L'impuissance de la puissance (The Powerlessness of Power)

Citation

Richardson, J. (2005), "L'impuissance de la puissance (The Powerlessness of Power)", Foresight, Vol. 7 No. 3, pp. 62-62. https://doi.org/10.1108/14636680510601995

Review DOI 10.1108/14636680510601995

An alternative title to this book could have been, according to its author, “The Misuse of Power” because the major political issue of our time is that power thoughtlessly exercised so seldom yields positive results. In many national settings, claims the author, power politics lead unavoidably to protest politics. When things get out of hand and protest becomes violent, one sees immediately that “violence stems from a lack of societal integration,” first at the national and then at the international level. Taken to its extreme, continued violence may lead to the collapse of a state.

Bernard Badie teaches political science at the famous “Sciences Po” school in Paris, and is the author of a variety of volumes on the state, sovereignty, and territoriality. His latest book is concerned with the abuses today of authority and the different forms of political force “because political influence is no longer what it used to be”. Adds Badie: “even the most modern and sophisticated military forces fail when confronted with rudimentary acts of terror”, e.g. the powerlessness of US forces in Iraq trying to cope for more than two years thus far with the ubiquity of home‐made explosive devices.

The US, indeed, lies at the centre of the new paradox. “Deprived of an enemy having some similitude to themselves”, the Americans “now find themselves dealing with harmful effects upsetting the game equation, redoubtable shifts that are most difficult to combat”. Behind such strategic change one finds not only an end to the wars of yesterday, but also:

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  entirely new forms of conflict and violence; and

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  the appearance on the scene of individuals, even entire societies (e.g. Ben Laden, Muslim communities).

These actors represent the others, those whom many of us simply do not know or else have preferred to ignore and heap with humiliation.

The bipolar east‐west world in which so many of us lived for 40 years after the second world war, in other words, is now gone. The bilateral nature of those four decades has given way (on the one hand) to instant exchanges of information but (on the other hand) to violence and multiple other dangers, risks we incur at our own peril if we continue to eschew a balanced mulltlateralism in global relations.

Some of foresight's readers will construe Badie's message as one of preaching to the converted. But from the depths of a political Europe that has often considered itself excluded from the main thrusts on the world political scene, Badie's counsel is needed as voters in the European Union decide on acceptance of a constitution and how this should be interpreted afterwards in terms of security and defence policy for the common good.