Toward a shared history of the present

Fabrice dAlmeida
IHTP, CNRS
University Paris II
(Contribution at the conference organized by the department of contemporary history of the Sdertons
University of Stockholm, 28-29 august 2006)

In 1863 the French author Jules Verne wrote a surprising text : Paris in the XXth
century1. He sent it to the popular editor Hetzel who had just accepted Vernes first
adventure novel Five weeks in a balloon. Hetzel read and corrected the manuscript and
finally decided to reject it judging that even if the author had been a prophet, the text
would not seduce the public. Verne put his text away and it remained unpublished until
1994.
The text had thus spent almost the entire 20th century in secrecy and from utopia, it had
become an historical document. Readers from the dawn of the 21st century might be a
little disappointed by the limitations of the narration and the poor story line but we will
be captivated by the fantasy of the perfect world Verne describes.
The book does not ignore history. Verne insisted on the creation of a special historical
commission that would have been appointed to settle the interpretation problems of the
Revolution and the Empire. This meant that a scientific history would be possible, just
like music would be scientifically explained2. Verne also insisted on the idea that war
would have lost all utility : war would even be considered as ridiculous as a duel. Victory
of science would have erased the memory of the great literary glories of the 19th century.
Verne must have been delighted to write that everybody would have forgotten about
Victor Hugo.

1
2

Jules Verne, Paris au XXe sicle, Paris, Hachette, 1994.

Idem, p. 96.

Almost at the same time as Verne's text was finally published, a British historian, Eric J.
Hobsbawm, published an extremely successful book, The Age of Extremes: The Short
Twentieth Century, 1914-19913. Here Hobsbawm contradicted Verne's optimistic vision.
As he described it, the 20th century had been a short period, a short 20th century,
beginning with the First World War and ending with the breakup of the communist bloc.
This disquieting period had known the most violent conflicts, which in turn were
followed by a period of prosperity from the end of the Second World War until the 70's
when the world entered into a crisis which was not ended by the disintegration of the
communist model. Far from opening a new era of opulence, wealth and happiness, the
end of communism meant the absence of any alternative to the capitalist development
model and would lead, sooner or later, to a tragedy. As the author himself noted, his age
at the time of writing seems to have played an important role in his pessimistic
interpretation of the past and vision of the future.
At the eve of the 20th century, a great number of books trying to make a more or less
general assessment of the 20th were published. There was surely a specific effect created
by the upcoming new millennium, to wish to revise the closing 20th century. This output
constantly searched for a clear halt in a history that valued the idea to count in centuries.
The 19th century was the one with the most conscience of itself and one understands why
Verne decided to entitle his book Paris au 20me sicle as a provocation addressed to the
men of his time, to his contemporaries. Verne placed the heart of the 20th century in
1960. The historians of the 90's had a tendency to view the Second World War as the
central moment of the century. And wasn't it indeed just after the Second World War that
the cut off had taken place between the West and the Communist world? The East/West
divide that ended in 1990 fundamentally determined the understanding of the 20th
century. Indeed, the century began sometime between 1914 and 1918, with what Franois
Furet was to name the birth of the communist illusion, and ended with the death of that
illusion4. Nevertheless, some years later, an extreme event corrected this vision. On
3

Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes - A History of the World 1914-1991, New York,
Pantheon Books, 1994.
4
Franois Furet, Le pass dune illusion, Paris, Robert Laffont, 1995. Another book on the 20th
Century.

September 11th 2001, the attack and destruction of the World Trade Center was viewed
by many as the beginning of a new era, the beginning of the new century. A 10-year gap
thus separated the 20th and 21st century.
The object of this communication is to reflect upon the writing conditions of a history of
the 20th century and more generally of a history of the present time beginning from a
simple hypothesis : we are victims of dominant representations of the 20th century and
we have great difficulty understanding today, a time of which the specific conditions
have been set anew since 9/11. On that day, commentators said the 70-year long
East/West gap had just widened to become a tension between Orient and the West. The
idea is also to show that counting by centuries is not the best means to define an era and
that it would be preferable to use alternative concepts, Histoire du temps prsent, History
of the present, Histoire immediate, Zeitgenossichegeschichte. In a first step, I will recall
the effectiveness of the notion of Histoire du temps present and show how much
comparative history has added to this notion. Next I would like to address the specific
obstacles to a shared history of time present, in particular obstacles inherited with the
dominant representations of the 20th century. Finally, I would like to question several
central historical notions starting from a hypothetic entry in the 20th century.
The notion of Histoire du temps prsent is difficult to separate from the scientific
laboratory that developed it as a concept5. The IHTP was created by Franois Bdarida in
1980, with the primary objective to force research to exit the boundaries of the Second
World War. Inspired by the Munich based Institut fr Zeitgeschichte which had enabled a
new historiography on both the Third Reich and the Federal Republic of Germany, the
Post World War era was the reference period for the IHTP at its creation. Soon however,
historians from the IHTP produced new research which indicated that understanding the
aftermath of the war was impossible without the matrix of the Second World War itself.
Bdarida himself noted that working on the 30's allowed to observe the unleashing of the
Second World War and to anticipate the effects of the war on the second part of the 20th
5

See Ecrire lhistoire du temps prsent, Paris, CNRS, 1992; Franois Bdarida, Histoire,

critique et responsabilit, Paris, Complexe, coll. Histoire du temps prsent, 2003

century. The IHTP wasn't focused on comparative history as much as on confrontation

between historians regarding national history. Bdarida, who had also studied Britain in
the 19th century, created networks of confrontation on national histories which stepped
beyond the East/West divide. In 1990, right after the German reunification, Bdarida
retired and was replaced by Robert Frank, an International Relations specialist, then by
Henri Rousso who largely contributed to open the laboratory to comparative research6.
From then on, several scholars studied foreign countries and started to reflect upon
transnational issues. But the most decisive change was the rewriting of the concept itself,
the concept of Histoire du temps prsent. The return of nationalisms, in particular in the
Balkans, the violent conflicts regarding remembrance, notably in ex-soviet satellite
countries, as well as in Russia, changed the perspective on the century. The impression
was that Europe had suddenly returned to the world of before the First World War. This
violent crisis alone had explained all that had followed, communism, Nazism,
imperialism and the tutelage of an entire world of cultures and regional particularities.
Thus, the history of the present was confused with the history of Hobsbawms short 20th
century, corrected by the dark vision of Mark Mazower. At the same time, the notion of
history of time present gained in popularity as Universities promoted chairs. Notably in
the United States a new focus had shifted toward the study of recent decades, mainly the
90s, as indicated by the choice of Timothy Garton Ash in his History of the Present7.
Garton Ash added a central idea : the history of the present can only be defined by the
subjectivity of the historian and his direct involvement in contemporary historical
events8. To that definition of the present times set on participation (shall I say
engagement), the historian must also add the problem of his own memory that can
affect his apprehension of the past.
However, all these histories continued to suffer from an implicit condition in historical
6

Roussos definition, Henry Rousso, Histoire du temps prsent , in Dictionnaire des

ides, Encyclopdia Universalis, 2005, p. 380-382 and his book with Philippe Petit, La
Hantise du pass, Paris, Textuel, 1998.
7
Timothy Garton Ash, History of the Present. Essays, sketches and despaches from
Europe in the 1990s, Londres, Allen lane/Penguin Book, 1999
8
See also Pieter Lagrou, De lactualit de lhistoire du temps prsent , Bulletin de l'IHTP,
n 75, juin 2000, pp. 5-15.

work. Writing a realistic history of the present faced a series of obstacles some of which
still concern the entire discipline. They reflect the manner in which the writing of history
inserted itself into the intellectual context of the 20th century. I choose to address these
obstacles as representations, a priori, biases, (bigotry) which influence practices and
historical discourse.
I will address four main preconceived notions. The first reflects what Weber had already
pointed out concerning scientist as well as politicians : bureaucratization. A part of the
professionallysation process was perverted in it. A number of our practices and
conclusions are largely influenced by an incestuous relationship between the historian
and the public administration. From the beginning to the end of our work, we interact
with public administrations. Professionally, many historians are civil servants.
Methodologically, we often found our hypothesis on administrative sources, based on
similar premises as our own when we try to locate an individual in a group, note deviant
elements, find how to constrain or explain an event. The development of prosography in
contemporary history and particularly in the history of the present since the 60s is
largely based on the spread of computerization in controlling citizens. Analysis
concerning political militants or the middle classes follows the same methods as those
used by the police and the judicial since the 19th century. Better yet, in the last three
decades, a number of administrations have created historical committees in order to
supervise public record access and, far from attracting amateurs, these committees are the
place of socialization of the academic world. These circumstances are even more
apparent in the case of contemporary history since historians are called upon as advisors,
in particular concerning far away places when language and knowledge are a
considerable advantage over public administrators. Sources, methods and means,
contribute to the bureaucratic confusion of historicism and explain the integration of
administrative approaches by the historian. Two examples illustrate this : the first is the
dominance of existing administrative analysis in historical work. Historical analysis
concerns cities, more rarely regions, the State or the Nation, and the existing transnational
administrative networks. Histories of Europe for example are mostly conceived from the
standpoint of the European Union or member states of the European Union. Historians

have trouble writing the history of zones beyond such administrative boundaries. In fact,
historians tend to forget the lessons of great masters in History : Lucien Febvre writing
the history of the Rhein region, Fernand Braudel writing the history of the Mediterranean
or Toynbee writing the history of civilizations9. The second example is the trend to work
on bureaucratic institutions such as the Church, Political parties, Labour Unions, in other
words, historical writing takes place wherever rational-legal paper-pushing triumphs.
This bureaucratic propension is largely stimulated by states that wish to hierarchize and
structure the national scientific collectivity to better diffuse models of aggregation
process and memorial strategies. Even the structuration of discipline and his reproduction
is a part of that bureaucratic system. In contradiction with the figure of an historian expert
as described by Olivier Dumoulin10, the historian tends to be a bureaucrat.
The second bias resides in the question of modernization. One of the most important
paradigms inherited from the 19th century was the belief in progress. In the 20th century,
whether in writing history or in political discourse, the notion of modernization replaced
the notion of progress. Societies were judged according to their capacity to be modern.
The debate on the Third Reich reflected precisely this implicit idea of Modernity. To say
that this regime had allowed social modernization of Germany was understood as a
positive judgment, indirectly implying progress. This reinstated an historical morale
implying that technique and progress are the engine of History. In the end, historical
writing in the 20th century never ceased to be disrupted with each innovation. However,
recent conflicts proved the illusion of the idea that a new tool would modify the soldiers
condition. In another field, social scientists noticed how medieval mentality survives in
our so-called modern societies. Edgar Morin would speak of a medieval-modern
mentality concerning rumor and hoax that spread over the internet11.
A third bias can be seen in the idea that the 20th century is the century of extremes, the
9

Lucien Febvre, Le Rhin, Paris, Perrin, 2e d 1997 ; Fernand Braudel, Civilisation matrielle
conomie et capitalisme, Paris, Colin, 1979, 3 vol; Arnold J. Toynbee, A Study of History,
Oxford, Oxford University Press, ed. 1972.
10

Olivier Dumoulin, Le rle social de lhistorien De la chaire au prtoire, Paris, Albin

Michel, 2002.
11

Edgar Morin, La rumeur dOrlans, Paris, Le Seuil, 1969.

century of the greatest massacres. A large part of the implicit philosophy of history of
Hobsbawm or Mazower12 presupposes that the greatest matrix of massacre is behind us,
that there is a trend toward reducing violence just as a recent Canadian report on war
violence stated13. However, this discourse is greatly challenged by experts in geo-politics,
futurologists, who are now most concerned about violent trends in parts of the world, in
particular Asia. The writing of history is influenced when historians believe they are
studying either a golden age or hell. How can historical writing escape these two visions
? This issue, concerning the relation toward violence, past, present and future, is also
based on philosophical pairs. Indeed, facing violence, a fourth paradigm often intervenes,
the paradigm of opulence. In particular this past decade, in the same way as the first
decade in the 20th century, a society of leisure has triumphed in the West, a society
wherein the highest individual accomplishment is sought, at the risk of falling into
depression or addiction in case of failure14. We would then be in a golden age wherein
conflicts or even current wars would only be the residual jolts (sursauts) of a slowly
fading past.
More than ever today, objective history is held up by philosophies of history and those
great tensions that are the basis of intellectual paradigms. The 20th century was built
around the tension between two notions, individualism and holism, opposing the masses
and the individual. Most great historical works in the last few decades have tried to
resolve this tension by looking at different causal systems. Hobsbawm for instance chose
a materialistic interpretation of the 20th century. The historical evolution of the 20th
century would have been based on the governing systems of masses and individuals :
liberal, communist, fascist, consumerist and so on. On the contrary, Emilio Gentile
offered a more spiritualist interpretation to overcome this model, inserting his analysis in
a political religious perspective15. His analysis met the hypothesis of Eric Voegelin and
Raymond Aron who viewed the drawback of religion as a transfer of the sacred toward
12

Mark Mazower, Dark Continent - Europes Twentieth Century, London, Penguin, 1998.
Human Security Report, Human Security Center, University of British Columbia, 2005.
14
Marc Valleur, Jean-Claude Matysiak, Les addictions Panorama clinique, modles explicatifs,
dbat social et prise en charge, Paris, Colin, 2006.
15
Emilio Gentile, Le religioni della politica. Fra democrazie e totalitarismi, Roma-Bari, Laterza,
2000.
13

non religious spheres, explaining both communism and fascism in this manner. The
question of beliefs and representations allowed the resolution of the tension between
collective institutions and individual actions. Today, there are no more contradictions in
history between those who follow a methodological individualism and those who follow
an absolute holism. The stronger tension today seems to oppose optimism and pessimism
as we already mentioned. This tension steps beyond diverging forms of political
engagement and fundamentally asks the question of the usefulness of history as a
discipline, a discipline that is confronted to societies in which the past will only be read
in view of the present. To the question : what is the use of history, isnt the most common
answer : to understand the present? But today, we take the answer a step further : we
question history only in view of todays concerns. This change of social use of the
discipline was called presentism by Franois Hartog16. Hartog said that occidental
societies mystify the past rather than turning it into knowledge. To use the words of
Claude Lvi-Strauss in La Pense sauvage, occidental societies are becoming cold17.
The tension between pessimism and optimism will eventually give rise to a new
opposition between on one side those who believe history should be written by, on and
for men and women and on the other side, those who believe history should be written by
man but not necessarily on man and human society and not only concerning mankind. In
other words, there is a shift toward a form of methodological Gaiaism18, with the entry of
environmental criterion in the writing of history. This propensity to write from an
alternative perspective has already largely been explored in literature. In history,
environmental studies have so far only concerned those specific subjects that are of
interest to mankind. For instance Emmanuel Leroy Ladurie studied glacier variations in

16

Franois Hartog, Rgimes dhistoricit, prsentisme et expriences du temps, Paris, Seuil, 2003,
pp. 33-37.
17
Claude Lvi-Strauss, La pense sauvage, Paris, 1962.
18
Here, we dont mean Gaiaism as a religion but we have built this concept in reference to animal
rights activists, such as the Global Action in the Interest of Animals. Most of those groups define
themselves according to the book of James Lovelock, Gaia A new Look at Life on Earth,
Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1979.

order to reconstruct the history of climate19. By this means, his ambition was to study
links between climatology, economic crisis and political crisis. In his opinion, a miniature
glacial period preceded and caused the French Revolution, which had indeed taken place
after several years of drought and cold. In a different field, the African historian, Felix
Iroko, wrote a history of termitariums in which he showed the existence of dried and
fossilized plants in the savannah from where such plants had disappeared. He thus
pointed out an ecosystem that had since disappeared. One might well imagine that
tomorrow, the Bonobo will not only be the object of ethology studies but that historians
might try to study their political and social variations in order to understand and
determine the situations best suited for the survival of the species. Todays trend to create
animal rights by insisting on the aptitude to suffer as defining the legal subject, authorizes
law suits in case of brutality against animals. In this context, we may already predict that
jurisprudence will lead to an historical writing theoretically disconnected from human
interests, beliefs and sensations. Today, we are still writing from the perspective of
human and social sciences but soon we will face the challenge of this methodological
Gaiaism. Writing history would then be under the influence of natural sciences, in
particular biology and ethology. In other words, after individualism versus holism,
pessimism versus optimism, this new tension between humanism and Gaiaism may well
prevail.
These paradigmatic tensions explain how difficult it is for us today to use some of the
classical historical notions and to classify facts and events according to their respective
importance. Two notions in particular require an adjustment if we wish to write a history
that can truly follow a humanist perspective, located on the human level, avoiding the
bias already mentioned. The first notion is precisely the notion of scale. History today
cannot be located at one and only one level. History requires constant passages between
local and global levels as Jacques Revel noted20. We all know how useful the study of

19

Emmanuel Leroy-Ladurie, Histoire du climat depuis lan Mil, Paris, Flammarion, 1993 and
Histoire humaine et compare du climat, tome I, Canicule et Glaciers du XIIIe au XVIIIe sicles,
Paris, Fayard, 2004.
20
Jacques Revel (dir.), Jeux dchelles - La micro-analyse l'exprience, Paris, Gallimard-Le
Seuil, Hautes tudes , 1996.

micro-events is for better understanding of a macro-phenomenon. We all know how

much the theory of interaction has gained from micro-studies. But other levels require a
higher attention on behalf of historians : wider economic and cultural spaces. Some of
these spaces are historically recognized, such is the case of the Balkans for example.
Others are not self-evident. The Franco-German space for instance is not considered to be
a study unit though over 8 million French citizens have traveled to Germany or even
lived in Germany since the creation of the Office des changes Franco-Allemands in
196421. The French population of Berlin is equivalent to a medium sized city with
approximately 20.000 inhabitants and two French schools. The France-German space has
only recently been taken into account with the creation in 2002 of a Commission to write
a Franco-German textbook for highschools. The Commission has already handed in
propositions and two publishing companies, Klett and Nathan, have been chosen to
publish the first Franco-German textbook for the last year of secondary studies22. The
German Historical Institute and the CRIA created a book collection on Franco-German
history with the objective to study both countries but also their interaction23. This project
of crossed history illustrates the will to present historiographical results from both
countries. Other bilateral projects exist within Europe. Such projects tend to modify the
logic of comparative history. Today, the question is no longer to juxtapose national
studies as comparisons, on the contrary, it is to take into account all levels of
historiographical operations in collaboration with colleagues from different national
backgrounds. This activity, that we have named shared history, presupposes collaboration
with academics from different environments, different countries and determines the
research object and questions as well as the source or document corpus in order to
confront common results in the different participating countries. Such efforts allow

21

Maybe because of so many contradictory representations of that space, see Edouard Husson,
Une autre allemagne, Paris, Gallimard, 2005.
22
Peter Geiss, Guillaume Le Quintrec, Histoire/Geschichte LEurope et le monde depuis 1945,
Nathan-Klett, 2006.
23
The Centre de Recherche Interdisciplinaire sur lAllemagne, created in 2001 in Paris. His
Director, Michael Werner, imagined the concept of Histoire croise, see Michael Werner,
Bndicte Zimmermann, Vergleich, Transfer, Verflechtung. Der Ansatz der Histoire croise
und die Herausforderung des Transnationalen , Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 2002, 28, pp. 607636 and also the collective book edited by the same, De la comparaison lhistoire croise,
Paris, Seuil, 2004.

historians to overcome national bias and sometimes even to distance themselves from a
bureaucratic writing precisely because transnational confrontation creates understanding
difficulties. This effort also requires different scales to be used. Neighboring regions are
laboratories well suited for the study of cultural practices, whether pointing toward
differentiation or permeability of cultures. This perspective explains the great interest for
Central and Oriental Europe where borders have not ceased to be modified in the course
of the 20th century. In these regions, States and Armies were not the only actors to
determine violence. There has indeed been competition between rival groups for ages, no
matter what the context of national or imperial dominance might have been. This is what
can be deduced from Omer Bartovs research in his borderland project24. The geographic
issue is thus far more complex than what was let on by the obsession of nationhood
inherited from the 19th and 20th century.
Just as difficult to use is the notion of major event. Several examples can illustrate this
point. The first one took place at the eve of the 20th century. On Christmas day 1999, the
entire world was expecting a major event to occur (not exactly Christmas) : the famous
Y2K bug. In the previous decade, computer technology companies, banks and insurance
companies had hired computer scientists to correct the three zero programs. No doubt,
new technologies were greatly enhanced by this profuse activity. The French press
advised canceling flights that would be in mid-air at midnight on the 31st of December. A
millennium fright surrounded this date, the 1st of January 2000. One might say that we
French do not have the notion of numbers and that we ignored the fact that the 21st
century only commenced on the 1st of January 2001. The 26th of December, precisely at
2 oclock in the morning, a depression entered the country from Brittany, reaching Paris
at 11 AM and pushing onward to the Eastern mountains. Wind traveled at 200 km per
hour. On the Champs Elyses, the installations which had been set up for the new
millennium parade shook and shivered. There was no respite following this storm. In fact
a second storm was already on its way, crossing the country in the night of the 27th of
December. One third of the country was deprived from electricity. Many streets and
24

Borderlands: Ethnicity, Identity, and Violence in the Shatter-Zone of Empires Since 1848,
Watson Institute for International Studies, Brown University. Project for 2003-2006.

highways were cut off with fallen trees. Approximately 30 people had died during the
storm. The trees in the park of the Chteau de Versailles and in the Luxembourg garden
were torn down by the wind. Neighboring Germany also fell victim to the storm.
Specialists predicted a fall in the price of wood. Natures chaos made France forget all
about the Y2K bug. Next to this, the 31st of December 1999 was a non-event, no plane
crash, no computer crash, no bank crash. What if natural catastrophes were more
dangerous than technological risks? This was the question people were asking in France.
How could we calm the outbreak of nature? This was a major question for a French major
event, but the Y2K bug continued to be a major preoccupation outside of Europe.
Exactly four years later, on the 26th of December 2004, a similar event created an
unprecedented outbreak of international solidarity, the Sumatra tsunami. In less than a
month, and for this event alone, the Red Cross collected more money than in one year
and the same was the case for all charity organizations involved in rescue work. This
considerable financial event was nevertheless not the event most covered by the media in
recent years. Indeed, Lady Diana Spencers funeral drew more media attention than the
tsunami. Her funeral took place on the 6th of September 1997 was followed by 2.5
million people around the world. This is more than the number of viewers of Zinedine
Zidanes head butt during the last soccer World Cup. These highly covered media events
are considered less fundamental than 9/11. Such events, though followed by many and
source of great emotional outbreaks, seem to be less important than decisions taken by
world leaders, decisions which bring men, institutions and countries into movement.
However, great media shows influence opinions by creating links between groups that
tend to ignore one another the rest of the time. Media events create a kind of global
culture which encompasses conflicts and opens a different type of understanding of time.
The historian must then count with different types of chronologies, chronologies that
overlap without necessarily superimposing. One of the illusions of the 20th century was
the belief in a continuous and progressive chronology even if it was no longer oriented by
eschatology. Today, we know that global time is not thought as a continuous series but as
a sum of fundamental events according to reference groups who look at the past as proof

of their existence. The global chronology is a list rather than a series. But is it still
history?
Globalization does have a history of its own if one considers the chronological continuity
of anti-globalist struggle since the Porto Alegre Summit in 2001 which could be a good
starting point for a history of the 21st century. But a rigorous historian would reject the
century yoke and admit that since the 1984 G7 summit in London, anti-globalist groups
had already begun protesting against what was increasingly perceived as rich country
encounters ignoring the poor of the planet. In 1989, in commemoration of the
bicentennial of the French Revolution, the 7 poorest countries were invited to participate.
Our scrupulous historian would also point out that the first G7 summit was in 1975 when
the French President Valry Giscard dEstaing invited the richest countries to meet in
Paris. Such a precise historian would also compare these chronologies with Davos which
exists since 1971, the same year Bernard Kouchner created Mdecins Sans Frontires,
Doctors Without Borders. Finally, the 21st century never stops diluting itself into the
previous century, unless it is the other way around?
Conclusion
The present escapes a purely quantitative context. It cant be reduced in an addition of
pre-formed times unit. The historian of the present times knows he must take into account
his own subjective memory and the traditional calendar is a part of it. To achieve a better
understanding of the humanity, and social relationships, he must though confront his
work with fellow historians to restore the depth of the past and set historical writing free.
This is the only way to fight the trend to mystify history that so many states glorify to reenforce their political influence. This human dimension of our work requires conferences
and seminars which truly establish a transnational scientific collectivity, capable to resist
state and ethno-religious community trends to abuse the past. An example of the
scientific margin of action has already come from Stockholm where in 1972 the texts on
CFC gas elimination were adopted to force governments worldwide to preserve the Ozon
layer. In that case, the action of scientists challenged the schemes of bureaucratization

and classical disciplines. On the contrary, they promoted a new model of international
collective action which later influenced the reflection on globalization.