Two-tier Pluralism in ‘Colour-blind’ France

France lags behind most other Western countries in its degree of ethnic representation, despite the longstanding presence of non-Western minorities in the country. French politicians and the public usually justify this situation by arguing that there are no such things as ethnic minorities in France, and therefore no particular ‘ethnic minority’ interests. Consequently, there is no need to be concerned about ethnic representation; class representation is enough. More recently, attention has centred on the presence of Islam. This frame biases political attention to religious issues related to ethnic minorities, leaving aside major problems such as racial discrimination. In contrast, this article argues that France is very similar to America when it comes to ethnic politics, particularly when analysing the political orientations of non-Western minorities. Without a proper voice to articulate their claims, ethnic minorities see their interests neglected in favour of other issues.     

A Reply to ‘Labour and Antisemitism: A Crisis Misunderstood’

In their 2020 Political Quarterly article ‘Labour and antisemitism: a crisis misunderstood’, Gidley, McGeever and Feldman argue that the Labour Party’s responses to its antisemitism crisis have been misguided because its understanding of antisemitism is wrong. We must look less at cases of individual antisemites and more at the ‘reservoir of stereotypes and narratives’, in which the long (but unacknowledged) history of left antisemitism has deposited its ideas—and from which they can be easily retrieved. This response challenges the reservoir concept as ahistorical, and culturally adrift, lacking the components necessary for cultural understanding—of being rooted, contextualised, complex and contradictory, evolving and regressing, but always home to inconsistent, yet coexisting, ideas and prejudices. The authors simply ignore the political dynamics of this crisis which have allowed antisemitism to be weaponised and made it all but impossible to have a calm, serious, rigorous reflection and public debate about antisemitism, and about Israel/Palestine. Such a debate is long overdue.     

‘Aménagement du territoire’ in France: State interventionism or regulation?

‘Aménagement du territoire’ in France appears to have been closely connected with State economic and social policies designed to organise expansion and counter inequalities. Concerned specifically with spatial inequalities, ‘aménagement’ benefited, until 1973, from the economic prosperity which had endowed the State with a capacity for redistribution. Faced with a sectional and centralised administration, it involved a certain procedural practice facilitated by the strengthening of executive power during the Fifth Republic. As a form of state intervention, it has tended to influence the decisions of major actors in the regional domain, and can be seen as a process of regulation which, while attempting to resolve difficulties or contradictions, may equally serve to aggravate or conceal them.     

Addressing ‘This Woeful Imbalance’: Efforts to Improve Women's Representation at CIA, 1947–2014

From the wartime Office of Strategic Services to the contemporary Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), women have played a key role in US national intelligence. Yet, aside from episodic attention to the especially colorful lives of individual spies or analysts, few resources have been available to assess the broader status and service of these women. On 30 October 2013, the Central Intelligence Agency released the document collection From Typist to Trailblazer: The Evolving View of Women in the CIA's Workforce, a set of declassified files related to women's employment at the agency. This essay places these documents – which include personnel files, interagency memoranda, and internal CIA surveys and studies – into their broader institutional and social contexts, arguing that, despite the slow pace of change, CIA has made significant progress in addressing sex discrimination within its ranks.     

France’s response to COVID-19

France experienced one of the world’s worst outbreaks of COVID-19 in the spring despite its excellent public-health system, and cases are rising once again. The use of top-down, centralised control measures in the French system slowed its response to the fast-moving crisis and contributed to the high death toll.     

Regional Mobilization in the ‘New Europe’: A Research Agenda

This Special Issue re-assesses regional mobilization in the ‘New Europe’. We anticipate that enlargement to Central Europe, the entering into force of the Lisbon Treaty and the largest economic and financial crisis since the birth of the European Community have affected how regional governments respond to Europeanization along three different dimensions: (1) the position they take vis-à-vis the process of EU integration more generally, (2) the strategies they adopt in response to Europeanization pressures and (3) their internal structures and dynamics of the EU member states as multi-level states. The article introduces a framework and formulates hypotheses to examine why and how Europeanization pressures in the ‘New Europe’ affect regional mobilization along these three dimensions. In the final section, the article also introduces the various contributions to this Special Issue and relates them to the analytical framework.     

In the shadow of the constitutional council: The ‘juridicisation’ of the legislative process in France

This study examines, first, why and how the French Parliament was ‘juridicised’, that, is, gradually placed under the tutelage of the Constitutional Council, and, secondly, the influence of past Council jurisprudence and the threat of future censure on the legislation of the 1986 parliamentary sessions. This influence is greater than has been heretofore acknowledged ‐ indeed, one simply cannot assess the legislative process without understanding the role, direct and indirect, of the Council. Assessment of the legislative effects of Council control of legislation shows that the controversy surrounding the legitimacy of judicial review in France, and the extent to which the Council functions as a gouvernement des juges, is understandable and probably permanent.     

Devolution and identity: Multidirectionality in ‘Welshness’ and ‘Northern Irishness’

In an era of Brexit and on-going constitutional debates in the UK, questions around devolution and national identifications currently attract scholarly attention as never before. This article focusses on national identification in two devolved regions, Wales and Northern Ireland, never before compared in this way, to explore how devolution can act in a fluid and multidirectional way to produce differing framings of national identification. Using original qualitative research, combining the tools of documentary analysis, structured interviews and focus groups, it considers these theoretical ideas through the prism of both political elites and everyday life to explore and compare the reasoning behind the politicization of key national identifications.     

Privatization in Kosovo: ‘Liberal Peace’ in Practice

This article examines internationally led privatization in Kosovo as an example of international statebuilding. It concentrates on the period from 1999 to 2008, when privatization was planned and implemented under formal international management. International statebuilding is typically sought justified with the idea of ‘liberal peace’, and this article shows how the tension between the political and economic tenets of the idea of liberal peace manifested itself in Kosovo's internationally led privatization.     

‘Walking in two worlds’: A qualitative review of income management in Cape York

The Cape York Welfare Reform (CYWR) initiative aims to reduce ‘passive dependence’ on welfare and restore ‘positive social norms’ to revitalise cultural and social networks and support economic engagement in Indigenous communities in the Cape York Region of Australia. Critics of the initiative and, in particular, its income management (IM) policies have associated it with a broader neoliberal reform agenda that delineates social ‘problems’ from their historical and structural context. This paper discusses key qualitative findings from a strategic review of CYWR, paying particular attention to the ways in which Cape York IM (CYIM) straddles both Indigenous and settler social norms, while perpetuating neoliberal conceptualisations of welfare ‘dependency’. We situate these findings within the existing literature on Australia's other IM models and also consider them in relation to subsequent government responses to the review and associated policies. We argue that CYIM represents a unique initiative, the subtle nuances of which have been largely ignored or misunderstood by critics. Further, we conclude that any extension or revision of this initiative should be considered with respect to deep and wide-ranging consultation of the Indigenous communities subject to CYWR. However, such consultation has not been the standard practice in Australian contexts.     

Japan’s approach toward Asian regional security: from ‘hub-and-spoke’ bilateralism to ‘multi-tiered’

This article argues that Japan’s growing activism in promoting multilateral regional security arrangements since the early 1990s stems from the country’s adoption of the ‘multi-tiered approach’; a new policy perspective that packages different types of coordination among region states, including bilateral, multilateral, and minilateral or subregional, in a layered, hierarchical manner. The significance of the approach explains why Japan has retained its enthusiasm for promoting multilateral arrangements, despite continuous criticism of their effectiveness and significance, as well as the marked decline in Japan’s economic power to support financially the country’s activism in regional institution-building. Meanwhile, the multi-tiered approach also explains Japan’s effort to maintain and strengthen its bilateral security relationship with the United States during the last decade. Four factors – a perceived change in the regional security order, growing self-recognition of major-power status, the legacy of history, and constitutional constraints – worked essentially to lead Japanese policy-makers to settle on a multi-tiered approach as a desirable policy choice in shaping the country’s security policy in post-Cold WarAsia.     

The North Korean abduction issue: emotions,securitisation and the reconstruction of Japanese identity from ‘aggressor’ to ‘victim’ and from ‘pacifist’ to ‘normal’

Abstract

After Kim Jong-il's confession in 2002 that North Korean agents had abducted thirteen Japanese citizens in the 1970s and 1980s, North Korea has become the most detested country in Japan, and the normalisation of bilateral relations has been put on the back burner. The abduction issue has taken precedence in Japan even over North Korea's development of nuclear weapons and long-range missiles. It has also grossly overshadowed the atrocities for which Imperial Japan was responsible in the 20th century. Why has there been such strong emphasis on an issue that could be disregarded as comparatively ‘less important’? This article understands the ascendency of the abduction issue as the epitome of an identity shift under way in Japan – from the identity of a curiously ‘peaceful’ and inherently ‘abnormal’ state, to that of a more ‘normal’ one. The differentiation of North Korea as ‘abnormal’ emphasises Japan's own (claim to) ‘normality’. Indeed, by incarnating the perils of Japan's own ‘pacifist’ ‘abnormality’, which has been so central to the collective sense of Japanese ‘Self’ in the post-war period, the abduction issue has become a very emotional argument for Japan's ‘normalisation’ in security and defence terms. The transformation from ‘abnormal’ to ‘normal’ is further enabled by Japan trading places with North Korea in the discourse, so that Japan is defined as ‘victim’ (rather than former aggressor) and North Korea as ‘aggressor’ (rather than former victim). What is at stake here is the question whether Japan is ‘normalising’ or ‘remilitarising’, and the role of the abduction issue discourse in enabling such foreign and security policy change.     

‘Women's rights as human rights’: Feminist practices,global feminism,and human rights regimes in transnationality 1

This paper argues that the recent calls for articulating women's rights as human rights can be successful only by misrecognition of the geopolitical context of human rights internationalism and the nationalisms that are sustained by it. Arguing that it is only on the level of universalized constructions of ‘women’ as a category and the generalized invocations of oppression by ‘global feminism's’ ‘American’ practitioners that such discourses of rights become powerful, this paper argues that policy and action require addressing localized and transnational specificities that created gendered inequalities. Even in national contexts such as in India, generalized invocations of women's human rights have not been useful since hegemonic forms of religion and culture have also been oppressive to women in minority communities. Concepts of economic and social justice rather than rights may work better in many such cases.     

‘Toys’ and ‘Whispers’ in ‘16‐land’: SOE and Ireland, 1940–1942

This article explores SOE plans to organise stay behind parties in neutral Ireland in cooperation with Irish army officers, in anticipation of a successful German invasion, as well as efforts to prepare for sabotage operations and to plant rumours through its agent Roddy Keith, and later through the British press attache John Betjeman. SOE's ambitions were opposed both by MI5 and SIS. MI5 wished to protect its own links with Irish intelligence, while SIS feared for the security of its covert Irish networks (which in fact were already penetrated). The consequent rows drew in C, Sir Frank Nelson, and other senior figures. They were resolved by Churchill, who felt that to provide the Irish with war material would only encourage them in their neutrality policy. His verdict was taken as an instruction to SOE to quit Ireland.