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381. Penser L'impensable: Le 11 Septembre Des Penseurs Français

Author:
François Lagarde
Publication Date:
06-2005
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
French Politics, Culture Society
Institution:
Conference Group on French Politics Society
Abstract:
La guerre américaine en Iraq était annoncée, et on a eu le temps d'en parler et de lui trouver une causalité ou une finalité, ou au contraire une illégalité ou une immoralité. L'attentat du 11 septembre 2001 survint sans que l'on s'y attende, et c'est après l'événement subit qu'il fallut le penser, dans " l'inappropriablité, l'imprévisibilité, la surprise absolue, l'incompréhension, le risque de méprise, la nouveauté inanticipable, la singularité pure, l'absence d'horizon ", comme le dit Derrida. On a eu du mal à voir, à ressentir le 11 Septembre en France à cause des distances géographiques et culturelles et à cause de la télévision, et on est resté sans quoi dire. On a d'abord pensé à soi-ramener l'événement à soi, pour la réassurance. Puis on s'est détourné du lieu, de l'événement du 11 Septembre, pour en penser la date, l'histoire, les origines et on s'est davantage intéressé aux auteurs de l'attentat qu'aux victimes. On découvrit alors, dans ce qui était au commencement impensable, une historicité, une légitimité, une rationalité, une possible bonté de la terreur.
Political Geography:
America and France

382. "Leur Histoire Est Notre Histoire": Immigrant Culture In France Between Visibility And Invisibility

Author:
Brigitte Jelen
Publication Date:
06-2005
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
French Politics, Culture Society
Institution:
Conference Group on French Politics Society
Abstract:
This article explores the tensions inherent in the implementation of specific spaces dedicated to the celebration of immigrant cultures in a nation based on an assimilationist model of citizenship.5 More specifically, it analyzes the possibilities for the recognition and visibility of cultural differences in a society where such differences are expected to remain socially invisible and limited to the private sphere. To illustrate this discussion in the historical context of post-colonial France, I will turn to the three most significant cultural projects implemented by the French government to acknowledge and make immigrant cultures visible: in 1977, Mosaïque, in 1984, Les Enfants de l'immigration, and finally, in 2004, the Cité nationale de l'histoire de l'immigration.
Topic:
Culture
Political Geography:
France

383. Anti-Americanisms In France

Author:
Sophie Meunier
Publication Date:
06-2005
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
French Politics, Culture Society
Institution:
Conference Group on French Politics Society
Abstract:
Why do the French appear as incorrigible anti-Americans? Why is France singled out as a bastion of systematic opposition to US policies? Anti-Americanism can be defined as an unfavorable predisposition towards the United States, which leads individuals to interpret American actions through pre-existing views and negative stereotypes, irrespectively of the facts.8 It is based on a belief that there is something fundamentally wrong at the essence of what is America. This unfavorable predisposition manifests itself in beliefs, attitudes and rhetoric, which may or may not affect political behavior. Is France, according to this definition, anti-American? It is difficult in practice to distinguish between genuine anti-Americanism (disposition) and genuine criticism of the United States (opinion). It is partly because of this definitional ambiguity that France appears more anti-American than its European partners. While it is not clear that the French have a stronger negative predisposition against the US, they do have stronger opinions about America for at least three main reasons: the deep reservoir of anti-American arguments accumulated over the centuries; the simultaneous coexistence of a variety of types of anti-Americanism; and the costless ways in which anti-Americanism has been used for political benefit. This article explores each of these three features in turn, before discussing briefly the consequences of French anti-Americanism on world politics.
Topic:
Politics
Political Geography:
United States, America, and France

384. Regulating Multiplexes: The French State between Corporatism and Globalization

Author:
Graeme Hayes
Publication Date:
12-2005
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
French Politics, Culture Society
Institution:
Conference Group on French Politics Society
Abstract:
The development of multiplex cinemas has reinvigorated film exhibition and cinema attendance in France. Yet in the wake of the exception culturelle, multiplexes also stoked corporatist fears over the Americanization of French cinema, and in 1996 the state introduced a regulatory procedure for multiplexes modeled on the loi Royer. Regulation has not stopped subsequent multiplex development but rather protected the dominant market position of the major, vertically-integrated French exhibitors. The resultant economic concentration has undoubtedly increased the domestic and international competitiveness of French cinema, but at the price of industry polarization and a loss of cultural and economic pluralism.
Topic:
Globalization
Political Geography:
America and France

385. Eloquent Fragments: French Fiction Film and Globalization

Author:
Martin O'Shaughnessy
Publication Date:
12-2005
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
French Politics, Culture Society
Institution:
Conference Group on French Politics Society
Abstract:
French (and Franco-Belgian) cinema has witnessed a return to the real since the middle of the 1990s and should thus successfully have pinned down the impact of the globalizing economy on the sociopolitical sphere. Yet neoliberal globalization is deeply resistant to representation within the frame of conventional fictions. Condemned to be a cinema of fragments by the shattering of the old leftist imaginary, has French cinema merely tracked globalization's local consequences, always letting systemic causes escape its grasp? Or has it identified successful strategies with which to restore eloquence to social struggle and suffering that otherwise seemed condemned to silence? Engaging with important films by the Dardenne brothers, Robert Guédiguian, Bertrand Tavernier, Manuel Poirier, Matthieu Kassovitz and others, this paper argues the latter. French film, it suggests, has found ways to make the fragments speak to the totality, to short-circuit neoliberal triumphalism and to interpellate a nation that no longer plays its erstwhile integrational role. While none of these strategies can provide totalizing systemic critique, they do show that cinema is playing an active role in the rebuilding of a radical oppositional imaginary.
Topic:
Globalization
Political Geography:
France

386. Le Réel à l'attaque: French Documentary and Globalization

Author:
Laurent Marie
Publication Date:
12-2005
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
French Politics, Culture Society
Institution:
Conference Group on French Politics Society
Abstract:
Amidst the success of the documentary genre in France, anti-globalization documentaries constitute a subcategory that has come to the fore since the mid-1990s. Akin to the post- 1968 wave of militant cinema, this new genre has nevertheless emerged out of an entirely different ideological, economical and political context. While the films benefit from a level of institutional support in terms of production, devising successful strategies of distribution and exhibition remains central to the political efficiency of this new wave of cinema engagé. As for the films themselves, they display a wide variety of approaches to globalization, from articulating the day-to-day activities of counterglobalization movements to representing the consequences of liberalism on different sectors of French society, not least the French working class. A few documentaries successfully tackle the international dimension of the globalization debate.
Topic:
Globalization
Political Geography:
France

387. Symptomatic Politics: The Banning of Islamic Head Scarves in French Public Schools

Author:
Joan W. Scott
Publication Date:
12-2005
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
French Politics, Culture Society
Institution:
Conference Group on French Politics Society
Abstract:
The controversies in 1989, 1994, and 2003 over the wearing of head scarves were in part a response to international and domestic political developments (including, most importantly, surprising showings of political strength at the polls by the Front National). But they were also symptomatic of a much larger problem, one that seems unresolvable within the context of republican universalism. That is the problem of reconciling the fact of the growing diversity of the French population (most of the Muslims in question in these affaires are French citizens) with a theory of citizenship and representation that defines the recognition of difference as antithetical to the unity of the nation. French republicans consider it a dangerous practice to grant political standing to groups. Representatives of concrete, social concerns do not belong in the public (legislative) arena, they argue, because it must be maintained as a realm of abstraction where decisions are made on behalf of the whole people, a people whose presumed commonality means that any elected representative represents them all. The head scarf is a tangible sign of intolerable difference and of failed integration. It defies the long- standing requirement that only when immigrants assimilate (practicing their beliefs in private) do they become fully "French." It stands for everything that is thought to be wrong with Islam: porous boundaries between public and private and between politics and religion; the supposed degradation of female sexuality and subordination of women. The head scarf in the public, secular school is a synecdoche for Islam in the body of the French nation-state.
Topic:
Islam and Politics
Political Geography:
France

388. Le référendum français de ratification du Traité constitutionnel européen du 29 mai 2005

Author:
Gérard Grunberg
Publication Date:
12-2005
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
French Politics, Culture Society
Institution:
Conference Group on French Politics Society
Abstract:
The 29 May 2005 referendum on the ratification of the European Constitution marks an important date for French political history since the beginning of the Fifth Republic. The widespread victory of the "no" vote requires an interpretation that takes into account the different dimensions of this event. One such dimension is the political context, which played a large role insofar as the referendum took place in a period when the government was particularly unpopular and when, more generally, the political class was suffering from the public's growing distrust. A second and key element was the deep division of the Socialist party, whose leadership was unable to wage a campaign offensive in favor of a "yes" vote. In general, the proponents of the "yes" vote--the major parties of the Right and the Socialist party, as well as the Greens--were incapable of offering voters a truly positive and convincing argument in favor of the Constitution. On the other hand, the proponents of the "no" vote, especially on the Left, succeeded in convincing voters that the social and economic crisis in France (particularly unemployment) was due to "liberal globablization" and that the European Union, far from combatting globalization's effects, was in reality an implicated actor. The campaign played a large role in a context where public opinion wavered right up until the end. The results underscored the massive "no" vote of the working classes, which poses a formidable problem for the principal pro- European parties. The "French no," which will have major repercussions on French political life, brought to an end the process of European political integration as it had developed over the last twenty years.
Topic:
Globalization
Political Geography:
Europe and France

389. Review Essay: Uncle Sam And Marianne As Couple Infernal

Author:
Edward C. Knox
Publication Date:
12-2005
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
French Politics, Culture Society
Institution:
Conference Group on French Politics Society
Abstract:
The flow of works on problematic French-American relations continues apace, more or less explicitly in the wake of books by Philippe Roger and Jean-François Revel.1 As their subtitles indicate, the three reviewed here take on the topic from highly critical standpoints.
Political Geography:
America and France

390. Iran: The Moment of Truth

Author:
Patrick Clawson, François Heisbourg, and Vladimir Sazhin
Publication Date:
06-2005
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Centre for European Policy Studies
Abstract:
The definition of European policy objectives and strategies vis-à-vis Iran's nuclear ambitions must take into account the specificities of the case, setting, as it were, its problématique. First, we have the unusual situation of a basically three-way game: the EU (and notably the EU-3, comprising the UK, France and Germany), Iran and the 'significant other', the United States, which is outside of the negotiation but a key player. Any student in strategy knows that a triangle is the most unstable and tricky combination to deal with, and the presence of yet another set of outsiders (notably Russia and China) adds another element of complexity.
Topic:
Development and Peace Studies
Political Geography:
Russia, United States, United Kingdom, Europe, Iran, Middle East, France, and Germany