DHeat waves, record temperatures, gigantic fires… This summer again, the evidence of climate change is obvious, sensitive and painful. Yet major public policies are still lacking. The ecological crisis is still and always relegated to a specific ministry. In France as elsewhere, it is a dimension of public policies at a time when it should be at the center.
How to give a central place to this vital crisis for humanity? How to put it at the heart of a powerful general policy? Is the solution on the side of war and its economic springs, as suggested by the title of a symposium held on June 10 at the Collège des Bernardins, “For a climate war economy? »? It was a question of inviting our economies and our societies to fight against global warming by following the principles of a war economy, that is to say a warlike commitment of the entire economic apparatus against a well-identified enemy. .
A formidable social, technical and economic laboratory
The parallel with the American industrial mobilization of the Second World War is particularly enlightening. By committing the United States to the “arsenal of democracy” in 1940, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1882-1945) began a decisive process.
Around a great democratic cause against the forces of the Axis (Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy), the objective was to radically reorient the American economy. The bet was far from over. Only the nineteenth military power in the world, grappling with massive unemployment (more than 20%) that has been on the rise since 1937, torn by deep social tensions, the country of Uncle Sam has nevertheless emerged completely transformed from the years of war. .
In 1945, the United States was the world’s leading military and economic power, produced half of the planet’s gross domestic product, had an unemployment rate of 1% and was at the center of a new geopolitics. At the heart of this radical change, we find a largely reconverted economy (we no longer produce cars), a formidable social, technical and economic laboratory, a society entirely devoted to victory.
Resorting today to the imagination of American industrial mobilization, to its practices, to its change of strategic scale, is therefore tempting. Why not enter our turn into this great existential mobilization? Why not put the economy at the service of a strategy rather than the strategy at the service of the economy?
You have 54.54% of this article left to read. The following is for subscribers only.