In the latest issue of the review Politicfive historians, sociologists and political scientists analyze, from concrete cases, the way in which a decision in politics is made. The file invites us to complicate the approach of decision -making processes by going beyond the opposition between determinism and exaltation of the decision maker.
The theme of the decision checks the instability of representative standards characteristic of our time. In international matters, in domestic politics, in economics, for two decades, decision -making voluntarism and the managing Aboulie alternately govern the speeches of opinion makers and those of political actors. The same, often, pass through the circumstances of one vision to another, according to an erratic rhythm whose recent French policy gives an emblematic example. This alternation seems to first reflect competition from two social models, one conceiving the “ governance »In the mode of entrepreneurial management, the other making normative choices the specifically political dimension. On the one hand an economist vision, on the other a political vision of society. The last delivery of the review Politic deserves to hold attention, especially because it can help free us from this alternative. The succinct text which opens this file, essentially descriptive of the studies which compose it, does not seek to request them to draw common conclusions. While being careful not to claim it, we would like to show that this publication can help refresh the problem of political decision.
These “ Decision figures Consist in five case studies, well -defined historiographical objects. Florent Brayard returns to the heavy file of the Nazi decision to give a “ final solution to the Jewish question ». Brigitte Gaïti shows how General de Gaulle was led to put his political existence in 1968 and 1969. Sylvain Laurens examines how – at the beginning of the seven -time Giscard d’Estaing in 1974 – a total measurement of borders to immigration was adopted. Isabelle Bruno, examining the Lisbon system implemented by the European Union since 2000, questions the relationship between governance and decision model. Benjamin Lemoine, finally, shows how the theme of public debt is the object, between 2003 and 2007, of a double reversal, from economist fatalism to political heroism and vice versa. Each of these researchers being a specialist in the area addressed, none dealt with the case examined as an example illustrating a thesis, but always as a specific object considered under the problem of the decision. This dossier therefore offers a series of singular decision -making process studies, or rather processes displaying or on the contrary denying itself as such. The chronological order adopted is an editorial convenience which manifestly has no thesis concerning a hypothetical evolution of the practice or the theory of decision. Nor does it seem that it is necessary to grant a particular meaning to the fact that these studies focus mainly on French and European politics of the last half century. This set, however, presents a deep methodological and problematic unity.
Although registering in various disciplinary approaches (that of the historian, the sociologist or the political scientist), these studies have in common not to presuppose any general theory of the decision but to proceed in the opposite direction: they seek to examine by the analysis of cases how concretely is a decision -making process. They thus deprive themselves of the brutal opposition between a tendency to exalt the moment and the author of a decision and that, dominant in the field of social sciences, which consists in dissolving the decision in a causal chain whose decision -making discourse would be only the imaginary dressing. Thus F. Brayard, relying on new sources, shows that the conception of the “ final solution And the decision of its implementation was not stopped at an instant T but built in a temporal sequence of a certain magnitude, which does not lead him to dilute the dimension of decision but rather to the increase in analytically. One of the subtitles of B. Gaïti (“ How de Gaulle is forced to become of Gaulle again ») Says the paradox that this study discerns: it is a binding political context which, during the winter 68-69, leaves no other outcome to the weakened president than to adopt a proactive posture, the ultimate effort not to bend to a sufficient necessity. There would be the very type of a “ Charismatic decision -making configuration ». The articles by Sylvain Laurens and Isabelle Bruno participate in this same effort to complex models. The first refutes the illusion of a turn -point In terms of immigration, a decisive choice before a situation, showing how, over time, the transformation of mental executives and the change of high administration staff had prepared a reversal of attitude towards migratory flows. In doing so, it changes the temporal framework and moves the premises of the decision but does not dissolve it in a process without an actor. The title of i. Bruno (“ Is there a pilot in the union ? ) May suggest that we should choose between the hypothesis of a disappearance of the decision in the mode of European managerial governance and that of Machiavellian concealment of the decision under the appearance of technocratic management. This article explores another path, recognizing the emergence of new decision -making processes, new actors in the decision (the “ advisers ), And new operators, statistics and accounting, of its implementation. We must think about “ governance Neither as erasure nor as a mask of the decision, but as another form, adapted to its own ends, of the political decision.
As we will have understood, these studies, taken together, do not lead to neutralizing or disqualifying the problem of political decision, but, by relativizing the simple and naive model of the decision as a unity of time, actor and thought, invite us to complexify our approach to decision -making processes. This prompt does not only concern specialists.