CIAO DATE: 08/2008
Volume: 20, Issue: 3
Fall 2002
Policy Activism In A Globalized Economy: France's 35-hour Workweek
Gunnar Trumbull
Globalization is commonly thought to impede policy activism. Yet France's 35-hour workweek initiative demonstrates that globalization can, in certain circumstances, create incentives for greater policy activism. This is because economic actors experience globalization differently. The French government, facing fiscal and monetary constraints, was seeking alternative means for promoting employment. French employers, facing new foreign competition, increasingly valued workforce flexibility. And French labor unions, facing declining membership, were anxious to establish a bridgehead in new sectors of the economy. These diverse pressures of globalization, felt differently by different economic actors, created the context in which an activist labor policy could be negotiated.
The New Politics Of African Cinema At The French Ministry Of Foreign Affairs
Teresa Hoefert de Turégano
The article examines French cinematographic policy toward Africa within the context of the shift in control from the French Ministry of Cooperation and Development to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Is francophone West Africa losing its privileged position in French cinematographic policy? During the first two years of the new regime for cinema a dual dynamic was evident, with both transition and historical continuity. In the final months of 2001 a clearer message appears in the politics of African cinema at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Central elements of the film policy under the Ministry of Cooperation are compared to current policy and then situated into French film politics in a more general sense.
French E-Managers: A Generation in the Making
Mette Zølner
The article argues that a new generation of managers is emerging in the wake of the French net-economy. The argument is based on a comparison of worldviews, identities and careers within two samples of French managers. The main sample consists of young and up-and-coming managers working in Internet related business and the other one of senior managers within large corporations. On the basis of 45 semi-directed interviews, press articles and sociological literature on French managers, the article clarifies similarities and differences between the two generations of managers. One observes for example that, as the senior executives, the new emerging generation of managers defines a 'good' and 'fair' society on the basis of traditionally French Republican discourses; they share similar American stereotypes; and managers from both generations tend to have graduated from 'grandes écoles'. Yet, the young and up-and- coming managers distinguish themselves by having graduated from prestigious business school and by the particular socio-economic conditions under which they entered professional life and which contributed in shaping their world-view and identity.
Affirmative Action At Sciences Po
Daniel Sabbagh
Unlike in the United States, in France, the main operational criterion for identifying the beneficiaries of affirmative action policies is not race or gender, but geographical location. In this respect, the first affirmative action plan recently designed in the sphere of higher education by one of France's most famous 'grandes écoles', the Institut d'études politiques de Paris, while not departing significantly from this broader pattern of redistributive, territory-based public policies, has given rise to a controversy of an unprecedented scale, some features of which may actually suggest the existence of a deeper similarity between French and American affirmative action programs and the difficulties that they face. That similarity lies in the attempts made by the supporters of such programs to systematically minimize the negative side-effects on their beneficiaries' public image potentially induced by the visibility of the policy itself.
The Strangeness of Foreigners: Policing Migration and Nation in Interwar Marseille
Mary Dewhurst Lewis
This article explores the relationship between foreigners' social and legal status by considering the case of Marseille during the interwar years. The author uses expulsion files to elucidate this relationship and its changing dynamics. Social factors worked to mark immigrants as desirable and undesirable and thus affected the rights that they legally could claim; yet the contours of this relationship changed over time as the policing of immigrants increasingly became a national security priority. During the 1920s and early 1930s, police discriminated between transient --and perhaps racialized-- port- area residents and the more settled denizens of Marseille's outer districts, then used this distinction to adjudicate expulsion cases. Over the course of the 1930s, police objectives shifted from achieving local stability to defending national security. As this occurred, police attacked foreigners more broadly and indiscriminately.
Albert Sarraut and Republican Racial Thought
Clifford Rosenberg
This article addresses the racial thought behind French immigration and colonial policy in the heyday of imperialism. Albert Sarraut and several other likeminded officials articulated a singularly contradictory view of human difference. They viewed colonial immigrants as an exotic menace, and looked with approval to the writings of racist thinkers in the United States, like Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard. At the same time, however, Sarraut and his colleagues considered North African immigration, in particular, as vital to France's future well-being; French policy-makers were more optimistic than the Americans that colonial migrants could be "civilized" within decades, or perhaps a few generations. This latter view encouraged them in their commitment to the Republic's civilizing mission and their belief that turning immigrants into Frenchmen was a practical and realistic necessity.
La Conscience religieuse dans l'ère de la laïcité
Angès Antoine
In his latest book, Marcel Gauchet analyzes recent transformations of the French republican model. The disenchantment which, according to Gauchet, characterizes modernity has reached the political sphere and, through a desacralization of the State and the end of ideologies, has led to a mutation of the representation as well as the role of religion in the social sphere. Should we regret the emancipation of civil society and the end of the Hegelian model that aimed at replacing religious universalism with state philosophy? Gauchet does not think so-he does not view the new theologico-political configuration as a risk for the political to die out but rather as the opportunity for a new form of democracy to emerge, one that would be based on true participation and humanity.
Identity and Democracy
Ellen Badone
This thought-provoking essay analyses the changing relationships between the French state and the individual. The author contends that French republican democracy originally developed as a bulwark against the hegemony of the Roman Catholic Church. However, in the secularized context of present-day France, such protection is no longer necessary. Hence, democracy has lost much of its original meaning. In the past, political actors privileged the collective good above private interests and identités. Now, however, it is precisely these agendas that have come to dominate French political discourse. In the face of competing minority demands, government must remain neutral and can no longer serve as the moral arbiter for the collectivity.
Sortie de la religion et recours à la transcendance
Danièle Hervieu-Léger
Marcel Gauchet's book La Religion dans la démocratie deals with current shifts in ideals and practices of democracy, as well as the way such shifts shake the foundations of secularity à la française. This article recaptures the key elements of Gauchet's analysis, centered around the loss of transcendence experienced by the state in such a context, and addresses the new forms that a reference to a norm "tenue d'en haut" could take in a French society "sortie de la religion" for good.