Unhelpful Fixer? Canada,the Euromissile Crisis,and Pierre Trudeau's Peace Initiative, 1983–1984*

ABSTRACT

This article provides the most rigorous international history to date of Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau's 1983 peace initiative, one of Canada's major foreign policy ventures of the Cold War, examining both Trudeau's motives and the reception of his initiative among Canada's allies. Drawing on newly declassified sources in Canada, it uncovers the two-track strategy behind this initiative, aiming to mobilise Western European leaders to exert pressure on the Reagan Administration on the one hand, while quietly urging European allies to call for a review of NATO strategy on the other. Based on previously unavailable archival materials from seven different countries, this article also reveals how the Canadian initiative was received by the world leaders Trudeau sought to win over. It reassesses the Canadian initiative, revealing that it borrowed heavily from existing proposals from other countries, and that NATO leaders viewed the initiative as a mere electoral ploy to help Trudeau win re-election rather than a serious project to ease East–West tensions. This article concludes that with this initiative Canada was not in fact playing the role of a ‘helpful fixer’ and that the initiative constituted part of a wider and understudied trend in government responses to the ‘Second Cold War’.     

A case of local rejection of a heritage tourism policy: tourism and dynamics of change in Abondance,French Alps

Despite the opportunities offered by developing and enhancing cultural heritage in the tourism sector, this article, based on a case study of a little town in the French Alps, shows that public policy of this type may also be subject to criticism and dispute. In the town of Abondance, a small ski resort being converted to cultural tourism site built around heritage, the demonstration observed involved both a desire to keep the skiing and a questioning of the political process, but also a rejection of the alternative solution involving the development of the cultural heritage of the Gothic Court of Savoy. During the qualitative survey of the social reactions, three types of arguments have been raised. (1) As summarised by one of the local leaders ‘the people do not believe in it’. Indeed, local shopkeepers are sceptical that cultural tourism will draw numerous visitors, and fear that is not economically viable. (2) In contrast to the ski resort, heritage tourism is only attached to the imagination of old age, immobility and even death, as if seniority of places necessarily corresponds to seniority of public and images. (3) For residents of the town, setting up a localised visit site has disadvantages because of the turnover of touristic traffic to which this type of tourism is exposed.     

Making History, Talking about History

Making history—in the sense of writing it—is often set against talking about it, with most historians considering writing history to be better than talking about it. My aim in this article is to analyze the topic of making history versus talking about history in order to understand most historians' evident decision to ignore talking about history. Ultimately my goal is to determine whether it is possible to talk about history with any sense.
To this end, I will establish a typology of the different forms of talking practiced by historians, using a chronological approach, from the Greek andRoman emphasis on the visual witness to present-day narrativism and textual analysis. Having recognized the peculiar textual character of the historiographical work, I will then discuss whether one can speak of a method for analyzing historiographical works. After considering two possible approaches—the philosophy of science and literary criticism—I offer my own proposal. This involves breaking the dichotomy between making and talking about history, adopting a fuzzy method that overcomes the isolation of self-named scientific communities, and that destroys the barriers among disciplines that work with the same texts but often from mutually excluding perspectives. Talking about history is only possible if one knows about history and about its sources and methods, but also about the foundations of the other social sciences and about the continuing importance of traditional philosophical problems of Western thought in the fields of history and the human sciences.     

Commerce and the European City Center: Modernization,Regeneration and Management

The Second European Congress on Commerce and City was held in Lille between 15 and 17 November 2000. It was organized by the French Ministry of Economy, Finance and Industry under the umbrella of the French Presidency of the European Union. Its major aim was to discuss how, and under what conditions, the evolution of commerce in Europe can contribute to the renaissance of European cities. The congress included plenary sessions, the presentation of two major studies on commerce and urban regeneration in Europe, three guided study tours, and the discussion of 25 European best practices aggregated into four thematic workshops: city strategies, enterprise strategies, public-private cooperation, and urban planning tools and programmes. This paper identifies those best practices, highlights some of the discussed issues, and presents a synthesis of the congress's declaration.     

Kinetic effect of carbonic anhydrase enzyme on the carbonation reaction of lime mortar

The effect of carbonic anhydrase enzyme on the precipitation kinetics and phase transformations of calcium carbonate, and on the strength development of lime mortars has been investigated with saturated lime solutions, lime pastes and lime mortars under atmospheric conditions. The results clearly show that carbonic anhydrase catalyzes the reaction between carbon dioxide and aqueous lime, and increases the rate of calcium carbonate crystallization, the yield of the carbonation reaction and mortar strength at early ages. This is most likely a kinetic effect associated with the increased rate of carbonate ions supply to the solution by the enzyme. In addition, this enzyme favors the formation of stable calcite and significantly modifies its morphology by developing new crystal faces. These results suggest a novel approach for accelerating the hardening of lime mortars using carbonic anhydrase enzyme, which may offer a potentially novel approach with significant benefits on the applications of lime mortars in architectural heritage conservation as well as in construction.