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Mercredi 10 septembre 2008 | Vadstena, Sweden
Publié le dimanche 13 avril 2008 par Delphine Cavallo
L'European science foundation (ESF) et la Linkoping university (LiU) organisent une conférence sur « La réforme du système étatique européen au XVIIIe siècle ». L'objectif est de retrouver les dimensions originelles des visions concurrentes, au XVIIIe siecle, de la question des politiques interétatiques en Europe.
Chairs: Professor Juha Sihvola, University of Helsinki, Finland; Dr.Koen Stapelbroek, Erasmus University Rotterdam, Netherlands
Grants: some grants are available for young researchers to cover the conference fee and travel costs.
The idea of a united Europe was by no means unknown in the eighteenth century. It is rather the case that different models for how to unite Europe were played out with such great sophistication and over such a wide terrain of ‘disciplines’ that the centrality of the issue of repairing a divided Europe, nowadays, is not always immediately clear.
During the entire eighteenth century, statesmen, diplomats, pamphleteers and intellectuals across Europe engaged in a major debate on the regulation of international politics. The rise of foreign trade since the late seventeenth century had complicated the Westphalia system of balancing powers, which appeared to have reached its limits for containing all-out warfare. Economic and military competition between Europe's dominant states persistently affected the potential of neutral states of realising their own commercial and political objectives. Within this context, an enormously rich debate about the future of the European State System emerged that absorbed all the political, moral and legal issues of earlier times. Across Europe scholars discussed the same issues, and not in isolation but through trans-national networks.
The purpose of this conference is to recapture the original dimensions of rival eighteenth-century visions of the past, present and future problem of European interstate politics. The participants will discuss questions such as: How did eighteenth-century scholars apply the great tradition of natural law to deal with the future of Europe? Which different sources of sociability and commercial morality were taken to be the appropriate means for building up a stable system of economically interconnected nation-states? How did different views of ‘decline’ of dominant states guide the perception of the development of wealth and power in the international realm? How did debates on tax innovation, finance and overseas trade and colonialism represent the main dividing lines within European political thought?
Through asking these questions, traditional historiographical categories like mercantilism and liberalism, and themes like the end of the ancièn regime, secularisation and the relation between Enlightenment and Revolution are suspended. They are replaced with a fresh outlook on schemes of cooperative regulation in international affairs (the ‘Concert of Europe’ and ‘Perpetual Peace’) and envisaged mechanisms of the Balance of Power and Armed Neutrality. Thus, the speakers at this conference address the longstanding debate on ‘small states’ and European integration and answers questions about the politics of globalisation. Drawing on a historical-political background that reaches deep into the eighteenth century, they seek to revive traditional perceptions in order to better understand the challenges of present-day European foreign policy and economic development.
Invited graduate students and young scholars working on related topics will be given the opportunity to present their work during poster sessions.
« La réforme du système étatique européen au XVIIIe siècle », Colloque, Calenda, publié le dimanche 13 avril 2008, http://calenda.revues.org/nouvelle10299.html