Search Results

This chapter focuses primarily on two presidential systems, those of the United States and France. In each country, an individual is empowered to make significant military decisions or delegate those decisions to subordinates. There are two particular elements that distinguish how the Americans ran their war compared to many of the other countries: agent selection and incentives. Because the United States led an ad hoc effort (Operation Enduring Freedom) and only later became the leader of the NATO effort, the primary means of control was leadership selection and termination. The chapter then turns to the French case, where there is a significant change in behavior on the ground that followed the presidential transition from Jacques Chirac to Nicolas Sarkozy. Chirac placed significant restrictions on where the French were deployed and with what capabilities. Sarkozy lifted those restrictions but still answered the phone when questions arose in the field. The chapter also briefly addresses the case of Poland.

This chapter argues that the directionless character of French economic policy today has been profoundly shaped by the decisions of French authorities long ago, notably the decisions surrounding France's break with the dirigiste model in the early 1980s. The chapter is organized as follows. The first section describes France's turn away from the dirigiste economic model and accompanying expansion of social protection. The second section points to the limits and growing dysfunctions of this social anesthesia strategy. The third section focuses on the efforts of France's president from 1995 to 2007, Jacques Chirac, to pursue liberalizing reform, while the fourth section focuses on President Sarkozy's attempts to revive statist industrial policy. The conclusion offers observations about the implications of the French case for the double bind.

This chapter charts the political responses of Lignes in the new millennium, as securitisation methods, crises and states of exception replaced consensual liberalism as the dominant modes of governance after 9/11. Rather than the review’s normal pessimistic stance, a reshuffled editorial board instead emphasised the need to reconstruct active, political agency to resist the governments of Jacques Chirac and Nicolas Sarkozy. An issue devoted to the militant Trotskyist David Rousset set the tone at the start of the new millennium, as Rousset’s experience in combatting concentration camps prompted the review to investigate the controversial use of migrant retention centres on French soil and theories of the State of Exception between Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben. New routes to active political agency are then produced, firstly via Jacques Ranciere’s account of the eruption of new political voices and sans papiers activism. Lastly, Alain Badiou’s emphasis on extra-parliamentary politics the Idea of Communism is contrasted to Daniel Bensaïd’s stress on the need for a new, militant political party in the run-up to the 2012 presidential elections.

In chapter 2, Nancy analyses a sentence from Nicolas Sarkozy in which the French president proclaimed that he wanted for this debate on national identity “du gros rouge qui tâche,” literally “cheap wine that stains.” The “gros rouge,” along with camembert, berêt, and baguette, is a symbol of eternal France and French identity, grasped, Nancy notes, as it were from below. Nancy analyses the clichés of French identity that those expressions carry. He shows how they carry the basest, lowest, most closed visions of what an identity is.

In November 2009, the Prix Goncourt was awarded to Marie NDiaye. On the surface, this development seems to lend further credence to the notion, put forward by the writers who signed the littérature-monde Manifesto, that a ‘Copernican revolution’ has been transforming the world of literatures of French expression. However, the award sparked an uproar that revealed the web of identity politics in which NDiaye was trapped. This chapter situates NDiaye in relation to existing theorisations of a littérature-monde in French. It argues that NDiaye was treated as a latter-day évoluée — a category created by the French colonial authorities to designate certain colonised subjects who had internalised French cultural and social norms. It also looks at NDiaye's comments about the impact of French President Nicolas Sarkozy's policies on ethnic minorities and immigrants in France.

This chapter explores the western reaction to Amina Lawal’s case. It outlines how famous western leaders, from Nicolas Sarkozy to Bill Clinton to Oprah Winfrey treated this case, and critically examines western non-governmental organizations’ responses. The chapter also examines how difficult it can be to discuss how Nigerian women feel about shar’iah, if their views are negative, in western scholarly discourses that are understandably concerned about the damage done by “imperial feminism.” This chapter tries to unearth Nigerian women’s voices in as authentic a way as possible, and provides two visions of gender rights in Northern Nigeria: that of Northern Nigerian historian Ibraheem Sulaiman and Northern Nigerian journalist, the late Balkisu Yusuf. The chapter ends with a short conclusion.

This chapter examines the growing politicization of border control policy in Europe. It first examines why the border has become important at all at a time when some have argued that borders are increasingly less relevant. The relatively easy movement of migrants into Europe until the 1970s was matched by the easy movement across the soft northern and southern borders of the United States at the same time. How, then, did the issue of the border become increasingly salient? This chapter argues that the developing political salience of the border has been the principle result, first of the reframing of the question of immigration by political party leaders as a failure by the state to control the challenge to identity. Party leaders and electoral competition have then mobilized public opinion around issues of border control as a political priority. This has taken place in the context of cross-border population movements within Europe, and by increased numbers of asylum seekers seeking entry into Europe.