French responses to the Prague Spring: connections, (mis)perception and appropriation

Looking at the vast literature on the events of 1968 in various European countries, it is striking that the histories of '1968' of the Western and Eastern halves of the continent are largely still written separately.1 Nevertheless, despite the very different political and socio-economic contexts, the protest movements on both sides of the Iron Curtain shared a number of characteristics. The 1968 events in Czechoslovakia and Western Europe were, reduced to the basics, investigations into the possibility of marrying social justice with liberty, and thus reflected a tension within European Marxism. This essay provides an analysis specifically of the responses by the French left—the Communist Party, the student movements and the gauchistes—to the Prague Spring, characterised by misunderstandings and strategic appropriation. The Prague Spring was seen by both the reformist and the radical left in France as a moderate movement. This limited interpretation of the Prague Spring as a liberal democratic project continues to inform our memory of it

The Rise and Fall of the French Agences de l’Eau

International audienceThe Agences de l’eau (Water Agencies) are well known abroad as the French attempt to develop integrated water management at river basin scale through the implementation of the Polluter Pays Principle (PPP). Yet, after 30 years of existence, environmental economists became aware that they were not implementing the PPP, and therefore were not aiming at reducing pollution through economic efficiency. Behind the purported success story, which still attracts visitors from abroad, a crisis has been recently growing. Initially based on the model of the German (rather than Dutch) waterboards, the French system always remained fragile and quasi-unconstitutional. It failed to choose between two legal, economic and institutional conceptions of river basin management. These principles differ on the definition of the PPP, and on the role of levies paid by water users. After presenting these two contrasting visions, the paper revisits the history of the French Agences, to show that, unwilling to modify the Constitution to make room for specific institutions to manage common pool resources, Parliament and administrative elites brought the system to levels of complexity and incoherence which might doom the experiment

The Exceptionalism of French Local Government

International audienc