Mimicking war: how presidents coordinate the American State

'Mimicking war', that is declaring war on some undesirable phenomenon - such as crime, poverty, illegal drugs, illegal immigration, terrorism and so forth - is a recurring strategy employed by White House incumbents from the beginning of the twentieth century. This paper examines the strategy and argues that the appeal to presidents of such war like exhortations are threefold. First, they provide a means by which the political executive can overcome the great problem of American governance - separated powers. Mimicking war, that is declaring a particular problem 'public enemy number one' constitutes a means of inducing coordinated government expansion. Second, mimicking war is a means of signalling a singular priority to bureaucrats and key policy makers thereby effecting a reallocation of scarce public resources to the new priority. Last, the strategy enables a president to set a political agenda and to justify the expansion of national standards of government in a political culture inherently hostile to federal governmental activity. -- Als-Ob-Kriegsführung bedeutet, dass irgendeinem unerwünschten Phänomen wie Verbrechen, Armut, Drogen, illegale Immigration, Terrorismus politisch der Krieg erklärt wird. In immergleicher Weise wird diese Kriegserklärung von den Amtsinhabern des Weißen Hauses seit Anfang des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts strategisch eingesetzt. In diesem Arbeitspapier wird diese Strategie untersucht und der dreifachen Anziehungskraft nachgegangen, die ein derartiges kriegsähnliches Vorgehen für den Präsidenten hat. Erstens kann die politische Exekutive so das große Problem überwinden, dass sich der amerikanischen Regierung immer in den Weg stellt: die Gewaltenteilung. Einem Problem den Als-Ob-Krieg zu erklären bedeutet, es wird zum 'öffentlichen Feind Nummer eins' und jede Koordinierung des Regierungshandelns und Ausweitung staatlichen Tuns zielt auf seine Beseitigung. Zweitens bietet eine solche Kriegserklärung ein Mittel, um der Beamtenschaft und den politischen Hauptentscheidungsträgern eine einzigartige Priorität zu signalisieren; so lässt sich eine Neuverteilung der knappen allgemeinen Betriebsmittel hin zur neuen Priorität bewirken. Drittens ermöglicht es diese Strategie einem Präsidenten, überhaupt eine politische Rangordnung durchzusetzen und nationale Gestaltungsansprüche des Regierens in einer politischen Kultur auszuweiten, die einem Tätigwerden des Bundesstaates an sich von Anfang an feindlich gegenübersteht.

Ironies of state building: a comparative perspective on the American state

This paper challenges prevailing assumptions about the American State. It rejects the conventional distinctions between strong and weak and activism and inactivism as no longer adequate to the modern reality of the expansive and extensive American State. With this premise, the paper undertakes three tasks. First, it examines the reasons for the scholarly neglect of the State amongst students of American government and politics, concluding that the level of federal activism (including taxing, spending, regulating and war making) observable in respect to both Democrat and Republican administrations renders this oversight unsustainable intellectually and analytically. Second, the paper develops a typology of ways in which the American State has been an effective presence in the US political system including its role in sustaining and then ending segregation, in standardizing national rights of citizenship, and in militarizing society. Last, the paper shows how recent advances in comparative studies of the state, notably with respect to federalism and state-society relations, offer lessons for developing scholarly knowledge of the American State. -- In diesem Arbeitspapier sollen die Annahmen über den amerikanischen Staat überprüft werden, die üblicherweise in der Wissenschaft gemacht werden: Die Unterscheidungen zwischen starkem und schwachem sowie zwischen aktivem und inaktivem Staat werden zurückgewiesen, da sie der heutigen Wirklichkeit eines expandierenden und ausgreifenden amerikanischen Staatswesens überhaupt nicht mehr angemessen sind. Vor diesem Hintergrund leistet das Arbeitspapier ein Mehrfaches: Erstens werden die Gründe dafür geprüft, warum die Forscher, die sich mit der US-amerikanischen Regierung und Politik befassten, den Staat so stark vernachlässigt haben. Dabei wird festgestellt, dass ein steigendes Niveau von Bundesaktivitäten das schließt Steuern, Ausgaben, Gesetzgebung und Kriegsführung ein - sowohl unter demokratischen wie republikanischen Präsidentschaften zu beobachten ist, sich diese Achtlosigkeit also intellektuell wie analytisch nicht rechtfertigen lässt. Zweitens wird in diesem Arbeitspapier eine Typologie der effektiven Präsenz des amerikanischen Staates im US-Politiksystem entwickelt, was dessen Rolle bei der Unterstützung wie der Beendigung der Rassentrennung, beim Durchsetzen nationaler Bürgerrechtsstandards und bei der der Militarisierung der Gesellschaft einschließt. Drittens wird gezeigt, wie jüngste Fortschritte in der vergleichenden Staatswissenschaft - vornehmlich bezogen auf den föderalen Staatsaufbau und die Beziehungssysteme zwischen Staat und Gesellschaft - Impulsgeber für die Weiterentwicklung des Wissens zum amerikanischen Staat sein können.

The American State and the Obama Presidency: A Preliminary Discussion

I characterize American State power as the expression of a "shock and awe" strategy, that is, the style of making dramatic policy pronouncements which centralise efforts and concentrate bureaucratic resources. Shock and awe,’ refers to the capacity of American state leaders to employ its sovereign power and ample resources determinedly to a particular end. This capacity rebuffs the notion of the United States as a weak state. It describes how powerful the centralized exercise of (civilian and military) bureaucratic authority bent on a single purpose has become in the US state. The state is the executive - the bureaucratic departments and agencies including the military controlled under presidential authority. Shock and awe is a strategy which presidents seek to employ definitively to address a crisis at home or abroad. It is distinctly American because of the constraints - including constitutional, political and electoral - under which the executive pursues policy and responds to crises

Building blocks of settlement: Italians in the Riverland, South Australia

The Riverland region is situated approximately 200 km. north-east of Adelaide and consists of a strip of land on either side of the River Murray from the South Australian-Victorian border westwards to the town of Morgan. Covering more than 20,000 sq. km., it encompasses the seven local government areas of Barmera, Berri, Loxton, Morgan, Paringa, Renmark and Waikerie. The region was first identified as an area of primary production in 1887 when two Canadian brothers, George and William Chaffey, were granted a licence to occupy 101,700 hectares of land at Renmark in order to establish an irrigated horticultural scheme. After World War 1, the SA Government made available new irrigation blocks at Renmark and other localities in the Riverland area to assist the resettlement of more than a thousand returned soldiers. A similar scheme operated in New South Wales, where returned servicemen were offered blocks in Leeton and Griffith, in the Murrumbidgee Irrigation Area. The period after World War 2 saw further settlement of returned soldiers on fruit blocks in the Riverland and new irrigation areas were developed to cater for this growth. In the 1950s and 1960s large numbers of migrants, especially Greeks and Italians, settled in the area, often buying the blocks of retiring first world war soldier-settlers. Today the Riverland is among South Australia’s strongest regional economies

Restricting Voting Rights in Modern America

The Supreme Court’s Shelby County v. Holder ruling invalidating Section 4(b) of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 is in part a product of efforts to resist further transformations to the traditional American institutional arrangements that have conferred advantages on whites, especially disproportionate political power. Those efforts in resistance are not likely to succeed in the long run. But they may embroil American elections and American governance in paralyzing conflicts for years to come.La décision de la Cour suprême dans l’arrêt Comté de Shelby c. Holder, invalidant la Section 4 (b) de la Loi sur les droits de vote de 1965, est en partie le produit d’une volonté de maintenir les avantages particulièrement disproportionnée des Blancs en matière de pouvoir politique et de résister à toutes les nouvelles tentatives transformation des arrangements institutionnels américains traditionnels. Ces efforts de résistance ne sont pas susceptibles de réussir sur le long terme. Mais ils peuvent entrainer les élections américaines et la gouvernance américaine dans des conflits paralysants pour les années à venir

Sociologie de l’État en recomposition

Dans cet article introductif, King et Le Galès rappellent tout d'abord les enjeux de la sociologie de l'Etat, champ de recherche en recomposition, tout comme l'Etat qu'elle vise à étudier. Ils mentionnent, d'une part, l'importance de l'Etat dans la structuration, la régulation des conflits, les inégalités, le pilotage des sociétés européennes et, d'autre part, les arguments mis en avant dans la littérature qui justifient l'intérêt pour la recomposition de l'état, notamment les processus d'européanisation et de mondialisation. Les auteurs évoquent ensuite brièvement des exemples de chantiers de recherche empiriques contemporains sur l'Etat en soulignant les difficultés de conceptualisation. Ils présentent ensuite une partie des travaux récents de sociologie de l'Etat à partir de deux controverses : la première a pour objet les questions de définition et les variables à prendre en compte pour analyser l'Etat, ce qui recoupe le débat sur la distinction entre Etat fort et Etat faible et la contestation des modèles traditionnels centrés sur l'Europe. La seconde controverse poursuit cette question des variables. Les auteurs, en s'appuyant notamment sur les travaux de Michael Mann, développent l'idée selon laquelle l'analyse des politiques publiques est centrale pour comprendre les recompositions de l'Etat contemporain. La présentation des articles réunis dans ce numéro, organisée autour de ces deux controverses, complète cette introduction. [Résumé éditeur

‘Race was a motivating factor’:Re-segregated schools in the American states

During the Obama presidency, Republicans made major gains in state legislative elections, especially in the South and the Midwest. Republicans’ control grew from 13 legislatures in 2009 to 32 in 2017. A major but largely unexamined consequence of this profound shift in state-level partisan control was the resurgence of efforts to re-segregate public education. We examine new re-segregation policies, especially school district secession and anti-busing laws, which have passed in these states. We argue that the marked reversal in desegregation patterns and upturn in re-segregated school education is part of the Republican Party’s anti-civil rights and anti-federal strategies, dressed up in the ideological language of colour-blindness

Calcutta Botanic Garden and the colonial re-ordering of the Indian environment

This article examines three hand-painted colour maps that accompanied the annual report of the Calcutta Botanic Garden for 1846 to illustrate how the Garden’s layout, uses and functions had changed over the previous 30 years. The evolution of the Calcutta Botanic Garden in the first half of the nineteenth-century reflects a wider shift in attitudes regarding the relationship between science, empire and the natural world. On a more human level the maps result from, and illustrate, the development of a vicious personal feud between the two eminent colonial botanists charged with superintending the garden in the 1840s

Symposium sur Inventing equal opportunity de Frank Dobbin

Frank Dobbin’s Inventing equal opportunities , published by Princeton University Press in 2009, has arrived at just the right time in a France where the theme of “diversity” has permeated big firms and where equal opportunity policies are being debated in the educational system, which, from kindergarten to university, is being accused of fostering inequality. This book provides a stimulating, innovative contribution to our understanding not only of these questions in the United States but also of the French case. We thought it was time to organize a symposium on a book that recounts and dissects nearly fifty years of development in equal opportunity policies in the United States. To fully describe the wealth of information in this book, we asked authors with different disciplinary perspectives to take part. By analyzing social movements, public actions, the legal system and occupational forms of mobilization, Frank Dobbin has revitalized and challenged accepted ideas about the role of public players in regulating behavior. He has also shown that legal uncertainty in civil rights cases has led to the formation of corporate standards that, though private, have the value of public ones.L’ouvrage publié par Frank Dobbin aux Presses de l’université de Princeton en 2009 sous le titre Inventing equal opportunities offre une contribution innovante et stimulante sur les thèmes de la diversité et de l’égalité des chances aux États-Unis mais aussi sur ce qu’il nous permet de comprendre en creux sur le cas français. Pour rendre pleinement compte de la richesse de cet ouvrage, nous avons choisi de solliciter des auteurs s’inscrivant dans différentes perspectives disciplinaires car Frank Dobbin mêle analyse des mouvements sociaux, de l’action publique, du système juridique et des mobilisations professionnelles

Truth and Reparation for the U.S. Imprisonment and Policing Regime: A Transitional Justice Perspective

In the literature on transitional justice, there is disagreement about whether countries like the United States can be characterized as transitional societies. Though it is widely recognized that transitional justice mechanisms such as truth commissions and reparations can be used by Global North nations to address racial injustice, some consider societies to be transitional only when they are undergoing a formal democratic regime change. We conceptualize the political situation of low-income Black communities under the U.S. imprisonment and policing regime in terms of three criteria for identifying transitional contexts: normalized collective and political wrongdoing, pervasive structural inequality, and the failure of the rule of law. That these criteria are met, however, does not necessarily mean that a transition is taking place. Drawing on the American political development and abolition democracy literatures, we discuss what it would mean for the United States to transition out of its present imprisonment and policing regime. A transitional justice perspective shows the importance of not only pushing for truth and reparation, but for an actual transition