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92. Un Passage À L'acte Improbable? Notes de recherche sur la trajectoire sociale de Zacarias Moussaoui
- Author:
- Stéphane Beaud and Olivier Masclet
- Publication Date:
- 06-2002
- Content Type:
- Journal Article
- Journal:
- French Politics, Culture Society
- Institution:
- Conference Group on French Politics Society
- Abstract:
- La France découvre, au lendemain des attentats du 11 septembre 2001 et de la guerre en Afghanistan, qu'elle a couvé en son sein des jeunes, nés ou élevés dans le pays, qui sont devenus des soldats de l'islamisme radical. Antoine Sfeir, directeur des Cahiers de l'Orient, estime à 150 le nombre de jeunes Français qui seraient impliqués dans les réseaux islamistes proches de Al Quaïda. Le plus connu d'entre eux, Zacarias Moussaoui, 33 ans, fiché depuis 1999 par la Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire (D.S.T.) comme "susceptible d'appartenir au Jihad international", est soupçonné d'être le vingtième pirate de l'air des attentats du 11 septembre 2001. Emprisonné aux États-Unis, il risque la peine de mort. On peut aussi citer Djamel Beghal, arrêté à Dubaï en juillet 2001, et son adjoint Kamel Daoudi, 27 ans, informaticien de formation, tous deux d'origine algérienne et également suspectés d'appartenir au même réseau Al Quaïda.
- Political Geography:
- Afghanistan and France
93. Affirmative Action At Sciences Po
- Author:
- Daniel Sabbagh
- Publication Date:
- 09-2002
- Content Type:
- Journal Article
- Journal:
- French Politics, Culture Society
- Institution:
- Conference Group on French Politics Society
- Abstract:
- Unlike in the United States, in France, the main operational criterion for identifying the beneficiaries of affirmative action policies is not race or gender, but geographical location. In this respect, the first affirmative action plan recently designed in the sphere of higher education by one of France's most famous 'grandes écoles', the Institut d'études politiques de Paris, while not departing significantly from this broader pattern of redistributive, territory-based public policies, has given rise to a controversy of an unprecedented scale, some features of which may actually suggest the existence of a deeper similarity between French and American affirmative action programs and the difficulties that they face. That similarity lies in the attempts made by the supporters of such programs to systematically minimize the negative side-effects on their beneficiaries' public image potentially induced by the visibility of the policy itself.
- Topic:
- Education
- Political Geography:
- United States, America, Paris, and France
94. Albert Sarraut and Republican Racial Thought
- Author:
- Clifford Rosenberg
- Publication Date:
- 09-2002
- Content Type:
- Journal Article
- Journal:
- French Politics, Culture Society
- Institution:
- Conference Group on French Politics Society
- Abstract:
- This article addresses the racial thought behind French immigration and colonial policy in the heyday of imperialism. Albert Sarraut and several other likeminded officials articulated a singularly contradictory view of human difference. They viewed colonial immigrants as an exotic menace, and looked with approval to the writings of racist thinkers in the United States, like Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard. At the same time, however, Sarraut and his colleagues considered North African immigration, in particular, as vital to France's future well-being; French policy-makers were more optimistic than the Americans that colonial migrants could be "civilized" within decades, or perhaps a few generations. This latter view encouraged them in their commitment to the Republic's civilizing mission and their belief that turning immigrants into Frenchmen was a practical and realistic necessity.
- Political Geography:
- United States, America, and France
95. Identity and Democracy
- Author:
- Ellen Badone
- Publication Date:
- 09-2002
- Content Type:
- Journal Article
- Journal:
- French Politics, Culture Society
- Institution:
- Conference Group on French Politics Society
- Abstract:
- This thought-provoking essay analyses the changing relationships between the French state and the individual. The author contends that French republican democracy originally developed as a bulwark against the hegemony of the Roman Catholic Church. However, in the secularized context of present-day France, such protection is no longer necessary. Hence, democracy has lost much of its original meaning. In the past, political actors privileged the collective good above private interests and identités. Now, however, it is precisely these agendas that have come to dominate French political discourse. In the face of competing minority demands, government must remain neutral and can no longer serve as the moral arbiter for the collectivity.
- Topic:
- Government
- Political Geography:
- France and Romania
96. Globalization and French Cultural Identity
- Author:
- Philip H. Gordon and Sophie Meunier
- Publication Date:
- 03-2001
- Content Type:
- Journal Article
- Journal:
- French Politics, Culture Society
- Institution:
- Conference Group on French Politics Society
- Abstract:
- Concerns about the potentially negative effects of globalization are particularly salient in France because of France's longstanding desire to maintain a universal culture and concomitant fear of cultural domination. This article analyzes the impact of globalization on various aspects of French culture-including the entertainment industry (movies, audiovisuals, and books), food, and language-and shows why the French resist globalization more on cultural than economic grounds. The article also looks at French policy responses to the cultural "threat" of globalization and argues that those policies are both less effective and less necessary than many French seem to think.
- Topic:
- Economics and Globalization
- Political Geography:
- France
97. La Corruption politique: un mal français
- Author:
- Éric Dupin
- Publication Date:
- 03-2001
- Content Type:
- Journal Article
- Journal:
- French Politics, Culture Society
- Institution:
- Conference Group on French Politics Society
- Abstract:
- This article examines why political corruption has become not only more visible in the past twenty years in France, but also more serious as a problem. After looking briefly at changes in the role of the judiciary and the media, the author focuses on issues of campaign finance and the economic insecurities electoral officials often face in the current political system. Psychological factors have mattered as well. Too many members of the political elite have assumed that political power entitled them to material advantages and exemption from conventional standards of ethical conduct. The concentration of power and weak boundaries between political, economic, and administrative elites have made the problem particularly acute in France.
- Topic:
- Economics
- Political Geography:
- France
98. Change and Resistance in the Fight Against Corruption
- Publication Date:
- 03-2001
- Content Type:
- Journal Article
- Journal:
- French Politics, Culture Society
- Institution:
- Conference Group on French Politics Society
- Abstract:
- Although political corruption in France is hardly new, only at the end of the twentieth century have public authorities made important efforts to address it. This article explains why, stressing underlying economic conditions in the 1980s and 1990s and changes in the composition and norms in the judicial, police, and administrative professions. The author goes on to argue that despite the publicity given to recent scandals, the attack on corruption remains restrained and politicians of both the Left and the Right remain ambivalent about facing the problem.
- Topic:
- Economics
- Political Geography:
- France
99. Vichy: Beyond the Syndrome Syndrome?
- Author:
- Steven Ungar
- Publication Date:
- 03-2001
- Content Type:
- Journal Article
- Journal:
- French Politics, Culture Society
- Institution:
- Conference Group on French Politics Society
- Abstract:
- Henry Rousso's The Vichy Syndrome (1987) has changed the way many people think and write about France since 1940. Yet it is likely that the term "syndrome" (from the Greek sundromos or "running together") in his title remains a provocation because it invokes a pattern of behavior linked to disease and abnormality By extension, it conveyed an implied accusation—perhaps even an indictment—concerning an inability on the part of France as nation and society to confront the nature of the 1940-1944 period. Among historians, debate on the data or evidence that the concept of syndrome might legitimize or even privilege with regard to the writing of history added to questions about what had prompted Rousso to level this critique against colleagues in the discipline.
- Political Geography:
- France
100. French Slavery and Modern Political Culture
- Author:
- Pierre H. Boulle
- Publication Date:
- 03-2001
- Content Type:
- Journal Article
- Journal:
- French Politics, Culture Society
- Institution:
- Conference Group on French Politics Society
- Abstract:
- The concept of an emerging modern political culture, developed in the eighteenth century and informing the struggles associated with 1789, has taken root in historical discourse. It offers what to some is the significant advantage of permitting the analysis of values which were once associated with a rising bourgeoisie—principles of individual liberty and rights, of merit, and free labor against group privileges, birth, and corporate rights— without necessarily tying these to a particular social group.2 The two works reviewed here, both the result of recent American Ph.D. dissertations, borrow the concept as an organizing principle, but, interestingly, focus on a major contradiction within that culture: the conflict between slavery, dominant in the colonies and spreading to France itself in the eighteenth century, and the new culture's core concepts of individual freedom and free labor. Sue Peabody studies the various court cases in which slaves in eighteenth-century France sought to obtain their freedom. Laurent Dubois, using a 1793 local slave rebellion in Trois-Rivières, Guadeloupe, attempts to demonstrate that the slaves used the emerging political culture proclaimed from France to fashion freedom for themselves. Both argue that, far from being peripheral issues, events related to colonial labor helped fashion the debate in France and, indeed, forced its radicalization.
- Political Geography:
- France