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Please join us as we celebrate the publication of David Laitin and co-authors Claire Adida (UC San Diego) and Marie-Anne Valfort's (Paris School of Economics and the Sorbonne) recent book Why Muslim Integration Fails in Christian-Heritage Societieswhich will be released in January 2016 by Harvard University Press.
Amid mounting fears of violent Islamic extremism, many Europeans ask whether Muslim immigrants can integrate into historically Christian countries. In a groundbreaking ethnographic investigation of France’s Muslim migrant population, Why Muslim Integration Fails in Christian-Heritage Societies explores this complex question. The authors conclude that both Muslim and non-Muslim French must share responsibility for the slow progress of Muslim integration.
Book signing to immediately follow. Copies of the book will also be available for sale.
David D. Laitin is the James T. Watkins IV and Elise V. Watkins Professor of Political Science at Stanford University. His specialty is comparative politics. In that field he conducts research on political culture, ethnic conflict, and civil war. His field expertise spans Somalia, Nigeria, Catalonia, Estonia and France.
Department of Political Science
Stanford University
Encina Hall, W423
Stanford, CA 94305-6044
(650) 725-9556
(650) 723-1808
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dlaitin@stanford.edu
James T. Watkins IV and Elise V. Watkins Professor of Political Science
laitin.jpg
PhD
David Laitin is the James T. Watkins IV and Elise V. Watkins Professor of Political Science and a co-director of the Immigration Policy Lab at Stanford. He has conducted field research in Somalia, Nigeria, Spain, Estonia and France. His principal research interest is on how culture – specifically, language and religion – guides political behavior. He is the author of “Why Muslim Integration Fails in Christian-heritage Societies” and a series of articles on immigrant integration, civil war and terrorism. Laitin received his BA from Swarthmore College and his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley.
Affiliated faculty at the Center for International Security and Cooperation
Affiliated faculty at The Europe Center
James T. Watkins IV and Elise V. Watkins Professor of Political Science
Speaker
Department of Political Science
Associate Professor of French and Director, Department of French and Italian
Discussant
Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages
Amalia Kessler
Lewis Talbot and Nadine Hearn Shelton Professor of International Legal Studies
Discussant
Stanford Law School
In the aftermath of the fatal attacks on the cartoonists of Charlie Hebo, TEC affiliate faculty Cécile Alduy explores the French reaction to the violence in light of the competing ideologies of an inclusive, secular republican unity and a more traditional, fearful nationalist rhetoric.
At a time when Marine Le Pen gained momentum on the political and media scene and has garnered unprecedented electoral results, it is urgent to decipher the logic of her father's speech and the foundations of its rhetorical efficiency. For the first time, a lexical analysis and statistical literature of a corpus of nearly five hundred texts can measure the originality of this new Frontist word. Public speeches, editorials and interviews of two successive presidents of the National Front are screened with a double processing, IT and rhetoric, to identify as close continuities and differences. The battle of words is central to the strategy of "demonization" initiated by the new President of the National Front since 2011.
Yet is the speech of the girl so different from that of the father? Jean-Marie Le Pen is not sure it is enough to adopt the lexicon of the Republic to bring real values. Beyond the lexical dust, deep structures and underlying national novel continue to the sources of a long literary tradition and extreme right politics. This book begins to dismantle the springs of Marinist speech and to enlighten this new tributienne word that meets real needs for meaning and values in a context of deep economic and identity crisis.
Last Friday's multiple terrorist attacks in Paris that killed 129 people and injured over 350 was the topic of KQED Radio’s “forum with Michael Krasny" (Monday, Nov. 16, 2015). The discussion centered around the potential impact to US and European strategy for fighting ISIS, immigration policy, and to French nationalism, values and public discourse on multiculturalism and open borders.
Participating in the panel was French literature associate professor and TEC faculty affiliate Cécile Alduy. Alduy is the author of the recent book Marine Le Pen's Words: Deciphering the New National Front's Discourse.
Joining Alduy were Bloomberg Paris bureau chief Geraldine Amiel, UC Berkeley professor of public policy Michael Nacht, and Brookings’ Center for Middle East Policy fellow William McCants.
A banner with the drawing "Peace for Paris" of French artist Jean Jullien hangs on the facade of the city hall in Nantes, France, November 16, 2015, as people observe a minute of silence to pay tribute to the victims of the series of deadly attacks on Friday in Paris.
Montek Singh Ahluwalia is an economist who trained at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. He spent several years at the World Bank before returning to India to serve as the Economic Advisor to the Finance Minister. The Government of India then appointed him to several senior positions, including Secretary of Commerce and Secretary in the Department of Economic Affairs at the Ministry of Finance. In 1998, he was appointed as a Member of the Planning Commission and Advisory Council to the Prime Minister of India. In 2001, he became the Director of Independent Evaluation Office at the International Monetary Fund, resigning this position in 2004 to become the Deputy Chairman of the Planning Commission.
He has written widely about India and the world economy, co-authoring Redistribution with Growth: An Approach to Policy, and editing Macroeconomics and Monetary Policy: Issues for Reforming the Global Financial Architecture with Y.V. Reddy and S.S. Tarapore.
The Payne Distinguished Lectureship is named for Frank and Arthur Payne, brothers who gained an appreciation for global problems through their international business operations. This lectureship, hosted by the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, brings speakers with an international reputation for leadership and visionary thinking to Stanford to deliver a major public lecture.
Montek Singh Ahluwalia
Deputy Chairman, Planning Commission 2004-2014, Government of India
Deputy Chairman, Planning Commission 2004-2014, Government of India
A pioneering textual analysis of French political speeches led by Stanford Professor of French Cécile Alduy reveals how Marine Le Pen, leader of France's surging far-right National Front, has made extremism palatable in a land of republican values.
French politician Marine Le Pen carried her father's right-wing fringe political party to first place in the country's latest elections for European Parliament.
Stanford scholar Cécile Alduy says Le Pen's success at the helm of France's right-wing National Front can be attributed to a combination of sophisticated rebranding and skillfully crafted moderate rhetoric that sells a conservative agenda that borders on extreme.
An associate professor of French at Stanford and a faculty affiliate of The Europe Center, Alduy conducted a qualitative and quantitative analysis of more than 500 speeches by Marine Le Pen and her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, to find out what has made their party surge in the polls.
Alduy's word-for-word analysis of National Front political speeches, published in the bookMarine Le Pen prise aux mots: Décryptage du nouveau discours frontiste (Seuil, 2015) has become a flashpoint of political discourse in France.
The resulting research is the first study of Marine Le Pen's discourse, the first to compile a corpus of this magnitude of political speeches by a French political organization.
After sifting through the data and performing extensive close readings of the corpus, Alduy found that the stylistic polish of Marine Le Pen's language conceals ideological and mythological structures that have traditionally disturbed French voters. Her research reveals how radical views can be cloaked in soothing speech.
"Marine Le Pen's language is full of ambiguities, double meanings, silences and allusions," Alduy said.
This diagram shows the spatial lay out of Marine Le Pen's discursive universe. Using factorial analysis in Hyperbase, one can create a "map" of all the most used words and how they correlate to one another: the closer they are spatially, the stronger their correlation, or how often they appear together.
Courtesy of Cécile Alduy
This diagram shows the spatial lay out of Marine Le Pen's discursive universe. Using factorial analysis in Hyperbase, one can create a "map" of all the most used words and how they correlate to one another: the closer they are spatially, the stronger their correlation, or how often they appear together. Image Courtesy of Cécile Alduy
But in terms of political agenda and ideological content, Alduy said the continuity between the younger and elder Le Pen is striking. "What is different is the words and phrases she uses to express the same agenda," Alduy said.
Alduy, whose research centers on the history and mythology of national and ethnic identities since the European Renaissance, conducted the research with the help of Stanford graduate and undergraduate students and with communication consultant Stéphane Wahnich. Academic technology specialist Michael Widner of Stanford Libraries and the Division of Literatures, Cultures and Languages, provided technical expertise throughout and trained students in the art of indexing the database.
With a grant from Stanford's Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education, Alduy and her team transcribed and analyzed more than 500 speeches by Marine and Jean-Marie Le Pen dating from 1987 to 2013.
Alduy's team used text analysis software such as Hyperbase or Voyant Tools to measure precisely how Marine's language differs from that of Jean-Marie.
They found, for example, that Marine Le Pen used the word "immigrants" 40 times in speeches, compared to 330 times for Jean-Marie, or 0.6 percent versus 1.9 percent, respectively. Instead, she used the more impersonal "immigration" or "migration policy" to discuss the issue and present this hot-topic issue as a matter of abstract economic policy rather than an ideological anti-immigration stance.
While Jean-Marie paired "immigrants" or "immigration" with words like "danger," "threat" or "loss," yielding phrases that scapegoat or even demonize France's large immigrant population, Marine used more technocratic pairings such as "protection," "cost," "euro" or "pay."
The effect, Alduy contended, is a repositioning of immigration from the racial and cultural problem Jean-Marie claimed it was to an economic one. Yet the actual policy agenda changed little from father to daughter, Alduy observed.
New language, same story
Jean-Marie Le Pen founded the National Front in 1972 to unite under the same political banner several extremist groups, from royalists to conservative Catholics nostalgic of the Vichy régime and the colonial Empire.
Since 1987 and his polemical statement about the Holocaust being a "detail" in the history of World War II, Jean-Marie has employed shock value to get media coverage. When asked about his daughter's new "normalization" strategy, which smoothes out the old xenophobic rhetoric in favor of a mainstream lingua, he routinely declares: "Nobody cares about a nice National Front."
But the party polled in the low double digits until Marine Le Pen took the helm in 2011. As she rose in the polls, Alduy began studying her speeches to understand what powered the politician's steady ascent.
In May 2014, Le Pen's National Front stunned the French political establishment by pulling 25 percent of the vote in European parliamentary elections, becoming the top French vote-getter in a multiparty system. President François Hollande's Socialists came in third. Last month, the party equaled that percentage in elections for local councilors. Such results make Marine Le Pen a credible contender for France's presidency as the country looks ahead to its 2017 presidential cycle.
To demonstrate how Marine Le Pen's language presents formerly unpopular ideas in a new light, Alduy pointed to the party's policy of préférence nationale (national preference,) the cornerstone of its platform since the late 1970s. This policy would give priority for jobs, social services and benefits to French citizens, and would strip from children of legally resident noncitizens the family benefits now available to all children in France.
As touted by Jean-Marie Le Pen, however, Alduy noted, "The phrase préférence nationale has negative connotations in the French mind."
"'Preference' sounds arbitrary, potentially unfair, and goes against the republican principle of equality in the eye of the law," Alduy noted. "So Marine Le Pen has renamed this measure priorité nationale (national priority) or even sometimes patriotisme social (social patriotism). Both new phrases sound positive and don't evoke discrimination as the former did.
"'Priority' evokes action, responsibility, leadership – all the qualities one would like an effective chief executive to embody," Alduy said. "Patriotism is a noncontroversial word that can rally across the political spectrum. Who wants to be called anti-patriotic by opposing 'social patriotism'? Yet both phrases refer to exactly the same measures."
In the same vein, Alduy observed, Marine Le Pen eschews the word "race" while her father stated unequivocally "races are unequal."
"Instead," Alduy said, "Marine Le Pen explains that 'cultures,' 'civilizations' and 'nations' have a right to remain separate and different, or else risk disappearing, overwhelmed by hordes of outsiders with a different, incompatible culture.
"The word 'race' has disappeared, but the same peoples are the target of this fear of the other."
Listening between the lines
Alduy's findings hint at ways voters everywhere can critically evaluate political thought and make sound political decisions in times of stress.
She observed that other far-right European movements, such as Geert Wilders' Party for Freedom in the Netherlands, have similarly rebranded themselves to expand their base.
"Like the National Front, the Party for Freedom now adopts the posture of a champion of Western liberal values and the defense of 'minorities' – gays and women – against the alleged homophobia and misogyny of Islam," Alduy said. "Yet the Party for Freedom is a typical xenophobic, far-right, anti-immigration, anti-Europe party in every other respect.
"I hope that people will start to pay attention to the meaning of words in political speeches and in the media."
In 2015-16, Alduy said, she hopes to convey to students the nuances of political code words such as laïcité (secularism), "the Republic" or "immigration" in a Stanford course titled How to Think About the Charlie Hebdo Attacks: Political, Social and Literary Contexts.
"We all have to be careful and listen to what is left between the lines," Alduy said.
"When we hear someone speak about equality or democracy, we have to pay attention not just to what we want to hear, or to what we assume these words mean, but to decipher what they mean in the context of this speaker's worldview.
"The positive or negative connotations of certain words can mislead us to think that we share the same definition of them with the politicians that use them to gain our vote."
Marine Le Pen prise aux mots is currently available only in French. Analyses and graphs taken from the book are available in English on the website www.decodingmarinelepen.stanford.edu.
Media Contact
Corrie Goldman, director of humanities communication: (650) 724-8156, corrieg@stanford.edu
France's far-right National Front politician Marine Le Pen hugs her father, Jean Marie le Pen, after her May Day 2012 speech in Paris. The younger Le Pen's meteoric rise in French politics has captured the attention of Stanford scholar Cécile Alduy, who has analyzed the differences between her speeches and those of her more polarizing father.
Is Europe "elderly and haggard", and could France become "the crucible of Europe" (Jan. 10, 2015 NYTimes op-ed)?
On the one hand, Europe is warned by the US about an Asian "pivot", and is perceived here as less relevant and effective. Significantly, certainly as a wake up call, Pope Francis recently compared Europe to a "grandmother, no longer fertile and vibrant, increasingly a bystander in a world that has apparently become less and less Eurocentric”. France had been previously presented here as an eminent representative of an "Old Europe".
On the other hand, the US has been constantly, during the last decade, advocating for a stronger Europe and stressing a special French role in this endeavour. A few days ago, after the terrorist attacks in Paris, President Obama publicly stated that "France was the US oldest Ally".
At a time when we have to face common challenges in the Middle East and in Africa, to adapt to new emerged actors and a more assertive Russia, to deal with direct threats including in the field of proliferation and the cyber space, to define a multipolar world and organize our economic relation (TTIP), what can be the EU contribution? What can also be a special intellectual and diplomatic French input to this global realignment?
Co-sponsored by The Europe Center, the Center for International Security and Cooperation and the France-Stanford Center.
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Ambassador Eric Lebédel is a French diplomat, former ambassador to the OSCE and to Finland, with a deep experience in Transatlantic relationship (twice as Minister's advisor; in the French embassy in Washington DC) and in European affairs. He is also involved in crisis management (PMs office), international security (embassy in Moscow, consul general in Istanbul) and multilateral diplomacy ( NATO's Director for crisis management, OSCE). Presently working on Strategic Partnerships for the French MFA and interested in e.diplomacy, he also regularly lectures at Sciences-po and ENA (Ecole Nationale d'Administration) on crisis management and Europe.
Thousands rally across France and other nations in solidarity against the January 7, 2015 attack on the Charlie Hebdo offices in Paris by gunmen shouting “Allahu Akbar” or “Allah is [the] Greatest.” What does this tragedy, called one of the worst terror attacks on French soil, portend for the future of religious integration in France?
Cecile Alduy, Stanford associate professor of French literature and affiliated faculty at Stanford's Europe Center in the Freeman Spogli Institutes for International Studies and Stanford Global Studies Division, was in Paris during the attack on the Charlie Hebdo offices.
Currently writing a book on Marine Le Pen and the far-right National Front, Alduy discussed the impact of the attack on French society and politics on KQED Radio's "Forum with Michael Krasny" (Thurs., Jan. 8, 2015). She was joined by David Pryce-Jones, author and senior editor of the National Review, Hatem Bazian of Zaytuna College, BBC News Paris correspondent Hugh Schofield, and Jack Citrin, professor of political science and director of the Institute of Governmental Studies at UC Berkeley.
French flags are tied with black tissue at the Elysee Palace in a sign of mourning in Paris January 8, 2015. France began a day of mourning for the journalists and police officers shot dead on Wednesday morning by black-hooded gunmen using Kalashnikov assault rifles.
The politics of economic crises bring distributive economic conflict to the fore of national political debates. How policy should be used to transfer resources between citizens becomes a central political question and the answers chosen often influence the trajectory of policy for a generation. This context provides an ideal setting for evaluating the importance of self-interest and other-regarding preferences in shaping public opinion about economic policy. This paper investigates whether self-centered inequity aversion along with self-interest influences individual tax policy opinions. We conduct original survey experiments in France and the United States and provide evidence that individuals care both about how policy alternatives affect their own interests and how they influence the welfare of others relative to themselves. Our estimates suggest that in France both disadvantageous inequality aversion---utility losses when others have better economic outcomes---and advantageous inequality aversion---utility losses when others have worse economic outcomes---are important determinants of tax policy preferences. In the United States, we find strong evidence of disadvantageous inequality aversion but not advantageous inequality aversion. The results for both countries suggest that self-interest and other-regarding preferences influence tax policy preferences and the findings in France are strongly consistent with self-centered inequity aversion.
This diagram shows the spatial lay out of Marine Le Pen's discursive universe. Using factorial analysis in Hyperbase, one can create a "map" of all the most used words and how they correlate to one another: the closer they are spatially, the stronger their correlation, or how often they appear together.
