During the referendums of 1980 and 1995, Jocelyn Coulon was outside the country. This speaks volumes about the interest that this researcher, author, journalist, director of a peacekeeping center and teacher had in the geopolitical issues of the planet.
His most recent work, The course of historyinvites us to retrace this path with him and see the world change.
Anyone who has ever read or heard Jocelyn Coulon knows that he has a formidable spirit of synthesis and analysis. His training in political science and the fact that he has worked in several professions have something to do with it. But it is his devouring passion that is the essence of it.
An omnipresent passion in the first chapters which immerse the reader in the intoxicating world of discovery and learning of Jocelyn Coulon as a child, adolescent and young adult.
His thirst for knowledge and transmission (a key word to sum up his career) is so strong that at the beginning of adolescence, he created his own newspaper, each copy of which he wrote by hand!
There is a downside to this, namely a difficult family life. His little scholarly universe has become his refuge from suffering.
Coulon says in the introduction that The course of history would have been reduced to a “tasteless breviary” if he had not added his opinions. Without being so harsh, let us recognize that certain passages will not teach much to initiates. There are also some repetitions (Lester B. Pearson and the Suez crisis for example). Fortunately, Mr. Coulon often intervenes in the narration to provide opinions, analyses and self-criticisms.
As he has often been in the field, several passages are very tasty with nice build-ups, such as tense visits to ex-Yugoslavia and Africa.
This experience in the field allowed the author to observe that the West often presents only one version of history. He therefore insists on the importance of learning to search for, find and read other versions. This greatly colors his conclusion where he considers that “History is now written with and by the States of the South.”
Mr. Coulon himself makes an act of contrition by affirming that in the 1990s, he was “a good soldier in the service of Western hegemony” while he was in favor of interventionism of all kinds in thorny conflicts.
This mea culpa follows – fortunately! – a surrealist passage where the author outlines the factors explaining “the success of [sa] presence in the electronic media” and where he claims that his book devoted to the Blue Helmets has “inspired a whole generation of French-speaking researchers in Canada and abroad.”
If the author was not in Quebec during the two referendums, it would be unfair to say that he was uninterested in the national question. On the contrary, he recounts his early years as a sovereignist and what led him later to review his positions. He takes a swipe at Jean Chrétien, estimating that in 1995, “the No camp did not have a leader of Pierre Trudeau’s calibre.”
He obviously addresses his unfortunate stint in federal politics and his defeat at the hands of Thomas Mulcair (NDP) in a by-election in 2007. A few years later, he would be appointed advisor on international affairs in Stéphane Dion’s cabinet before being swept up in the minister’s dismissal by Justin Trudeau. A “political execution,” he says of his fate.
Entitled “Uncertain Times,” the conclusion looks to the future, drawing inspiration from events that have occurred since the beginning of the century. The nuanced analysis warns against simplified interpretations. Here, Mr. Coulon is at the height of his art.
Extract
I think that the failure of the experiment of democratic socialism in Chile was not only the result of the internal contradictions of each political current in that country. It also highlighted the external interferences determined to make Chile their political, social and economic laboratory without worrying too much about the Chileans. It took me a long time to reach this conclusion. At the time, I saw all the evil of the United States, but I did not understand the power play that was taking place on a global scale and of which some small countries were direct or indirect victims.
Who is Jocelyn Coulon?
A graduate in political science from the University of Montreal, Jocelyn Coulon was a journalist at Dutydirector of the Montreal campus of the Pearson Peacekeeping Centre, university professor, guest columnist at The Press and researcher at the UdeM Center for International Studies and Research. A specialist in international and military affairs, he has published around ten works.
The course of history
All in all/The Duty
256 pages
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