La politique du dehors avec les raisons du - European University ...

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those targeting an unpopular foreign nation, or a disliked minority or migrant community at home. Projected to foreign policy, xenophobic demagoguery can heighten irrational security fears and a correspondingly hostile policy towards antipathetical nations. The primacy of rationally defined national interests has always been suspect. Anthropologist F.G. Bailey, author of the seminal book Strategems and Spoils, quoted a letter written in 1648 by Count Oxiensterna, a Swedish statesman, to his son: “You do not understand, my son, how small a part reason plays in governing the world.” 4 Bailey highlighted the lure of demagoguery and xenophobia for average citizens: “Ordinary Jane and Ordinary Joe are quicker to feel than they are to think; they respond more readily to a message that touches their emotions than to one that requires them to attend to a carefully reasoned argument. Reason does not mobilize support; slogans do. Reasoning is demanding; slogans are comfortably compelling.” 5 Culture and foreign policy The study of culture and its linkage to international relations has been receiving greater attention in recent years. 6 Valerie Hudson succinctly captured one aspect in this linkage—between national identity and foreign policy--this way: “When we speak of culture and national identity as they relate to foreign policy, we are seeking the answers that the people of a nation-state would give to the following three questions: ‘Who are we?’, ‘What do ‘we’ do?’, and ‘Who are 2
they?’” 7 Culture organizes meaning for a society: “culture tells us what to want, to prefer, to desire, and thus to value.” It also “provides scripts and personae that are reenacted and subtly modified over time within a society.” 8 Culture shapes foreign policy, at least indirectly. 9 Shared systems of meaning become transferred to the foreign policy making process. For Hudson, “culture in and of itself is not a cause of anything in international relations…. It is in the ‘who draws what ideas’ and the ‘how the ideas are employed’ aspects that causes of events can be found.” 10 Differences in the internal values found in states can become refracted onto foreign policy behavior. A good example is in the self-selected national role conception. Thus the Third Reich saw itself as preserver of the Caucasian race, the U.S. as champion of individual enterprise, Sweden as mediator, and Canada as multicultural pioneer. 11 For Hudson, it may even be the case that “A nation’s leaders rise in part because they articulate a vision of the nation’s role in world affairs that corresponds to deep cultural beliefs about the nation.” 12 Accordingly national action scripts may profound shape a state’s international politics. Culture is regarded as a guarantor of continuity in a state’s foreign policy and it follows that cultural analysis can indicate which “Well-known and well- practiced options, preferably tied in to the nation’s heroic history, will be preferred over less well-known and less familiar options or options with traumatic track records—even if an objective cost-benefit analysis of the two 3
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Page 5 and 6: are a number of reasons for this. T
Page 7 and 8: unprecedented human migration, phob
Page 9 and 10: short, shifting social hierarchies
Page 11 and 12: egion had had important political r
Page 13 and 14: Muslim and Mediterranean worlds is
Page 15 and 16: If France’s relations with Arab s
Page 17 and 18: destination for French aid, investm
Page 19 and 20: predecessors. In a speech to French
Page 21 and 22: minorities so well: he thinks of hi
Page 23 and 24: France than anywhere else. Mutual r
Page 25 and 26: 11 Kal J. Holsti, “National Role
Page 27: 63 From Emmanuel Todd interview in

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