A recent article questions the possibility of a return to war in Europe, and another exposes the “Macron doctrine” as revealed by a major interview. It is also about the upcoming elections in Portugal and Italy, the notion of the Anthropocene, the comic strip practiced by Riad Sattouf, and then a dozen fiction books recently published in Hungarian, Finnish, German or in Danish.
The perspective seems as wide as the world — and it is! Nothing concerning socio-political or cultural affairs seems foreign to this publication. Here, in short, is a bedside magazine for the honest woman and her fiancé of the globalized world.
This recent medium of intellectual, strategic and political debate is called The Great Continent. Created in 2019 and published by the Geopolitical Studies Group (GEG), a Parisian think tank based at the very prestigious École Normale Supérieure, the journal is entirely digital and largely free. The funds come from private donations and in small part, for the moment, from subscriptions.
Gilles Gressani, normalien graduate in 2012, president of the GEG and director of the Great Continent, explains this editorial creation by a lack felt by his generation. “Basically, we didn’t really know where to find what we wanted to read in the morning in the French-speaking world,” he said in an interview with Duty, accompanied by the editor-in-chief, Mathéo Malik. Historical journals were disappearing, the university is somewhat compartmentalized and the media space is also closing, while the English-speaking space remains very active. »
The director cites the example of the American magazine Foreign Affairswhich this year will celebrate its 100and birthday. He and the editor, however, qualify the proposed rapprochement with the journal Debate, by Pierre Nora and Marcel Gauchet, scuttled in 2020 after 40 years of existence. First because The Great Continent is a pure player (an all-online review), as they say over there. Then because this new publication is reacting to changes in the world, for example, at the moment, to the threat of war in Ukraine.
Mr. Malik cites the work done on COVID-19 over the past two years, published in a special section with many graphics and maps. The infographics swelled the readership. The journal now exceeds four million page views.
“There is a real demand for something between the vertiginous time of the tweet and the slow time of the books, continues Mr. Gressani. People are not going to read on the Internet a text on the functioning of the Russian army, unless it is topical. »
Global vision
The creation of Great Continent also comes to tackle another problem, not generational this time, but general: there are very few media spaces where one can dissect the world outside the strict national framework, whereas more and more fundamental issues are already globalized. Does the GAFAM mean anything to you?
“Europe must be taken out of European affairs,” asserts the director. It is necessary to take an interest in the problems by leaving the technical framework worked by the economy and the law. You have to be open to all the social sciences, literature or geopolitics. »
“We want to be structuring, but not structured, adds Mathéo Malik. Most people speak from somewhere and position themselves on the politico-ideological chessboard. What interests us is looking at the map. We want to examine emerging issues and talk politics without having a political line. »
Nor is the objective to neutralize partisanship through expertise, warns the director, although he himself trained in a large school of the Republic, an educational machine counting among its former 14 Nobel Prize winners, a president and countless senior officials. It would rather be a matter of following the transformations, understanding them and explaining them, for example by reproducing speeches by Viktor Orbán, president of the Hungarian “democracy”, but accompanying them with explanatory notes.
The archives already have more than 1,300 collaborators, from all political and professional backgrounds, including many prestigious signatures of learned decision-makers or artists, from Henry Kissinger to Thomas Piketty and from Mario Vargas Llosa to Toni Negri.
The Great Continent employs seven permanent staff in Paris and is published in French, an assumed choice to cover the vast world where English serves as the lingua franca, but where the “market of ideas” also seems saturated in this language, maintains Mr. Gressani.
English is not in the development plans either. On the other hand, the publication already offers sections in four other European languages (German, Italian, Spanish and Polish), which will have their editorial autonomy by 2024, according to the wishes of the leaders.
“And why not also in Mandarin” adds the director, while the editor-in-chief points out that Franco-French signatures are already “not at all in the majority” in his publication.
The magazine also awards the literary prize 3466 (according to the height of the summit of Mont Blanc, continental promontory). The reward of 100,000 euros enables the translation and dissemination of a European novel. The first award dubbed The marriage of Cadmus and Harmonyby Roberto Calasso, Italian writer who died in July 2021.