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(Series Information) European Papers - A Journal on Law and Integration, 2020 5(1), 387-401 | European Forum Insight of 25 April 2020 | (Table of Contents) I. Introduction. - II. Requests for assistance from certain EU Member States and replies received. - II.1. Italy. - II.2. Spain and France. - III. Available assistance mechanisms and their use in the COVID-19 crisis. - III.1. Ad hoc Assistance. - III.2. The NATO Euro-Atlantic Disaster Response Coordination Centre. - III.3. The EU Civil Protection Mechanism. - IV. Lessons learned and further research paths. - IV.1. The lack of public information and the need for transparency of European public action. - IV.2. Realpolitik and the civil-protection autonomy of the Union. - IV.3. The gap between EU citizens' expectations and the Union's competences. | (Abstract) It is of course too early to draw conclusions about the European Union's response to the COVID-19 crisis in its Member States while we are still in the midst of the health crisis. On the other hand, it is already possible to correct the widely shared first impression that European solidarity had been shattered. The available public data systematized in Section II and the analyses in Section III show that European solidarity has been expressed in two ways: First, bilaterally between EU Member States; second, collectively under the recent impetus of the European Commission. To help explain this impression of the absence of a Union, Section IV proposes three paths that should be the subject of further research: public information and the policy of transparency of European public action, the Union's emergency-reaction autonomy in the face of third countries' Realpolitik strategies, and the gap between the expectations of the Union's citizens and its actual competences.

Boa parte dos desafios do direito internacional atual dizem respeito a sua localização epistemológica. Decisões na Corte Internacional de Justiça são carregadas, até pela própria natureza da Corte, de conflituosidade entre estados, falhando por vezes na efetividade das decisões da Corte. Critica-se, ainda, o direito criminal internacional por não ter eficácia em algumas situações como o mandado de prisão contra Omar al Bashir, que continuou exercendo a Presidência do Sudão até abril de 2019 (mesmo tendo contra si mandado de prisão do Tribunal Penal Internacional – TPI), e o tratamento da Corte para a situação do Afeganistão (perante o TPI). Na realidade, deve-se avaliar se esta suposta ineficiência do tribunal seria resultado de problemas jurídicos ou políticos. Há limites operacionais para o direito internacional e para o direito criminal internacional que estão além da esfera jurídica, em desafios jamais enfrentados por operadores do direito em outras áreas, em especial porque o TPI não opera a partir de uma estrutura estatal nacional, mas depende da boa vontade de estados. The main focus of this article os to check the limits of applicability of international criminal law regarding to political obstacles. The key question is related to verifying how much international criminal law could become a mere instrument of some states’ realpolitik. Even if international law is marked by a strong idealism, it still seems far from their central objective. The article has two essential aspects of development: on the first the structural epistemology of international criminal law and realpolitik are studied, while on the second part the focus is on a series of case studies to check how does international law finds balance between two seemingly antagonic points, normativity and politics. The studied cases are Nicaragua v. USA, as a base for comparison with international criminal law, the Omar al Bashir case , related to the cooperation (or the lack thereof) between state parties of the Rome Statute and the International Criminal Court and the situation in Afghanistan, before the ICC, still developping.

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Pragmatism and progress. Political discourse in Europe between Juste milieu and Realpolitik (1830-1860). The emerging political culture of Juste Milieu and the career of the «moderate » project of politics were two main agents of change in nineteenth-century Europe. The article analyses the plurality of argumentative patterns and semantic transformations around the concept of «middle way» from the French Revolution up to the Italian and German nation building after 1860. The controversial juxtaposition between the conservative-based symbolic language of politics and the growing expectation of liberal reforms led to a widespread debate across Europe. Especially after the July Revolution in 1830, country specific terms and political discourses on the paradigm of moderatism emerged not only in France but also in Germany, Italy and in the Iberian Peninsula. Liberal and conservative moderates were successful in initiating and implementing constitutional reforms and nation building. They convincingly proclaimed to prevent future instability and to refuse to comply with the two opposite extremisms of revolution and reactionary conservatism. This paper proposes to reassess the Age of Revolution paradigm and to examine the first half of the nineteenth century as a period of moderatism-led crucial transformations of modern political discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For decades there has been a continuous complaint on the lack of an authentic interest and of a general scientific concern regarding the perseverance of the concept “crusade" in modern centuries; in recent years, however, much has been published, although the prevailing interpretation has been explaining the persistence of anti-ottoman military expeditions not as a continuation of the crusade spirit, but merely as an expression of sheer realpolitik or of dynastic interests. Truth be told, without denying the good reasons that lie behind this interpretation, it is the actual inquiry of events and of people that took part in the Gonzaga's expeditions between the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century, that seem to limit this assumption, especially with the key figure of Carlo Gonzaga Nevers, whose “big dream" of conquering Constantinople and of a “Catholic-Protestant crusade", spot him together with history's major players of the first quarter of the seventeenth century. Although this is an eminently “evenemential" work, it provides indeed a still-to-be-completed historical framework, which is not only of great historiographical exclusive interest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]