Is Polish current historical policy turning its back on Europe?

Whereas many European states are reluctant to carry out an active “historical policy”, preferring – or pretending – to remain neutral in historical issues and to leave them to scholars, Poland, especially since the return to power in 2015 of the ultra-conservative party Law and Justice (PiS), is not bothered to enforce such a policy in various spheres under state control, from public media to schools, diplomacy and cultural action.

Essais Pologne Histoire

Tourism, sustainable cities and circular economy: 3 sectors full of perspectives for Japan’s trade of international services

In its contemporary history, which can be considered having started in 1945, Japan has achieved the remarkable performance of having most of the time recorded trade surpluses. This result is all the more impressive that it has been mainly driven by exports of goods, almost constantly on the rise since the Japanese economic take-off in the 1950-1960s, despite limited local availability of raw materials and, after 1980, a stagnant population.

Essais Économie Asie

An energy tax revision to reduce debt, boost investment and employment and facilitate the adoption of other structural reforms

In a context of lack of confidence, depressed investment and aggregate demand as well as deflation risks, all of these phenomena occurring despite a conjunction of favourable factors (cheap oil, weaker euro and very accommodative monetary policy), we propose to take up the proposal of the European Commission to revise the Energy Taxation Directive, introduced in 2011 and withdrawn last year due to the opposition of the Parliament and the Council.

Essais Union européenne Économie

Taxing “dead capital” to make it more productive

At least since the birth of modern capitalism in eighteenth-century Europe, competition has been recognized by many economists and other theoreticians of ethics and social sciences as an essential driver of progress. Either applied to trade, politics or science, competition, they claimed, stimulates innovation and confronts products, services, parties or ideas on a marketplace that rewards the best and sanctions the worst, alike a permanent race where spectators are also expected to be voters, as it should be the case in liberal democracies.

Essais Économie

From the Atomic Age to the Age of Atomization: a tentative history of the 21st century

During the summer 1989, a few months before the collapse of the Berlin Wall and with it, of an ideology and a geopolitical scheme that had structured the world for almost half a century, Francis Fukuyama argued in his famous essay “The End of History?” that we may have reached “the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution”, that is “the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government”.

Essais