the monsters. including war. “An extended war” in that “it has become out of bounds, investing all human domains with a polemical logic”. The previous collection was completed just before the aggression of Ukraine, at the end of February 2022. This one takes stock of a little more than a year of conflict, nourishing this reflection by the variety of speakers, in their approaches as in their nationalities.

“Under the sign of uncertainty”

“The war in Ukraine opens a new page in the history of strategy in that it is both a total war and a limited war. Total, it is for the Ukrainians fighting for the survival of their nation, but it remains limited for Russia and for Ukraine’s Western allies”, points out Jean-Marie Guéhenno, French diplomat specializing in defense issues and professor at Columbia (New York), emphasizing that “Western opinions today have the spectacle of war, but not the war itself”.

Read the tribune of Gilles Gressani and Mathéo Malik: Article reserved for our subscribers “We are living the return of an inter-war period”

The risks of escalation are no less real, especially if the conflict is long-term. The Italian academic Carlo Galli analyzes what differentiates this second Cold War from the first, noting in particular that, if the latter “had produced, in its own way, a world order, the second is presented under the sign of uncertainty, as a particularly intense moment of the disorder that characterizes this new phase of globalisation”. A posthumous text by Bruno Latour, reviewed by the author just before his death, titled “Is European soil changing under our feet? “, closes the collection.

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