Tribuna Atl\u00e1ntica is an international publication of contemporary thought. Its name expresses a way of standing before reality rather than a thematic specialization. We are interested in the times we live in, though not only in what has just happened. Current affairs offer facts, decisions, conflicts, innovations and political shifts; understanding them requires relating them to processes that began earlier and whose consequences are, very often, still unknown to us.<\/p>\n
Thinking about the present carries the difficulty of having to be done from within. We do not know how the processes we are living through will end, nor can we free ourselves entirely from the categories, experiences and concerns of our own age. Ortega y Gasset set out that relation between life and circumstance in Meditaciones del Quijote<\/em>, published in 1914. His reflection on the self and its circumstance has become almost an aphorism, though what matters here is something broader: we think from a specific historical situation, conditioned by it and at the same time able to subject it to examination. Circumstance does not by itself provide an explanation of the world, but it determines the place from which we begin to question it.<\/p>\n Today that circumstance is particularly complex. Many of the categories with which we organize reality remain necessary, even though the phenomena we set out to study cross their limits with growing ease. The State retains its political and legal centrality, while companies, capital, digital services, supply chains and economic decisions carry out much of their activity in spaces that overflow any single jurisdiction. Borders continue to produce very real consequences, but they no longer delimit on their own the processes capable of transforming a society.<\/p>\n Law has been confronting that problem for decades. When Philip C. Jessup delivered his Storrs Lectures<\/em> at Yale in 1956, published that same year as Transnational Law<\/em>, he began from situations that could not be understood without crossing the traditional divisions of legal knowledge. Domestic law, public international law and private international law could all bear upon a single relationship. Jessup was writing in another context and before the digital revolution, but he identified a difficulty that has since become far more visible: some realities are understood less well when method requires them to be broken up before they can be studied.<\/p>\n The same difficulty arises today outside the law. A technological innovation can alter employment relations, corporate structures, forms of creation and standards of liability. A trade decision takes on strategic significance when it touches raw materials, supply chains or industrial autonomy. An energy policy produces economic, social and diplomatic effects at one and the same time. Human mobility admits of demographic, legal, economic, cultural and political readings that complement one another without collapsing into one. Specialization remains indispensable; reality is simply under no obligation to respect our specializations.<\/p>\n The thematic breadth of Tribuna Atl\u00e1ntica follows from that plain fact. Law, economics, geopolitics, technology, business, science, history, culture, philosophy and institutions appear in its pages whenever one of those perspectives helps to make better sense of the question under examination. Disciplines retain their identity, but problems frequently cut across several of them.<\/p>\n Fernand Braudel addressed this twofold question \u2014 the relation between disciplines and the need to work with different temporal scales \u2014 in \u201cHistoire et Sciences sociales: La longue dur\u00e9e\u201d, published in Annales<\/em> in 1958. His name came to be associated above all with the longue dur\u00e9e, yet that text also contained a reflection on the inevitable contact between the social sciences when their objects of study led them onto common ground. Braudel warned, moreover, of the limits of a history dominated by the immediate event. The observation retains its interest in a news culture able to register a fact almost at the very moment it happens, but not necessarily to grasp its reach with equal speed.<\/p>\n A judgment that seems decisive on the day it is handed down may end up a minor piece in a much longer line of case law. An election read as a rupture may reveal, in time, continuities that were barely perceptible then. A technology presented as unprecedented may reopen questions about freedom, power, responsibility or the human condition that have centuries of intellectual tradition behind them. To think contemporaneously requires recognizing what is genuinely new in our age without turning the present into a zero point of history.<\/p>\n The adjective Atl\u00e1ntica answers to the same wish to observe relations rather than isolated compartments. For centuries the Atlantic has been one of the great spaces of communication between Europe, the Americas and Africa. Along its routes travelled people, goods, capital, knowledge, institutions, languages, religions, legal models and political ideas. Out of those relations came new societies and decisive transformations, but also systems of domination, colonialism, slavery, wars and inequalities whose consequences belong to that same history.<\/p>\n Historiography eventually turned that reality into a field of study in its own right. Bernard Bailyn systematized much of this perspective in Atlantic History: Concept and Contours<\/em>, published in 2005. A few years earlier, in \u201cThree Concepts of Atlantic History\u201d, David Armitage had proposed a distinction between different ways of studying the Atlantic space, according to whether attention fell on the whole of its circulations, on the connections between its parts, or on the relation of one particular society to that wider world. Rather than transplanting a historiographical method into a contemporary publication, what matters is preserving a simple and fertile intuition: explanatory power is lost when processes built out of relations between different territories are studied as though each had developed its history separately.<\/p>\n Europe, the Americas and Africa form the historical setting from which this Atlantic perspective arises. They are not a homogeneous bloc and have never maintained symmetrical relations with one another. That very difference is part of what makes it worth observing them together. European regulatory decisions shape the activity of companies in the Americas and in Africa; United States policy has repercussions for European and Latin American balances; Africa’s demographic and economic transformations will have growing effects on its relations with Europe and the Americas; Latin America is redefining traditional ties while broadening its relations with Asia, Africa and other economic spaces.<\/p>\n Within that framework, the Ibero-American dimension carries a weight of its own. Spain, Portugal and Latin America preserve, for all their differences, a historical fabric of languages, institutions, legal traditions, migrations and cultural relations that continues to generate shared spaces of conversation. That fabric does not erase distinct national trajectories, nor the tensions of a shared history; what it does is help explain why certain legal, political, economic or cultural discussions circulate with particular ease between societies thousands of kilometres apart.<\/p>\n The Canary Islands occupy a singular position within that geography. Their political and legal membership of Europe, their proximity to Africa and the depth of their historical relations with the Americas make it possible to observe from a single place realities that are more often seen on separate maps. There is no need to grant the islands an artificial centrality. It is enough to note that the idea of periphery shifts with the scale on which the map is drawn. On a strictly continental representation of Europe, the Canaries appear at one of its edges; from an Atlantic perspective, that peripheral condition becomes relative and their connections with other spaces take on greater importance. Changing the point of observation does not alter the facts, but it can bring into view relations that an earlier representation left in the background.<\/p>\n Nor does the Atlantic perspective turn the Atlantic into a closed horizon. It would be impossible to understand Europe, the Americas or Africa today while ignoring the economic and technological weight of Asia, the growing centrality of the Indo-Pacific in international strategic competition, or the influence of the Middle East over energy, security and trade. China and India take part in industrial, financial and technological decisions with direct repercussions on all three Atlantic shores. A disruption on shipping routes far from our own space can alter prices, supplies and corporate strategies within days. Having a place from which to look does not oblige us to reduce the world to whatever lies closest.<\/p>\n The word tribuna adds a public dimension to that perspective. An idea changes once it is published, finds readers and enters into relation with other interpretations of the same world. It leaves the private or specialized sphere and exposes itself to reading, to agreement and to dissent. That tradition long accompanied the reviews of thought, culture, law and politics that allowed ideas born in universities, institutions, professions or intellectual circles to reach readers beyond them.<\/p>\n The contemporary environment has radically transformed the conditions of that conversation. A text written in Lima can be read at once in Madrid, Bogot\u00e1, Buenos Aires, Dublin, Panama City, Tenerife or anywhere else. A question raised from Africa can enter into conversation with experiences from the Americas or from Europe without the delays and material barriers that for centuries conditioned the circulation of ideas. Being international thus ceases to be merely a statement of intent and can become a daily practice.<\/p>\n Tribuna Atl\u00e1ntica stands in that space between the specialized production of knowledge and public conversation. It does not seek to replace academic research, nor to compete with the daily news. Its place is another: there where knowledge, professional experience and reflection can meet without being shut inside a discipline, an institution or a border.<\/p>\n The unity of a publication of this kind could hardly come from a closed list of subjects. It lies in the relations it establishes among them and in the will to consider the present on different scales. Some questions need the precision of law, others the perspective of history, economics, science or philosophy, and many call for several of those ways of looking at once. The purpose is not to erase their differences, but to let them speak to one another where reality itself has already brought them into contact.<\/p>\n Tribuna Atl\u00e1ntica sets out from a historical experience formed over centuries between Europe, the Americas and Africa, but it does not turn that origin into a limit. It deals with the present without reducing it to current affairs, and it turns to the past whenever that is needed in order to understand it. Its perspective is Atlantic because it acknowledges a history, a geography and a web of relations from which it has chosen to look, and it is contemporary because what interests it, in the last resort, is understanding the age we live in without assuming that its own categories are enough to explain it.<\/p>\n Contemporary thought is not, therefore, a doctrine we wish to formulate, but the intellectual work we have chosen to undertake.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Contemporary Thought Tribuna Atl\u00e1ntica is an international publication of contemporary thought. Its name expresses a way of standing before reality rather than a thematic specialization. We are interested […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-3410","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pcdd-global.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/3410","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pcdd-global.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pcdd-global.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pcdd-global.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3410"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/pcdd-global.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/3410\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pcdd-global.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3410"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}