Editorial
The articles in this issue discuss some of the political, ideological and sociological developments in a Western world undergoing restructuring.
Hubert Landier emphasises what must be a personal approach to overcoming racism, that of an individual who, taking the risk of loneliness, refuses to allow others to think and act on his behalf when his convictions lead him to reject what he sees as destructive to humanity. This gesture frees them from the confinement of an identity, as described by the author in his works, a place that makes them unaware of the disparity of the outside world.
A parallel development is the division of what remains of the West, whose current evolution, according to Paul Magnette, is marked by the second conservative revolution initiated by the American presidency and characterised by the socio-political convergence of what distinguished the traditional right from the far right. He questions the possibility of an ideological reaction from the left in Europe, to transcend social categories and establish policies that benefit the greatest number of people.
Nicole Morgan revisits studies published before the current global upheaval, which are now, not relevant once again in the current context. Among the utopias of the present and past, she recalls the one that Thomas Moore humorously evoked, free from any divine or princely authority, here too under divine anointing, therefore promoted to define humans according to their function within a common good governed by reason. Without being rooted in tradition or in a collection of national entities, as Zhao Tingyang imagines when he evokes a ‘All-under-Heaven’ that would be a unified ‘worldness’ beyond the international.
Returning specifically to this international or multinational order or disorder, François Misser notes the spillover of the war between Russia and Ukraine onto economic relations between African states and on humanitarian and security issues. In this context, the military aid provided by Ukraine to certain African states has led to the severing of their diplomatic relations with Kyiv, which does little to reduce Russian influence while incurring a diplomatic cost for Ukraine.
Paul Roger Bassong highlights the incompleteness of a linguistic science that is overly Eurocentric, calling for it to pay greater attention to data from African languages, which are numerous and often poorly understood. In this sense, he points out that this science, like any other, is based on empirical data that leads to its constant transformation, both at the linguistic level and in terms of the categories of thought that are indebted to it. This suggests the idea of a theoretical linguistics that is open to the margins, but also to a renewal of conceptual production.
Cristina Popa Tache‘s study concerns social media platforms, which oscillate between democratic participation and the spread of disinformation and hate speech, violations of privacy rights and algorithmic distortions. European standards are evolving in line with the case law of the European Court of Human Rights but are coming up against ethical contradictions between claimed autonomy and actual content, which, according to the author, require multidimensional regulation of the cyber-spatio-temporal public domain.
From a global perspective, Jeffrey Levett questions the possibility of political measures to improve the quality of life and well-being of the planet’s inhabitants, which is threatened by drought, food insecurity, environmental pollution and radiation, even though it lacks neither resources nor skills. However, it is their insane distribution that is at issue, as much as the lack of freedom that civic education based on classical philosophy allows.
Nils Andersson recalls the words of Jean Jaurès, who before the First World War predicted that capitalism carried the seeds of war, to describe a contemporary environment that is more chaotic than at the end of that war and which contradicts any notion of the ‘end of history’ while, conversely, giving rise to cyberwars in a world that has become multipolar.
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In the ‘Debates and Documents’ section, Paul Magnette questions the European security strategy as the era focused solely on national sovereignty comes to an end. The US version falls back on a megalomaniacal simplism that obscures climate issues, interferes with European sovereignty and plunges international relations into instability.
The Europe-Third World Centre (CETIM) points out that the International Treaty on Plastic Pollution (5th session, Geneva, August 2025) has placed the economic and commercial interests of transnational corporations above the protection of life and the environment.
Patrick Paul proposes restructuring medical practice from a transdisciplinary perspective that combines allopathic medicine, Chinese medicine and various traditional practices based on the concept of anthropological invariants.
Paul Ghils