In the late 1950s and 1960s, many French politicians, journalists, and travel industry leaders argued that the French had lost their manners. Although some foreigners, most notably Americans, spoke of rude French hosts, this negative stereotype was largely a French construction. Defenders of artisanal tradition reinforced the idea of French rudeness to highlight the dangers of postwar modernization, while technocratic commentators used the stereotype to criticize artisanal practices. Responding to this perceived crisis in hospitality, Charles de Gaulle's Fifth Republic expanded its involvement in mass tourism, launching "amicability" campaigns and boosting investment in high-rise hotels. The discourse of French rudeness helps explain the evolution of France's travel industry and illuminates cultural dimensions to postwar modernization and Franco-American relations.
The new Mansfield and Winthrop translation of Tocqueville's classic text, notable for the lengthy introduction the translators provide as well as their determined effort to create the most literal word-for-word translation that has ever been published of the work, draws the critical eye of four Tocqueville specialists. Focusing on the introduction, Seymour Drescher points out that the translators' decision to regard the Democracy of 1935 and the one of 1840 as a single work, a decision made against the grain of recent scholarship, leads them into misunderstandings of how Tocqueville came to view the strengths and weaknesses of American democracy by the 1840s. Arthur Goldhammer, at work on his own translation of Democracy, goes beyond the longstanding debates over literal versus interpretive translation to point out a large number of errors in rendering French expressions into English. Melvin Richter explores a number of instances where the pursuit of literalness leads to distortions, and then focuses on the consequences translating l'état social as "social state" rather than "state of society." Cheryl Welch examines how the decision to translate inquiet as "restive" rather than "restless" or "anxious," as she would have preferred, leads the translators to underestimate how much Tocqueville's views of religion and women were informed by his own anxieties about moral disorder in a democratic society. Mansfield and Winthrop respond to their critics with a detailed discussion of several of their most controversial word choices and with a defense of their strategy of literal translation.
The MIT Cultura project juxtaposes French/American opinion and expression, in order to involve respondents in a collaborative and ongoing process designed to identify perspectives and values, and so to undermine cross-cultural misconceptions and stereotypes.
Analysis of opinion polls shows that even Americans unfamiliar with France are prepared to hold opinions about the country. Many see France as a non-America, a positive or negative counter-model. Moreover, "Americans" comprise many different perspectives and so "France" does not mean the same thing to everyone.
Francophobia is at base a systematic and recurrent critique of an alleged societal model based on political centralization and cultural elitism, seen as beginning with the monarchy and continuing on into the Republic, and contrasting with American liberalism, democracy, egalitarianism, and anti-statism.
Francophobia, a set of stereotypes, insults, and ready-made judgments designed to prove one's patriotism and score political points, is based primarily in diplomatic and conservative circles. The war in Iraq was a moment of special mobilization of Francophobia by the administration and a large share of the media, and may prove to have been a crystallizing moment for the discourse.
Dane Johnson's Le Divorce and Le Mariage are representative of contemporary novels that use French-American interpersonal relations to reconfigure questions of national identity and cultural specificity, via metaphorical networks that recall the "complex connectivity" that characterizes globalization.
American films about France or French people seek to maintain a certain level of Frenchness, usually through superficial traits and stereotypes, while also naturalizing them for perceived American expectations, including a taste for romance, a clear demarcation between good and evil, a certain type of action, and happy closure.
French Catholicism experienced a renaissance in the interwar decades, which expressed itself in a variety of forms: associational activism, cultural production, and political organizing. The new Catholic activism left a mark on the life of the late Third Republic; it played a well-known part at Vichy; and it made a major, if not always acknowledged, contribution to the renovation of French public life in the aftermath of the Second World War.
Centre for Non-Traditional Security Studies, S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies
Abstract:
This paper traces the 'securitisation' of US foreign economic policy since the advent of the Bush administration. It does so with reference to US economic policy in East Asia. It argues that in the context of US economic and military preponderance in the world order, the US has been able to resist the temptation to link foreign economic and security policy. While there was evidence of the securitisation of economic globalisation in US policy from day one of the Bush administration, it was 9/11 that firmed up this trend. For the key members of the Bush foreign policy team, globalisation is now seen not simply in neo-liberal economic terms, but also through the lenses of the national security agenda of the United States. Economic globalisation is now not only a benefit, but also a 'security problem'. 9/11 offered the opportunity for what we might call the 'unilateralist-idealists', in the Bush administration, to set in train their project for a post-sovereign approach to American foreign policy. The paper identifies some intellectual contradictions in current US strategy and raises a series of question about the implication for world order of the consolidation of the trends identified in the paper.