Historian Pierre-Etienne Will decodes the current official reevaluation in China of some Qing dynasty officials as great patriots and paragons of bureaucratic ethics.It may be attributed to the resemblance between present-day political life and the context of fear and muffled political confrontations that characterize the Qing, contrary to the Ming.
Critics of Catalanism often reduce the movement to a reaction based on economic and fiscal selfishness. Jeanne Moisand shows how Catalanism originally identified itself with the defence of protectionism and the Spanish empire. It was only after the latter had been lost that the Catalan economic identity became opposed to the Spanish nation.
In this article derived from a conference given at Princeton University in November 2008, Pierre-Etienne Will discards culturalist arguments justifying the absence of a democratic regime in China and searches for “sprouts of democracy” in Chinese history.
Empires are not necessarily the obsolete political form that the historiography likes to condemn. Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper offer a global and long term history that convincingly shows their relevance and complexity. Should not the European Union look at empires of the past to define its sovereignty?
