I am 60, and I am as much an internationalist as when I was younger, when I was a Marxist-Leninist. Internationalism is one of the rare pieces of that heritage to which I remain loyal. That is Barack Obama's strength. A politician has finally understood that politics is not only about the closing of a mine in Ohio-it is also about the will to reach out, to embrace the world of today's young Americans. That way, young Americans may eventually reconcile with politics.

The totalitarian state is not a force unleashed, the truth is in chains.

Even if it doesn't sound like it at first, that's an identity that Europe can go out into the world with and take a leading role.

France is a country where thinking is supposed to be furtive, invisible, almost clandestine. France is a country of cliques and sects.

When you believe in what you are doing, when you are seeking justice for the killing of Daniel Pearl, when you want to alert public opinion to the plight of the massacred people of Darfur, or in the recently martyred former Soviet republic Georgia, it makes more sense to use the media than to work in silence.

There is a true weakness in American thought today: their incapacity to be interested in the intelligence of evil.

I definitely don't agree with that sort of rhetoric from the United States - this idea that all the major conflicts of our age need to be solved militarily.