French Decision-makers Research Articles

Common Security and Defence Policy as France’s Winning Strategy ? Evidence from Recent Experience

France’s status as a conventional power makes Paris an inevitable actor in the context of Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP). Insofar France is considered as a staunch protagonist of the EU/European strategic autonomy and an opponent against the US/NATO dominance in Europe, the most recent CSDP progress may be expected to belong to the merits of French decision-makers. Based on a closer analytical look, however, CSDP is not reducible to a coherent outcome of French interests. At the EU level, the French influence turns out to be limited. A strong ideological attachment of this EU Member State to sovereign politics and a consequential lack of commitment to common issues of defence and security may be viewed as an impediment to the materialisation of a more significant clout of Paris on the communitarian scale. Yet relevant limits are predominantly a structural consequence, which is a pattern enhanced by the current dynamics in global politics. This makes one consider France’s status as a “system-influencing state” more cautiously. In a sense, the paper takes issue with the literature on the recent CSDP progress as an expression of political and policy convergence and re-focuses attention on manners in which inter-European dynamics can shed light on positions of individual members.

MENTAL MAPS AND FOREIGN POLICY DECISION-MAKING: EURAFRIQUE AND THE FRENCH MILITARY INTERVENTION IN MALI

Extract ----- Abstract Mental maps matter. By looking at France’s decision to launch a military operation in Mali in January 2013, this article decrypts the complex compound of decision-makers’ mental maps focusing in particular on the geographic image of Eurafrique. When justifying the military intervention in one of their country’s former colonies, French decision-makers framed the Malian crisis as an imminent threat to the European continent, emphasising geographical vicinity and the close ties between Africa and Europe. These arguments mirror the concept of Eurafrique, a spatial construction that stresses the complementary and interdependence between the two continents. This article reintroduces the notion of Eurafrique as a frame for analysing the present-day French security discourse towards the African continent in general and towards France’s former colonies in particular. The argument joins the debate on the use of mental maps in the field of foreign policy analysis (FPA). The findings show that the notion considerably influenced French decision-makers’ perception of the crisis in Mali, but also points to the narrative’s limited reach as its success is dependent not only on the transmitter but also on the recipients. Keywords: Mental maps, international security, France, Africa, political psychology ----- Bibliography: Erforth, Benedikt: Mental maps and foreign policy decision-making: Eurafrique and the French military intervention in Mali, ERIS, 2-2016, pp. 38-57. https://doi.org/10.3224/eris.v3i1.26006

A Revision of “the Irish Exception”: Seán Murphy, Irish Recognition Policy and the Republic of France, 1944

The article reframes Irish wartime neutrality. It posits that Ireland’s policy towards Vichy France conformed to the prevailing legal interpretations in the field of diplomatic recognition. This was consistent with the practice of Ireland’s longstanding recognition policy from the 1930s until the 1960s. An enigma, however, envelops Ireland’s retention of the Irish Minister to the Republic of France, Seán Murphy, after the fall of Marshall Philippe Pétain in August 1944. Charles de Gaulle’s Provisional Government demanded the replacement of all heads of missions who had served in France during the Vichy interlude. This violated the traditional practice of recognition law as understood by Ireland and other neutrals. But the neutrals, with the exception of Ireland, reluctantly complied with the demand. How did the Irish Department of External Affairs succeed in circumventing this? No evidence of an illusive “back channel”, that some authors speculate ended the accreditation crisis, has been found. There is limited evidence that secondary factors, such as the proposed establishment of an Irish Red Cross Hospital in Normandy, played a direct or significant role in senior French decision makers’ calculations to reverse their policy in the case of Murphy. This article offers a fresh explanation for France’s extension of a dispensation to Ireland: on petition from the Irish government, René Massigli, the new French Ambassador in London, made two decisive interventions which altered the climate of opinion in Paris and enabled Seán Murphy to remain. “We had no quarrel with any group of Frenchmen and our one desire with regard to France was to see her whole people united under one Government… We did not want quarrels between Frenchmen in Ireland1.”

The Americanization of France: Searching for Happiness After the Algerian War by Barnett Singer

Reviews 295 of this experimental hybrid work, both images and text are fully inverted, forcing the reader to turn the book around. In Yeux, Serres takes philosophical and literary experimentation to unprecedented heights, in comparison to his earlier works. 3D technology, designed by Dassault Systems, allows the philosopher to catch a glimpse of what it is like to see the world through the eyes of other life forms, including bees, cats, rats, and falcons. In the larger context of Serres’s ecocentric worldview, the importance of this simulated experience cannot be overstated, despite its inherent limitations. After momentarily perceiving the world differently through the eyes of another organism, Serres obliterates any meaningful distinction between the subject and the object. The philosopher takes aim at traditional, mainstream Western philosophy , which has relegated other life forms to the status of an object.Serres convincingly contends that the entire biosphere is replete with subjects in the philosophical sense. Fervently declaring that millions of autonomous, sentient subjects exist on this planet, the philosopher explains in the first chapter, “Voir et être vu”: “Car ils reçoivent, stockent, traitent, émettent la lumière; brillent donc comme des yeux [...] comme la plupart des choses renvoient la lumière tout autant qu’elles la reçoivent, la piègent et la traitent, j’imagine qu’elles voient tout autant qu’elles sont vues” (12). In this first section and throughout the work as a whole, Serres attempts to deliver a coup de grâce to outdated anthropocentric thought systems that run contrary to the principles of modern science. Serres’s motivations for elevating other animals to the privileged position of a subject are quite transparent. Without a radical paradigm shift that recognizes non-human agency and the intrinsic right of every being to exist, the philosopher is convinced that our mistreatment of the cosmic forces upon which our very sustenance depends will lead to oblivion. For Serres, debunking unfounded notions of human exceptionalism is the key to preventing an eco-apocalypse and saving the human race in the process. In what is perhaps his most innovative text to date, Serres compels us to think harder about the philosophical question of agency by temporarily immersing ourselves in simulated, virtual realms and reflecting upon all of the ramifications of scientific erudition before it is too late. Mississippi State University Keith Moser Singer, Barnett. The Americanization of France: Searching for Happiness After the Algerian War. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2013. ISBN 978-1-4422-21659 . Pp. 281. $65. At the outset, Singer outlines in his thesis that the Algerian war was a“searing”(5) chapter in French history causing a significant fracture in the country’s culture and mentalités. Until then, France was a “serious” (5) nation whose people “lived in good part for ideals, and for others, rather than their own happiness” (50). Following its “giving in” (5) on the Algerian front, the country “amputated something very significant of itself” (5–6), and began “succumbing to the ideal of personal, material happiness and, increasingly, happiness à l’américaine”(6). Singer unabashedly chooses sides and clearly indicates a preference for the former period.Although the title implies the focus is on the post-Algerian war period, half the volume is devoted to the tumultuous years preceding Algerian independence, the extreme violence of the FLN in both countries during the war, and the conflicts between the various French decision-makers leading up to the final resolution. As a colonial military historian, the author details“the terrible disheartening”(66) of the military during that war and its negative impact on young Frenchmen who “progressively gave up on patriotic, military orientation”(77).Ample biographical information is provided as well on the heroes he admires most: General Salan who believed that General Bigeard,“the great warrior of unfeigned culture and heart” (69), was “‘the sole person who could have resolved the problem’ of French Algeria” (68). As for the “dogmatist” (62) de Gaulle, whose “gargantuan ambition made him nearly a clinical narcissist” (63), he and his negotiator Louis Joxe, “were ‘had’ in the accords concluded at Evian” (66). While atrocities and barbaric murders committed by the FLN on peaceful citizens in France and...

Beyond the Treaty of Utrecht: Véron de Forbonnais's French Translation of the British Merchant (1753)

SummaryThis study focuses on the cultural and political context from which stemmed the French translation of the British Merchant. The paratextual and macrostructural interventions that characterised Le négotiant anglois clearly demonstrate that the translator, Véron de Forbonnais, used his work to set out his own epistemological method and his way of looking at inter-state relations. With the book, Forbonnais had distanced himself from Gournay by rejecting the idea that in order for France to prosper in a situation of international competition the government needed to adopt a muscular strategy that included the adoption of a navigation act modelled on the one enacted by Britain in 1660. At the same time, Forbonnais warned French decision-makers that signing commercial treaties with the maritime powers might also be prejudicial to national economic interests. Forbonnais supplied qualified French readers not only with an annotated edition of the British Merchant but also with a translation of Davenant's Of the Use of Political Arithmetick. In so doing, he proposed to his audience a type of governance based on a competent use of statistics. In conclusion, I will argue that in Le négotiant anglois Forbonnais anticipated the key political and economical tenets of his project of ‘monarchie commerçante’, which he later set out in the Principes et observations æconomiques (1767) in order to counter the rise of the epistemology and plans for a ‘royaume agricole’ put forward by the physiocratic movement.

Stepping up to reintegration: French security policy between transatlantic and European defence during and after the Cold War

This paper discusses French views of transatlantic and European defence from the late 1940s to France's ‘return’ to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in 2009. It argues that, while until the early 1950s the French Government viewed transatlantic and West European security cooperation as mutually reinforcing enterprises, by the end of that decade French decision-makers had developed conflicting perceptions of transatlantic and European defence. During the 1960s, the dominating political discourse in the Fifth Republic portrayed relations between Atlantic and European solidarity as a ‘zero-sum’ game: What was good for the Alliance was bad for Europe and vice versa. President Charles de Gaulle advocated the creation of a European ‘Third Force’, although links with NATO were never outright severed. During the 1970s and early 1980s, a ‘zero-sum’ attitude to Atlantic and European defence consolidated although as the Cold War came to a close, Mitterrand started a selective but steady re-engagement wi...

Emotional Beliefs

AbstractA belief in alien abduction is an emotional belief, but so is a belief that Iran intends to build nuclear weapons, that one's country is good, that a sales tax is unjust, or that French decision makers are irresolute. Revolutionary research in the brain sciences has overturned conventional views of the relationship between emotion, rationality, and beliefs. Because rationality depends on emotion, and because cognition and emotion are nearly indistinguishable in the brain, one can view emotion as constituting and strengthening beliefs such as trust, nationalism, justice or credibility. For example, a belief that another's commitment is credible depends on one's selection (and interpretation) of evidence and one's assessment of risk, both of which rely on emotion. Observing that emotion and cognition co-produce beliefs has policy implications: how one fights terrorism changes if one views credibility as an emotional belief.

First Lessons in Neo-Colonialism: The Personalisation of Relations between African Politicians and French Officials in sub-Saharan Africa, 1956–66

In scholarly debates, ‘French neo-colonialism’ is defined as the social history of relations between Francophile African elites and French decision-makers in African policy, and it is frequently interpreted as a sinister manipulation of rather passive African populations. Exploring the newly accessible French archival documents, it is now possible to understand better how French officials became neo-colonial players, from the frustration of the last days of colonialism, to a new model of friend and foe in sub-Saharan Africa. A complex and highly emotional interplay of relations with African leaders accounted for the seemingly rational ‘neo-colonialist’ behaviour of French civil servants from 1955 at least to the decade after decolonisation.

Rebonds : Le mythe des musiciens de jazz américains à Paris dans les années 1960 : une révision de l'histoire contemporaine

American jazz musicians in the 1960s perceived France as a land of exile and welcome ; they helped create the myth of a “golden age of jazz” in Paris. This historical period still rings with nostalgia and feeds the current myth and actions of the French cultural establishment. Based on a corpus of interviews collected for the monthly journal, Jazz Hot, this article explores the process by which such a myth was constructed and maintained. The author analyzes how positive representations of cultural confrontation were manipulated by French decision-makers, to serve their political and ideological purposes, sometimes to the detriment of the artists.

The rise and fall of French Ecological Tax Reform: social acceptability versus political feasibility in the energy tax implementation process

The French government has a 10-year history of negotiations with industry, resulting in voluntary agreements on energy consumption. When implemented, these voluntary agreements produced very few results in terms of global reduction of greenhouse emissions (Politiques et Management Public 11(4) (1993) 47), hence the idea of an energy tax became increasingly attractive for many French decision-makers. Ecological/Environmental Tax Reform (ETR) should have been one of the major political decisions and successes of the past leftwing coalition government. Instead it became one of its major failures as the Constitutional Court decided to terminate the energy tax project in December 2000. Through insights gleaned from focus groups and interviews with business-people and decision-makers, an attempt is made to understand the failure of the energy tax project. Firstly, decision-makers lacked crucial information about public and business opinions and secondly, there were conflicts between the relevant administrations. The fuel revolts of 2000 ended any hope of resolving the conflicts and implementing ETR, which was ultimately found unconstitutional. This paper examines the political controversies raised by the ETR project and the reasons for its eventual collapse, in the hope of contributing new understanding to the body of knowledge on the political difficulties of introducing environmental policy instruments.

Crisis Research: French Decision Makers’ Expectations

André Oudiz, Introduction p.203Martine Bungener, Scientific Expertise in the Case of Public Health Crises p.204Philipe Lacombe, Agronomic Research and Research into Crisis Situations p.205André Oudiz, Crisis Management and Applied Sciences p.207Jean–Pierre Galland, Crisis Management and Catastrophes p.208Geneviàve Beaumont, Crisis Management and the Environment p.209Vincent Boissonnat, Health Crises and Knowledge Production p.210

Prescriptions For Health Policy Paralysis

Prescriptions For Health Policy Paralysis