Love as difference: the politics of love in the thought of Malek Chebel

This article discusses the ongoing discourses on love that first developed in the 1980s in France as they are articulated through the work of Malek Chebel. It argues that for Chebel ‘love’ contributes to the ongoing negotiation between Islam and the West and of Islam in France/Europe. The article considers his discourse on love within the context of the current debates on French constructions of community and membership and examines how love engages with the question of difference and identity to decentre and de‐essentialise ‘Islam’. It concludes that the negotiation between Europe and Islam involves questioning the role of Maghrebi culture and tradition in defining ‘Islam’ in France.     

Drawing Algeria into Europe: shifting French policy and the Treaty of Rome (1951–1964)

Abstract

In France and Europe today, claims arise defining so-called Muslim and European ‘worlds’ and labelling them irreconcilable. These claims ignore the intertwined history of France and North Africa. When the six founding members of the European Economic Community (EEC) signed the Treaty of Rome, French administrators still considered Algeria to be a constituent part of France, despite the ongoing war. The Algerian question was central to negotiations for the Treaty of Rome and during them, French officials attempted to inscribe Algeria within the founding documents of the European project through a policy of ‘Eurafrique’. Their partners, eager for France’s signature on the Treaty, accepted a vision of integrated Europe with borders crossing the Mediterranean. This decision raised thorny issues in the months and years to come, first in debates of how or even if the Treaty could be implemented overseas, then when independent Algeria attempted to define its relationship with the EEC. These episodes of negotiation and interaction reveal the centrality of the question of empire to the foundations of integrated Europe.     

Presidential elections and Europe: the 2012 game-changer

Abstract

As well as marking 60 years since the signature of the Treaty of Rome, 2017 will see the 10th presidential election of France’s Fifth Republic. The overlap between the question of Europe and the election to France’s highest office provides the framework for this article to explore the development of the European debate in France. Prior to 2012, and despite the increasing and undeniable salience of it for French domestic concerns, the question of Europe is widely considered to have been a secondary issue in presidential elections. Focusing in particular on the period since the pivotal debate and referendum on the Maastricht Treaty and the intervening transition from ‘permissive consensus’ to ‘constraining dissensus’, this article will explain how and why Europe has seemingly defied logic to remain on the margins of successive election campaigns, before presenting the 2012 presidential elections as a game-changer on how the question of Europe featured. The conclusion offers a discussion on the ramifications for future presidential elections, starting with that of 2017.     

近代托斯卡纳与法兰西的重要关系——“佛罗伦萨国家档案馆＂有关档案研究

意大利统一前,托斯卡纳大公国是意大利中部一个较为重要的国家,其历史曲折复杂。由于它的战略地位、经济力量和政治价值,托斯卡纳在意大利和欧洲历史中一向发挥突出的作用。在法兰西第二共和国与法兰西第二帝国时期,据佛罗伦萨国家档案馆已解密的有关档案,托斯卡纳大公国曾密切注视法兰西政治局势、政府活动及其对外政策,对法实行一种积极政策。托法之间的密切关系具有重要的意义,它为我们了解欧洲近代历史的深度提供了一个生动的例子。     

Constant Desjardins,Peripatetic Cartographer

ABSTRACT

The French-born, nineteenth-century commercial cartographer, Constant Desjardins (1787?1876) remains a rather obscure figure, despite a productive career of more than four decades and his creation of a precociously designed atlas of Europe. Desjardins was a typical mapmaker of his age in his interest in thematic mapping, his use of the new technology of lithography, and his publication of materials primarily for the growing educational systems of Europe. Yet he was unusual in the increasingly nationalistic era of nineteenth-century Europe in that he produced multilingual as well as monolingual maps. He also crossed many state borders, working in France, Bavaria, Austria, Hungary and Serbia. Indeed, this cosmopolitanism may explain his relative obscurity.     

Regional demographic trends in France: an examination at the level of the "zones d'emploi"

"The paper studies the regional demographic trends in France from 1968 to 1990.... The study follows two main objectives: (1) Analysis of the main regional migration and population trends over the three census periods from 1968 to 1990. (2) Analysis of the growth trends of different types of regions on the basis of typifying the ?zones d'emploi' (labour market regions) according to economic criteria and settlement structure criteria. The large-scale patterns of the population and migration trends seem to be relatively stable in comparison to the massive change in the general economic and political framework in France and Western Europe.... The different region types, however, show more distinct changes." (SUMMARY IN ENG AND FRE AND RUS)     

Avorio d'ogni ragione: the supply of elephant ivory to northern Europe in the Gothic era

This article accounts for the hitherto unexplained increase in the availability of ivory in mid-thirteenth-century France through an alteration in the medieval trade routes that brought elephant tusks from Africa to northern Europe. A newly-opened passage through the Straits of Gibraltar allowed a small amount of luxury goods to be shipped together with bulk materials necessary to the flourishing textile industries of northern Europe.     

Avorio d'ogni ragione: the supply of elephant ivory to northern Europe in the Gothic era

This article accounts for the hitherto unexplained increase in the availability of ivory in mid-thirteenth-century France through an alteration in the medieval trade routes that brought elephant tusks from Africa to northern Europe. A newly-opened passage through the Straits of Gibraltar allowed a small amount of luxury goods to be shipped together with bulk materials necessary to the flourishing textile industries of northern Europe.     

论第二次世界大战前罗马尼亚的平衡外交

慕尼黑会议之后,德国在中东欧占据了优势,英法在对德绥靖走到尽头后,逐步趋向对德遏制,并试图在东欧组建反德阵线。在两大集团争夺东欧的情况下,罗马尼亚推行在所有大国间保持平衡的政策。一方面,罗马尼亚与德国签订经济协定,以经济上的让步减轻德国对它的压力,并谋求从政治上得到相应的回报;另一方面,寻求英法的政治保障,加强自身的安全,但同时拒绝加入英法匆忙组建的反德阵线,使自己置身于冲突之外,期待出现有利于自己的时机。     

Turning Weakness into Strength: France's Post-World War II Diplomacy

Books reviewed in this article:
Hitchcock, William I. France Restored: Cold War Diplomacy and the Quest for Leadership in Europe, 1944-1955     

A Colonial Expedition? French Soldiers’ Experience at the Dardanelles

As many French soldiers as ANZACs fought at Gallipoli. Their preconceptions had more to do with colonial campaigning than with the dominant French experience of the Great War — mass mobilisation to defend the nation on home territory. Moreover, a significant proportion of the troops at the Dardanelles were colonial. Yet the French soldiers discovered at Gallipoli a ‘front’ that was part of the mutual siege that ringed Europe and that bore more than a passing resemblance to the front in France. The article explores the experiences and perceptions of the French soldiers facing this paradox.     

Rural France in Europe: new challenges

This article examines the specificity of rural France in Europe and assesses the nature of the new challenges confronting it. Discussing the changes affecting the peasant world and French rural society, it aims to provide a balanced picture of the agricultural question by linking it to the issue of ruralité. Rural France has now become an object of debate not only for French society, but also for the future of European agriculture. The article also analyses to what extent France remains original in its position as the most ‘rural’ of the western European states by examining its relationship to its territoire and its integration into a global economy.     

Aurignacian ethno-linguistic geography of Europe revealed by personal ornaments

Our knowledge of the migration routes of the first anatomically modern populations colonising the European territory at the beginning of the Upper Palaeolithic, of their degree of biological, linguistic, and cultural diversity, and of the nature of their contacts with local Neanderthals, is still vague. Ethnographic studies indicate that of the different components of the material culture that survive in the archaeological record, personal ornaments are among those that best reflect the ethno-linguistic diversity of human groups. The ethnic dimension of beadwork is conveyed through the use of distinct bead types as well as by particular combinations and arrangements on the body of bead types shared with one or more neighbouring groups. One would expect these variants to leave detectable traces in the archaeological record. To explore the potential of this approach, we recorded the occurrence of 157 bead types at 98 European Aurignacian sites. Seriation, correspondence, and GIS analyses of this database identify a definite cline sweeping counter-clockwise from the Northern Plains to the Eastern Alps via Western and Southern Europe through fourteen geographically cohesive sets of sites. The sets most distant from each other include Aurignacian sites from the Rhône valley, Italy, Greece and Austria on the one hand, and sites from Northern Europe, on the other. These two macro-sets do not share any bead types. Both are characterised by particular bead types and share personal ornaments with the intermediate macro-set, composed of sites from Western France, Spain, and Southern France. We argue that this pattern, which is not explained by chronological differences between sites or by differences in raw material availability, reflects the ethnolinguistic diversity of the earliest Upper Palaeolithic populations of Europe.     

A comparative study of Caribbean return migration from Britain and France: towards a context-dependent explanation

"The currently dominant element in the labour migration from the Caribbean to Britain and France is a return flow of migrants. This paper focuses on the migrations from the Commonwealth and the French Caribbean to Britain and France respectively. While these migrations are historically similar in origin, subsequent differences in the colonial and immigration policies of Britain and France have resulted in divergent migration trends and experiences. New sources of data are drawn on in this comparative study of return migration to the Caribbean, providing up-to-date information on the size and demographic characteristics of the returnee populations. Equally important to this study is the section of the migrant population who are likely to remain in Europe. The authors argue that a comprehensive model of labour migration would need to incorporate the non-return situation in its dynamic entirety."     

Modeling Expansive Phenomena in Early Complex Societies: the Transition from Bronze Iron Age in Prehistoric Europe

The Bronze Age/Iron Age transition in Prehistoric Europe represents a perfect case study to test different and competing hypotheses of social dynamics and economic change in small-scale societies. The paper discusses the possibilities of modeling what could have happened in Europe between 1800 and 800 bc, in terms of spatiotemporal dynamics. The paper presents some theoretical aspects of the dynamic study of expansive phenomena and gives an overview of a computer model programmed to explain the way new burial forms expanded in Europe. The main idea is comparing classic demic diffusion models (spread of population), cultural transmission models (spread of ideas), and technological innovation diffusion model (spread of goods). We will present the fundamentals of a preliminary study towards the computational simulation of such hypothetical social mechanisms, using a dataset composed of more than 1,500 georeferenced and radiocarbon dated archaeological contexts of a period between the Early Bronze Age and the first Iron Age (1800–800 bc) from an area including the North-East of Iberian Peninsula, Southern France, Northern and Central Italy, Switzerland, Austria, and Southern Germany.     

Peripheral Players? German Colonial Interests,The Press,and the Spirit of Locarno

The Locarno Conference, held on 5–16 October 1925, represented the culmination of nearly two years of diplomatic communication between the foreign offices of Germany, Britain, and France. The conference was an attempt to normalize relations between the former Allied powers and Germany's new Weimar Republic and more tightly bind Germany's politics and economy to Western Europe. Colonial German lobbies hoped that the Locarno talks heralded the return of empire and an end to Germany's banishment from the work of the ‘civilizing mission’ and the humiliating experience of being a ‘postcolonial state in a still colonial world’. Public scrutiny from false press reports about the restoration of the German colonies emanating from Germany, France, Britain and its colonies and dominions, and even the United States complicated matters for Locarno delegates by forcing discussion of off-agenda topics. This article interrogates how the Colonial German lobby influenced the Locarno Conference through activity in the international public sphere, how they managed a partial victory in the wake of Locarno, and more importantly, the Colonial German lobby learned new and better strategies for playing properly to public opinion and international bureaucracies.     

中国谋求打开对欧关系的努力

20世纪60年代初,随着国际形势的变化,特别是中苏关系的破裂,中国在对外关系方面做出重大调整,重点是谋求打开对欧关系。为此,中国在公共关系、经济和政治外交等领域积极展开活动。总的来说,中国在上述领域所做的努力是有成效的,特别是中法关系正常化标志着中国对欧外交的一个重大突破。但也要看到,中欧关系总体上依然发展缓慢,这主要是由于大多数西欧国家仍不能摆脱美国的控制来发展对华关系造成的。     

Racism, ethnicity and multiculturalism in contemporary Europe: a review essay

This essay examines the specificities of contemporary European racism. In particular it compares and contrasts recent expression of racism with nineteenth century expressions of racial exclusion and racial hatred. Building on arguments from two important recent collections on the upsurge of racism in western Europe, it seeks to develop a political geography of racism, one that could supplement political and sociological theories of race and racism in contemporary Europe. In so doing it links recent expressions of racism to the politicisation of migration, the tightening of community and political borders, and the development of a new politics of exclusion and new geographies of closure which seek to control exogenous minorities in, and exclude ‘foreigners' from, Fortress Europe. In examining the racial geographies of countries as divergent as France, Britain, Spain, Sweden, Germany and the Netherlands, it provides a critical overview of social processes and ideological developments that have led to the recent resurgence of racism in western Europe.     

Re-appropriating Europe: Albert Camus's wartime Europeanism

The study of ideas of Europe in the works of Albert Camus is a relatively recent aspect of Camus scholarship, but one that has tended towards the teleological, reading Camus's stance on Europe as pioneering or at least anticipating modernday European integration. This article proposes a re-reading of Camus's Lettres à un ami allemand , of which the third letter (written in 1944) is one of the strongest expressions of Europeanism in the Camusian oeuvre. Unlike existing scholarship, it situates this text in the context of the various understandings of Europe of the resistance movements and the collaborators in Occupied France. Based on Higgins's understanding of resistance poetry as an effort to reappropriate language, and through comparison with Camus's hitherto largely ignored book review of works by Brice Parain, the article demonstrates how Camus's text constitutes an effort to reappropriate the discourse of Europe.     

Widespread diffusion of technical innovations around 300,000 years ago in Europe as a reflection of anthropological and social transformations? New comparative data from the western Mediterranean sites of Orgnac (France) and Cave dall’Olio (Italy)

During MIS (Marine Isotope Stage) 9 and the transition to MIS 8 – around 350–300,000 years ago – some lithic assemblages in Europe reflect marked transformations in technical behavior. These transformations involved the standardization of products and the development of diversified and elaborated débitage methods which are considered to be markers of the transition from the Lower to the Middle Palaeolithic i.e. from Mode 2 to Mode 3. Taking the analysis of the sites of Orgnac 3 (Ardèche, France) and Cave dall’Olio (Emilia Romagna, Italy) as a starting point, this paper discusses the variability of these assemblages in Southern Europe as well as the social and anthropological implications of the emergence of new technical behavior. It also aims to show that common features existed both in Northern and Southern Europe. The development of more complex technical systems on a progressively wider territory and at an increasingly earlier age argues in favor of the hypothesis of a close connection with the process of “Neanderthalisation”, possibly accompanied by the transmission of ideas through extensive social networks.