France's Efforts Research Articles

The Central Asian Direction of French Foreign Policy (1992-2022)

From the moment of the collapse of the USSR to the present days France showed interest in building relations with the countries of Central Asia in a wide range of areas of interaction. France was one of the first European states to recognize the independence of the new republics. The article is aimed to expand knowledge about French policy in Central Asia and the factors that determine the interest of Paris in the Eurasian region. In the context of the transformation of the world order and global geopolitical tensions France's capabilities are narrowing which encourages Paris to pursue a proactive foreign policy on the Central Asian track. At the same time the place of France's ideological and value rhetoric in its foreign policy in the Central Asian countries is gradually occupied by economic reasonability. France's interests in the region are focused on energy resources and Afghan issues. France's efforts are aimed at reducing the dependence of Central Asian countries on Russia and China. It is concluded that France is strengthening the economic dimension of its foreign policy in Central Asia with an emphasis on expanding cooperation with the two leading countries of the region - Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan.

EUFOR ČAD/CENTRALNOAFRIČKA REPUBLIKA: POLITIZOVANI MANDAT EVROPSKE UNIJE I VOJNO UPRAVLJANJE DARFURSKOM KRIZOM

From the moment of its establishment, EUFOR Chad/Central African Republic was a specific military operation, not only from the perspective of the European Union, but the host countries as well. Mutual skepticism emerged already in the first phase of the decision-making process, when the preliminary assessments of its success and implementation were quite pessimistic. The lack of agreement among the EU Member States regarding conducting an intervention conditioned additional efforts of France, as the main initiator, to fulfil its ambitions through the decisions of Common Security and Defense Policy, thus securing its strategic position on the African continent. Equally pronounced critical blade in Chad was also covered up, having in mind that the inevitable fragmentation of ideas was avoided through a one-sided decision passed by the current political leadership. The other specificity is reflected in the fact that, based on numerous parameters, EUFOR Chad/CAR operation was assessed as the biggest intervention of the European Union conducted so far. Despite operative, logistical and financial difficulties that postponed implementation of the mandate, the operation was concluded on March 15, 2009. The logical question emerging regarding the previously stated characteristics is whether they impacted the defining of the mandate, the dynamics of its implementation and the final result of EUFOR Chad/CAR operation? The basic assumption which is the starting point for the authors of this paper states that the pronounced specificities echoed in the form of politization of the mandate and the military management of the Darfur crisis as direct motives of the operation. The lack of political mechanisms supporting the military action in conflict solution concurrently contributed to militarization of crisis management of the EU. The affirmative argument of the previously expressed statements is the impact of permanent shortages to the consistency and effectiveness of the results of EUFOR. An additional insight is expressed in the consent of the host country, the Republic of Chad, which was, in this concrete case, driven by strategic interests and strengthening of the authoritarian rule.

DURRES CONGRESS EXPRESSION OF ALBANIA'S POLITICAL MATURITY

DURRES CONGRESS EXPRESSION OF ALBANIA'S POLITICAL MATURITY

Characterization of Environmental Health Inequalities Due to Polyaromatic Hydrocarbon Exposure in France.

Reducing environmental health inequalities has become a major focus of public health efforts in France, as evidenced by the French action plans for health and the environment. To evaluate environmental inequalities, routine monitoring networks provide a valuable source of data on environmental contamination, which can be used in integrated assessments, to identify overexposed populations and prioritize actions. However, available databases generally do not meet sufficient spatial representativeness to characterize population exposure, as they are usually not assembled for this specific purpose. The aim of this study was to develop geoprocessing procedures and statistical methods to build spatial environmental variables (water, air, soil, and food pollutant concentrations) at a fine resolution, and provide appropriate input for the exposure modelling. Those methods were designed to combine in situ monitoring data with correlated auxiliary information (for example, atmospheric emissions, population, and altitude), in order to better represent the variability of the environmental compartment quality. The MODUL’ERS multimedia exposure model developed by INERIS (French Institute for industrial Environment and Risks) was then used to assess the transfer of substances from the environment to humans, through inhalation and ingestion pathway characterization. We applied the methodology to a carcinogenic Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbon substance, benzo[a]pyrene(B[a]P), to map spatialized exposure indicators, at the national scale. The largest environmental contribution corresponded to the ingestion pathway. Data processing algorithms and calculation of exposure will be integrated into the French coordinated integrated environment and health platform PLAINE (PLteforme intégrée d’Analyse des INégalités Environnementales) which has been developed to map and analyze environmental health inequalities.

Mad at Tangier: Hygienist discourses, mental disorders, and European competition for hegemony in early twentieth-century Morocco

ABSTRACTThis study focuses on the discourse on mental pathologies affecting Western residents in Tangier that was elaborated from the late 1920s. After gaining prestige as a health resort during the nineteenth century, Tangier experienced mounting foreign intervention, ultimately leading to the establishment of an international regime, which substantially changed the city’s perception. Strong winds and a rough sea climate, coupled with the stress associated with the restless struggle for hegemony between the Western powers, became a suspected source of psychological distress for foreign newcomers. In this context, the French doctor Paul Remlinger, director of the Pasteur Institute, and José Sievert, head of the Spanish Laboratory, defined a mental pathology supposedly specific to the city: the “Tangerian neurosis” or “psychosis.” As we will try to show, their views, which enjoyed a lasting influence that went beyond medicine into literature and popular culture, reflected general anxieties associated to the efforts of France and Spain to colonize Tangier and Morocco at large, and to pathologize their inhabitants and environment.

King and Colony in Pierre Corneille’s Le Cid

Pierre Corneille's tragicomedy Le Cid has often been interpreted as the story of medieval Castile's transition from feudalism to a strong monarchy, a story that clearly resonates with France's own domestic political concerns under Louis XIII. This article focuses instead on Castile's external political engagements in the play, and how they reflect France's efforts to establish colonies during the seventeenth century. It is argued here that reading Le Cid alongside France's record of colonization in North America allows the play to be understood not only as an exploration of a fraught moment in French domestic politics, but also as a reflection of the kingdom's efforts to maintain and expand control over foreign lands. Several aspects of Le Cid — Rodrigue's duel with Don Gomes and the events surrounding it, Castile's conflict with the Moors, and King Don Fernand's mostly ineffective efforts to maintain order — appear on close inspection to have implications for affairs external as much as internal, a feature of Corneille's tragicomedy that distinguishes it from the Spanish play that inspired it. More broadly, this article shows how accounting for France's colonization of the New World may help cast the famously insular French seventeenth century in a new and revealing light.

Giuseppe Antonio Borgese and Italian propaganda abroad

After the outbreak of war, public and private institutions in Italy embarked on various propaganda projects without coordination. It was not until Vittorio Emanuele Orlando became prime minister (from 30 October 1917 to 23 June 1919) that the first serious efforts were made to organize propaganda abroad. G. A. Borgese, a contributor to the Corriere della Sera, took an active role in the defense of Italian intervention in the war and was assigned various missions abroad, commissioned by the editor of the newspaper and, after this first experience, by the army and naval authorities, and by Orlando himself. His unpublished report Dello spirito pubblico in Francia, written at the end of his mission to Paris in March and April 1917, describes Italian propaganda efforts in France and French public opinion on Italy and the Italians, making it an important text that reveals both the problematic relations between Italy and France and the mistakes and shortcomings of Italian propaganda.

Negotiating China's Destiny in World War II, edited by Hans van de Ven, Diana Lary, and Stephen R. MacKinnon

Negotiating China's Destiny in World War II, edited by Hans van de Ven, Diana Lary, and Stephen R. MacKinnon. Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2015. xii, 336 pp. $60.00 US (cloth). This collection of papers on the Sino-Japanese War of 1937-1945 includes contributions by Western, Chinese, and Japanese scholars and exemplifies a revisionist tide in the historiography of China's foreign relations. The book focuses on the role of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek (Jiang Jieshi) during the 1930s and 1940s. Though the image of Jiang's wife, Song Meiling, is pictured twice on the book's cover, her important role is much deemphasized as are the roles of other figures. The editors have followed three themes in arranging these fine chapters: the death knell of the old empires and the rise of China, the negotiation of alliances, and sovereignty. Marianne Bastid-Bruguiere's, Deluded Quest for Allies: Safeguarding Territorial Sovereignty and the Balance of Power in East Asia, 1931-1945, is the first chapter of the collection and is slightly mistitled. She draws on a wide range of French primary sources as well as English, French, and Chinese secondary sources examine France's effort retain power in Vietnam from 1931 until 1941. Neglected in her contribution is France's beleaguered religious protectorate in China, which covered foreign and Chinese Catholics. Rana Mitter's contribution traces Britain's reconciliation with the decline of its imperial influence in China. Chang Jui-Te recounts Tibet's efforts preserve its de facto independence and complete autonomy and Jiang's effort extend Nationalist China the limits of the Qing Empire through non-violent means. Yang Kuisong's chapter closely follows the complicated, turbulent relationship between the Chinese Communist Party and The Communist International (the Comintern) from 1937 1943 when Stalin disbanded the latter organization. Yang argues that although, Mao's pragmatic policy was focused on winning the revolution in China, a policy not acceptable the Comintern (p. 87), Mao did not break with Moscow or the Comintern (p. 88). In chapter five, Diana Lary chooses four Canadians to encapsulate the nature and scope of Canada's relations with China in wartime (p. 97). She examines General Victor Odium, who represented Canada with its vague, long-term China policy in Chongqing; Robert McClure, a missionary doctor and refugee relief worker; Norman Bethune, a surgeon close the Chinese Communist Party; and Quan Louie, a military aviator from a leading Chinese family in Vancouver, killed while flying over Germany (p. 97). A quibble: While Lary draws attention the work of French Canadian Jesuits, she overlooks the Anglophone Canadian Catholic priests of the Scarboro Mission Society who worked in Quzhou, Zhejiang Province with the Grey Sisters of the Immaculate Conception from Pembroke, Ontario. …

René Massigli's Mission to London, 1944–1954

René Massigli's considerable contribution to French diplomacy began during the First World War. After being closely involved with many significant developments in French foreign policy during the inter-war years, Massigli then served alongside Charles de Gaulle during the Second World War. Informed by his experience of the 1930s, he adopted a view of western European security that saw him determined to promote greater co-operation between France and Britain to withstand a potential German resurgence and a looming Soviet threat. But following France's efforts after 1950 to promote European integration based on Franco-German co-operation, Massigli re-defined his role of ambassador and openly challenged French initiatives such as the Schuman Plan and, in particular, the European Defence Community, not only because they did not include Britain, but also because they threatened his view of French security. This analysis assesses Massigli's strategic vision and his attempts to overcome the underlying constraints.

‘A hideously difficult country’: British propaganda to France in the early Cold War

This article examines British propaganda efforts in France in the early Cold War in the light of a developing relationship in which the senders' own strategies were to be modified and challenged. The article argues that initiatives to broadcast propaganda from Britain into France via the BBC operated within a broader and developing information policy context. Broadcasting from outside the country through the BBC was supplemented with attempts by British personnel stationed in France to embed positive messages directly within the contemporary French media. By 1950 however, the British propaganda initiative seemed inappropriate and outmoded, taken over by the French themselves and by a British desire to prioritise countries outside Western Europe.

Development of a spatial stochastic multimedia exposure model to assess population exposure at a regional scale

Analyzing the relationship between the environment and health has become a major focus of public health efforts in France, as evidenced by the national action plans for health and the environment. These plans have identified the following two priorities:-identify and manage geographic areas where hotspot exposures are a potential risk to human health; and-reduce exposure inequalities.The aim of this study is to develop a spatial stochastic multimedia exposure model for detecting vulnerable populations and analyzing exposure determinants at a fine resolution and regional scale. A multimedia exposure model was developed by INERIS to assess the transfer of substances from the environment to humans through inhalation and ingestion pathways. The RESPIR project adds a spatial dimension by linking GIS (Geographic Information System) to the model. Tools are developed using modeling, spatial analysis and geostatistic methods to build and discretize interesting variables and indicators from different supports and resolutions on a 1-km2 regular grid.We applied this model to the risk assessment of exposure to metals (cadmium, lead and nickel) using data from a region in France (Nord-Pas-de-Calais). The considered exposure pathways include the atmospheric contaminant inhalation and ingestion of soil, vegetation, meat, egg, milk, fish and drinking water. Exposure scenarios are defined for different reference groups (age, dietary properties, and the fraction of food produced locally).The two largest risks correspond to an ancient industrial site (Metaleurop) and the Lille agglomeration. In these areas, cadmium, vegetation ingestion and soil contamination are the principal determinants of the computed risk.

FINANCIAL SURVEILLANCE

While critical academic studies on financial surveillance blossom, they hardly pay attention to the critical capability of those who are involved in the implementation of anti-money-laundering/countering terrorist financing (AML/CTF) policy. In this paper the authors attempt precisely this analysis of existing mobilizations which contest the everyday implementation of AML/CTF standards. Which practices are at stake? Who are the actors involved in denunciation? Which argumentation is used? What are the normative positions from which actors raise criticism? Are denunciations shared by a wider public or do they remain sector-specific? This paper brings together empirical results from research conducted separately by the two authors on, respectively, the gradual institutionalization of the role of banks in anti-money-laundering efforts in France and Switzerland and European measures against terrorist financing.

Moving Mars: The Logistical Geography of Louis XIV'S France

This article considers France's military potential in the later seventeenth century through an examination of logistical resources and the communication systems that could link these resources to military operations. It challenges the assumption that France possessed a military advantage as a geographically contiguous and resource-rich territory apparently able to sustain military operations on interior lines. It shows how both natural and institutional barriers handicapped France's efforts to support military operations, despite the impressive levels of military mobilization achieved under Louis XIV.

Two faces of patient safety and care quality: a Franco-American comparison

Patient safety, and more broadly the quality of care, is typically discussed with reference to the reduction of preventable adverse events within hospitals and adherence to practice guidelines on care processes. We call it the 'care-centered approach' and recognize that the United States is a leader in the field. Another face of patient safety and care quality may be defined as the 'system-centered approach'. It focuses on access to a timely and effective continuum of health-care services--clinical prevention, primary care and appropriate referral to and receipt of specialty care. Although France's efforts to pursue a care-centered approach to patient safety are limited, its system-centered approach yields some benefits. Based on the evidence we have reviewed for access to primary care (hospital discharges for avoidable hospital conditions), mortality amenable to medical intervention and consumer satisfaction, in the United States and France, there appear to be good grounds for bolstering the system-centered approach in the United States.

UNDERCOOKED GROUND BEEF AND PERSON-TO-PERSON TRANSMISSION AS MAJOR RISK FACTORS FOR SPORADIC HEMOLYTIC UREMIC SYNDROME RELATED TO SHIGA-TOXIN PRODUCING ESCHERCHIA COLI INFECTIONS IN CHILDREN IN FRANCE

In a prospective matched case-control study of sporadic pediatric hemolytic uremic syndrome related to Shiga-toxin producing Escherichia coli infection in France, eating undercooked ground beef, contact with a person with diarrhea, and drinking well water during the summer period were identified as risk factors. Prevention efforts in France should focus on reducing not only food-borne but also person-to-person transmission.

Preparing for Total War: The Conseil Supérieur de la Défense Nationale and France's Industrial and Economic Preparations for War after 1918

This article examines France's efforts to prepare for war during the interwar period. Immediately following the First World War, French political and military leaders, convinced of the possibility (and indeed the likelihood) of another European war, set about preparing the country for a conflict that was expected to be total in nature. Given the importance that French planners attached to economic factors in such a conflict, the article focuses on industrial and economic preparations for war during peacetime. Industrial preparations involved placing French industry in a position to produce large quantities of armaments as quickly as possible once war began, while economic preparations consisted of organizing the non-military sectors of the economy to meet wartime civilian needs. The article argues that France's economic and industrial preparations for war fell far short of what was needed — an assessment that reflects the huge gap between the plans drawn up in the wake of the First World War and the results achieved on the eve of the Second World War. Much of this failure, moreover, can be attributed to the weaknesses of the Conseil supérieur de la défense nationale, the institution charged with preparing the country for a future war. In addition to highlighting the concrete aspects of industrial and economic preparations for war, a focus on institutions not only throws light on how the interwar French state worked in practice, but also directs attention to a critical factor in the success of any regime: its ability to translate policy goals into concrete measures.

Tempered Sympathy: Canada’s Reaction to the Independence Movement in Algeria, 1954-1962

This article examines the reaction of the Canadian government to the Algerian war for independence from France from 1954 to 1962. It reveals that, while sympathetic to the ambitions of colonial peoples to determine their own national destinies, the Canadian government often judged colonial issues after the Second World War by the impact they had on the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, Canadian security interests and the Cold War. Given that the Algerian war threatened France's ability and willingness to contribute to NATO during this period the Canadian government felt compelled to support France's efforts to retain its North African colony both politically and militarily. Canadian officials wanted France's participation in NATO and were unwilling to antagonise France by opposing its Algerian policies. In this instance national security interests were of a higher priority for the Canadian government than support for the principle of national self-determination for colonial peoples.

Pale, poor, and 'pretubercular' children: a history of pediatric antituberculosis efforts in France, Germany, and the United States, 1899-1929.

An international consensus emerged in the years between 1900 and 1910 regarding the need to refocus antituberculosis efforts away from treating tuberculosis in adults and toward preventing active disease in children. This paper uses social history as a framework to explore pediatric health experiments in France (foster placement of city children with rural farm families), Germany (open-air schools), and the United States (preventorium) for children considered 'pretubercular'. The scientific, social, and political variables that reshaped prevailing ideas and practice with regard to TB prevention during those years are described. The creation of the first preventorium in the United States is explained and the way in which French and German pediatric prevention strategies were adapted to address a specific population considered at high risk in the United States, indigent immigrants, is detailed. For each of these three nations, nurses were central actors. Their efforts provide a unique vantage point to study the cultural dimensions of risk and prevention embedded in nursing care and the interplay between science, culture, nurses, and the state.

The Lost Ballad : Max Ophuls' Last Hollywood Project

Figure ?. Irmgard von Cube in the 1940s. Courtesy of Deutsches Filmmuseum Frankfurt/Main-Sammlung Straschek. LUTZ BACHER The Lost Bailan: Max Ophuls' Last Hollywood Project In biographical accounts ofMax Ophuls' career, his contributions to producer Walter Wanger's project of bringing Rosamond Lehmann's popular novel The Ballad and the Source to the screen are mentioned in passing, if at all, falling victim to a biographical short cut that originated with Ophuls himself. After he directed Wanger's The Reckless Moment in Hollywood, the story goes, he proceeded directly to The Duchess of Langeais project whose collapse in Paris in the fall of 1949 led immediately to his becoming a European director again with the making of La Ronde at the beginning of 1950. The source for this version of events is Francis Koval's spring 1950 interview of Ophuls for Sight and Sound, in which he said that "The Recldess Moment . . . led to the project of La Duchesse de Langeais. I actually came to Paris to shoot this famous novel with Greta Garbo and James Mason. As nothing came of it, ... I enthusiastically seized the chance of filming another famous Schnitzler subject: Der Reigen" (Max Ophuls 22). Though this was the truth, it was not the whole truth, and Balzac, Garbo, and Mason certainly made for a better story than Rosamond Lehmann and Joan Bennett. The wealth of primary sources available on the Ballad project's development in the Walter F. Wanger Papers at the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research and such reliable secondary sources as Matthew Bernstein's Wanger biography readily permit restoring Ballad to its proper place in the story of Ophuls' return to Europe.1 But the Wanger Papers also facilitate a much closer look at Ophuls' work on the project. They include the almost daily communications between Ophuls and Wanger during the latter's European travels in the spring of Arizona Quarterly Volume 60, Number 5, Special Issue 2004 Copyright © 2004 by Arizona Board of Regents issN 0004- 1610 98 Lutz Bacher 1949, a period coinciding with Ophuls' efforts to provide an effective cinematic form for the adaptation of a complexly structured novel in a contentious collaboration with the screenwriting team of Irmgard von Cube and Allen Vincent. These documents illuminate the creative process to an extraordinary degree, while revealing Ophuls' enthusiasm for the material.2 Still, determining the extent of Ophuls' authorship of the final draft screenplay is problematic, complicated by the lack ofdaily communications after Wanger's return and by Ophuls' having to leave the collaboration five weeks before its completion to work on another screenplay. It becomes a matter of comparisons: of the early drafts with the final draft and of the latter with the earlier writing efforts of both Ophuls and von Cube and Vincent, loosely applying the "criterion stylistic paradigm " of Ophuls' films I devised for my study of his American career (Max Ophuls 5-9). But by making a case for the significance of Ballad in Ophuls' oeuvre, I am also arguing, ultimately, for the value of critical attention to un-produced screenplays, especially when they come at critical junctures in a director's career and "describe" the film-to-be as carefully as Ophuls.' The communications between production executives, producers, and directors at 20th Century-Fox, finally, shed light on certain qualities of the screenplay that precluded its going to production. Ophuls' modernist structure, arguably the most important aspect for him as preparation for similar efforts in France, may have been a major factor in its demise. In the motion picture industry's heady days of August 1945, Wanger paid the extraordinarily high price of $175,000 plus an additional bonus of $25,000, if U.S. sales exceeded 600,000 copies (they did), for Ballad's motion picture rights to Rosamond Lehmann, a contemporary of Elizabeth Bowen and Virginia Woolf and then deemed their equal. Bernstein noted that Wanger admired the novel's characters' '"constant search for happiness and truth in a world shackled by the chains of a bigoted culture,' and thought it would be a superb vehicle for Bergman " (Bernstein 265). But a treatment by Gina Kaus and two screenplays by Michael Blankfort...

From biblical exegesis to crises of european modernity: Reflections on girardian theory and its limitations

Over the last two decades the field of ‘Girard studies’ – the application of René Girard's theories on mimetic desire and sacrificial violence to cultural artifacts – has tended to focus increasingly on Biblical texts and theological implications of Girard's interpretation of Christianity as a ‘theory of man.’ After summarizing Girardian theory in its current form, this essay stresses the applicability of the theory to François Furet's reading of the crisis of bourgeois culture and to Pascal Bruckner's reading of the malaise of the post Cold War world and the ethnic crises associated with the break‐up of the former Yugoslavia. This essay also demonstrates how Girardian theory illuminates the recent historical and judicial crises associated with France's efforts to come to terms with the memory and legacy of the collaborationist Vichy regime during World War II. The essay concludes with a brief assessment of the advantages as well as the pitfalls of employing Girardian theory to demystify the crises of modernity.