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This book analyses and compares instances of the diffusion of political norms and ideas in the history of Franco-German relations. While this relationship is often described as a history evolving from enmity over reconciliation to friendship, the book uses the concept of diffusion as a complementary analytical perspective to emphasize how political norms and ideas originating in one society have influenced the other, especially in periods of intergovernmental conflict. Established in International Relations to explain transnational normative change in contemporary contexts, the framework of diffusion is heuristically useful to explore how various types of actors have contributed, using analytically different mechanisms, to normative change across the Rhine. The book presents eight case studies featuring various contents and mechanisms of ideational diffusion taken from three contexts of Franco-German history, including the French Revolution, the Franco-Prussian War, and Franco-German rapprochement after 1945. Arguing that phenomena that are often seen as genuinely 'national' evolutions, such as German nationalism or the French system of primary education, cannot be understood without taking into account the reception and emulation of norms from across the Rhine, the book should help students and scholars to overcome the limits of methodological nationalism when studying bilateral relationships, in the Franco-German context and elsewhere.
List of contents
1 Introduction.- 2 The mainstream narrative of Franco-German relations and the value of 'diffusion' as a complementary analytical framework.- 3 Exporting revolutionary institutions across the Rhine.- 4 Importing 'alien' or 'enlightened' law? Understanding the partial diffusion of the Code Napoléon in the Confederation of the Rhine.- 5 Importing nationalist warfare: Prussia's emulation of the Napoleonic way of war.- 6 Understanding the incomplete emulation of Prussian warfare by the French Army after the Franco-Prussian War.- 7 Learning from the Prussian Schulmeister? German influences on French primary education before and after 1870.- 8 The 'Germanisation' of local identities in Alsace-Lorraine.- 9 Enabling reconciliation through the recognition of mutual entanglement: The emergence of a Franco-German transnational memory of the First World War.- 10 Understanding the diffusion of West German ordoliberal ideas within the context of the introduction of the European Monetary System.- 11 Conclusion: the added value of studying diffusion in the context of Franco-German relations.
About the author
Eric Sangar is Lecturer in Political Science at Sciences Po Lille, France, a member of the research centre CERAPS, University of Lille, and an associated member of the Centre Emile Durkheim at Sciences Po Bordeaux. He authored the monograph
Historical Experience: Burden or Bonus in Today's Wars? and co-edited the volume
Researching Emotions in International Relations.
