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ACL(facteur d'impact)International audienceThis article discusses some findings of a European research project led by Bergen University, 'Eurosphere: Diversity and the European Public Sphere - Towards a Citizens' Europe'. The project aimed to evaluate perceptions of the construction of a European Public Sphere and of transnational relations among specific social actors interviewed in 16 European countries, between 2007 and 2012. In this particular article, the authors first examine reactions to the European Diversity Directive in France among three political parties (2 majority and 1 minority), three think-tanks, three NGO/SMO, and four media. Analysis of their attitudes towards diversity reveals a Girondin/Jacobincleavage across actors. The Directive on Diversity is estimated to have had a positive impact in France because it obliged organizations and institutions to position themselves and revisit the debate on racial and postcolonial questions and on the European role in the democratization process of European societies. Concerning the relationship between the French and the EU's attempts to build a European public sphere, we find not so much a European Public Sphere understood in the thick sense of the concept but, rather, a progressive Europeanization of the French national public sphere.Cet article est une présentation synthétique des résultats du projet de recherche européen conduit par l'université de Bergen, 'Eurosphere: Diversity and the European Public Sphere - Towards a Citizens' Europe'. Son but était l'évaluation de la construction d'une sphère publique européenne auprès d'acteurs sociaux spécifiques interrogés dans 16 pays européens, entre 2007 et 2012. Le principal axe de réflexion fut la mise en oeuvre de la Directive européenne sur la Diversité. Il s'efforce, tout d'abord, de rendre compte de la réception de la Directive en France auprès de trois partis politiques majoritaires et petits partis régionaux, trois think-tanks, trois mouvements sociaux/ NGO et quatre media. L'article met en évidence le clivage girondin/jacobin dans la réception en France de la directive Diversité: celui-ci traverse presque tous les acteurs, souvent au profit d'un discours républicain/jacobin, qui semble se durcir aujourd'hui mais qui associe chez tous les acteurs la nécessité d'associer étroitement les préoccupations sociales à celle de la diversité dans sa mise-en-oeuvre au sein du modèle républicain. Il évalue positivement l'impact de cette directive en France dans la mesure où elle a obligé organisations et institutions à se positionner par rapport à elle et à reposer notamment le débat sur la question raciale et post-coloniale et sur le rôle de l'Europe dans le processus de démocratisation des sociétés européennes. Concernant la relation entre les tentatives européennes et françaises de construire une sphère publique européenne, nous avons trouvé qu'il n'existe non pas tant une sphère publique européenne qu'une européanisation progressive de la sphère publique française

After the implosion of the Soviet Union, democratization processes in all the post-Soviet republics took their specific paths. This chapter highlights the particular characteristics of these processes, focusing on three examples: Estonia, Moldova, and Kazakhstan. It demonstrates that the concept of trust has different meanings in the democratization processes in each of these republics, whether it refers to trust in political institutions, in inter-ethnic relations, or in interpersonal relations. All these meanings and kinds of trust have contributed to the stabilization of political systems in the post-Soviet republics and to coping successfully with the hard path of democratic transition. This chapter explores how to establish democratic systems and institutional trust in the post-Soviet republics and peacefully manage the demographic and cultural heterogeneity in building a democratic nation. Consequently, this involves the respect of minority rights that conform to the standards of the Helsinki agreements.

In this article I propose to explore the meanings, mechanisms and issues at stake in the reconstitution of identities which can now be seen taking place in the countries of the post-communist space. We shall consider this space not as a thing in itself, but in terms of its old and new interactions with the countries of western Europe, in order to understand the phenomena of reconstructed identities in general, in the context of their relationship to the period of globalisation in which we now find ourselves.The notion of space is complementary to the historical perspective of the analysis proposed here, which conceptualises the interaction between spatial groups (nations, states, 'natural groups') and social groups (classes) in terms of paradigms. It also has the advantage of postulating the existence of a 'substratum' capable of accepting different forms of identity. The emphasis is on the current reconstruction of identities, religions and politics in the global space as it relates the economic and social identities of particular contexts.We shall consider what remains in place, as well as those aspects which are reconstructed ; we shall look at the interaction or possible interference between the various cultural and political traces in each society; these traces, both old and not so old, become superimposed, combining in a peculiar alchemy. Beneath the surface, between what was there before and what has now been reconstructed, is a process we can identify in terms of the prefixes 'de', 'dis' or 'un': de-construction, dis-integration, the un-writing of the reference points built up under communism, which had itself disintegrated and reconstructed what was there before.All attention is on the social movements of the contemporary period, which are carrying out this process of the progressive deconstruction of the paradigms of the centralised nation state in both East and West. What required reconstruction after 1989 can be termed re-individualisation, re-privatisation or re-capitalisation; in other words a re-harmonisation with the social mechanisms in operation throughout the non-communist space.In some cases, we are witnessing a form of restoration of not the communist, but the pre-communist period (restoration of private property, of democratic institutions if there were any, or of conceptions of the nation inherited from that past). In other cases the restoration is more of a symbolic reformulation to re-root the society in a longer-term historical continuity.The idea of the re-construction of identity thus supposes both that there has already been a de-construction of identities in relation to the reference points current in the communist space -constructed within the national / class paradigm -and the temptation to replace it with a pre-construction that evades historical temporality (the ethnic group) as opposed to a matrice that is open to a new political future. This is usually for reasons