Word: moisi
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Contributors: Marguerite Johnson, Dominique Moisi, Michael Walsh...
Contributors: Marguerite Johnson, Dominique Moisi, Michael Walsh...
Even if their heads tell the French that Germany has changed, the carnage of World War I followed by the humiliating defeat and Nazi occupation of World War II has not been erased from their hearts. "The French are deeply insecure," says Dominique Moisi, associate director of the Institute for International Relations in Paris. "The Germans are asserting themselves, and we are growing fearful. Our fears may not be well founded, but we have them nonetheless, and a fearful people will not always distinguish carefully between myth and reality." Recent polls nevertheless show that large majorities in most Western countries...
...Genetic Fallacy. As Moisi observed, fearful people do not always recognize reality. In the German case, concern is based on the assumption that aggression and fascism are in some way the result of genetic defects that particularly afflict Germans. If not in the genes, another line of thinking holds, perhaps the evil is rooted in national character. Neither notion is scientifically valid. "You can't talk about something genetically wrong with the German people," says Moshe Zimmerman, professor of German history at Jerusalem's Hebrew University. "All the characteristics attributed to Germans may be found in Swiss, Americans and others...
Dominique Moisi, co-founder of the French Institute for International Relations, finds that anti-German attitudes have become "rather fashionable among the French elite." The "climate of opinion," he says, is "moving in the wrong direction. We are beginning to see Germany presented as the new Japan within Europe. Japan is a code word for something alien, something non- European." He believes, on the contrary, that Germany is a "truly European power" and its unification will be a "positive thing...