From the strategy to the geopolitics

From the strategy to the geopolitics,
several elements of a multidisciplinary approach

What is the strategy? According to the Greek etymology, the strategy means "to conduct the army", Plato adding at once that the war, thus the strategy, must be submitted to the policy, the military art to that of the government. Before the Greeks, Sun Tzu (the VI-th century before J.C.) is the first theorist recognized as such of the strategy, his Art of the war being still studied by all the strategists and strategies and saving the surprising actuality, namely in view of the importance accorded by the Chinese thinker to the psychological and not military means in the war, phenomenon which characterizes more than any other strategic modern era of the nuclear. It will be necessary nevertheless to wait 1794 that the word strategy appears for the first time in our language, under the pen of the Prussian general Frierdrich Wilheim Bulow.

The strategy is at the same time a determined action by contingent, military, economic, cultural, sociological, and a speech, dimension considerably strengthened with the arrival of the telecomputer science and of the Infowar, the war of information. The strategy includes intellectual operations and physical operations, "concrete", selected among a palette realizable and acceptable actions. From this point of view, the strategy is at first a choice, a science of the decision.

According to the Petit Larrousse, the strategy is "the art to coordinate the action of military, political, economic and moral forces implied implicated in the behavior of a war or the preparation of the defense of a nation or of a coalition", or else "the art to coordinate actions, maneuver dexterous to reach an aim". Le Robert prefers a more simple definition: "the art to manage societies".

The most current definitions are these which were elaborated by the great classical strategists, from Karl Von Clausewitz to Basil H. Liddell Hart and to Raymond Aron: " The art to use the military forces to reach the results established by the policy " (André Beaufre: Introduction in strategy), the author remarking by himself that " this definition is [...] narrow, as it concerns only military forces ". Therefore does he propose to replace the other two definitions: "The art to make compete the force to reach the purposes of the policy " and, in order to underline the specific character of the strategic action, "the art of the dialectics of desires using the force to solve their conflict ". According to Clausewitz, the strategy is "an art of war" aware that the war is "the continuation of policy by other means". The strategy, as "art to command" is thus "obliged to submit and to sign to the purpose political, joint to the tactical forces which they coordinate and organize the action", explains the general de la Maisonneuve . This hierarchical relation between the two concepts is however confirmed by one of the great classical strategists, Liddel Hart, who defines the strategy as "the art to distribute and to implement the military means to achieve the purposes of the policy".

But the concept of the strategy of Liddel Hart or Clausewitz remains still exclusively connected to the military domain. So, we shall see further that, after the arrival of the nuclear fire, the technological progress in the problem of information and the apparition of conflicts not military (transnational threatens, Mafia, terrorism, economic wars, "new threats", etc.), the strategy tends to release more and more from the pure military domain. Nevertheless, the interest of definitions given by Clausewitz, Liddel Hart or the classical strategists in general is to show the connections, which unite the strategy to the policy and to the tactics.

To define the strategy, we see it, it is thus previously necessary to distinguish from a series of concepts and of disciplines which are closely associated to it but with which it should not be mixed up, risking to lose from the sight its own significance and object. In such a way we articulate the first party of this work on the difference and the connections existing between the strategy, itself, the geo-policy, is connected but different discipline, which is an analytical means and a major but not exclusive elaboration, the policy, which determines it, and the tactics, which has for function to allow to reach the purposes established by it. The geo-policy requires a completely particular attention as scientific independent approach of the political phenomena and of the military strategy, we shall study in a first time the reports between the policy, the strategy and the tactics.

Policy, strategy and tactics

- The policy is a triad which includes, as explains the general Jean Salvan: the intention that we want to realize (project of society, ideology), the struggle to come to power (national, imperial or global) and to maintain there, that is "the art to manage" and the projection of the power, and, at last, the nomination of " friends" and "enemies" , the political responsible faces have in principle as first tasks to guard the internal consent of the political unity, generally the nation or the State, - menaced from the interior by disintegration or blasting phenomenon ("internal enemy ": secessionist, disintegrating sphere of influence) - and at the external security of this very unity, always potentially menaced from the outside (" invaders", the imperialist hegemonies, enemies of fundamental values or geo-economic opponents, etc.).

For Raymond Aron, the Policy "the research of national interest", definition which has the merit to express clearly the relation between the strategy and the policy, because the strategy, as art to command the forces intended to protect the nation, is a direct emanation of the political power which has as first object to preserve the unity and the eternity of the existing political unit. More concretely still, in case of conflicts, there are thus the political responsible faces, which define the strategies and the military purposes. It is not useless however to determine this other key concept of the geo-strategic science.

According to us - but this classification can be contested - the military purposes are: "the precise and evaluated result, allowing to render concrete the success of a general strategy (defines by the Politics) who justified the war untying ". The military purposes are not other than the global strategy - or general - returned to the military theatre and to the geopolitical area in which this theatre belongs. There are thus two levels of military purposes: at first, "the military purposes " or "the tactical objectives" of the states-majors; secondly, "the strategic objective" on more long term or " the military strategic purposes" defined by the policies to see in action in the regional and general context to which belongs a given theatre. We find out the traditional dichotomy between the tactics and the strategic.

Therefore, the policy fixes the purposes and mobilize the means necessary to the realization of a strategy. The States are the source of the strategic authority, which they delegate for a determined mission. "To reach the purposes of their concept, the political chiefs need a method and means, it is the strategy ", sums up the general Salvan.

- The strategy thus understood is consequently "the ensemble of methods and means permitting to reach the purposes required by the policy" (Salvan) or still "the art to make compete the force to reach the purposes of the policy " (Beaufre). In this "high" acceptation, closely connected and to be dependent to the politics, we speak generally of a total strategy, term on which we shall come back ulterior. The strategy is the military behavior of a political alliance concerning a total action: it is not a thought or an abstract reflection, but an action that the thought clears, since precise political objectives. It is necessary nevertheless to precise that today, the strategy as the concept of forces should not be limited to their primary military or martial accepting. There are also cultural strategies (in particular in the USA), economic, diplomatic, even psychological and media. It is however this modification connected to the technical progress and to the process of globalization which conducts the American strategist Edward N Luttwak to define the strategy as " any action of force organized or led face to a conscious hostility".

- Tactics, as to it, is mainly "the art of the fighter" as well as "the use of means permitting to fight against an enemy". From a classical military point of view, the operating tactics aim the purposes of the military strategy, which compete to reach the purposes of the total strategy. More definitions can also be given to the tactics. For Clausewitz, "the tactics, is the use of the armed forces in the fight". For Luttwak, it is "the combination of means, the people on the terrain (or in the medium) precise face to an enemy" . According to Le Petit Larousse, the tactics is "an ensemble of skilful means used to obtain the wanted result or the manner to struggle itself during the battle", or still "the art to lead a battle combining by the maneuver the action of various means of fights and effects of arms". At last, for the general Salvan, the strategy is "the art to use means and people to reach the purpose established by the strategy": - Therefore in tactics as soon as the arms - classical or modern - are used, including, certainly, against the civil objectives . As the strategy from which it depends, the tactics is consequently much diversified. It can be military, revolutionary, guerilla, classical, nuclear, geo-economic, etc...

To sum up the relation between the three concepts, from which the reciprocal imprecation makes think to an inclusion of Russian dolls, as explains the general Salvan, we can say that the strategy aims to realize the political proposes, that the strategic purposes condition the tactics, which has as to it for mission to use the arms to reach them more effectively possible. The tactics is thus, in nature, concrete. It aims precise objectives on the terrain, or military, economic, diplomatic, psychological, etc... Another modern strategists added with justice other fundamental element to this triad: the techniques, which, with the arrival of the nuclear, really revolutionized the classical data of the strategy and of the tactics.

Therefore, in his transactions The paradox of the strategy, Edward Luttwak explains that there was a real architecture at five levels: at the lower, the techniques, which consists in the concept, the realization and to implement of means, of the person, of the quantity, and of the use of space; then, the tactics, which combines the technical means of the people on the precise terrain face to the given opponent. Then come the two intermediate levels, not mentioned earlier: the operational (very common term in the military language), which makes interfere the time and the distance, and the strategy of theatre, which combines the operational level with the geographical and space constants and variable (whence the correspondence of the term geo-strategic); at last the great strategy, which govern and have to make converge the developed efforts in four lower levels (military and \ or civil) in coherence with the decisions of the political power. At last, in a more classical logic but realizing the confusion of various concepts, we can also quote the admiral Castex who, in his Treaty on the strategic theories (1937), explains that " the military strategy is as the solar spectrum. It has an infrared which touches the kingdom of the general strategy by which it interpenetrates with the general policy, and an ultra-violet rays which interferes with the domain of tactics".

Different levels of strategy

According to us, but this choice is disputable and non comprehensive, can distinguish three great levels of the strategy:

1/ the global strategy, term used by the general Lucien Poirier to define the most high level of the strategy, defined by the political power. In the classical terminology used for the French military superior education, the global strategy is named integral. It conceives the supreme national intentions and determines the general strategy, which fixes the purposes to be reached in the diplomatic, economic, cultural, psychological, military, technological, informational, etc.. domains. It is indifferently named the grand strategy (Luttwak), the national strategy (Pentagone), or some more total strategy (Beaufre, Salvan), by allusion to the total engagement, term which determines the modern "total" wars (even totalitarian) and the processes of the global hegemony that the American leadership is the modern major example.

2/ Strategies of means, by which a State or a group of States decides to be supplied with means : technological, military, industrial, etc., (ex: nuclear weapon; satellites, etc.) permitting to exercise its power;

3/ the regional strategies or the particular strategies (Salvan), local declinations of the global strategy - following the geo-economic and civilization areas - fixing the operational purpose and the terms of deadline.

As we see, the strategy conducts inevitably to the geo-policy, the two approaches being extremely superposed - sometimes even mixed - and analyzing the same phenomena: wars and various forms of conflicts opposing between them the nations or the geo-policy units.

Geo-strategy: from the strategy to the geo-policy

If the strategy is at the beginning "the art of the fight", the geo-policy, as to it, as the geography from which it follows, "is firstly to make war", as explained the leader of a French geopolitical modern idea, geographer Yves Lacoste (1967). Only then, as the strategy, it got emancipated gradually from the cells of military prospects and the fields of battle to become a proper discipline, issued from the geographical science but also connected to other disciplines of social sciences, namely the political science.

According to Yves Lacoste, the term geo-policy nominates an intellectual and scientific approach more as a science purely speaking, a way to see things which privileges the spatial and geographical (geo-policy) configurations of various types of phenomena which reveals of the category of policy. So defined, the geo-policy takes into consideration the rivalries of powers in the measure as these ones concern to territories, the control (or the possession) of territory being a mean to exercise an authority or an influence on the people and the resources which are there. They speak consequently not only about the rivalry between the States on the spaces which can be of a very large range, but also the conflicts or the competitiveness between other types of political forces and on the territories which can be of relatively small sizes, in the framework of cities also. We see it, the link between the geo-policy, as scientific approach, and the strategy, as art of the war, is almost consubstantial, as the geo-policy is the conceptual and analytical fundamental tool of the strategist. The geo-strategic statement does not make at last than to rewrite this reality. This neologism allows besides to underline the discovery of the modern strategy in the not exclusively military domains as well as the possibility of this art of war to serve also as means of observation, at the service of a scientific geopolitical approach analyzing the conflicts and the wars and their political motivations.

For some "purist" strategists , the statement geo-strategy will be an excess as the strategy uses necessarily and by its nature the categories of the geography and of the geo-policy. However, we think as to us that it is happy in the sense that it translates the semantic and war studies evolution of the strategy to a scientific discipline.

As to the geo-policy, it is a multidisciplinary approach, between the strategy, the geographical, economic and climatic constants and variables, the political science and the study of civilizations. Since some years, the significance of the economy and of the economic conflicts, even the substitution of these one to the military classical wars inside the western world, based the apparition of another neologism also closely connected to the strategy and the geo-policy, the "geo-economy".

In France two great geopolitical-analysts contributed to rehabilitate this discipline, before mainly studied in Germany, Russia and in the Anglo-Saxon countries: the first is at the beginning a strategist, the General Pierre Maria Gallois, the initiator of the "force of French nuclear pressing" and of the theory of "the dissuasion of the weak to the forceful", a real revolution in the strategy. For him, the geo-policy studies mainly "the influence of the medium on the human". The second is the geographer Yves Lacoste, for whom the geo-policy has mainly for a subject "the study of territorial rivalry of powers and their repercussions in the opinion" . Paradoxically, the general Pierre Maria Gallois accords a more central place to the geography and to the medium which Yves Lacoste, who defends a concept less geographically deterministic and closer to the political science. For the famous geographer, in effect, they "do not speak about a science (.. ..) but about to know how to think the ground space and the struggles which go, to try better to penetrate the secrets of that is going to happen in order to act more effectively". Is it always that the difference and the complementarily between the two geopolitical approaches such as defined by Gallois or Lacoste illustrates the pertinence of the concept of geo-strategy.

Strategy, geo-policy and " war of representations"

In a care of clarification, and as scientific approach analyzing the deep reasons of conflicts, the geo-strategy, as the modern geo-policy, analyzes in a completely special way the "representations", that Yves Lacoste defines as "driving forces of the history". These ones preside at the elaboration, by the political responsible faces of different struggling camps, processes of mobilization, which stumbling block is, the most part of the time, a rivalry of powers as to territories, resources and the strategies of influence, and sometimes even the ideological stakes, namely when, fanatical (for example the Islamic Talibans, of AIG, of Ben Laden nets ,of Egyptian Gamaà islamiyya, etc.), these one supplant momentarily the geo-economic requests . We added momentarily, as not only it is rare enough that the purely ideological or religious considerations weigh heavier than the economic and geo-strategic "concrete" considerations, but we state that the ideology and the religion are frequently instrumentalized by the policies with purposes of mobilization within the framework of the strategies of authorities and the rivalry of forces. But it doesn't want to tell us anything, contrary to what think a number of geopolitical-analysts or strategists hostile to the "civilization paradigm", that the religious and identity representations were negligible or superficial, that is simple pretexts. As reminds Yves Lacoste, the identical, civilization and ideological representations are real, when even they are instrumentalized, as they "make sense" for thousands of human beings who are going to die for them and because they have real geo-political consequences. Far from being simple handles of mobilizations, the geopolitical representations nominate "the ensemble of collective ideas and perceptions of political, religious or another order which animates social groups and which structures their vision of the world" .

  Recognizing the primordial role of representations, though being hostile to the paradigm of civilization developed by the American professor Samuel Huntington (The Clash of the civilization), the French geo-political-analyst Francois Thual, analyzes as to him the nature of this stumbling block through the concept "of the identically-orientated conflict ", inside which "the representations " are the central element as they create and legitimize the request of a camp (supposed to be "anterior" or " pure ", thus "legal proprietor"), face to the adverse camp, "ulterior", "usurper", "unfaithful", even " invader", thus illegal. In addition, "the representations" are they intended to legitimize "the desire of territory ", "the will of power" of the "Friend camp", and thus to disqualify the motivations and the requests of the "Enemy camp".

Considering that with the arrival of modern telecomputer science means and the general regaining of identically-orientated conflicts, consecutive at the end of the cold war and the return of the identical rolled-back, consequence and reaction to the Globalization, the representations make more sense than ever, we think as to us that the statement war of representations is happier than ever to indicate this type of inseparable phenomena of the psychological and media war.

  From the point of media science and the psychological analysis, in fact, the war of representations dresses also a psychological and subversive dimension. For Laurent Murawiec, expert of the new military forms, Information Warfare (InfoWar), the "cyberwar", the psychological war and the war of representations are also adjacent and interdependent concepts included in what they name generically "the InfoWar". Born from a triple technological revolution : electronic, information and broadcasting companies, the InfoWar makes only renew and make more effective the old recipes of the propaganda, of subversive strategy and manipulations described since Sun Tzu.

  In this context, the war of representations consists mainly to demoralize the enemy , distort his contact with the reality introducing to him a pseudo reality, a false representation of events more probably "true" and incontestable, as it seems irrefutable proved, even lived in direct by the stupefied spectator by "the reality" of the images. The technological progress in the domains of " virtual " thus contributed incontestable to break the boundary between the real and the imaginary, so that the strategies of collective manipulation at the services of authority and of the war were never as redoubtable as today, inside even of the societies said democratic.

  But parallel to the arrival of the telecomputer science, which permitted a modern extremely effective and unpublished use of the subversive strategies and of phenomena of the psychological and information war, a completely particular attention should be given to the arrival of the nuclear weapon, which has not only generated a real geo-strategic revolution, but considerably strengthened the range of the forms of representative wars and psychological before studied, the classical war having partially to be erased before other military forms owing to the dissuading character of the force of nuclear pressing and of its consequences.

The geo-strategy and the nuclear era

With the nuclear, a new strategic and war studies question is posed: how henceforth to think the geo-strategy and the war knowing that this one is further potentially apocalyptic and definitive? Paradoxically, this latent possibility of the final nuclear holocaust as a probable consequence of war, this destructive extreme possibility of the bellicose action, will conduct the strategic actors holders of the nuclear fire to reinterpret of different manner, less exclusively military, the manner to solve their conflicts, any effective recourse to this weapon being with the full right perceived as a collective suicide. "The irruption of the atom in the political- strategic domain involves a sharp violation between the period of the classical war and the new ballistic - nuclear age, writes the general de la Maisonneuve. The explosion of the first nuclear bomb in Hiroshima, the 16th of August 1945, calls the fundamental rupture. In the strategy, there is a before and an after Hiroshima .

The use of the atom for military purposes really revolutionized the strategy, as by the formidable power of fire immediately accessible as by the difficulty to make use of the excessiveness of its effects. The threat gives use. The ultimate goal of the strategy is not more simply to engage means to win the war, but to dissuade the opponent to undertake it. While the arms created until then were made to use them, the nuclear weapons are made to intimidate, a phenomenon proper to the psychological and subversive war, and their use will be the mark of the failure of their ultimate goal. It does not hinder that the intimidation does not exist only if all the use conditions are really integrated.

The Terror can it then make place to the hope, and the world did it become at last peaceful due to the existence of such high-power arms which they prohibit the war? It is unfortunately far, to be so. The existence of the nuclear stocks certainly hindered a major collision between East and West during "the cold war". But there were also struggles between the non nuclear nations, and the number of wars or other crisis using arms said conventional had even the tendency to increase slightly everywhere in the world since the cold war, the two principal holders of the nuclear fire supply them, within the framework of the war by proxy which did never imply a collision between them.

The nuclear weapon is not thus a weapon as other: it constitutes a weapon of dissuasion against a major aggression and not a weapon in a limited conflict. Besides, the nuclear arms assure only a partial safety. It is viable and strategically effective only if it is continued by the credible conventional forces. A real effective guard is based thus on the complementarily of means and tools of various nature, simultaneously conventional and nuclear, that is strategic and tactic, as well as the military terminology specifies this dichotomy.

The nuclear dissuasion: a geo-strategic revolution

The apparition of the nuclear weapon opens solemnly a new era of the war studies. It implicates a neutralization, even of a partial evacuation of the military classical war of the field of conflicts, the nuclear dissuasion and "the equilibrium of the fright" leading the nations holders of the nuclear fire to reinterpret completely their strategy and to privilege the systems of different collisions or more biases.

It is in virtue of this protocol that the principle of dissuasion, a direct consequence of the military- strategic nuclear revolution, will become one of the key elements of the strategic idea of the nuclear era. "Beginning with this unpublished situation, and purely revolutionary in the war studies, is going to elaborate a theory of the not - war - the nuclear strategy - based on the unique threat of the use, in reality on the fear, that is on other form of the war: the psychological war ". We shall come back during the lines, which follow on the theme according to us, central, in the problem of geo-strategy, of the psychological war and to its complement, the "information" war.

As remarks the general Jean Salvan, we could object that the classical strategy of dissuasion begins with the Romans, the inventors of the famous "si vis pacem, para bellum". But this concept differs precisely from the concept of the nuclear dissuasion in the measure as at the era of the Romans since the apparition of the atom, the dissuasion does not rest on the strategy of the imaginary and of the virtually of the use of arms, the nuclear weapon having for strategic primary function not to make physical real effects (behind in the case of failure of the dissuasive strategy which bases it) but better than to act on the minds of the adverse chiefs in terms of anticipation and dissuasion. "From this fact, explains Salvan, the nuclear powers are not completely in antagonist positions, and also partners. They have a common interest: that their policies and strategies do not contain in a germ of risk of nuclear increase (to see R. Aron). It is thus a strategy of consensus in time of peace to keep the peace, but which let to subsist possibilities of limited conflicts: civil wars, terrorism, taking of the hostages, or classical war ".

The nuclear dissuasion has no thus for a primary goal to win a war but simply to hinder. Two main conditions should be integrated that would be a real dissuasion: to have a tool of a real quality, that is neither by passing nor overpowering; the political responsible should be really capable to make a decision to begin a nuclear fire.

The general Poirier and Gallois and "the dissuasion
of the weak to the forceful"

For the general Pierre Marie Gallois, author of numerous essays related to the nuclear and henceforth classical: Geopolitics the ways of Power, as for the general Lucien Poirier, who exposed a large part of the geo-strategic concepts in his Essay of the theoretical strategy (1981) and in his work The great voices of the strategy(1985) there is a real rupture between the past and modern epoch of the nuclear in the problem of the strategic theory. Therefore France, henceforth "average" nation, owes it for these two developers of the French dissuasion to know take advantage of this strategic mutation which makes relative in some manner the reports of force and shakes the laws of military power. In a context of decolonization and of lowering of the strategic power of France, the strategy of the nuclear dissuasion will be the occasion for France to try to survive among the club of "the great" and to preserve its strategic independence, major purpose of Charles de Gaulle and the generals Poirier and Gallois.

It is in such a way, desirable to remain independent, in particular in relation to the USA and NATO - still remaining among the Allies - and to manage to dissuade by itself the unique Soviet Enemy without inevitably making recourse to the western Alliance, the France of de Gaulle will implement a nuclear program - solemnly opened, as reminds with the full right the general Gallois, during the 4th Republic - in virtue of that Poirier and Gallois called the strategy of dissuasion of the weak to the forceful. The last one is based on the idea that "the weak" is capable to threaten a probable "force" aggressor with an exorbitant sanction in relation to the stake, that is risking to inflict to the aggressor, much more forcefully, not acceptable losses intended to dissuade ex ante to begin an attack. Henceforth member of the atomic forces club, France will become then for the Anglo - Americans, in the context of a cold war, an infringer of the first class, guilty, from the point of view of NATO and Washington, to open the box of Pandora of the nuclear proliferation.

Therefore, by extension, in the general context of the nuclear proliferation in the profit " of the rogue States" that the western nations are afraid of the nuclear armament, the strategy "of the dissuasion of the weak to forceful" will know not only a posterity in the non-western world, but also a new variant, more recent, these that some named "from the mad to the forceful", statement indicating the States (not or anti-western) susceptible, from the point of view of the strategic prospective ("new threats"), to exercise something like a blackmail to the nuclear terrorism . As the vulnerability of the democratic nations is simultaneously in the fact that the human life dress a primordial importance and in the fact that the public opinion can easily be used by the actors terrorists keeping to make bend a Government through the public opinion and means of an information among which it should take into account.

The nuclear proliferation

Indissoluble to the first concept, that of the nuclear proliferation nominates as the growth of the number of States which possess a nuclear independent arsenal (horizontal proliferation) as the excessive accumulation of the stocks of nuclear arms by some forces (vertical proliferation).

Up to 1955, the USA and the Soviet Union managed to keep the secret of the concept and the use of the nuclear weapon. However, during the twenty next years, the knowledge were gradually disclosed and transmitted (proliferation). In this context, the United Nations Organization created, in 1957, on International Agency of Atomic Energy (IAAE) charged to promote the peaceful uses of this new energy and to monitor the dangers of the modification of direction of these technologies to military purposes.

During this second period of extension of the nuclear military skill over the initial circle of the two grand ones, four nations begun the nuclear tests: Great Britain in 1952, France since 1960, China in 1964, and India in 1974. Since then, these four nations were supplied with nuclear arms. During the third phase, it will be the turn of the Pakistan and the Northern Korea to be supplied also with the nuclear force relatively weak. Except these four States, we know that some other countries store the nuclear weapon without effectuated detected tests : Israel, Iran, Algeria, maybe even Libya and Southern Africa.

The anxiety of the two grand ones - who saw their bellicose- strategic leadership in some kind competed - as well as "the international community" face to the growing dangers of dispersal and proliferation was translated, since the years 70, by a certain number of projects and agreements of restriction in the frameworks of UNO. It is in this context that are born, under the initiative of USA and of the Soviet Union, the negotiations of an agreement of non-proliferation (TNP), entered in virtue in 1970. By this agreement, the nuclear powers engaged solemnly not to transmit their military strategic skill to the States not stills supplied with the nuclear arsenal. As to these last, they refused and engaged not be supplied.

In some way, TNP constitutes, for the "not nuclear" nations, a kind of refusal of the sovereignty, think that pushed a number of average importance States to refuse to adjoin, seeing an attempt to their sovereignty and freedom. Therefore is it possible for any signing country to leave at any time TNP, whereas it considers that its supreme interests are threatened. However, the nuclear tests carried out by India in 1974 having shown the gaps of this international system of non-proliferation, additional measures were introduced since to try to guarantee more effectively the non-proliferation.

Among these measures, we can mention the extremely limiting conditions of export from some reactors using uranium hardly enriched, or even capable to produce plutonium, as well as the materials serving to enrich the uranium or to retreat the nuclear fuel and to extract plutonium.

Because of these motivations given to them and the signs of activity eventually, detected, divers observers classified the States in categories. In the first group, we find the States which are actively interested in the atom: at first India, Israel and Pakistan, which seems have reached or exceeded the threshold of a storage of an arsenal, then, in particular, the Northern Korea, Iraq, Iran (which develops by an intense method its nuclear civil program in cooperation with Russia), with a nuclear significant ambition, at last, Southern Africa, Argentina, Brazil, Taiwan, which, having exhibited a large interest to arms, seem kept this purpose (on the enforcement of that is from Iraq). The second group of countries will have the capacity to be supplied with arms but the do not manifest the intention, at least for the moment, that is the case of Germany, Australia, Canada, Japan, and Sweden. The third category integrates the States hardly incoherent that the atom does not keep indifferent for the different reason. These ones try to save the option opened not passing the rubicund. Certainly, a similar schematic classification remains disputable as it varies according the selected criterions and evolves with the time.

***
The decade of 1970 is that of the first negotiations between the Soviet people and the Americans about their nuclear stocks. They do not speak about the remarkable agreements SALT (Strategic Arms Limitation Talks). The agreements SALT-1 result in two texts. The first one foresees some restrictions to the offensive arms. The second imposes to limit to a unique place the antimissile protection, the rest of the two territories being voluntary kept in a condition of vulnerability. The treaty of Moscow from the 26-th of May 1972 (known under the name of the ABM agreement. (Anti-Ballistic-Missiles), confirms and approves this mutual limitation of the capacity of defense. We precise passing that with the re-launch of that we called vainly "the new war of stars", that is the project of the antimissile defense (National Missile Defense) developed now by the Administration of Bush JR, the USA took the decision to neglect the international agreements of interdiction and nuclear limitation, beginning with the ABM agreement from 1972. By this act, they risk to re-launch the armaments drive, as the unique solution for the countries unable to pursue such a project, extremely expensive, is to multiply the changes and the number of nuclear heads in a strategy of compensation and saturation, the system of anti-missile defense not being capable to destroy simultaneously a large number of charges.

As to the agreements SALT-2, they will have the purpose to put a ceiling on the number of missiles at long range. However, the limitation not taking into account the qualitative improving, as the number of heads by the thrower, the agreement will easily be turned. Therefore, the agreement signed in Vienna on the 15th of June 1979, will not eventually be ratified by the American Senate, the Soviet people coming to seize Afghanistan.

The nuclear strategy, the cold war and "the war of stars"

In parallel, it is on the discussion of development of the Euro-missiles that the decade 1980 will be opened in the problem of nuclear strategy and proliferation. Despite all its efforts, the Soviet Union will not manage to hinder it. During the same period, USA launch the Initiative of Strategic Defense (ISD), by the media called " star war", which offers a vast research program that, in time, to restore the invulnerability of the American sky.

Certainly, the Soviet people accept hardly the actual state of the fact: the American territory becoming inviolable and the Euro-missiles menacing the USSR. In 1986, in Reykjavik, Gorbatchev offer to Reagan to retire the SS-20 in exchange to the American refusal of the Euro-missiles from 1 000 till 5 000 kms of range and the Initiative of Strategic Defense, which is not without causing an analogy to the actual refusal of the Chinese and of the Russians to see to develop the new American anti-missile program dear to the Administration Bush. As Bush JR today, too conscious of the superiority that the mastery of the sky and of the economic fatal exit - for Russians and for the Chinese - that would constitute any armaments drive, Reagan refuses because of this last condition. Soon, Gorbatchev does not really make a more immediate request but offers the withdrawal of the missiles from 1 000 until 5 000 km zero option and of those from 500 up to 1 000 km the doubled zero option. The president Ronald Reagan accepts and signs, on the 7th of December 1987, the treaty of Washington.

As to the policy of interdiction of tests recommended "by the two Grand ones " since 1992, we know that it is not really penal for these last whereas they are capable to realize tests by simulation, that is mainly the case of the USA. It appears in exchange completely unacceptable for the States not managing at all his technically highly complicated, in particular India and Pakistan, which continued their tests in 1999, tests and even the France of Jacques Chirac, which, in 1995, three years later after the decision to prohibit the tests, solemnly opened the new post of the president by a series of nuclear tests however hardly debatable also inside the American and European "Allied " of France.

After that sketch summing up several aspects of the "horizontal" proliferation, we mention now the "vertical " proliferation: the quantitative evolution of the nuclear forces stocks. The article 6 of TNP condemns the nuclear armaments drive and proposes to be negotiated a full disarmament. The negotiations (START, INF, etc.) between the two Superpower since the falling of the Soviet Union were intended to come to a first reduction of half numbers of the strategic charges (passage approximately from 12 000 up to 6 000 from one side and from the other), practically completely carried out, as well as for a second reduction in equivalent proportions. Nevertheless, since the disintegration of the USSR and in the favor of the difficult phase of transition which characterized the post- Gorbatchov decade and the economic decline of Russia, the real strategic problem is posed in Russia and in the Republics of the ex Soviet Union or present outflow of brains experts in fissile materials decided to be on service at the States wishing to enter unofficial inside the nuclear club and modernize their already existing arsenal: Iran, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Northern Korea and certainly China.

Nuclear power and vectors: the strategic stake

The fact to possess the nuclear fire is really effective, as the dissuasion concerns, only if there are means to aim them on the purposes and objectives, that is which if the State holder of such arms arrived to be supplied with vectors. Traditionally, in the military strategy, the evaluation of nuclear power takes thus into account at once the power of the explosive charges and their vectors at, short, average, or long range, that they speak about aircraft or classical missiles or intercontinental ballistic missiles. Therefore the evaluation of the nuclear and strategic power of a nation does it include a number throwers, the number of heads per thrower and the length of trajectories still estimating the probabilities of survival in an attack and the different possible scenario.

We can classify the nuclear weapon in several categories, following to the fact that consider it from the military or political point of view.

From the strictly military point of view, we have to distinguish anti-cites arms, having as objectives the economic centers of the opponent, the anti-force arms, which threaten more specially its military means. The first implicate the forceful powers capable to reach vast purposes, objective which reduces considerably the degree of precision. The hoped power is obtained for a vector on for a unique head, or for multiple heads, the last ones permitting better to cover the distributed purposes and to saturate the defense. In exchange, the anti-force arms have as essential characteristic to be precise as they should reach the precise and compact purposes. From the military point of view always, the strategic arms can also be classified in functions of the place of launching. We name them "soil-soil", when they are thrown since the silos or ground means of transport, as SSBS (soil - soil-ballistic-strategic). They are called "sea -soil" if they are thrown since the ships of surface or submarines, that is case of the Sea - sol-ballistic-strategic (MSBS). They are at last called "air -soil" if they are thrown from the aircraft, as it is case of Air - Soil-Average Range (ASMP).

From a more political point of view, this time, we distinguish three categories of nuclear arms: central systems, Euro-missiles and tactical arms. The central systems regroup the arms of a nuclear nation capable to reach the adverse territory since its own national soil or since submarines, thus of marine domain. Concerning to the USA and Russia, we deal with intercontinental ballistic missiles of superior range up to 5 000 km as well as to the ballistic missiles of submarines, even if we know that Russia is orientated to a restriction submarine throwers, for the military reforms and economy reasons (serious crisis traversed by the Russian army since a dozen of years). As to France, which has selected contrary to the Russians to privilege the aircraft launchers, we consider that the least ranges are sufficient, as concern the ballistic missiles of SNLE (Sub-Marine Nuclear missile launcher).

From the strategy of nuclear dissuasion to the "integral strategy": the American example

As it suppresses partially the military direct collision, the strategic revolution conducted by the atom will rehabilitate the non military forms of war (namely the psychological war) and to expand the domain of conflicts better than to suppress or to reduce. Since there, " the strategy escapes in some way from the field of battle" (J.P. Charnay), as it becomes "the art of all the forms of war" (Maisonneuve), military and non-military: psychological, info-war, media, subversive, economic and even " representative ".

So is it in the favor of this mutation that term of conflict (so however that of crisis) will tend progressively to replace, in the western societies, that of the war, the first one recovering a more large palette, not exclusively military, the conflicting phenomena. "The classical war - opposition of two armies, confirms the general of the Maisonneuve, appears as an exception, while there are multiplied and developed the non-military wars: civil, cultural, economic wars, in other words the mankind entered in the era of a global conflict" . Thus, accordingly, of the total or "integral" strategy, as the strategy is the art of war and the conflicts led by the political authorities or the transnational or economic authorities.

In this respect, the national global strategy of the USA deserves a special study as, the Super-force - not contested for the moment - benefiting of a superiority in all the domains of power, America is the unique nation of the world disposing of a strategy named "integral" or "total".

The total strategy of the USA

According to the French strategist Hervé Couteau-Begarie, the President of the Compared Strategy Institute, the integral or (total) American strategy remarkably coherent and is organized around three axes: the general economic strategy, the military strategy and the general cultural strategy. Therefore, the incontestable domination, for the moment, of Washington above the Rest of the world, is based on the correspondence of four main domains of general power: the military power, certainly, the USA controlling grounds and seas and without which a small number of armed conflicts in the world do not seem manage to be solved ; cultural and information power , " force of cultural pressing " of Washington being based on almost total mastery of means of Tele-computer and planetary satellite communication; the technological power, no computer in the world is able to function without the American software nor even communicate on the Internet; and mainly, at last, an extraordinary economic power, America being, from far, the richest country in the world, (a third party of the global GNP (GROSS NATIONAL PRODUCT), and the American enterprises occupying the first global place in numerous sectors of activity (cars, agro-industrial, aeronautics, bank, new technologies, audiovisual, etc.). We remind that the American capital market concentrates about two thirds of the global investments.

Closely connected to the concept of Revolution in the Military Affairs (RMA), the new American strategic doctrine goes from the assessment that, since the second world war, the strategy is not more only in war, but also in economic (whence the interest for the "geo-economy"), cultural, "information" (Information Warfare), and even "humanitarian ".

Particularly explicit, Zbigniew Brzezinski explains that is the American "total strategy ": "the exercise of imperial American power derives (...) from a superior organization, from the capacity to mobilize without terms important economic and technological resources for military purposes, from the seduction, muddy but important, which exercises the American way of life, as well as the recognized dynamism of the political elite". Shortly, no power can pretend to compete in four key domains - military, economic, technological and cultural - which make a global power" .

It is if fact because it is polymorphic, integral, diffuse, namely through its media - cultural dimension and not exclusively military, apparently neutral, that the American hegemony is the new form of imperialism. " As this model earns more terrain in the world, it creates a favorable context for the indirect and apparently consensual exercise of the American hegemony, Brzezinski states. The hegemony of the USA implicates a complicated structure of establishments and mediations planned to generate the consent (...) the global superiority of the USA is unique so by its size as by its nature (...) they speak about an hegemony of new type. America became a nation indispensable for the planet ". We see it, the American strategists express in their manner the famous idea of the "destiny manifests" of the USA, always deeply anchored in the American mentality since John Sullivan launched in 1850. In is in such a way that the President Eisenhower could say: " Among the nations dedicated to justice and freedom, the destiny gave us the role to lead the others " . Also the characteristic of the American hegemony is it in the certitude according to which "the American way of life ", the American economic and political concepts, and even the forced actions of the USA (raids, "air bombing", embargo, etc.) makes "privileges " for the entire mankind. Listen better to Richard Nixon: "God wants America to lead the world", or still Robert Kagan: " the benevolent hegemony exercised by the USA is good for a vast party of the global population" . In such a way, the USA interests (economic, ideological, strategic, etc.) "being mixed" with those of the Mankind, to protect these ones by the raw force returns to serve the Mankind itself even and to guarantee the " Human Right".

In his essay the American strategy and the Europe (Economica, 1998), the French geo-strategist Bruno Colson explains that, since the cold war, the strategic objectives of the foreign policy of the US of America remain unchanged: to destroy or to loosen the potential enemies, rivals or concurrents in order to keep as long as possible their status of unique Super-force. That they were "Western " or not. That they were ancient members of the Agreement of Warsaw or the close "allied" of NATO. This strategic integral or global doctrine of Washington appears clearly in the American concept of the "National Strategy of Security", which content was revealed to the public on the case of the apparition, in March 1992 of the Defense Planning Guidance of Pentagone elaborated in connection with "the National Security Advice" (NSA), higher American instance of Security and of the international policy. We found out that the USA should make everything " to dissuade the eventual rivals, among the advanced and industrially developed countries, to challenge our domination, will it whether be only to aspire to a larger role at the global or regional scale (...). The mission of the USA will be to assume that not be authorized to any competing power to emerge in the Western Europe, in Asia or on the CIS territory". For Washington, it is the matter to hinder the Europe and the Japan, "allied" relatively humble, as well as the weakened Russia, but still afraid to raise the head and to prejudice the American leadership, en fact to the perfect American economic - commercial power. "That is important, pursues the author of the report, it is the feeling that the international order is at last supported by the USA, which should be able to act independently as one collective operation can not be directed". More recently, another American official document emanating from the National Intelligence Community (NIC), published in January 2001 and entitled Global trends 2015 , gives the large lines of the state of the world and confirms the orientations of the Pentagone report. Redacted under the direction of John Gannon, this document repeats the strategic American priority to remain the unique Super-force and to dissuade any competitor or "anti-hegemonic" alliance. Among the countries capable to create a major threat as inclined to oppose to "the leadership" of Washington, the report mentions the triangle Russia - China-India, though the reserves be emitted issued on the capacities - and not the shy attempts -of the government of Vladimir Putine to restore the cape. In fact, this report is to put in parallel with the new international strategy of Bush jr republican Administration , marked by the returning from the veterans of the cold war and the key participants of the war of Gulf, as Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice or Donald Rumsfeld, author of the report (1998) denouncing the will of "the rogue States" (Iran, Iraq, Northern Korea, Sudan, Libya) to be supplied with ballistic arsenals. Rice and Rumsfeld do not miss however to denounce a Russia guilty to break its strategic environment coming nearer to China, to Iran and to India, and to renew with the communist powers as Cuba or China. For the new republican Administration, Russia remains thus a threat for the USA and West in its ensemble, and the hostility of the President Poutine to the extension of NATO in the Baltic Countries constitutes a "challenge" to the Super force of the USA.

Nominating simultaneously the rogue States and the Eurasia nuclear powers (China, Russia, India) rebellious as the major dangers, Global Trends 2015 confirms the unilateral orientation of the National Security Strategy of the USA which should manage to act without being limited by the international organizations and to pursue the project of the anti-missile defense in violation of non-proliferation agreements. We understand better, in the light the different strategic American reports, why the USA act under the mandate of the UNO in Iraq (1990-1991), as the solutions of the international organizations correspond to the American strictly national interests, but passes then in ex- Yugoslavia (1999) or again in Iraq (1998-2001), when "the internationalism" can not be more used as a strategic facade of the American geo-economic nationalism. The managing United Stated do not continue less to affirm that "the global superiority" of their country "necessary" to the Mankind, as it is supposed "to guarantee the Democracy and the Peace" in the world and the "the protection of the market economy". We deal here, we see it, to a total strategy, in this sense that the national strategy of the USA is as integral as integrated, as victorious as absolute, and that the American hegemony is actually justified and internalize by a legitimate ideology, forging the prestige and moral representations of the USA and its "charitable" leadership.

The total strategy, globalization and economy of fight

As well as some experts of the strategy contest the pertinence of the statement "war of the information", the others reject that of the "economic war", the war being exclusively connected, according to them, with the use of armed forces and generating ineluctably the loss of human lives. "The war is not the same thing as the competitiveness or the rivalry, commercial" or others, Laurent Murawiec explains, director Geo-policy Service. Therefore, we can not speak about war wildly" . The others in exchange, namely the General Pichot-Duclos and Nicolas Harbulot, in France, the creators of a "Military economic School", or still Edward Luttwak, leader of the strategic American idea, consider that the economic war is one of the main forms of a modern conflict.

We can define the economic war as a process by which the States or a groups of States develop royal means ( military force, ministries, cell of information, financial public helps, laws, legal stocks, diplomacy, special services, etc.) and oblique (media, international organs, NGO, etc.) to conquest or to conserve the markets, to the benefit of the national enterprises. In the context of globalization and of fierce competitiveness between three of the major poles of the economic power: the industrially developed countries of Asia - including Japan and China -; the USA (and wider NAFTA); and Western Europe, the statement of power is not considered more only among the nuclear heads, as understood Moscow after the falling of the Soviet Union and the interventions of NATO in Iraq and in the ex-Yugoslavia, but mainly in parts of markets and in rates of growth. In such a way the concept economic war does it testify that are not more the ideological - political blocks that collide in the world, but the States or the geo-economic blocks (that does not exclude at all that they were also geo-civilization) antagonists, concurrents or rivals.

Far from permitting the edification of the world integrated society, the globalization definitely gave birth to the reorganization of economic forces, the unification being limited only to the markets, that is to the field of battle and not to the actors, as the purpose is the total conquest of the market. Even increased up to the rank of optimum of second rank (economic regional unions), even of first rank (markets integrated under the banner of the WOC), the market continues to oppose the actors who act in the framework of severe competitions, as more ferocious, as there aren't any more protected markets and that the stake is not more to win a respectable party on a given product, in the manner to what was considered still in the 80, but to be the first, except all others, as illustrates the case of Microsoft in the field of computer science. In the mind of the American chiefs and their representatives in WOC, and liked by the anti-trust offices which are stirred up in the very America, the market is considered "opened" and thus "liberal" in presence of the "actual monopolies", whereas the theoretical possibility to question is recognition This new liberal hegemonic model allows to understand the sharpness of the Americans to impose, in the frameworks of WOC, the agricultural transgenic products, new food norm of tomorrow which they master perfectly, letting to the Europeans the protester and marginal market of "bio" products. It is in this context of bankruptcy of the competitive traditional liberalism, or the theories of free exchange and the right to the competitiveness are not more arms of rhetoric for the Europeans and the new industrially developed countries, which begin the new concept of "economy of fight", the American strategist Edward Luttwak explaining that the USA are appealed, if they want to preserve the first place, to transform their system of production into a machine of economic war.

However, the economic war is not separable from the other forms of war: military, "information", psychological, subversive, etc.. Far from substituting to the armed conflicts, it accompanies them, as well as we saw during the war of Gulf.

The total strategy and the Info-war

Translated by the American statement Information Warfare, the war of Information is at the base of the "technology of information", "information war" or "cyber - war" (electronic and information) and of "the psychological war", explains Laurent Murawiec, the director of Geo-policy Service . So, the Americans understood already for a long time that the traditional operations of the psychological war, consisting "to make lose the North in the adverse population", can perfectly be adapted to new technologies of direct tele-emission and to the electronic and information war (cyber-war). Therefore does it exist since already some years, in USA, a university (the "National Defense University") which delivers the diplomas "Infowarriors". We teach the multi- disciplinary methods and extremely elaborated aiming "to implant false realities and to conduct to psycho - cultural and political movements" going in the direction of American "national interests".

In reality, in USA, the psychological Operations (" PsyOps ") and the "Info-war", are not means among the others. They have much, even more, importance that the military classical operations, as it base and proceed the last ones. Briefly, the "psychological Operations" are decided by the White House itself, then conceived and led by the Central office of Information and Management of psychological Operations of Pentagone ; NSA; CIA; a Department of State; as well as the American Information Agency (US Information Agency, USIA), with all the branches (satellite international links, station of wireless and television). Therefore "the info-war" is it as much offensive as defensive war, so that all the American armies possess today the "cyber-war" cells , that it is the matter of Air Force Information Warfare Center, located on the air basis of Kelly, in Texas, of the 609th squadron of the Info-War of the American Aircraft, of the Group of psychological Operations of the Aircraft based in Fort Bragg, in Northern Carolina, the Fleet Information War Center (FIWC), or still the Joined Forces Information Warfare Command, JSIWC of Norfolk, in Virginia.

With the development of means of modern communication and the globalization of the economy, "the mastering of telecommunication webs, the production of information chips or even these of audiovisual series import more that possession of mines of petroleum ", remarked Philippe Cohen . Therefore classical (hard) domination does it cede to the soft (soft) hegemony. So after the second world war , the USA acquired progressively "a force of non-material pressing " (J. Sir Gaillard), which gives to them an absolute superiority in the problem of power and in a problem of cultural influence.

The Infowar is really based in a large party on spatial means, the principal modern method of the collection, of transmission and distribution of information. At the moment of coordination, information and pressing operations led by NATO in Kosovo between March and June 1999, more than 50 satellites were directly implicated. At least 15 in 20 different spatial systems were used in the preparation and in the fulfillment of the attacks. The spatial information thus became a multiplication of force at three levels: strategic, tactical and operational, at the unique profit of the power which masters the spatial technologies: the USA. As if the information is at the base of any strategy and any military operation, it is necessary to state that the non-American means of spatial information during the war in Kosovo were insignificant. With the unique satellite in orbit not used by the USA during the war, the Europeans took part to an armed intervention in quality of " blind operatives", deprived of any global vision of the theatre which possesses on the contrary the American command. "The capacity of the Europe to dispose with its destiny passes through the existence of a military European power which will not see soon the day. But the preliminary decisive stage to restoring of an independence of decision at all the levels will be the readiness of a military spatial force integrated, nevertheless easier to create than a force of integrated fight ", explains Jacques Blamont, adviser of the general Director of national center of spatial study (CNES).

Geo-strategy and civilization paradigm

Our study on geo-strategy and new forms of conflicted remain incomplete if we do not give a particular place to the paradigm of civilizations to reinstate the statement of the American professor Samuel Huntington. We certainly explained earlier that this paradigm should be used with precaution in the measure as the identity and civilization representations - as those ideological - are frequently instrumentalized by political responsible faces in order to mobilize the opinion and the masses of different struggling camps for the benefit of conflicted, belligerent, irredentism, etc enterprise. But we also reminded that the identity representations "make sense", regardless to their degree of historical truthfulness and instrumentalisation.

Despite the commonplaces relative to the "world village" and to the hypothetical "planetary consciousness" definitely peaceable, last consequence of the "happy globalization", the paradigm of civilization does not remain more receivable, because the "identity representations", that they are based on authentic facts or myths, "make sense" inside the masses and geopolitical actors. That we wanted or not, they make quantities of human beings, since time immemorial, accept to die for their religion, their nation, their identity or their civilization belonging. In the framework of the geo-strategic approaches, which analyzes any form of human conflicts, they should thus be considered, nevertheless Marx was right to have affirmed that only the reports of economic and material forces determine the course of the History.

Civilization shocks, a new paradigm after the cold war

For Samuel Huntington, the author of the loud essay, hardly debatable, entitled the Clash of civilizations, "a civilization is the highest mode of regrouping and the highest level of cultural identity which the human need to distinguish themselves from other sort, it is defined by elements simultaneously objective, as the language, the history, the religion, the customs, the institutions, and by the subjective elements of auto- identification ... the civilizations are the largest "we" and they are opposed to all the others " they" . The civilization thus defined is the answer to the main and ontological question that the human asks, to know, "who am I", " where from do I come". From there follows a religious size of the civilizations, because "the fundamental supreme valors", divided by the members of the same civilization, are based on transcendent, sacred, absolute principles .

For Huntington thus, the After cold War was characterized by a resurgence of identical and religious phenomena, for too long time "deprived" by the frame of ideological thinking inherited from the East- West collision and exacerbated by the globalization. Not only this last one seems strengthened the contacts between the peoples of the same civilization, due to means of communications, but it seems simultaneously provoked violent reactions of anti-western rejection, as beside the " West", the globalization or the globalization rhyme ineluctably with the "neo - imperialism". Despite the" end of the History", marked by Francis Fukuyama, proclaiming the definitive triumph of the " benevolent hegemony" of the American democracy, the international system seems stopped to turn around the unique West, in a phase of demographic and spiritual decline, according to Huntington to become multi-civilization or multi-polar. The great ideologies of the 20th century (liberalism, socialism, anarchism, corporatism, communism, social democracy, conservatism, nationalism, fascism, Christian democracy, etc.) will be henceforth to exhaust. The West losing its influence, these different systems, the symbols of its hegemony, will be on the road of decline. "Their place is taken by the religions and other forms of the identity and of engagement being based on cultural basses (...). Therefore, "the intra-civilization shock between the political ideas embodied by the West is on the way to be supplanted by the inter-civilization shock of cultures and religions" , explains Huntington.

Samuel Huntington counts seven main contemporaneous civilizations: western, Confucian, Japanese, Muslim, Indian, Slav- Orthodox, Latin American (western "over -rise"), and maybe eight with the "African". For the author of the Shock of civilizations, the main present and future conflicts will result from the shock opposing these different civilization between them, conflicts frequently very ancient, but reappearing violently almost everywhere since the end of the cold war, which "frozen", postponed, in some kind these conflicts. Among these seven civilizations, Huntington distinguishes four capable to acquire or to immortalize an international hegemony or still to counteract, in the long run, hegemony of one of them, mainly from the West: the West and the Islam, from one hand, two civilizations having the same "claim to the universe"; the Hinduism and China (or the Confucius world), on the other hand, non universal tradition, but in full extension and capable, during the next century to hand to contest the western hegemony or to resist to the proselyte attacks and the Islam conquerors, in full phase of renascence. Inside these principal "geo-civilization powers", two main angles of "global conflicts" appear: one around the major Islam civilization shock / non Muslim world; the other around the opposition, all also impressive, between, from one hand, the hegemonic West (the western "Super-society" with an universal pretension dominated by the USA), and from the other hand, the not western "Rest of the world " appearing or undeveloped: principally the Asian "Sino- Confucian" civilization, Islam and India, these three civilizations exceeding each of them a milliard of inhabitants.

The myth of "Globalization"

Contrary to some received ideas, "the globalization" is not a new phenomenon and it does not conduct necessarily to a unified and harmonious "planetary supra-society". Neutral process, thus independent from the ideological above mentioned projects, the globalization dates in fact from the 16-th and 20- th centuries and it was initiated by the international trade and the marine exchanges. We can define as the "immediate put in relation and the creation of relational, strategic, economic, scientific and financial transnational nets". For the philosopher Jurgen Habermas, as for Francis Fukuyama or Fouad Ajami in the USA, or still Jacques Attali and Guy Sorman in France, the globalization would mean the death of the nationalism, traditional religions and civilization identities. It would seal the arrival of a peaceable "international community", even of a "world government" (UNO, WOC, OSCE, Criminal International Court of Hague, etc.). According to this concept, the States- Nations will be real obstacles to the happiness of the human kind, which only the globalism can allow, installing a universal harmony. Therefore the wars would they be bad not by nature, but only as they are motivated by the defense of the national interests, vectors of "hatred" between the peoples, the very concept of nation being deleted. They are in exchange fair and lawful if they are conducted in the name of the universal moral principles (" the right of interference", "humanitarian intervention") and if they have for the purpose, as it was the case of the Joint Forces operation in Kosovo, to contest the principle of national sovereignty, for the benefit of "the right of minority" to dispose freely of themselves.

Forceful because of this pleasant certitudes, the supporters of the modern internationalism criticize the defenders of the "civilization paradigm" also affirm that " the shock of civilizations" is improbable because the means of modern communications tend to create a new form of "planetary" belonging. However, Internet and the satellites did not make at all to disappear the civilizations and the identities of peoples. They allowed on the contrary to these last ones to leave the limited and frequently historically artificial framework of the national state, to reach to a transnational, certain, but not cosmopolitan "civilization consciousness". "The explosion of media, explains François Thual, namely tele-visual and visual, allows still more than in the past to intensify the request, to exasperate the obsessions and to intensify threats. The internal and external conductivity of the identity themes was accelerated by the technical progress of communication (...). The media transform the identity into an emotional stream of sounds and images" .

If the philosophic - political internationalism is not globally divided only by the Westerns themselves, the " world" ideology frankly speaking, that Huntington named "Davos Culture", concerns only a small party of the planet (approximately 1- % of mankind). In reality, the Globalization in question is perceived by the other civilizations - which form, the 4 / 5 th of the globe - as an avatar and a "hypocritical mask" of the "western imperialism". Since then, the irreversible phenomenon of globalization, which nominates the modern and planetary means communication, should not be mixed up with the ideology of globalization and the structures, extremely western, of the above mentioned "international Community".

The boundaries of globalization
As to the globalization itself, as neutral phenomenon, it touches only a rather modest party of the human, public or economic activity. It does not hinder the American economy not to function that to 12 or 13 % on the extra-continental exchanges, nor the French, Italian or German export to be at first at European destination in the overwhelming majority. Therefore, as to France, the 3rd or the 4th world exporter according to the conjuncture and one of the countries most opened of the world, it is necessary to mark that the party of usual exchanges with the external does not reach 25 % of the GROSS INTERNAL PRODUCT, in very slow growth since the beginning of the century, and that these are carried out in 80 % with its close neighbors of the European Economic Space (European Union + EUROPEAN ASSOCIATION of free TRADE). The economies are not more opened today than they were not at the beginning of the century, and the global economic integration so marked is still far from being realized. In the financial sphere, at first, the convergence of the real interest rates is lower to that it was under the regime of gold standard. For those, which are multinationals, approximately three-quarters of their added cost come from their origin countries, so that the "global" firms save always a national basis. It is explained by the fact that the dismantling of some of their branches of activity concern precisely the not profitable branches with weak added cost.

The enterprises, despite of their growing internationalization, remain bound to their primary nation by their capital, their culture and main chiefs. In the work entitled "Generalization in Question" (1996), Paul Hirst and Grahame Thompson dispute with force even the concept of globalization, which extended as a irreversible phenomenon leading to annulment of borders and every possible barriers among people. According to them, speaking about globalization in the sense of generalization would mean that the world economy " is dominated by the global uncontrollable forces and that the main participants in the modification are authentic transnational firms; (that) these last are not obliged to an oath towards any state - Nation in particular, and select their place of implantation depending on a criterion of maximum advantage ", so many conditions, which can not be confirmed by the reality. Therefore the Anglo-Saxon free-trade economic doctrine requiring, under the WOC and AMI covering, abolishment of borders - mainly outside the USA, however - on behalf of the world economic growth and of the universal well-being, it appears to be also enslaving contract hardly benefiting from, that is in the USA, where the firms benefit from the most significant scale economies and where the internal legislation maintain actually a strong protectionism.

In his work "Jihad Versus Mc World" (1996), American sociologist Benjamin Barber has shown that the modern disastrous phenomena, as the urban and neo-tribal violence, the identity particularistic responses (sexism, regionalisms, separatism, and others), or still the religious integration, not because the other face of Janus of the process of globalization, which is a manufacturer of anomie and uprooting, thus of identity particularistic responses, which are compensatory and severe.

Everywhere, really, the ethnic - religious blocks, the particularities, the separatism and the every possible identity conflicts amplify. The vision of a ideal world, where all the peoples would live in peace attract, but it remains, unfortunately, widely not realistic. Only the intelligentsia from Europe and Northern America, which represents only a part of intellectual and economic elite of these continents, proclaim the inevitable arrival of the universal Harmony. Certainly, the melting pot, the inter-community marriages, the "anti-racism" are phenomena, which can be noticed inside the western societies, although they are carried out frequently in a context of impoverishment and "ghetto" of those, who are interested (zones of large concentration of immigrant communities). But whatever they say, the culture of cosmopolitanism and typically western philosophy so-called "Politically Correct" and "positive discrimination" concern only the rich "white" societies, which are getting old and representing hardly 15 % of human beings, if the Eastern European countries with an also completely decreasing demography are included too.

Correlative to this phenomenon, which seems to certify "the end of the history" and to announce "the universal citizenship", one can observe a growth of prolific and poor peoples from the south to the rich regions demographically decreasing of the Northern hemisphere, a phenomenon which Alfred Sauvy and General Gallois have labeled as the "inevitable rise of the people from the South to the North", phenomenon caused by the inexorable (but not necessarily inevitable) by the gap between the riches and the demographic pressure. There is a need to dispute the fact that the "multi-ethnic" idealism, extolled by the supporters of the global Village, has only one meaning. Certainly, the presence of the non-European immigrants is increasingly accepted and important in Europe. But the mass immigration, being far from being familiar to the universal Harmony, confirms first of all the gap between the riches and the economic inequality of the nations, which is an explosive phenomenon, from the point of view of the geo-strategic prospective, which risks one day to call wars and human dramas.
In parallel, inside the non-western civilization, this is more an opposite phenomenon to that one of melting pot, which has been mainly ascertained after the decolonization and the departure of the Europeans from the former colonies. In Western Africa, the rich Europeans and the "white" Lebanese businessmen, are more and more compelled to leave places, as the Chinese minorities victims of pogroms in the South-Eastern Asia, while the western tourists are regularly taken as hostages and sometimes even killed from Algeria to Cashmere, passing through Chechnya and Egypt. In India, even, the western Protestant exiles are sent threaten physically, however in the Chinese provinces, "The Haughty Western" are as undesirable, as "the black devils" (the Africans) or the Catholics, the Chinese culture always having considered other civilization as barbarous, in a Greek meaning of the term.

Everywhere in the world, in favor of a real nationalist or religious fever, the identity violence oppose among them nations, mainly those of the third world, and are at the basis of mass murders, from Cashmere till Sudan, passing through Indonesia of Nigeria. The racial and religious tolerance does not make any more income in Turkey - where the Kurds are persecuted, about one century after the Armenian genocide, always denied by Ankara, and the removal to work of the Greeks to Saudi Arabia, which is officially a slave, fundamentalist and racial state, or even to the black Africa, where the enemy peoples and tribes continue to exterminate each other, as it could be seen within the last years in Sierra Leone, in Rwanda, in Burundi or in other places.

The singers of the globalization hide besides the fact that the ascending poverty, the reduction of certain vital and strategic resources (mainly the petroleum and the water), as well as the climatic turbulence, do nothing but activate the geo-political conflicts among the nations or geo-civilization areas. Therefore, the so-called westernization-universalization, on the way to the whole world, and celebrated through what Guy Sorman or Alain Minc label as "the happy globalization", remain widely illusory.

The globalization strengthens in the end "the civilization memberships", particularly in favor of the constitutions of transitional geo-economic and coherent civilization poles: Agreements of Free Exchange from the north of America (NAFTA-United States-Canada-Mexico), the European Union ("the Fifteens" capable to become "the Twenties" or "The thirties"), the Chinese zone, the pan-Turkish zone, the Arabian-Islamic world (WIL, the World Islamic League), and others.

Therefore, the concept of trans-nationalism is not in any way a synonym for globalism or cosmopolitanism. Contrary to a geopolitical trans-national union of States belonging to the same civilization, as the Chinese space, the Hindu era, the States of Europe or of the Islamic world, can range very well within a framework of a revision of the Anglo-Saxon world universals, what the USA are afraid t of very much, when they try to impede the constitution of "geo-civilization anti-hegemonic coalitions" risking to dispute the values of "the international community" and the American "leadership", which is its guarantor. Where, for example, the American insistence to promote the entrance of an Islamic state, Turkey, in the European Union, in order that the EU does not become a "Jew-Christian Club", in fact a geo-civilization unit, which can be coherent and powerful, capable to compete against Washington. Therefore the essential component of the civilizations, which are the cultural traditions and the religions, mainly in their proselyte and theocratic versions, can be as walls of defense against "a globalization" levied as orientated to the west, neo-colonial and hegemonic, thus liquidating "the cultural identities". If the West is so much disputed by other developing "geo-civilization blocks", it happens because of the fact that it is as much liquidating of the traditional identities, as because it creates a new form of the imperialism, certainly "cosmopolitan", but concerning exactly the aboriginal century-old models.

"The West" in question and the Rest of the World

If the geo-strategic paradigm of cold War has died, as explains Huntington, in any case such as we have known it, a new form of bipolar collision risks to appear again within the next few years on the international stage, opposing this time the hegemonic West to the emerged authorities/powers, which became united inside "anti-hegemonic unions" to retake the statement accepted by Zbigniew Brzezinski in a work entitled "The Grand Chessboard". Such is the thesis, which is supported by General (CR) Pierre Marie Gallois, for whom the war of Kosovo can be analyzed as premises of a "Global Shock " among the advanced "Super-West ", which is dominated by the USA, and the western and former communist Rest of the World: Russia, India, China, Northern Korea and others. As to the initiator of the French "pressing force", the bombardment of embassy of China, during the operation of Joint Forces, can be analyzed as "a warning", thrown to Peking, in case if China tries to create "an anti-hegemonic" alliance against the USA with Northern Korea or Moscow. In addition, the American strategies are afraid, most of all, of all the emerging coalitions, which are recalcitrant for the American leadership: unions Russia - India - Iraq; Russia - India - Iran, Iran - China - Northern Korea - Russia and others.

Being far from refuting the "civilization" theories of Huntington, the geo-economic and cynical concept of the international policy, supported by Gallois, seems to be more complementary than antagonist, since the geo-strategy, like the Person itself, can not be reduced to one or other two large components of the person: the substance, (which corresponds to the geo-economy, and to the geography in general, to the "concrete" constants and variables), and the reason, the non-reality, (which refers to the ideological- religious, psychological and representative, "abstract" phenomena).

The theory of "all civilization" overestimates, certainly, the role of religions and cultures, still denying the technologic-economic relations of force and the geo-political constants, but the theory of "all geo-economic", on an example of Marxian, participates by a form of materialism, and denies both the representative and abstract phenomena, which, in any case, make senses: cultural, ideological, psychological and religious. In fact, the new paradigm of post- cold war time includes two fields of study, the civilization shocks can be completely doubled by the geo-economic shocks, as it is already the case between the Extreme - East (the "Sino - Confucian" world for Huntington) and the West.

According to Samuel Huntington, the shock between "the global West" and "the rest of the world", which is mainly Islamic, Confucian, and Hindu, will be a "civilization shock", within which "the arrogant/haughty universality of the West" will arouse a growing animosity of the unmanageable/rebellious civilization eras, the so-called universality not being hidden as the mask of a new imperialism. Huntington notices, not without correspondence, that, by its claim to the universality, the West keeps obviously that peoples all over the world should to join the values, the culture and the western institutions, which are considered as good for making the way of thinking "the most elaborated/perfect, the brightest, the most liberal, the most rational, the most modern". Or in a world full of ethnic conflicts and shocks among the civilizations, "the western belief in the universal applicability of its culture" has three main defects, in the opinion of the author: "it is incorrect, it is immoral and it is dangerous". Also the realistic theory of the international relations "predicts that the main States of non - western civilizations should become closer, in order to counterbalance the prevailing power of the West (...) the western universality is dangerous to the rest of the world, since it could be at the basis of a war among the main States of various civilizations, and for the West, since it could lead its own defeat" .

Therefore Huntington if afraid of the fact that the "forced" foreign policy of the USA, the "diplomacy of bombardments and embargo"(Gallois), established after War of Gulf, and followed by the new American Administration, despite of the non-interventionist credo of Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell, does not strengthen, in time, the hostile perception of the West in the world, reactivating for ever the shock of a civilization between the North and the South, which is besides more global as it feeds itself on the awful lack of equilibrium of the rich.

This jet and "anti-hegemonic" shock, which is both forecast and afraid of by Zbigniew Brzezinski, would oppose irreconcilably "The Globalize West" to "the traditionalism of the third-world", which is also labeled as the world on the way of "re-aboriginality ". By this term, Huntington specifies the phenomenon of a post-colonial revenge against "The imperialist West", which animates the second generation of politicians of the third world, especially the Muslims, the Hindus and the Chinese. This "re-aboriginality" will be sequentially behind the general ideology of the western ideological models. The developing world would begin thus the "second intellectual and ideological decolonization", which is encouraged paradoxically by the democracy, since the Muslims or the Hindus-founders win from now on the democratic elections, even if they are still frequently cancelled or impeded by the "secular" or military regimes established in (Algeria, Turkey, Tunis).

The "re-aboriginality" would thus pass mainly through the re-appropriation of non-western social-political models. Let's quote only Ali Ben Hadj, an intellectual leader of the Algerian IFS, expressing his fundamental and anti-western vision of the world in columns of journal "International Politics" in September, 1990:"my father and his brothers in religion have expelled physically the oppressive France from Algeria, I devote myself, with my brothers, with the faith's arms, to banish it intellectually and ideologically, and to finish with its supporters, who have sucked its poisonous milk (...). The relations with the third States and peoples are set up, in our eyes, on a strong belief: to spread the Islam in the world, and among all the nations and all the peoples. (...). Our relation with the Jews can be only the war, Jihad: the final point".

In the light of recent events suddenly occurred in Chechnya, in Macedonia (the irredentism of Albanian speakers of the UCK), in Ivory Coast, in Indonesia, in Nigeria or in Afghanistan, it is necessary to state that the number of human beings kill or agree to be killed, in order to protect the thing, which conceive as being their identity, their ideology or religion. Often, these representations are made instrumental by the political responsible persons, and motivated by the economic interests. But in other cases, especially the cases of the Islamic, who are ultra-founders Talibans in Afghanistan, decided to wipe off any trace of an ante-Islamic civilization, we deal with the totalitarian ideological-religious phenomena of a rare violence. Almost autonomous, which means emerged on a praxis, without being a simple rhetorical emanation of concrete or external interests (or avoiding all this, in case of necessity), these geo-strategic phenomena of ideological kind and the geo-civilization ones contradict the laws of economy and of modern political authority. Since rather than to conclude an attractive agreement of building pipelines with the American company Unocal and to be recognized by the international community - with the only condition to deliver an Islamic terrorist Oussama Ben Laden - the Talibans have preferred to be internationally separated, the impoverishment, and even the gradual degradation with their strategic allies, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. In pragmatic real-policy, the ultra-fundamentalist Sunnis, that they were Talibans, "neo- Wahhabs", and others, prefer sometimes the total chaos, which is not without reminding the national-socialist end of days. These phenomena, which can not be understood by the rationalism and even in a cynical vision such as Machiavellian just as in common sense, the contemporary geo-strategy of totalitarian phenomena must be taken into consideration.

As an objective discipline, the geo-strategy analyzes without taboo all the forms of conflict, including this kind of ideological-religious conflict in a sense (or even in a civilization claim). The paradigm of a shock of the civilizations, analyzed peacefully in the USA within a real discussion, which is proved in the work of Samuel Huntington, more respected as being transatlantic than booed inside the societies of the Old Continent, mainly in France, it seems to be hit in Europe in a way of a methodological taboo and by a disqualification of principle, in the name, sometimes, of a closely state-nationalist concept of the international relations, sometimes, on the contrary, by virtue of a internationalist and peace-making postulate, which is "politically correct", which disqualifies any speech describing the military possibilities of any religious doctrine.

So, the forbidden philosophy, which is also so-called "politically correct" and totalitarian, canceling the foreign dichotomy of foreign/local, and denying, by principle, the identity and civilization dimensions, aims to disqualify, in fact, the geo-strategic approach and the scientific research in a problem of defense, for the simple reason that the evaluation of threats and the means of defense, intended to resist these threatens, and which is also analyzed by the geo-strategy, involving the acceptance of account, by the strategist and the geo-political theorist, of variables and ideological, economic, psychological, geographical, ethnic - cultural, religious, and thus civilization contacts, which oppose and distinguish unavoidably the nations and civilizations among them. The geo-strategist, as the military strategist, the geo-political theorist, and even the war studies, are, in principle, "politically incorrect".

The biographic note

* Alexandre del Valle, a contributor in Geo-policy in Paris II and at the International Institute of Strategic Studies (IIES), is the author of an essay with a foreword of General P. M. Gallois: "The Islam and the USA (The Age of Human Being, 1997) and also cooperates in the various journals of geo-policy (Herodote ; The Strategic, The geo-Strategic, Quadrennial Geopolitics) or of actual politics ("The Figaro Magazine", "Spectacle du monde", "The Panoramiques", and others).
In his last work, "The War against Europe: Bosnia, Kosovo, Chechnya" (2001, edited by Syrtes), Alexandre del Valle makes a general picture of the world of geopolitics the after cold War period, then makes modern and confirms the analyses developed in his first essay and shown in the present article.