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Michel Girard

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 September 2009

Charles Doran
Charles Doran
Affiliation:
Johns Hopkins University, School of Advanced International Studies
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Extract

Michel Girard, professor of political science, Sorbonne, Paris, passed away suddenly on January 27, 2009, after a lengthy battle with cancer. To the end, Professor Girard was an unsurpassed scholar and professional. Ten days before his untimely death, he delivered a superb lecture at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) in Washington, D.C., on the rise of the new great powers and their integration into the global international system. He had also organized a panel for the International Political Science Association meetings in Santiago, Chile, on which he included two North American scholars.

Type
In Memoriam
Information
PS: Political Science & Politics , Volume 42 , Issue 4 , October 2009 , pp. 787 - 788
Copyright
Copyright © The American Political Science Association 2009

Michel Girard, professor of political science, Sorbonne, Paris, passed away suddenly on January 27, 2009, after a lengthy battle with cancer. To the end, Professor Girard was an unsurpassed scholar and professional. Ten days before his untimely death, he delivered a superb lecture at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) in Washington, D.C., on the rise of the new great powers and their integration into the global international system. He had also organized a panel for the International Political Science Association meetings in Santiago, Chile, on which he included two North American scholars.

Professor Girard's interests ranged from Middle East politics to transatlantic relations to international political economy. Recently, he had just coauthored an article on turbulence and stability in transatlantic relations in Political Etrangere with Helen Milner of Princeton University. In his classes at the Sorbonne, he taught a graduate course in international relations theory to a very eclectic group of students from the world over.

But Professor Girard's scholarship did not stop at the water's edge of academia. He applied his ideas to practical politics. At the height of tensions between the United States and France over Iraq policy, he established two ongoing academic exchanges and research symposiums between the Sorbonne and Princeton and the Sorbonne and SAIS. At the very first session of the latter exchange, he placed on the conference agenda precisely the problems that were troubling the two countries.

Professor Girard did not waste his analytic powers either on excessive idealism or on an empty pursuit of realpolitik. He analyzed international politics realistically but with compassion and a desire for shared solutions. His understanding of politics extended to the institutional level, and he always used this perceptiveness in a fair and balanced way in the interest of all of his colleagues.

In the great tradition of French scholarship, Michel Girard reached the minds of scholars on the American shore. He was an activist and an institution builder who thought that democratic politics was too important to be left to governments.

Professor Girard will be remembered in the United States in particular for his passionate attention to transatlantic relations. Much like Raymond Aron and Jean-Baptiste Duroselle of an earlier era, Michel Girard cared about Europe and North America. Displaying institutional leadership as well as insight, Michel Girard left political science and the world of politics a better place because of his extraordinary initiative and intellectual vision.