The man readily describes himself as a “Burgundian peasant.” This modesty does him credit. However, when listing his past positions, Director of Chase Manhattan Europe, General Manager of Midland Bank plc, President of Thomas Cook, Managing Director of Société Générale de Belgique…, he is more likely categorized among the large landowners. The aristocratic perspective does not exclude common sense. Perhaps this strange synthesis characterizes the latest work of this former Professor of International Business Strategy at IEP Paris. Hervé de Carmoy calls for an intellectual, almost civilizational, revolution made possible by an “urgent awakening of individual consciousnesses” freed from both *a priori* assumptions and false truths: “Germany is us,” the author asserts from the introduction because there are “no more real borders on earth.” Regardless of the differences that may arise at Franco-German summits between Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy, the time is no longer about globalization but, for better or worse, about “globality,” an advent of “the world as the main actor in all earthly affairs.” One might expect an inevitable and imminent cold, dehumanized conceptual takeoff about liberalism, yet one would be wrong: the clay sticks to the boots of this “Gentleman farmer.” The inalienable and essential, that which, if one dares say, keeps the planetary shop running, is man. Or rather men: “billions of practices performed by almost all of the living.” This idea, already inculcated by this Vice-President of the Trilateral Commission in his Sciences Po students and tested, with some success it seems, in international finance, was not indeed asserted in his work “The Enterprise, the Individual, the State, Leading Change” (Odile Jacob 1999) that at the heart of the entrepreneurial approach is the fact of ordering “thousands of micro-changes that take place day after day, week after week, in a specific human community”?
To this difficult-to-define “globality” in terms of human mass but oh-so-real in its effects felt by the latter daily, the author proposes to associate the notion of “Empirie,” a new denomination for this uncontrollable accelerations and halts engine. Only two entities, according to him, can still manage to channel the inherent violence, at other times the founder of positive mutations, of this “world” actor, a sort of Leviathan of modern capitalist times: the United States and Europe. Provided they stop their vain rivalry and learn to rediscover their “value base and common interests.” And to reverse what is called elsewhere the chain of command: descending from international organizations to states, then to individuals, accepting to reinvest the latter with the power to change the game. Only, observes Hervé de Carmoy, Americans and Europeans share a history, education, and culture that not only bring them together but also make them capable of inducing this fundamental mutation on a human scale. The BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, and China), mired in the paradoxes of their chaotic economic development, reveal themselves at present incapable of taking an active part, and moreover harmless for the human being, in this revolution of minds.
The author is well aware of the “angelicism” of some of his proposals. To believe nowadays in man’s intelligence would make more than one smile. But the tone of his commitments suggests that this is not a spurious reflection. Certainly, a touch of nostalgia can be felt here and there— and a few consequent contradictions in the text — about the eminent role played by the State: to the point that the author seems sometimes hesitant about the last-chance missions to be entrusted to it. But the facts, doubled with figures, tend to comfort him in the universality of his reasoning. Hervé de Carmoy, we will hardly complain in these times of constant compromises and ideological lukewarmness, is at times a stubborn, if not fierce, supporter of Western democracy. The dictatorial excesses of Russia, the sterile enrichment of the Arab-Muslim world, Japan’s role reduced to a “hyphen” between two continents, a Latin America undermined by “pustules of banditry,” an Africa that “counts less, apart from energy, than the rock of Hong Kong when it comes to GDP,” and a “China in midstream” would thus find little favor in his eyes. Not to mention Islamist terrorism, whose only victory is having “organized the world around it,” staving off almost “a point of global growth,” but ultimately doomed to certain failure.
Whether it irritates — which it will inevitably do while delighting its author — or generates enthusiasm for its boldness, this booklet comes indeed at an opportune time: after the dismal experience of the current US administration, and for that very reason, the United States should undergo profound changes while Europe, led by a German Chancellor and a French President more in sync with Washington, opens new prospects for transatlantic cooperation. Suffice it to say that the conditions for a “Euramerica” as mentioned by Hervé de Carmoy have never been more in place. Prescient book or “wishful thinking”? Answer after the American election.
Hervé de Carmoy, “L’Euramérique,” Collection “Quadrige, essais débats,” Editions PUF, 2007, 180 p., 14 euros.
