Columbia International Affairs Online: Working Papers

CIAO DATE: 02/2009

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

Nicolas Mariot

January 2009

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.