Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: 2007 is going to be a crucial year for France. A new President is going to be elected. France has been for a long time in a double identity crisis. Internally, a process of post-modernisation with regard to decentralisation, multiculturalism and, increasng fluidity of national borders is going putting into question the hitherto conceptualisation of a unified state-nation. Externally, France is no longer the Designer of the future of the EU. On the basis of discourse analysis this paper discusses how the EU impacts the identity of the state-nation and how the political elite's hitherto conceptualization of the state-nation is put into pressure both by the society and by the EU.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Between 1960 and 2005, France launched 46 military operations in its former colonies in Africa, the most recent being the continuing French military deployment on the cease-fire line in Côte d?Ivoire. French military interventionism in its former empire appears to be a consistent policy since decolonization, and is coupled with an extensive network of bilateral Franco-African defense and military assistance treaties. The continuity of French military policy in Africa is a puzzle, however, since overall French defense policy and grand strategy changed significantly during the period in question. The conventional wisdom in the literature on the subject in English and French is that the continuity of French African military policy can be attributed primarily to ideological and identity factors particular to France. This paper will argue that realist theory, rather than arguments about French ideology and identity, is better able to explain French military policy in Africa since decolonization and the privileged place of the former French empire in French defense policy as a whole. Several historical cases of French military intervention since decolonization will be analyzed by contrasting realist theories with ideological arguments based in ideas of French exceptionalism and colonial history to systematically evaluate the explanatory power of realism for this resilient feature of French policy.

Publication Type: Internal Paper
Abstract: In 1739, one of many contracts was negotiated by a professional voyageur (fur trader) in Upper Louisiana for a trip from Kaskaskia down the Mississippi to the coast. In addition to his wage and a tobacco allowance, the voyageur had negotiated that his laundry costs be covered on arrival in New Orleans. This was a unique clause in any voyageur contract in Louisiana, but the contract was especially unusual for another reason. The voyageur, Jean Saguingouara, was Indian, the son of a Catholic convert brought up in Upper Louisiana by a French officer of noble origin.
Saguingouara’s insistence on a laundry clause signaled his adhesion to European standards of cleanliness that were culturally more compatible with his elite French guardian’s notions of washing than indigenous ones. It hinted, materially, at his apparent achievement of ‘frenchness.’ This was a concept linked to the official French assimilationist policy of “frenchification,” itself premised on a fluid concept of identity as hierarchically ordered but also mutable and malleable, being dependent on climate, environment, as well as religion and culture.
Saguingoura’s notion of cleanliness, like that of his French guardian, was predicated on the display of laundered clothing. Laundering, as in this voyageur contract, referred specifically to the cleaning of “small” linens. As a rule, for men these would be limited to shirts, handkerchiefs and stockings. For the French as with other Europeans in this period, it was the act of changing into laundered linen (rather than washing the body) that was understood to effectively clean the body by absorbing any grime. Indeed, the emphasis on laundering practices obfuscated a profound disconnect between the cleansing powers of laundered linens and a repulsion towards washing bodies stemming from anxieties about disease (fears that were crystallized in the emphasis on the role of water in rituals). But for those Indians encountered by the French in Louisiana, clothing was not subject to being washed, though bodies might be, marking a key point of divergence with eighteenth-century French cultural norms.
This distinction in concepts of cleanliness, I suggest, is crucial for understanding how Europeans apprehended indigenous bodies, and how they rationalized differences in skin color. In the eighteenth century, and in spite of the emergence of increasingly proto-biological notions of a fixed ‘racial’ identity, travelers and settlers continued to linger on the effects of the environment on the development of skin color. They also stressed the role played by the regular application of grease as a factor in the darkening of skin. The absence of clothes washing (and thus, of clean bodies) to remove and negate the effects of this application of grease provided a key logistical step in Europeans’ explanations of the skin tone of indigenous populations. Saguingouara’s voyageur contract thus sheds light on French-Indian notions of ethnicity as (literally) embodied in cultural practices such as washing.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This study is a mixed methods analysis of how French-Muslims respond to a French law banning the wearing of religious symbols in French public schools. In summer 2007, 356 French-Muslims were surveyed, and 20 of those Muslims were interviewed for this analysis. The statistical analysis reveals religiosity to be a significant predictor of French-Muslims’ negative sentiment toward la Loi 2004-228, the ban on the wearing of religious symbols in French public schools. In the interviews, French-Muslims express how they perceive la Loi 2004-228 as stifling Islamic religious identity and freedom, and leading to religious and political struggles in France. The paper concludes with a discussion of how the current situation in France represents a struggle over assimilation and how the issue of and controversy over Muslim immigration has spread throughout the European Union.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: While France vehemently denounced the attacks of 9/11 on the United States, with French papers (such as Le Monde) taking the lead in expressing solidarity with the American people and government, relations between the two countries suffered due to French