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1. Factsheet: Emmanuel Macron

Author:
Bridge Initiative Team
Publication Date:
10-2021
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
The Bridge Initiative, Georgetown University
Abstract:
Emmanuel Macron is a former banker turned politician who currently serves as the president of France. Under Macron’s leadership, the French government has implemented a number of anti-Muslim policies, including the “anti-Separatism” law. Macron has claimed that Islam is a “religion that is in crisis all over the world today,” and routinely claims acts of violence as unique to French Muslims. Many activists and experts argue that Macron has adopted Islamophobia as an electoral strategy ahead of the April 2022 presidential elections.
Topic:
Government, Domestic Politics, Islamophobia, Emmanuel Macron, and Muslims
Political Geography:
Europe and France

2. Paris, Algiers Concerned over Mali’s Transitional Regime

Author:
Rina Bassist
Publication Date:
12-2020
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies
Abstract:
In our latest issue of Ifriqiya, Rina Bassist discusses the regional and international challenges facing Mali's new transitional government, and its precarious security situation. Can Mali’s new government regain territorial control and restore personal security? For the past four months, Mali has been governed by a transition government that was set up after a military coup d’état in the summer of 2020. The international community initially condemned the coup, but it has since been forced to accept this reality, and has been encouraging Mali’s military and the transition government to advance the implementation of the 2015 Algiers peace accords. Yet actions taken so far by the military and the new regime do not bode well for the future of the country, and are showing signs of weakness vis-à-vis a multitude of armed groups, including several jihadi militant organizations.
Topic:
Security, Government, and Transition
Political Geography:
Africa, France, Algeria, and Mali

3. Visits of Sovereignty and the articulation of the national and the local in France and Germany on the eve of World War I

Author:
Nicolas Mariot
Publication Date:
01-2009
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Centre for European Political Sociology
Abstract:
This paper seeks to explore the problems and potentialities of asymmetrical historical comparison by examining visits by heads of State to the provinces in Germany and France on the eve of WW I. This act of political legitimisation and representation is analysed through the lens of the practical organization of the event understood as an administrative routine, thereby bringing into question many of the categories routinely mobilised to describe and to oppose two models of national integration.
Topic:
International Relations, Government, and War
Political Geography:
Europe, France, and Germany

4. Finance and the Macro-economy: The Politics of Regulatory Reform in Europe

Author:
Sofía Perez and Jonathan Westrup
Publication Date:
01-2008
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies, Harvard University
Abstract:
This paper analyzes major changes in the regulation of the financial sector in Europe over the last three decades. Focusing on the pattern of change across five countries (Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Spain), the paper identifies two major periods of regulatory change: first, the shift away from postwar patterns of credit regulation in the 1970s and 1980s, and second, the intensification of state supervisory powers and the introduction of new regulatory structures from the 1990s to the present. In both cases, the authors point to the way in which different models of financial sector regulation affect the political consequences of macro-economic policy for political elites as an explanation for choices that governments have made in the regulatory arena. More specifically, while regulatory change in the first period may be largely explained by the way in which different postwar models of credit regulation impinged upon a government's political ability to impose disinflation, choices in favor of different regulatory structures in the second period (single regulator in Britain and Germany versus multiple regulators in the other countries) can be related to differences in the area of pension reform. By focusing on the political implications that different modes of financial regualtion can have for elected officials in the context of different macroeconomic scenarios, the authors offer an explanation of regualtory change that differs from accounts which emphasize the primacy of financial market forces in driving such change.
Topic:
Economics and Government
Political Geography:
Britain, Europe, France, Germany, Spain, and Italy

5. Cultural policy in France - Genesis of a public policy category

Author:
Vincent Dubois
Publication Date:
10-2008
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Centre for European Political Sociology
Abstract:
This paper is a partial translation of a book published in French, which puts forward a socio-historical analysis of the relationships between cultural and political/bureaucratic field. This analysis sheds light on the conditions of the emergence, shaping and institutionalisation of a State policy regarding culture in France, from the late 19th to the 20th century. In this perspective, what is now called “cultural policy” is considered as the product of the history of power struggles, wherein the main stakes are the legitimate definition of culture and the definition of the legitimate functions of the State. The historical comparison reveals that these power struggles have long hindered the shaping of a “cultural policy”, which only took place starting in the early 1960s. It also shows that the persistence of these issues led to an “institutionalisation of vagueness” of a policy whose object could still not be precisely defined by the late 20th century. This research thus contributes to the history and sociology of the cultural field, as well as of the State and State intervention. By analysing the conditions and limits of a State definition of culture, it also sheds light on the modes of expression of the State's symbolic violence. The notion of category of public intervention developed used in the context of this research is embedded in the elaboration of a broader framework of analysis, aiming to account for socio-historical processes of institutionalisation of groups, relational structures, representations and constitutive normative frameworks of what is called a policy.
Topic:
Conflict Prevention, Government, Political Economy, and Political Theory
Political Geography:
France

6. Urban Sustainable Development and the Challenge of French Metropolitan Strategies

Author:
Philippe Hamman
Publication Date:
11-2008
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Centre for European Political Sociology
Abstract:
This article focuses on some salient issues of urban sustainable development in France, specifically with regard to six urban agglomerations: Bordeaux, Lille, Lyon, Montpellier, Nantes and Toulouse. The reticular dimension of these issues is analysed with reference to the ways a plurality of actors imagine, project and realise the construction of cities, rather than through sectoral points of view. This relational approach is divided according to a triple focus in which we successively address: firstly, the state of SD policies in the listed major French cities, in terms of contents and conception; secondly, their implementation from the perspective of instruments; and finally, the circuits of their realisation. Thus, urban SD appears within a (locally variable) set of linkages that place these issues firmly in areas of interrelations and intersections.
Topic:
Demographics, Development, Government, and Political Economy
Political Geography:
France

7. Wie viel Erbschaftssteuern?

Author:
Jens Beckert
Publication Date:
10-2007
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies
Abstract:
Germany introduced a federal inheritance tax in 1906. Historically, the share of its revenues compared to total tax revenues has always been low. Currently, less than one percent of total revenues are generated from inheritance tax. In countries like France, the United States and England, inheritance tax revenues are higher. With its ruling in 2007 the German supreme court has forced parliament to revise regulations on inheritance taxation. Various proposals are currently the subject of intense political debate. I take this discussion as the starting point for an investigation of fundamental arguments for and against estate taxation. Proposing that inheritances be taxed as a further type of income within the context of the income tax, I examine the impact of inheritance taxes on economic performance, family solidarity and the political community as well as the relationship between inheritance taxation and important value principles of individual freedom, social justice and equality of opportunity.
Topic:
Government and Political Economy
Political Geography:
Europe, France, and Germany

8. Côte d'Ivoire: augmenter la pression

Publication Date:
09-2006
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
International Crisis Group
Abstract:
Le Premier ministre Charles Konan Banny n'a pas pu mettre en œuvre la feuille de route qui devait doter la Côte d'Ivoire d'un gouvernement légitime et démocratique. Les Ivoiriens n'éliront pas leur président avant le 31 octobre 2006 comme le réclama it le Conseil de sécurité de l'ONU. Le pays est touj ours contrôlé par les anciens rebelles et les forces gouvernementales, séparés par une zone tampon fragile tenue par le s forces de maintien de la paix de l'ONU et de la France. La véritable guerre civile n'a peut-être pas encore eu lieu. Le deuxième report des élections s'inscrit dans une stratégie délibérée de la part des hommes politiques qui ne veulent pas d'une paix dont ils n'auraient pas la maîtrise et qui cherchent à évaluer le pouvoir d'une co mmunauté internationale qui doit prendre des décisions diffic iles en septembre: reporter les élections, maintenir l'autorité de Banny pendant encore six mois et demeurer activement engagée dans le pays. Un échec à ce stade augmenterait fortement le risque que ce pays, qui était autrefois l'un des plus prospères d'Afrique, continue à se rapprocher d'un bain de sang qui n'a été évité que de justesse depuis quatre ans.
Topic:
International Relations, Government, and Peace Studies
Political Geography:
Africa and France

9. Rethinking European Law's Supremacy

Author:
Christian Joerges, Rainer Nickel, Damian Chalmers, Florian Rödl, and Robert Wai
Publication Date:
07-2005
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
European Research Papers Archive
Abstract:
The clear rejection of the European Constitutional Treaty by the French and Dutch electorates seems to reflect, at least in part, the uneasiness of many European citizens with a Europe which they perceive to govern "from above" with insufficient legitimacy, and without an adequate balance of free market vs. social concerns.
Topic:
Government and Treaties and Agreements
Political Geography:
Europe and France

10. The Role of Public Discourse in European Social Democratic Reform Projects

Author:
Vivian A. Schmidt
Publication Date:
06-2005
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
European Research Papers Archive
Abstract:
Public discourse, understood both as ideas about public action and interactive processes that serve to 'coordinate' the construction of those ideas and to 'communicate' them to the public, has been central to the success (or failure) of the reform projects of social democratic parties. Certain background factors, including countries' policy legacies, problems, preferences, and capacity set the stage for reform while good ideas which are cognitively sound and normatively appropriate as well as relevant, coherent, and consistent contribute to reform success. But institutional context also matters with regard to how ideas are conveyed to whom, with 'simple' polities emphasizing the 'communicative' discourse to the general public and more 'compound' polities the 'coordinative' discourse among policy actors. This is demonstrated with examples from Germany, France, Britain, Italy, the Netherlands, Denmark, and Sweden.
Topic:
Civil Society, Democratization, and Government
Political Geography:
Europe, France, Germany, Denmark, Italy, Sweden, and Netherlands

11. Update on the Ratification Debates: What Prospects for the European Constitutional Treaty? Results of and EPIN Survey of National Experts

Author:
Sebastian Kurpas, Marco Incerti, Justus Schönlau, and Julia De Clerck-Sachsse
Publication Date:
05-2005
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS)
Abstract:
The ratification process of the Constitutional Treaty has taken some unexpected turns, since the publication of our initial report. The situation has changed especially dramatically in France: within only 10 days the 'yes' camp slid from a previously stable figure of around 60% to below 50%. Our report had concluded that “if the reasons for a particular European compromise are not made transparent to the citizens, issues can be used in a divisive way at the national level”. It therefore called for a stronger European dimension in the national debates and expressed the hope that politicians and the media would play their role in stressing the common European significance of the European Constitution.
Topic:
International Relations, Government, and Treaties and Agreements
Political Geography:
Europe and France

12. After 'Non' and 'Nee': Plans B, C, and D for the European Constitution

Author:
Daniel Gould
Publication Date:
06-2005
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Peterson Institute for International Economics
Abstract:
The proposed European Constitution, which was just voted down in France and the Netherlands, is technically a treaty containing far-reaching amendments to the present set of treaties governing the European Union. Article 48 of the EU treaty text currently in force specifies that any such amendments first be unanimously approved by the governments of the member states within an Inter-Governmental Conference framework and then ratified by each country. The first, intergovernmental step of ratification was completed October 29, 2004.
Topic:
Economics and Government
Political Geography:
Europe, France, and Netherlands

13. How Many Third Ways? Comparing the British, French and German Left in Government

Author:
Eckhard Schröter
Publication Date:
02-2004
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Institute of European Studies (IES), UC Berkeley
Abstract:
In the late 1990s, the European Left seemed to be once more in the ascendancy with Social Democratic-led governments in power in the majority of EU countries, including the United Kingdom, France, and Germany. At the same time, the debate about the socalled 'Third Way' — as an icon of the apparent electoral revitalization of European Social Democracy — rose to become the most important reform discourse in the European party landscape.
Topic:
International Relations and Government
Political Geography:
Britain, United Kingdom, Europe, France, and Germany

14. Disenchanted Conscription: A Military Recruitment System in Need of Justification

Author:
Anna Leander
Publication Date:
06-2003
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Danish Institute for International Studies (DIIS)
Abstract:
The Economist's point of view is a widely shared one. It also seems warranted by current trends in policy-making in developed democracies. The US, the UK, the Netherlands, Belgium, Italy, Spain, and Portugal have abolished or are phasing out conscription. Even France, mother of citizens armies through the revolutionary levée en masse, just saw (literally as the event was broadcasted as a main feature of the evening television news) its last conscript leave the armed forces. The Nordic countries and Germany have not abolished conscription, but conscripts make up a shrinking share of the armed forces, which governments plan to shrink even further. For many observers this confirms that they simply lag behind. They will soon be brought to reason and abolish conscription. But this is a simplistic understanding of what determines the fate of conscription.
Topic:
Defense Policy, Government, and Peace Studies
Political Geography:
United States, United Kingdom, France, Belgium, Spain, Italy, Netherlands, and Portugal

15. Dealing with Iran's Nuclear Program

Publication Date:
10-2003
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
International Crisis Group
Abstract:
The announcement on 21 October 2003 of an agreement between Iran on the one hand and Britain, France and Germany on the other, is an important and welcome step in resolving the controversy surrounding Tehran's nuclear program. But it would be wrong to assume that it ends it. The challenge now is to use the breathing space provided by the agreement to tackle the questions – about its implementation, the future of Iran's uranium enrichment activities and Iran's own security concerns – that, for the time being, it has deferred.
Topic:
Foreign Policy, Arms Control and Proliferation, Government, Nuclear Weapons, and Politics
Political Geography:
Britain, Iran, France, Arabia, and Germany

16. 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

17. Do Judicial Councils Further Judicial Reform? Lessons from Latin America

Author:
Linn Hammergren
Publication Date:
06-2002
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
Abstract:
JUDICIAL REFORM EFFORTS IN LATIN AMERICA, and by extension worldwide, seem to fall easily prey to magic bullets. In the past two decades, reformers in the region and aid providers from North America and Western Europe have seized upon a whole series of entry points for judicial reform—including model codes, accusatory criminal justice systems, court administration reforms, information technology, alternative dispute resolution, legal services, and constitutional courts. Sometime during the late 1980s, as the issue of judicial independence came to receive more serious attention, judicial councils joined the list, and nearly a dozen countries adopted them. It was not until the late 1990s that questions about their utility began to emerge. Although Latin America is beginning to reexamine its love affair with the councils, the model has been gaining ground in other regions. Western Europeans, who invented the mechanism, have been suffering their own doubts. This has not prevented their joining with U.S. reformers in recommending it to postcommunist nations in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union and in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. The cautionary lessons from Latin America's several-decade experiment with judicial councils have not yet been analyzed and disseminated. This essay is a start in that direction.
Topic:
Democratization and Government
Political Geography:
America, Europe, France, South America, Latin America, and Central America

18. Continental welfare states in Europe confronted with the end-of-career inactivity trap: A major challenge to social protection in an aging society

Author:
Anne Marie Guillemard
Publication Date:
03-2002
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies, Harvard University
Abstract:
The paper is an attempt to assess continental welfare state reforms that use the window of the end-of-career inactivity trap. The question addressed is: what is the most effective way to break up the vicious circle of early exit from the labor market, which is a specific pathology of continental welfare states. The cases of the Netherlands and Finland, two countries that have succeeded in reversing the early exit trend in recent years, prove that only a radical change in paradigms that govern social protection may turn the vicious circle of welfare without work for aging workers into a virtuous circle of active aging. In states in which reforms have focused on changing the rules and regulations that govern retirement systems, or on restricting early exit pathways, as is the case in France, they have failed to break up with the end-of-career inactivity trap.
Topic:
Government
Political Geography:
Europe and France

19. Creating Stability: National Preferences and the Origins of European Monetary System

Author:
Mark Aspinwall
Publication Date:
12-2000
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies, Harvard University
Abstract:
This essay compares the preferences of France, Italy, and Britain on the creation of the European Monetary System in 1978-1979, especially the Exchange Rate Mechanism, which stabilised nominal exchange rates. My claim is that the different conclusions reached by the governments (France and Italy in, Britain out) cannot be explained by economic circumstances or by interests, and I elaborate an intervening institutional variable which helps explain preferences. Deducing from spatial theory that where decisionmakers 'sit' on the left-right spectrum matters to their position on the EMS, I argue that domestic constitutional power-sharing mechanisms privilege certain actors over others in a predictable and consistent way. Where centrists were in power, the government's decision was to join. Where left or right extremists were privileged, the government's decision was negative. The article measures the centrism of the governments in place at the time, and also reviews the positions taken by the national political parties in and out of government. It is intended to contribute to the growing comparativist literature on the European Union, and to the burgeoning literature on EU-member-state relations.
Topic:
Economics, Government, and International Cooperation
Political Geography:
Britain, Iraq, Europe, and France

20. Ideas, Culture and Political Analysis Workshop

Author:
Thomas Risse, Sarah Mendelson, Neil Fligstein, Jan Kubik, Jeffrey T. Checkel, Consuelo Cruz, Kathleen McNamara, Sheri Berman, Frank Dobbin, Mark Blyth, Ken Pollack, George Steinmetz, Daniel Philpott, Gideon Rose, Martha Finnemore, Kathryn Skikkink, Marie Gottschalk, John Kurt Jacobsen, and Anna Seleny
Publication Date:
05-1998
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Social Science Research Council
Abstract:
The last decade or so has witnessed a resurgence in scholarship employing ideational and cultural factors in the analysis of political life. This scholarship has addressed political phenomena across a variety of national and international settings, with studies of European politics being particularly well represented. For example, the work of scholars like Peter Hall (1993), Peter Katzenstein (1996), Ronald Inglehart (1997), Robert Putnam (1994) and Daniel Jonah Goldhagen (1995) has improved our understandings of European polities, societies and economies. Yet despite a recent rise in interest, ideational and cultural explanations still meet with skepticism in many quarters of the discipline. Some scholars doubt whether non-material factors like ideas or culture have independent causal effects, and others, who accept that such factors might matter, despair of devising viable ways of analyzing their impact on political life.
Topic:
Conflict Resolution, International Relations, Security, Democratization, Economics, Government, Human Rights, International Cooperation, Nationalism, and Politics
Political Geography:
United States, Middle East, France, and Latin America