Tocqueville Conversations 2024

Our next Conversations were held in a political and geopolitical context radically different from our three previous editions. Since we first launched our conferences, the deep democratic crisis in Europe and the United States has been the focus of our attention. But with the total war launched by Vladimir Putin’s regime against his Ukrainian neighbor, Ukraine, Europe, the whole democratic world and its geopolitical balance are brutally threatened and disrupted. We find ourselves confronted to a war which, from one moment to the next, can jump over the fragile fence of the Ukrainian borders, and reach the West. We are, as in 1914, on the brink of confrontation. Ukraine is fighting for us against a regime that has shown its true face and no longer hides the fact that its enemy is both Ukrainian and Western. Moscow sees itself fighting a civilizational war against the West. What are the causes of this catastrophe? What does Putin want? What are the motives and goals of the violent national-imperialism that he embodies? Is it a relapse of communist totalitarianism or a much older despotic and imperial operating mode? Do we have a responsibility, as the Kremlin keeps saying, accusing the West of having encircled it? Or was it our strategic blindness to the reality of the Russian threat and our series of renouncements in response to its repeated aggressions that have led to disaster? What will be the political and geopolitical consequences of the extraordinary Ukrainian resistance that is unfolding before our eyes? What is at stake in this battle? How does it concern us? And what answers should the Western democracies give to this existential challenge? How can we get out of the war and how can we build peace and security in Europe and more generally in the new world in which we have been thrown without being fully aware? Could this crisis, as dramatic as it is, be the occasion for a salutary leap forward for our Western societies, which had perhaps forgotten the tragedy of history and the price of freedom?