Contrasting Franco-American Perspectives on Sovereignty

The findings of this paper augment Keohane\u27s argument that sovereignty is a useful conceptual lens in the study of International Relations and that understanding divergent conceptions of sovereignty in Europe and in the United States is crucial to shedding light on the formulation of their respective policies. Indeed, the first goal of this paper is to expand on Keohane\u27s premise and to address how France and the United States understand sovereignty. The second goal is to argue that the current conflicting perspectives on sovereignty displayed by France and the United States are a departure from a historical pattern whereby, at each key time period, challenges to the shared definition of sovereignty and of the world order it symbolized, came from nondominant actors within or without the system in question. This paper posits that we are currently witnessing contradictions amongst the dominant actors. The third task of this article is to argue that the United States\u27 current position on sovereignty, its meaning and its function, perpetuate a system that favors the use of force to resolve disputes. By contrast, the multi-perspective sovereignty espoused by France within the European context, could provide a new paradigm for a world order guaranteed by international rule of law and not by the use or the threat of the use of force. Finally, this paper concludes that these fundamental differences go beyond an academic debate and carry with them significant normative, economic, and political consequences that make diplomatic confrontations between the two countries unavoidable

Contrasting Franco-American Perspectives on Sovereignty

The findings of this paper augment Keohane\u27s argument that sovereignty is a useful conceptual lens in the study of International Relations and that understanding divergent conceptions of sovereignty in Europe and in the United States is crucial to shedding light on the formulation of their respective policies. Indeed, the first goal of this paper is to expand on Keohane\u27s premise and to address how France and the United States understand sovereignty. The second goal is to argue that the current conflicting perspectives on sovereignty displayed by France and the United States are a departure from a historical pattern whereby, at each key time period, challenges to the shared definition of sovereignty and of the world order it symbolized, came from nondominant actors within or without the system in question. This paper posits that we are currently witnessing contradictions amongst the dominant actors. The third task of this article is to argue that the United States\u27 current position on sovereignty, its meaning and its function, perpetuate a system that favors the use of force to resolve disputes. By contrast, the multi-perspective sovereignty espoused by France within the European context, could provide a new paradigm for a world order guaranteed by international rule of law and not by the use or the threat of the use of force. Finally, this paper concludes that these fundamental differences go beyond an academic debate and carry with them significant normative, economic, and political consequences that make diplomatic confrontations between the two countries unavoidable

Contrasting Perspectives and Preemptive Strike: The United States, France, and The War on Terror

A few years ago, Samuel P. Huntington\u27s article in Foreign Affairs, The Clash of Civilizations? described a West vs. the Rest conflict leading to the assumption of an essentially unified Western civilization settling [g]lobal political and security issues ... effectively ... by a directorate of the United States, Britain and France and centered around common core values using international institutions, military power and economic resources to run the world in ways that will . . . protect Western interests . . . .” Against the West, the specter of disorder and fundamentalism was looming and would precipitate conflicts. This widely accepted dichotomy fails to take into account differences that exist within the \u27West. These differences are not seen in European or American discourse, or in their diplomatic rhetoric, but they are apparent in the substantive meaning each assigns to concepts such as democracy, sovereignty, and the rule of law. An illustrative example of this point is the rift between the United States and France over the war in Iraq. This rift reached a crisis three years ago at the United Nations, and, notwithstanding diplomatic pleasantries, it is still very much alive. Hailed by some as a champion of peace and criticized by others as an irresponsible nation, France was singled out by the United States and British administrations as the culprit of the failure of diplomacy. There are many aspects to this quarrel. This Article concentrates specifically on the impact of the Bush Doctrine of preemptive war-the claim of the right to strike first and do so unilaterally-and the French reaction to it, as it pertains to international law. When the Bush Administration introduced its new strategic doctrine in the National Security Strategy of September 2002, the United States claimed the right to use force preemptively against any country or terrorist group that could potentially threaten American interests. Most United Nations members promptly rejected the Bush Doctrine as incompatible with the accepted view that armed force can only be used in self-defense against armed attack or when authorized by the Security Council. France emerged as the spokesperson, especially at the United Nations, of the worldwide opposition to the Bush Doctrine. As a result, much of the rebuttal coming from the United States was directed at France. Condoleezza Rice, the U.S. National Security Adviser at the time, was quoted as suggesting that U.S. policy should be to [p]unish France, ignore Germany and forgive Russia. This Article discusses the United States\u27 and France\u27s differing perspectives on the use of force in international law at the time of the crisis. More importantly, it will address the likelihood (or not) that the Bush approach could modify or alter existing international law and the role that France can play in this process. Finally, it will assert that while contrasting legal perspectives are topical, they cannot hide the underlying reasons for the ongoing quarrel between France and the United States. Political considerations, economic interests, and cultural issues are a fundamental part of any comprehensive understanding of the situation and are part and parcel of the relationship between international law and international politics in the current world order

Concise comparative summaries (CCS) of large text corpora with a human experiment

In this paper we propose a general framework for topic-specific summarization of large text corpora and illustrate how it can be used for the analysis of news databases. Our framework, concise comparative summarization (CCS), is built on sparse classification methods. CCS is a lightweight and flexible tool that offers a compromise between simple word frequency based methods currently in wide use and more heavyweight, model-intensive methods such as latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA). We argue that sparse methods have much to offer for text analysis and hope CCS opens the door for a new branch of research in this important field. For a particular topic of interest (e.g., China or energy), CSS automatically labels documents as being either on- or off-topic (usually via keyword search), and then uses sparse classification methods to predict these labels with the high-dimensional counts of all the other words and phrases in the documents. The resulting small set of phrases found as predictive are then harvested as the summary. To validate our tool, we, using news articles from the New York Times international section, designed and conducted a human survey to compare the different summarizers with human understanding. We demonstrate our approach with two case studies, a media analysis of the framing of “Egypt” in the New York Times throughout the Arab Spring and an informal comparison of the New York Times’ and Wall Street Journal’s coverage of “energy.” Overall, we find that the Lasso with L2 normalization can be effectively and usefully used to summarize large corpora, regardless of document size.Statistic

La santé publique, un acteur majeur des politiques urbaines de transport actif ?

Les politiques urbaines qui encouragent les déplacements à pied et à vélo sont reconnues pour être potentiellement favorables à la santé. Pourtant, la recherche s’est peu intéressée au rôle des acteurs de santé publique dans l’émergence et la mise en œuvre des politiques de transport actif. L’article questionne ce rôle des acteurs de santé publique à partir des résultats d’une recherche comparative à Montréal et Toronto (1970-2016). Suivant le cadre théorique des coalitions de cause et à partir d’une analyse documentaire et d’entretiens semi-directifs, nous étudions les interactions des acteurs de santé publique et les valeurs de santé dans la politique. Nos résultats montrent le paradoxe de la présence des acteurs et des valeurs de santé dans l’émergence des politiques de transport actif, et de leur relative absence dans la mise en œuvre. Les résultats ouvrent une réflexion sur la contribution des acteurs de santé publique aux politiques urbaines.Urban policies that encourage walking or cycling to work are widely considered as healthy public policies given the benefits of increased physical activity, reduced traffic congestion and reduced air pollution. The difficulty for public health actors is that action to promote walking or cycling is largely outside their reach, for instance : building walking and cycling infrastructure (broader sidewalks, cycling lanes, and so on), improving access to public transit, or changing bylaws on maximum speed limits. These actions fall under the responsibility of transportation and urban planning sectors. In other words, creating healthy public policies requires that public health actors partner with actors from other sectors. In doing so, they are likely to come up against « politics and power games » (de Leeuw, 2017, p. 344). This paper explores what public health actors do to integrate a health perspective into urban policies for active transportation. As policy instruments fall under the responsibility of other sectors, what do they do? Are they limited to advocacy efforts? And how can these policy instruments be implemented when these other sectors are primarily concerned with something other than health? To answer these questions, this paper examines the role of public health actors in the process of leading two major Canadian cities, Montreal and Toronto, to develop active transportation policies (the policy emergence phase) and to implement these policies, including specific initiatives to change the built environment for active transportation (the implementation phase). We observe how public health actors, and in particular the local public health authorities, interact with actors from other sectors concerned with active transportation. We also consider how health knowledge and values are used in the legitimisation of active transportation policies. This focus on interactions and values stems from our use of an advocacy coalition framework (Sabatier & Weible, 2007). The methods include documentary analysis (official plans and documents related to active transportation) and semi-structured interviews (Montreal=20, Toronto=20) with key actors from the active transportation policy subsystem (in particular: municipal councillors and employees; public health actors, especially from local public health agencies; representatives from interest groups involved with active transportation). There are four main results from this study. Firstly, arguments for active transportation based on health benefits have circulated beyond the community of public health actors. Such arguments are found in the official plans stating the objectives of both cities’ active transportation policies; in rationales justifying the specific initiatives under study; and in the discourses of actors from other sectors. Secondly, public health actors spend considerable time and effort in the production and diffusion of knowledge regarding the intersections between transportation, urban planning and health. Based on this knowledge, they also adopt public positions on policy issues regarding active transportation. They are, however, largely absent from the implementation phase of the specific active transportation initiatives under study here (figure 1). Third, public health actors engage with actors from other policy sectors that share their values and vision regarding active transportation policies. This is especially true of their interactions with non-governmental organisations and university researchers. Lastly, it is more difficult for them to establish interactions with actors that do not share their values and visions regarding preferred policies, especially with municipal transportation services. In conclusion, our results suggest that the inclusion of health knowledge and values into official plans that state the objectives of active transportation policies is not sufficient to determine that health has become part of active transportation policies. Constitutional rules that define how responsibilities are shared between sectors, and the definition of a policy sector by a dominant profession and a dominant policy paradigm, limit the extent to which public health actors may shape active transportation policies so that they become healthier urban policies

Public health, a major player in urban active transport policies?

Urban policies that encourage walking or cycling to work are widely considered as healthy public policies given the benefits of increased physical activity, reduced traffic congestion and reduced air pollution. The difficulty for public health actors is that action to promote walking or cycling is largely outside their reach, for instance : building walking and cycling infrastructure (broader sidewalks, cycling lanes, and so on), improving access to public transit, or changing bylaws on maxim..