Outward Projection: France in the World

Abstract

In previous chapters, we have explored how culture has been used as an instrument for domestic government. In this final chapter, I propose to widen the perspective by considering the governmental recourse to culture to inflect attitudes beyond national frontiers. Certainly, this distinction is not as clear-cut as it might initially appear. In areas as diverse as laicity, education and national history, we have seen how notionally domestic debates and struggles were framed through and through by anxieties about the solidity of France’s identity in an era of evermore patent economic, political and cultural globalization. Conversely, the assertion of the nation’s role on an international stage plays not simply to its manifest addressees but also to a home audience’s putative appetite for images of a strong defensive State (Parmentier, 2008, p. 24) — these can thus feed the types of storytelling strategies for domestic media analysed in Chapter 3. Moreover, the kinds of conceptual lens deployed for domestic patterns of government through culture can be adapted for this somewhat different terrain. Francois Chaubet suggests that the preoccupation among both analysts and governments over the last two decades with what Joseph Nye has called ‘soft power’ — how to secure desired outcomes without relying on purely economic and military resources — can also be seen as a ‘Gramscian moment’ in international relations (Chaubet, 2013, p. 93; Nye, 2004). Of course, as Chaubet notes, such issues predate Nye’s coinage, and one might point also to the existence of an established ‘neo-Gramscian’ school of international relations (Ayers, 2008). Nonetheless, it is true that globalized strategies for cultural projection and defence have become more prominent and self-conscious. This symbolic terrain has become more densely populated, with a greater range of actors (nation-states, regions, private enterprises, sundry other organizations) deploying new kinds of apparatus and strategy. While this may not have displaced the United States from its status as global hegemon (Maclean & Szarka, 2008, p. 8), it has certainly problematized France’s long-standing aspiration to constitute an alternative pole of cultural hegemony (Chaubet & Martin, 2011, p. 9).