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If man counted, since the elaboration of the concept of perpetual alliance by Emmanuel Kant, the number of its opponents, the oppositions which have been made in the name of realism, pragmatism or of naturalism, in a word, the claim of the imperative primacy of the strong on the weak, the philosopher would have laugh quite loud in front of such energy spent to contradict a simple principle: the men are able to transcend a basic state of automatic opposition and to establish an alliance of political quintessence in order to enjoy conjointly  of their proper –collectives and personal– existences.

With the coming back to a more complex geopolitical distribution due to the collapse of the soviet bloc, the temptation is great to see the world as a chaotic area where are clashing State’s particles, where their economical, military or diplomatic masses are in the same time the condition and the guarantee of their survival. It is first to forget that the cold war is very often extremely simplified as the fight between two homogeneous blocs when these ones were not so homogenous and not fighting, as proved the western inaction during Budapest 56 and Prague 68 among uncountable other local or regional revolts, and secondly, the equilibrium between the two superpowers at the top, in influence’s sharing, and sometimes in convergence of interests (Suez crisis, Helsinki Summit). Then, the world has never counted as much international (bi- or multilateral) alliances as today, what makes the fundamental unit of sovereignty, the State-nation, highly –not to say completely– dependant on its pairs.

Of course, the States can have contrary interests, inverse ideologies, what does not demonstrate at all any systematic opposition, unfortunately for the defenders of the clash of civilizations, inventing the proofs of their eschatological theory as the History goes ahead. Divergence and convergence are the normal movements of the human activities and if it does is important to place it in a non-bellicose straitjacket in order to guarantee ourselves of the inability of collective lethality, the first is a source of opposition only in case of non-sufficient communication, and the second is not more a fusion with loose of identity. It is always more easy to be afraid of threats coming from other cultural areas, that anybody says if the nature of these threats are military, economical, migratory, cultural, criminal or anything else. The building of itself against the other, phenomenon generating conflicting fundamental relationships, is very tempting in the periods of interrogation  on its becoming, but it is not a solution.

Inversely, considering that the United States are the unit of reference of the contemporary world is a mistake because the analysis is placed in a modernist referential which is the limited strategic horizon of our American partner, while the European Union (EU) is originally vanguard by its post-modernist essence, i.e. precisely founded and founding itself on the perpetual alliance of Kant and anticipating by this way the level of globalization that we are living actually.  If it is very regrettable that the time is currently catching up with the EU, that its historical tensor tends to be shorter when the EU has some difficulties to re-invent itself, to imagine what it will be in fifty years, and that it is attempted by a modernist withdrawal that the result, guesses one, would be better than nothing, other ones have very well understood the advantages of the post-modernity and its associated strategic modus vivendi. It is the case of China which invests hugely and develops bilateral partnerships with the African States. The day of the black continent’s awake, China will be there: lessons to the old colonial powers which should certainly be more efficient to help Africa to develop itself than to extract its resources and to tempt a very often counter-productive interference. The United States, which animate the European polemics, illustrate besides certainly a oppositional modernism, military in Middle East, commercially facing the united Europe, and generally facing the emergent powers –and they do it because they have the possibility, the whim man could say– are not as much as paranoiacs and apocalyptic that man says, and play also the post-modernity, becoming the first commercial partner of Algeria, agreeing with Russia without flattery nor fear, trying the ALENA for the South American emergent countries. When India and China, nuclear powers, discuss the settlement of their disputes, when even Africa tries the African Union and the association Africa-Caribbean-Pacific, that the nuclear force is placed as a regional dissuasion and that the traditional armies serve anly to the prestige or to the boarder conflict, man should regret that the European Union does no return more than it does in a warfare that the continent has too much known for the world’s misfortune, and that it let down the post-modernist advantage of its strategy of concertation more than opposition? The European Security and Defence Policy (ESDP), fantastic tool of security, currently more in power than in act, i.e. in becoming, should orientate itself from a post-modern security force toward a modern defence force, precisely when even the American defence force is post-modernizing by the delegation of its tasks, by the intelligence, and mainly by the action upstream of the military intervention (in Pakistan notably)?

It is obvious that the constitution of traditional military operational means is indispensable for the European Union, that a limited endowment of unit of fast-deployment projection is the right answer to the lack of union in the fundamental field of external defence, as much as it has to make advance the communitarization of the State powers. But if the defence can be a tool of strategic collaboration, as it is the one of the Atlantic Alliance, as the industrial production and then the economy has been the one of the European Union for its fifty first years, if the defence is also a guarantee against the –minim– risks of external attacks, it constitutes itself as a sword of Damocles, as the weight associated to the words, in the frame of the European autonomy of strategic agreements. It is for this reason that the ESDP exists already, even in power. And it is associated to other European policies, as it is with the Common Foreign and Security Policy –despite the fact that it is, for leadership reasons, more included in this one than really associated–, as it should be more with the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP), in order to make a mutual enrichment and an increased efficiency of the policies adjustment, that it can take all its dimension.

A political union has the geographical limits of the territorial entities that compose it. The civilization –imprecise concept melting ethnicity, politics and religion in a defined and extended historical curve–, or rather thus culture, does not have any boarder. The power is associable to a political union and not to a culture, because the value of this one can not be measure. It does not exist beside a unique identity corresponding to political structures: some Arabs are Jewish and some French are Muslims, even if these ones do not constitute the majority of the population within the political ensembles that they compose partially. If a political union bases really on common cultural referents, without it would only be a strategic alliance, those referents are not sufficient to define the culture and are any other role that the one of referent of communitarization.

Anyway, it is indispensable to let down the stage where man considers that power is relating to military forces; otherwise the decolonization should never happened, otherwise the United States should have won the Vietnam war. “To be” is hence a question primarily cultural, and then political. Man “is” not more because man is powerful. And even less because man is militarily powerful. The United States of America “are” not more than the European Union, and the European Union “is” not more than the Federated States of Micronesia. The historical perpetuation of the existence is neither in relation with the power but a question of geographical and temporal dispersion of the culture. The return to the idea of basic power, the one installed and maintained by the coercive action of the force in act, is an archaism: as Aristotle demonstrated it, the slave is much more powerful than its master because the master cannot subsist without the slave, but the slave without the master, yes.

The only thing which can justify such a return is a catastrophist apocalyptism, showing future threats as terrible spectres, announcing unknown dramas, which should man be protected of however by traditional means. It is the fear of the other, the fear of the loose of collective existence which always drive to the announcement’s messianism. And the fear come from the contact with the other. The living, sometimes virulent, expression of cultural features of groups sharing it is the result of the relationship in the globalizing area, i.e. the world. Man does not need to express its culture toward its cultural-sharers, but man is conscious of its richness and of the need to communicate it with the contact of those who have a different one.

The global integration has another consequence, which is not cultural, but strategic: the security substitutes itself to the military, because the security substitutes itself to the war. The passage from modernity to post-modernity tends to the annulations of the absurdity of men: destroying ourselves to exist. The power belongs well to the consultation more than the death, in the opening more than the closing. It by this way that Al Farabi and Ibn Rushd offered us the Aristotle’s thought. It is by this way that the Renaissance extended all over our continent. It is in this way that the Enlightens lighted Europe. It is in this way that the democrats vanquished the totalitarists. It is in this way that the European Union has been built in a fantastic philosophical and philanthropic project: establish the alliance of perpetual peace. It is from and by this idea that the European cultural referents are today, and it is by this way that it will exit tomorrow, because the Kantian idea is in the same time a cultural and political principle. If the European Union has to re-start, it should do it from this idea, it is its nobler and more efficient way to exist.

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