Beyond selecting the new President, the second and final round of the 2007 French Presidential election will raise many questions about the meaning of the results for France, and for the EU and trans-Atlantic relations. This roundtable event is scheduled to follow soon after the election to give the benefit of review. Panelists from wide-ranging disciplines will each comment on what can be learned from the campaigns, the final voting patterns, and prospects for French and Francophone politics, culture, and society.

About the Panelists

Patrick Chamorel has been a visiting fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution since 2005. He is currently based at the Stanford Center in Washington, D.C., and will soon be the Center's Resident Scholar. He has written extensively on U.S. and European politics and U.S.-European relations. As a political scientist, Chamorel has taught and done research on comparative U.S. and European politics on both sides of the Atlantic. He is currently focusing on French politics on the eve of the 2007 presidential election.

Margaret Cohen is the Andrew B. Hammond Professor of French Language, Literature, and Civilization, and director of the Center for the Study of the Novel at Stanford University. She is author of Profane Illumination: Walter Benjamin and the Paris of Surrealist Revolution and The Sentimental Education of the Novel. Her research interests involve rethinking the literature and culture of modernity from the vantage point of its waterways. She is currently working on a book concerning how the history and representation of global ocean travel informed the development of the modern novel.

Jean-Pierre Dupuy is professor of French and political science at Stanford University and social and political philosophy at Ecole Polytechnique, Paris. He is author of The Mechanization of the Mind: On Origins of Cognitive Science and Self-Deception and Paradoxes of Rationality. His current research projects are: the paradoxes of rationality or the classical philosophical problem of the antinomies of Reason at the age of rational choice theory, analytics philosophy, and cognitive science; the ethics of nuclear deterrence and preemptive war; the philosophy of risk and uncertainty; and the philosophical underpinnings and the future of societal and ethical impacts of the convergence of nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology, and cognitive science.

Elisabeth Mudimbe-Boyi is professor of French and Comparative Literature at Stanford University. She is also director of the Program in Modern Thought and Literature and the Undergraduate Studies in French program. She is author of Beyond Dichotomies: Histories, Identities, Culture, and the Challenge of Globalization and Remembering Africa. Her research interests include cultural relations between Europe, Africa, and the Caribbean; literature, intellectuals, and society; and women writers.

Tyler Stovall is professor of history at University of California, Berkeley. He is author of Paris Noir: African Americans in the City of Light and The Rise of the Paris Red Belt. He is coeditor, with Sue Peabody, of The Color of Liberty: Histories of Race in France. He has written numerous articles on French history and has been president of the Western Society for French History. His work on African Americans living in Paris is of special importance to contemporary understanding of both French and American culture.

Sponsored by Stanford University's Forum on Contemporary Europe, History Department, Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages, and France-Stanford Center for Interdisciplinary Studies

Cosponsored by the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies, the France-Stanford Center for Interdisciplinary Studies, and the Consulate General of France in San Francisco.

Alain Bauer is a French criminologist, a freemason, and a constitutionalist lawyer.

He has been Chancellor of the International Masonic Institute since 2003. Mr. Bauer is also the Director of the Institute for International and Strategic Relations and the National Institute for Higher Studies in Security, Director of Institute Alfred Fournier, and Director of Versant SA. He was the former Vice-President of the University of Paris, Panthéon-Sorbonne from 1982-1989 and a board member of the Chancellor's Office of the University of Paris. Mr. Bauer was also the former Secretary General of the World Trade Center in Paris-La-Défense and a former member of the International Legal Commission of the World Trade Center Association.

Roger Errera is a graduate of the Paris Institut d'etudes politiques, the Paris Law School and the ENA, Ecole nationale d'administration. Mr Errera is a former senior member of the Conseil d'Etat, France's Supreme Court for administrative law. He also sat on the Conseil superieur de la magistrature. After having taught extensively in France and abroad, he is presently a Visiting Professor at the Central European University in Budapest.

A former member of the UN Human Rights Committee, Mr. Errera has worked in Central and Eastern Europe as an expert and a consultant for the European Commission of the Council of Europe on legal and judicial issues.

Mr. Errera is the founder and editor of the "Diaspora" series, a collection of essays on Judaica and Jewish affairs published in Paris by Calmann-Levy (33 books published so far). He is the author of a number of articles and essays on judicial review, public law, free speech, freedom of religion, refugee law, judicial independence and accountability, nazism and communism.

Sponsored by the Mediterranean Studies Forum, the Stanford Law School, the History Department, and the Forum on Contemporary Europe.

Markus Hadler is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Sociology, University of Graz, Austria, and currently Visiting Assistant Professor at the Forum on Contemporary Europe. He also is a member of the International Social Survey Programme (www.issp.org).

His current research focuses on the political culture within Europe and the US. The main emphasis is placed on the interaction between macro level characteristics and individual attitudes and behavior. Here, a core research question is whether political attitudes are influenced stronger by modernization processes or by institutional settings. Other research topics are voting behavior, social inequality, mobility, and methods of empirical research. Most of his research is done in an international comparative view. For this purpose survey data are used and related to country characteristics by multilevel analyses.

Professor Hadler will present the paper, "Anatomy of Political Identity: Determinants of Local, National and European Identities 1995-2003", written by Markus Hadler, Kiyoteru Tsutsui and Lynny Chin. The paper examines how individuals' identification with different levels of collectivity varies across countries, groups and individuals within the

context of the expansion of the European Union (EU) since the 1990s.

Presentation abstract:

Europe's political landscape has changed dramatically during the last decades. Consider the breakdown of the communist system, the emergence of new states, and the ongoing integration and enlargement of the European Union (EU).

At an institutional and policy level, the EU's growth and increasing internal unification are without doubt. However, when it comes to individual attitudes, the acceptance of the integration is less clear ­as proven by the rejection of the EU constitution in the Netherlands and France.

This talk analyzes individual attitudes by using survey data spanning the period from the 1980s to 2006. Three common arguments with regard to the individual identification to Europe are discussed: Whether perceived benefits result in a stronger attachment; whether the ongoing integration results in a higher affiliation; and whether knowledge and education promote European identity.

The results show that changes in individual attitudes and the changes at the European level are only loosely coupled in the case of identity. Professor Hadler will discuss how sociological and social psychological explanations offer additional explanations and insights.

Josef Joffe is the Marc and Anita Abramowitz Fellow in International Relations at the Hoover Institution and is publisher-editor of the German weekly Die Zeit.

Joffe's areas of interest include U.S. foreign policy, international security policy, European-American relations, Europe and Germany, and the Middle East.

His essays and reviews have appeared in a wide number of publications including the New York Review of Books, Times Literary Supplement, Commentary, New York Times Magazine, New Republic, Weekly Standard, and the Prospect. Additionally, his scholarly work has appeared in many books and in journals such as Foreign Affairs, the National Interest, International Security, and Foreign Policy as well as in professional journals in Germany, Britain, and France.

Joffe is currently an adjunct professor of political science at Stanford, where he was the Payne Distinguished Lecturer in 1999-2000. He also is a distinguished fellow of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford. In 1990-91, he taught at Harvard, where he is also an associate of the Olin Institute for Strategic Studies. He was a visiting lecturer in 2002 at Dartmouth College and in 1998 at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School. He was a professorial lecturer at Johns Hopkins (School of Advanced International Studies) in 1982-1984. He has taught at the University of Munich and the Salzburg Seminar.

His most recent book is Überpower: The Imperial Temptation in American Foreign Policy.

Reared in Berlin, Joffe obtained his Ph.D. degree in government from Harvard.

http://www.hoover.org/bios/joffe

Event Synopsis:

Professor Joffe opens his talk with two movie quotes, "With great power comes great responsibility" from Spiderman, and "If you build it, they will come" from Field of Dreams. Both quotes, he explains, relate to the idea of modern American hegemony. The United States must concern itself with policies and institutions that promote its own interests and those of others, and by doing so will attract international support and cooperation as it did in the "golden age" of American-led institutions such as NATO. This era ended with the fall of the Soviet Union, following which the United States has seen its legitimacy decline lower than ever, even while accumulating unprecedented military power. The void left by the Soviet Union has unbalanced the global power structure and caused other countries to turn against the aggressive policies of the new single hegemon, the United States, in situations like the invasion of Iraq under George W. Bush.  Professor Joffe describes the role that America's "imperial temptation" played in its invasion of Iraq, causing a further decline in America’s global legitimacy, a crumbling of international support, and an unwitting boon to Ahmadinejad's regime in Iran, which Joffe considers to be the real threat and which essentially had its "dirty work" of removing Saddam Hussein from power done for it by the United States. Joffe urges the U.S. to think strategically about how collaboration with other countries can help rebuild mutually beneficial institutions and bolster U.S. legitimacy, rather than approaching its role in the world ideologically, treating other nations with contempt and turning them against the U.S.

A discussion session included such questions as: What has the role of American exceptionalism played in the events of the last decade? Was the outcome of the most recent Iraq war inevitable, or was it a result of bad policies and poor handling by the U.S. government? How can a country go so wrong as the US has (in pursuing the "wrong war, in the wrong country, at wrong time" as Joffe describes)? To what extent has the de-legitimization of the US been caused by its policy toward Israel? What should the U.S. approach now be toward Iran?