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Pierre Buhler, born March 21st, 1954, is an alumnus of the French business school HEC (Ecole des Hautes Etudes Commerciales, 1975) and of Sciences Po Paris (1977). He gradutated in 1982 from the Ecole Nationale d’Administration (ENA, Paris).
He also holds a BA in law (University Panthéon-Sorbonne, Paris), a BA in ethnology, University Denis Diderot-Paris VII), a master in applied economy (University Paris-Dauphine), as well as a degree in Polish (National School for Oriental Languages, Paris).
After graduating from the Ecole Nationale d’Administration, he joined the diplomatic corps, and was first assigned to the French delegation to the Conference on Security and cooperation in Europe, in Madrid. In 1983 he was appointed second secretary at the French Embassy in Warsaw. From 1985 through 1988, he served as second counsellor in the French Embassy in Moscow. He then joined the Directorate for Strategic Affairs and Disarmement in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and became, in 1990, Deputy Head of the Policy Planning Staff. Appointed second counsellor at the French Embassy in Washington in 1996, he moved to New York in 1996 to become the head of the Department for culture and education of that embassy. In 2001, he became the diplomatic adviser to the Minister of Defence, until 2002.
After a short stint as secretary general of the Ambassadors’ Conference in 2002, he was seconded to the Ministry of Higher Education, and elected associate professor (political sciences) to teach international affairs at Sciences Po, Paris, from 2002 to 2006.Appointed ambassador of France to Singapore in 2006, he completed his duties in 2009 to become general manager of France Coopération Internationale (FCI), a public agency for technical expertise and project engeineering, which he was called to transform into a new legal entity, France Expertise Internationale (FEI), in 2011. He returned briefly to the Ministry of Foreign and European affairs to serve at the Directorate for global affairs and was then appointed ambassador of France to Poland in April 2012.
After completion, in September 2016, of his tour if duty in Poland, he was appointed a Secretary General of the French Delegation to the 71th General Assembly of the United Nations, and from January through August 2017 he served as a counselor of the Planning Staff of the French Foreign Ministry. He was then appointed Chairman & CEO of the Institut Français, Ambassador in charge of French cultural action abroad, a position he held for three years. He then joined the Policy Planning Staff of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, to work on cultural diplomacy and soft power issues, which he also teaches as adjunct professor at the Paris School of International Affairs (Sciences Po), at Hertie School (Berlin, fall semester 2022) and at the College of Europe (Natolin, Berlin).
In the French diplomatic corps, he holds the rank of minister plenipotentiary.
He has been made an Officer in the Ordre National du Mérite (2015) and in the Ordre National de la Légion d’Honneur (2023). He is a Commander in the Polish Order Polonia Restituta, of the the Polish Order of Merit as well as of the Romanian Ordinul National Serviciul Credincios. In 2010, the “European Centre for Solidarność” conferred upon him the Medal of Gratitude.
He is fluent in English, German, Polish and Russian.
He is the author of a “History of Communist Poland ; autopsy of a sham”, published in French in 1997 (Editions Karthala) and in Polish in 1999 (Wydawnictwo Dialog). He has authored “Power in the XXIst Century” published in French in 2011 (CNRS Editions), which was awarded, in 2012, the Anteios Prize of the best book of the year in geopolitics. The 2nd edition appeared in paperback in 2014 and the 3rd one in 2019. In 2025, his essay, titled Pologne, Histoire d'une ambition. Comprendre le moment polonais, was published by Tallandier. He has also been extensively published in French journals such as Commentaire, Questions internationales, Politique étrangère, in the syndication sites Telos, Project Syndicate, Le Grand Continent, La Grande Conversation, Diploweb as well as in various daily newspapers (Le Monde, Le Figaro, Libération, Les Echos).
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