Michel Rocard
Michel Rocard is a former prime minister of France and a former leader of the Socialist Party.
-
2011-10-27
| With its refusal to negotiate for a realistic peace, Israel is effectively demanding the disappearance of Palestinian identity. The rest of the world should not tolerate that effort, even if the US does.... read |
-
2011-07-28
| Could the financial crisis of 2007-2008 happen again? Since the crisis erupted, there has been no shortage of opportunities – in the form of inadequate conclusions and decisions by officials – to nurture one’s anxiety about that prospect.... read |
-
2011-04-25
| Tunisia has been independent for 55 years, and Côte d’Ivoire for 51 years, yet France is once more playing a decisive role in these countries – and in Libya. Naturally, many Africans are unconvinced that France is not acting in its own economic and strategic interests.... read |
-
2011-01-25
| Unlike other African or Middle Eastern countries, post-independence Tunisia remained largely a land of free enterprise, allowing for some industrial development. As a result, a large middle class emerged, and it is this group that is driving what could turn out to be the Arab world’s first-ever “bourgeois” revolution.... read |
-
2010-10-13
| Twenty years after German reunification, a new generation has arrived at power - one that has never known war firsthand. That is good news for Germany, but not necessarily for the EU.... read |
-
2010-07-16
| France is in disarray, with Nicolas Sarkozy’s popularity at the lowest point seen in decades for a French president and scandal roiling the government. But the deeper problem is that the French are less happy, and less optimistic about the future, than they once were - or than citizens of other countries are now.... read |
-
2010-04-26
| Only a united and strong Europe can tackle the global fight against climate change, encourage the adoption of new financial rules in order to avoid the excesses that led to the crisis of 2008-2009, or handle a rising China that will soon account for 20% of world trade. But that Europe has been strangled in recent years, with Germany now taking is turn at the rope.... read |
-
2010-01-22
| There is no unanimity requirement or veto in the UN General Assembly, which might well be why it has not been called upon in the effort to fight climate change. Yet the General Assembly is the only place where obstruction by major countries – for example, by China and the United States at December’s global climate talks in Copenhagen – can be bypassed.... read |
-
2009-10-22
| By awarding its Peace Prize for 2009 to Barack Obama, the Nobel Committee took a big risk. But the risk of devaluing the prize may have been worth it, because peace is hard to achieve and needs to be nurtured.... read |
|
Good and Bad Capitalism
|
Michel Rocard 
|
|
We are now in a strange period in which governments, bankers, and journalists herald the end of the economic crisis just because large banks are no longer failing every week. But nothing has been solved, and unemployment continues to rise.... read
|
-
2005-11-15
| As I write this, violent clashes with the police have been going on for nearly two weeks in the suburbs of Paris and other French cities, with cars being set on fire at a rate of nearly 1,000 per night. Why is this happening? How far can it go?... read |
-
2004-12-09
| The moment of truth has come. The European Union must decide on December 17 whether to open accession talks with Turkey. Is today’s Union prepared to reverse a course first charted by such titans as Charles de Gaulle and Konrad Adenauer four decades ago? ... read |
-
2006-01-03
| Turkey is now, finally, negotiating with the European Commission the terms of its possible membership in the European Union. But whether “possible” becomes “eventual” remains very much an open question. Indeed, completing the negotiations is likely to prove as difficult as the decision to start them.... read |
-
2005-08-12
| The rejection of the European Union’s Constitutional Treaty by French and Dutch voters was, according to all evidence, more a rejection of unregulated globalization than it was a rejection of Europe. The general instability of social relations – most importantly, but not only, of employment – is slowly becoming intolerable for a growing part of the population in many developed countries, not just in Europe. And there cannot be a stable economic order – at least not in democratic countries – if electorates reject its underpinnings.... read |
-
2004-11-17
| Europe’s integration project is historically unprecedented. For the past millennium Europe has lived in an uneasy equilibrium, giving birth to every great empire that dominated and pacified the world in the last 500 years. Its eight or nine principal nations made war on each other whenever one threatened to seek and secure mastery over the others. Europe gave us the last two world wars, and to the balance sheet of monstrosities must be added its grotesque refinements in the art of murder: the Holocaust and the Gulag. ... read |
-
2004-08-04
| Reconciling morals with how a society is organized - in other words, reconciling ethics with politics - is one of humanity's oldest ambitions. Hammurabi, Raamses II, Solon, Confucius, and Pericles were among the first great figures to embark on this effort. The emergence of the nation-state in the eighteenth century, and the extreme level of barbarism reached in the twentieth century, may have created the impression that an ethical politics was an unrealizable dream, or that it was a dream growing ever more distant as it receded into the future. ... read |
-
2005-05-23
| With its ten new members, the European Union comprises 25 countries and 453 million citizens. In light of the fact that during the past millennium the EU’s members fought countless wars with each other, and that for forty five years a cold war split the continent into two hostile blocs, today’s Europe is a success of monumental historical significance. ... read |
-
2005-02-01
| Are Israelis and Palestinians really ready to strike a peace agreement? Events have certainly moved at a brisk pace in recent months, with one obstacle after another to a lasting deal seeming to come down. Yasir Arafat’s death was followed by the choice of his successor in a direct election with universal suffrage, which was accompanied by Israel’s decision – one unique in the world – to help, not hinder the democratic process in territories it occupies. As a result, no one doubts Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’s legitimacy. ... read |
-
2008-08-20
| With financial crisis spreading and economic growth slowing, these should be boom times for Europe's social democrats. So why are center-left parties across the Continent faring so poorly?... read |
2011-10-27
