Le premier séminaire de recherche en visioconférence, consacré au sujet « Crise et souveraineté », se tiendra en salle audiovisuelle au lycée Félix Éboué le vendredi 22 janvier de 13h à 15h. Julie SAADA, université d’Artois, nous parlera de « Révolution, empire et utopie. La crise politique au-delà des frontières ». La conférence sera suivie d’un échange avec le conférencier.

“Most of the histories of International Law either postulate that liberalism has always been linked to imperialism, culminating in the “civilizing mission” invoked to legitimate nineteenth century European colonial empires, or claim, to the contrary, that liberalism is anti-imperialist since it promotes the universal equality of rights and every people’s right to self-governance. My aim is to show that imperialism stemmed from liberalism, but that the very ambivalence of the latter is responsible for the apparently opposing claims presented above. I examine how the ambivalent relationship between liberal arguments and the justifications of empire played out on an international stage by looking at the work of two French thinkers and politicians, Alexis de Tocqueville and Edgar Quinet, both writing during the French colonization of Algeria. Tocqueville, the liberal-conservative, became republican-progressive when he wanted to defend the Empire. This case illustrates how liberal theory can become imperialist when it integrates elements drawn from classical republicanism. Quinet, the anti-clerical republican socialist, supported a colonial imperialism based upon a philosophy of history that gives a very specific role to both Islam and the French Revolution (understood as an accomplishment of Christian ideals), considering them as realizations of utopian visions that had come into being in historical time. From a methodological viewpoint, understanding the links between international law and empire therefore requires an analysis of the circulation of ideas between distant, and even opposed, doctrines. It requires us also to confront global theories (liberalism, imperialism) within an empirical context in order to understand how they are diffracted through the contextualized positions of situated actors.”