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Printing emerged more slowly in the Nordic lands than in most parts of Europe. The first active printing press in modern Latvia appeared in 1588; Estonia, Finland and Norway would wait until the 1630s and 1640s respectively. It was also in the seventeenth century that a provincial print trade of any significance would develop in Denmark and Sweden, the two main political powers of the region. While our knowledge of the evolution of printing in the Scandinavian region has long been well established, the print culture of the Nordic lands is often still approached from national perspectives. In this article, we propose to consider the print output of the entire Nordic region – Denmark, the Scandinavian Peninsula, Iceland, Estonia and Latvia – as a single corpus. Using the resources of the Universal Short Title Catalogue project, we will consider what elements unite the history of printing in the region, as well as how distinct Nordic print culture is from that of the rest of Europe. We will consider especially the role of institutions (the church, crown, universities and colleges), foreign agents and linguistic traditions in shaping the print output of the Nordic region before 1700. What emerges from this study is a clear portrayal of the extent to which the Scandinavian book world takes inspiration and diverges from broader European norms. This article will make the case strongly for the importance of studying print culture in a comparative international perspective, and offers broader conclusions on the crucial interactions between print, power and peripheries in early modern Europe.

Keywords: Book Trade, Publishing, Periphery, Sixteenth Century, Seventeenth Century, Commerce du livre, édition, périphérie,  siècle,  siècle

Thomas Carlyle characterised pre-Revolutionary France as “The Paper Age,” where paper signifies a flimsy and fraudulent culture of inflated ideas and depreciated money. Yet paper was also the substantial vehicle of Romantic literary and intellectual endeavour and the circulation of ideas—a ubiquitous, multifarious medium and powerful agent of cultural change across Romantic Europe. Paper means books, magazines, manuscripts, letters, but also wallcoverings, wrappings, papier maché objets d'art, and waste. This essay explores the multivalencies of Romantic paper: at once fragile, vulnerable, and ephemeral (the single sheet) and resilient, flexible, and enduring (the bound book); both high culture (Wordsworth's The Excursion) and high prestige (Coleridge's unique Malta notebook) but also low culture (playbills) and low prestige (manufactured from rags). Shifting attention from the inky message to the paper medium, and drawing on technological, economic, ecological, regional, and labour contexts of paper manufacture, distribution, use, and reuse, this article aims to theorise and apprehend anew a tactile and affectively loaded Romantic material that can be invisible and elusive in its portability, transformability, and pervasiveness.

The central assumption of this paper is that international regime theory constitutes an important heuristic tool which contributes to a better understanding of the dynamics of European security as it emerges from the Cold War era. Comprising a set of principles, norms, decision-making procedures and a framework of permanent organizations, the new European architecture forms an authentic security regime based on a process of regional cooperation. The Yugoslav conflict, which constitutes the first test of this regime, illustrates the fact that, even if these institutions failed to end the conflict, they did influence the behaviour of the main European actors. Not only did they favor interstate cooperation but they also reined-in the inclination of states to opt for self-centered policies based on short-term interests. From this perspective, regional security organizations have helped significantly to limit the scope and potential spill-over risks of the conflict in addition to decreasing the tension between the major European actors.

This article is a story narrating the evolution of my own reflections during my Ph.D.: “Planning at the Borders of European Peripheries: The Serbia/Croatia Borderland and the EU Cooperation and Reconciliation Injunctions” (Ph.D. thesis, Tours, Université François-Rabelais, 2016). Using auto-ethnographic methods, this article demonstrates a conviction, the necessity to engage with a reflexive and critical approach, before, during, and after the production of research. I show first how I built the thesis' epistemological approach, by progressively deconstructing classical theoretical frameworks (nationalist, post-socialist, post-Yugoslav). I expose and discuss then the outcomes of such a reflexivity, in particular how I gradually became conscious of the coloniality of (my) knowledge. These mental gymnastics allowed me to occasionally overcome – but regularly report on – the limits of my research, but also to recognize the unsurpassibility of certain aspects of my work connected to the situation in which I stated and conducted it. Reflecting on epistemological reflexivity contributes to clarifying scientific (in)validity of research, and better situates researcher's arguments, their position and positionality.

Keywords: Réflexivité, pensée décoloniale, épistémologie, nationalismes méthodologiques, post-socialisme, post-yougoslave, Reflexivity, decolonial option, epistemology, methodological nationalisms, post-socialism, post-Yugoslav

This article analyzes how populist discourses vary depending on political orientation. More precisely, it explores in a comparative manner the discourse of Marine Le Pen and Jean-Luc Mélenchon. 38 non-institutional discourses and 53 institutional discourses are studied with the theoretical framework of Raoul Girardet. The latter highlights the presence of four populist myths in the speeches of French politicians: conspiracy, golden age, savior, unity. Subsequently, a second comparison between two types of speeches will also be made. It seems that Le Pen and Mélenchon do not make similar use of the four myths in their speeches. While the conspiracy myth is used similarly by both politicians, the Golden Age and Unity myths are only partially so. The last myth (the myth of the savior) is not used in a comparable way. Moreover, Mélenchon's speeches remain relatively stable depending on the location, while those of Le Pen vary much more.

Keywords: Populisme, institutionnalisation, discours, mythes, communication politique, Populism, Institutionalization, Discourse, Myths, Political Communication

Considering debates frequently raised in France concerning the situation of pre-trial detention, the author identifies some trends: the constant reference to statistics; lack of efforts to precise the meaning of indicators used in making a demonstration — in fact the same statistics can be used to demonstrate contradictory theses —, a largely spread habit to always speak of more : more use of pre-trial incarceration, more pre-trial detainees... Those practices, argue the author, lead to ignore important changes in trends and to avoid questioning the meaning of those. The limited interest in research using more sophisticated indicators — that could add usefully informations to the data published regularly by the prison administrations —, international comparisons between data not necessarily comparable, references to old statistics, all result in everyone continuing to attribute to France the European championship in terms of pre-trial detention, while the actual situation could be totally different. Considering all those elements, the author presents new bases to reanimate the debate on the question of the use of pre-trial detention.

The enlargement of Europe and globalization are reconfiguring European consumerism. In this new context, personal, local and national agency in the social and the political relations of consumption are in great flux. I will use some recent language and circulars regarding GMOs to suggest that what consumers may be gaining in active agency through the creation of supranational agencies and NGOs and the proliferation of Internet activism, they may be losing in the accountability of their local governments. Further, the means by which “European” consumers are being created, possibly a classe objet in Bourdieu's terms, reflects an erosion of national sovereignty and its crisis, producing what may be a “consolation narrative” to the spectre of the failure of democracy.

AbstractThe European Union has the Euro but fiscal policy in terms of tax policy remains for the time being a domain of the member states. This entails not only a situation of fiscal competition, but some of them engage in simple tax-dumping in order to attract (in various cases dubious) foreign investment. Luxemburg and Malta are taken here for examples to highlight the contradiction between principles of law which should govern states and an “offshore sovereignty” seeking precisely to circumvent both of them. This makes necessary a certain number of contortions on behalf of the European Union that become ever less justifiable.

Martin Heidegger was profoundly marked by his reading of Fyodor Dostoevsky's "Political Writings", which he read in the edition by Dmitry Sergeyevich Merezhkovsky and Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, the latter being the main instigator of the Conservative German Revolution. From these writings Heidegger retained the notion of homeland (Heimat) and derived a racial conception of Germanity and Russianity that found positive expression in his Black Notebooks of 1939-41, coeval with the German-Soviet Pact. But this does not mean that Heidegger favored Russia on all points. Indeed, Heidegger's successive statements on Russia show, with all the ambivalence characterizing the Hitlerian and Nazi vision of the world in this respect, that Russia remained for him an adversary whose strength he measured vis-a-vis the Germans, whom considered the only truly historical and metaphysical people.

Keywords: Martin Heidegger, Fiodor Dostoïevski, Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, Russie, Révolution conservatrice, National-socialisme, racisme, Pacte germano-russe, Seconde guerre mondiale, Cahiers noirs, Martin Heidegger, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, Russia, Conservative Revolution, National Socialism, racism, German-Soviet Pact, Second World War, Black Notebooks