Search

Begin New Search Political Geography France

641. Des élections municipales sous le signe de la parité

Author:
Françoise Gaspard
Publication Date:
03-2002
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
French Politics, Culture Society
Institution:
Conference Group on French Politics Society
Abstract:
The March 2001 municipal elections in France constituted a political litmus test, done one year before the presidential and parliamentary elections. They were also the first to fall under the new parity law enacted in June 2000. For the first time, there had to be an equal number of men and women on candidate lists for cities of more than 3,500 inhabitants. While the debate over parity had been intense, the first application of the parity law went more smoothly than expected. The most surprising feature of the election results is that the Right, which had shown little enthusiasm for parity, seems to have been the primary beneficiary of the new system. The question is now whether a larger presence of women in local politics will lead to a real change in public policy, and if it will have an impact on the national level, where the law is a lot less constraining than at city level.
Political Geography:
France

642. Canonization of Norbert Élias in France: A Critical Perspective

Author:
Daniel Gordon
Publication Date:
03-2002
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
French Politics, Culture Society
Institution:
Conference Group on French Politics Society
Abstract:
In his article, "The Canonization of Norbert Elias in France: A Critical Perspective," Daniel Gordon argues that important scholars in France have regarded Norbert Elias, the German-born sociologist, with such unqualified admiration that they have failed to examine his life and thought with sufficient scrutiny. Gordon explores several aspects of Elias's intellectual development: his volkisch Zionism and germanophilia during his twenties, his flight from neo-Kantian philosophy to Karl Mannheim's sociology during his thirties, and his abortive efforts to make a new life for himself in France after leaving Germany in 1933 and before eventually settling in Britain. All these experiences, Gordon argues, colored the way Elias drew the comparisons between Germany and France that lay at the center of so much of his thought, comparisons that betrayed a certain kinship to the prejudices German nationalists in the 1920s held about German Kultur and French civilisation. Gordon concludes by suggesting that many French scholars on the left took to Elias's work during the 1980s because it offered them a framework, after the decline of Marxism, for sustaining a critical analysis of hierarchy in French society.
Political Geography:
France

643. The New "Ethnology" and "la situation coloniale" in Interwar France

Author:
Alice L. Conklin
Publication Date:
06-2002
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
French Politics, Culture Society
Institution:
Conference Group on French Politics Society
Abstract:
Jean Bazin's 1996 invocation of the enduring effects of Georges Balandier's critical insights of the 1950s is a testimonial to not just how revolutionary, but also how persuasive these insights were and remain. It is common currency now, even among those of us who are not anthropologists, that first European travelers, then European scientists "invented" places like "Africa" that tell us more about themselves/ourselves than the reality they purported to describe. The particular "invention" of the twentieth century was anthropologists' "discovery" of "pure cultures" untouched by history and especially by colonialism. Having found such peoples, anthropologists then devoted themselves to recording and preserving their "authentic" traditions before it was too late. Balandier's precocious contribution to the field, in this context, was to take the colonial situation itself as his object of study as early as 1951 and to render visible the unequal power relations so discreetly evacuated by his more "complicit" professional colleagues.
Political Geography:
Europe and France

644. 150 Years Of Algerian Painting: Relevance for Understanding the Postcolonial Situation

Author:
François Pouillon
Publication Date:
06-2002
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
French Politics, Culture Society
Institution:
Conference Group on French Politics Society
Abstract:
There are significant differences between the way academics in France and the United States see postcolonial processes, differences having to do with particular national histories. It is, however, precisely the task of academics to work to transcend such specificities. So the differences must have to do with collective intellectual movements in the two countries, and it would perhaps be useful to compare them.
Political Geography:
United States and France

645. 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

646. 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

647. 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

648. 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

649. Democratic Control of Armed Forces: the National and International Parliamentary Dimension

Author:
Wim F. van Eekelen
Publication Date:
10-2002
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Geneva Centre for Security Sector Governance (DCAF)
Abstract:
Democracy takes many forms. The basic notion that governments derive their legitimacy from the freely expressed votes of their citizens is translated in many different parliamentary practices. Even the conceptual distinction of the three main functions of government – legislative, executive and judicial – as defined in Montesquieu's Trias Politica, seldom resulted in a complete separation of powers. In many countries the members of the executive also sit in parliament. In the US the separation between legislature and executive is the most complete. The President has wide-ranging authority; his ministers are not responsible to Congress. Nevertheless it works, because of a complicated system of checks and balances affecting both legislationand budget appropriations. In France the President of the Republic regards foreign affairs and defence as his special domain in which the cabinet, let alone parliament, has little influence. A common characteristic of Western democracy, however, is its pluralistic character in which the people elect their representatives and have a choice between different political parties. In some cases the decisions reached in parliamentary assemblies are subject to a referendum as a form of direct democracy.
Topic:
Foreign Policy, Democratization, and Government
Political Geography:
Europe and France

650. Europe and the Middle East: Towards A Substantive Role in the Peace Process?

Author:
Roland Dannreuther
Publication Date:
08-2002
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
The Geneva Centre for Security Policy
Abstract:
The Middle East is the region where Europeans have, arguably, most strongly felt their loss of great power status. During the nineteenth century, European powers encroached upon, occupied and annexed various territories in the Middle East. With the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire after World War 1, Britain, and to a lesser degree France, became the undisputed external actors in the region and in large part created the modern Middle Eastern state system. Although a certain degree of power was devolved to local leaders, Britain and France ensured their prerogatives over foreign and defence issues and assumed responsibility for regional stability. Other powers, such as the Soviet Union and the United States, were not absent from the region but did not essentially challenge the European hegemony. The Soviet Union's power projection had been greatly reduced in the aftermath of revolution, civil war and internal consolidation; the United States deliberately abstained from assuming a political role, with all its tainted colonial connotations, and only demanded an 'open doors' policy in relation to its trade and commercial interests. In this relatively unchallenged strategic environment, Britain had a remarkable freedom to act as the principal regional security actor. In practice, the period of British dominance was to be relatively brief, being characterised by one historian as 'Britain's moment' in the Middle East, and was also increasingly to be frustrated by the growing inter-ethnic conflict in Palestine.
Topic:
Conflict Resolution and Peace Studies
Political Geography:
Britain, Europe, Middle East, France, and Soviet Union