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This article focuses on three key dates in analyzing the monetary policy options arrived at by the States of Europe over the course of the last thirty years. By the creation of the European Payments Union in 1958, the European States made a regionalist policy option by establishing the intra-European convertibility of their currencies while maintaining exchange restrictions with respect to the dollar zone. In 1958 on the other hand resumption of general convertibility of currencies demonstrated the "global-linkage" policy option of the decision-makers of the period by removing any specifically European substance from the European monetary agreement. From this perspective, the decision of December 1978 to institute a monetary System would clearly appear to be by far the most important initiative taken in some time to reestablish a framework for European monetary cooperation. With regard to international monetary relations, eight countries have therefore, within three decades, chosen two regionalist policy options and one global-linkage policy option. The purpose of this study is to identify the circumstances, reasons and impact of the policy options that have successively been implemented.

This article analyzes the ways by which the racial construction of two Polynesians, Ahutoru and Omai, has taken place in France and England between 1769-1776. Instead of considering the indigenous through morphological criteria, most of Europeans racial representations were founded on the confrontation between the experience of alterity and the growing expectations toward Aotourou and Omai. To which extent the sociocultural conjecture of the European aristocracy became crucial in the racialization process. If one indigenous showed marks of virtue and was respectful of the European elites' socio-cultural practices, he was associated to the idealist “noble savage” representation, while the contrary led to a much inferior representation named “ignoble savage”.

The Minorities question is currently a hot issue in Europe. But what are the concerned minorities and to which of them should the existing – national and international – legal instruments apply? Amongst the States of the New Europe, Latvia, with its important immigrant population, offers a striking example of the current minority problematics. The study of this Baltic country reveals the main issues about this question and shows why there are currently reasons to broaden the traditional concept of national minorities. I also shows how some countries have undertaken to instrumentalize this trend to turn “their” minorities in neighbouring states into political instruments.

The reconstruction of Europe already goes back many years and more than one convention and treaty were worked out in order to unify their efforts. Under the Europe of the Six, we saw the birth of the European Coal and Steel Community (E.C.S.C.), the European Atomic Energy Community (E.A.E.C., Euratom) and the European Economic Community (E.E.C., Common Market).Today's efforts are concentrated on the elaboration of the Single European Act. The goal is the foundation of the Twelve or, under another name, the United States of Europe. The philosophy behind this Act is clear : the european communities and the european political cooperation have the objective “of contributing together towards the advancement of a concrete european union”.We also find an innovation in this Act : for the first time, the European Council will have a legal foundation. There will also be important modifications at the Court of Justice level.We will see vast modifications within the territories involved under the Act. The free movement of goods, people, services and capital is part of these innovations. In short, space without internal boundaries which gather under the same roof many countries having common objectives. The Single Act is the tool permitting them to reach this goal.

This essay attempts to see the wood and the trees by considering a selection of entries in RÊVE (Romantic Europe: The Virtual Exhibition). Living trees in the landscape are here included alongside products fashioned from timber to draw attention to the often-neglected dimensions of wooden items. While the sources of wood are rooted in particular places, objects made from timber are able to move and accrue meaning through use and association. The essay moves from the Selborne Yew, made famous in the Romantic period by Gilbert White, to a tea caddy derived from another contemporary literary celebrity, Yardley Oak, before considering travel boxes owned by Teresa Guiccioli and Byron and the implications of furniture fashions for the survival of rare arboreal species. The essay is concerned with different kinds of value, as influenced by commercial markets, fashion, quality, literary and historic association, and environmental concerns. It thus considers a Stradivari violin and an Ayrshire fiddle, a Mauchline ware binding and a literary monument set among living trees.

Nominally addressed to the “museum,” this essay delineates its broad features in the Romantic period, a time of remarkable experimentation and growth, while exploring the adjacent possibilities of a digital “museum” such as RÊVE (Romantic Europe: The Virtual Exhibition). Recovering the imaginative and eclectic model of the early modern curiosity cabinet, a form of gathering and containment for the notable and the contingent that actively engages the beholder in making connections, I approach the museum less as a fixed place or structure than as a scene of action (or related actions) that bears closely on Romanticism and its materialities, particularly in the realm of memory, mobility, interiority, temporality, and presence. The museum, in this way, is what it does, or what it enables us to do, as we organize, frame, and document (as well as overlook, misappropriate, and forget) the ever-rising tide of material things that marked the turn of the nineteenth century. From paintings to travelling cases, reliquaries to trees, folding screens to books, writers' chairs to locks of hair, RÊVE's exhibits perform or repeat the museum's essential gestures by assembling and mediating objects for our considered inspection, while making space for things to form associations, to re-member, to move—and in turn, to move us.

AbstactThis article retraces the sources of immigration towards Canada and the United States during the post-war period, and paints a picture of the immigration practiced in Western Europe. Dealing with international immigration also means touching on the immigration practices of the receiving countries: their border policies (selection), as well as their policies in the interior (integration). Finally, still in political terms, immigration can be perceived in a power relation game that is established, at the international level, between the receiving countries and other countries, or within the very receiving society.

AbstractBuilding on the notion of strategic culture, this article substantiates the existence of a historical tension between Europeanism, continentalism and internationalism in Canadian foreign policy. We explore this basic tension at the conceptual level, but also through the positions taken by governments and political parties since World War ii. We note that, by aligning itself on Washington, the Conservative government of Stephen Harper (2006-2009) is the first to privilege continentalism exclusively and at the expense of other perspectives. While the decline of Europeanism seems inevitable, the anticipated resilience of Canada' s strategic culture leads us to question this attempt at transforming Canadian foreign policy.

Keywords: politique étrangère canadienne, relations transatlantiques, Europe, Canadian foreign policy, transatlantic relations, Europe