Diffusion in Franco-German Relations

A Different Perspective on a History of Cooperation and Conflict

Eric Sangar

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9783030360399
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030360405
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Diplomacy & Treaties
• Index: Politics & International Relations

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.

© The Author(s) 2020

E. SangarDiffusion in Franco-German RelationsStudies in Diplomacy and International Relationshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36040-5_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Eric Sangar¹

(1)

Sciences Po Lille & CERAPS University of Lille, Lille, France

Eric Sangar

Email: [email protected]

Keywords

Methodological nationalismFranco-German relationsDiffusionHistoriography

End Abstract

Why Yet another Book on Franco-German Relations?

In 2014, when I started using the Eurostar to travel between Paris and London as part of a new job, I could not help but wonder why the two cities were located in two separate time zones. Not that I was particularly unhappy about this fact: more than once, the hour I ‘saved’ upon arrival at St Pancras allowed me to be on time for my various appointments without losing too much sleep. Still, every time I crossed the Channel Tunnel, I asked myself if this time difference was not just another result of British ‘exceptionalism’.

It was only in the early days of the research for this book that I found the real answer: the time difference was not at all a result of any British insistence on maintaining its ‘splendid isolation’ from the continent but in fact a side-effect of the German occupation of France during the Second World War. As retraced in detail by Yvonne Poulle (1999), France had adopted the Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) until its territory was divided into a Northern part under direct German military administration, and the formally independent Vichy France in the South. To facilitate train transport, the military administration soon imposed the Central European Time valid in the German Reich on occupied France. The resulting time difference with Vichy France resulted in major difficulties in maintaining regular train timetables on the French train network that still functioned across the line of occupation. This prompted the leadership of the French state railways to successfully lobby in favour of the adoption of the ‘German’ hour in Vichy France. Hence, the practical necessities of train transport made France switch to the Central European Time, despite being geographically situated in the GMT zone—a switch that was never reversed after 1945.

This little anecdote should illustrate the main purpose of this book: to illustrate how norms and ideas originating in one country have come to influence the other—across diverse contexts, including in times that are considered as being shaped by mutual hostility and conflict. In times of apparently growing political fragmentation within and across societies, it may be more important than ever to keep in mind that interconnectedness and mutual influences do not cease even when formal institutions of international cooperation and integration lose their importance and policy-makers return to framing policies in national terms. Privileging the perspective of the impact of transborder circulation of norms and ideas—without claiming that it is the only one valid—is, in my view, central to overcoming methodological nationalism (Wimmer & Glick Schiller, 2002) in the study of bilateral relationship in the discipline of International Relations (IR), be that in the Franco-German context or elsewhere.

Obviously, there is a plethora of books covering Franco-German relations. A simple keyword search for book titles on Franco-German relations in WorldCat produces 166 results in English (“Franco-German relations”), 111 results in German (“deutsch-französische Beziehungen”), and even 595 results in French (“relations franco-allemandes”). Still, when I started preparing an undergraduate module on Franco-German relations that I designed with a focus mainly on instances of mutual influence through travelling norms and ideas, I was disappointed to discover that there was hardly any book I could recommend as accompanying reading throughout the module. Indeed, the available recent volumes on Franco-German relations published by Anglophone political science and IR scholars subscribe to an analytical narrative emphasizing a history of century-old political, economic and military rivalry and conflict, whose disastrous effects have only been overcome through the parallel processes of Franco-German reconciliation and European integration after 1945. In this teleological narrative, Germany and France are often taken as separate and independently evolving societies, with wars being represented as the main instances of mutual interaction. By contrast, in the absence of actual violent conflict, many analyses present France and Germany as rather autonomous political entities, whose economic, legal, and political evolutions are shaped by predominantly internal dynamics, resulting in sometimes harmonious, sometimes conflict political interests defended by the respective national governments.

Two examples among others may help to illustrate this tendency in the Anglophone IR literature on Franco-German relations: both Cole (2001) and Webber (1999, 2005) are concerned with analysing the Franco-German relationship, and both privilege an analytical perspective presenting the evolving policy positions of the two countries side-by-side, focussing on negotiations via ‘high politics’ as the means of achieving political agreement and neglecting underlying processes of mutual normative influence through learning or civil society communication. Krotz and Schild acknowledge the importance of cross-border civil society and ‘parapublic’ communication but interpret such activities mainly as a result of Franco-German intergovernmental negotiations (Krotz & Schild, 2013). The edited volume by Germond and Türk (2008) is the almost only overview volume that also includes instances of transborder exchange of norms and ideas, but it lacks a coherent analytical framework that builds on the available categories of the study of diffusion in IR.

Yet, scholars of anthropology and cultural history have taught us that individuals communicate and travel across the borders of their political communities, and as a result also the norms and ideas they bring with them from their home societies. These processes have often taken place not only despite but even thanks to interstate conflict and proliferating nationalism (Kaiser, 2005). Indeed, historians have produced a rich body of knowledge detailing how France and Germany (or more precisely, the German states prior to 1870) have become societies that are closely intertwined through often complex processes of imitation, interpretation, and translation. Only some of these works—such as the important studies by Alan Mitchell (1979, 1984, 1991, 2005)—are available in English language. Others, including the seminal study by Claude Digeon on the influence of German philosophy on French intellectual life after the Franco-Prussian war (1959), or the works by Michel Espagne and Michael Werner on ‘cultural transfers’ (Espagne, 1999; Espagne & Werner, 1987)—have never been translated into English. Furthermore, as they are written by historians, these works typically do not engage with the analytical tools developed in recent years in political science and IR to capture the different theoretical mechanisms of transborder ideational influence.

Aims of this Book

Indeed, since the 1990s and 2000s, there has been an important amount of IR scholarship dedicated to the dynamics of international norm diffusion. Thanks to these works, we know not only that processes of intentional policy transfer and emulation but also of unintentional diffusion and circulation of knowledge and ideas constitute an essential aspect of the evolution of the international system and its units. We also know that the diffusion of norms and ideas can be stimulated or blocked by domestic actors acting often in non-linear fashion, and against the preferences of national governments. Building on these debates, the overall aim of this book is to offer an alternative analytical view to the study of French-German relations in a historical perspective. It will focus on instances when norms and ideas originating in one country were diffused to the other, resulting in (often non-linear) change in the country of reception that would not have occurred otherwise. More specifically, this book has three main objectives:

1. 1.
   Exposing diffusion as an alternative—in the sense of complementary—perspective on Franco-German relations for an Anglophone audience of IR students and scholars: in most existing accounts, the manifold and complex interconnections between the French and German societies have been neglected. Instead, scholars too often focus on high politics and the resulting evolution of political preferences through intergovernmental negotiation. When social norms and identities are discussed, they are often conceived as purely intra-state phenomena, thus neglecting how social and political actors have been influenced by transborder socialization or communicative persuasion from across the Rhine. It will be shown that such dynamics took place both in periods of conflict and of cooperation on the intergovernmental level, and that it is therefore analytically useful to go beyond a binary conceptualisation of Franco-German relations as a history moving from ‘enmity’ to ‘amity’. By analysing why, how, and to what effect norms and ideas originating in one country diffused to the other, the book adopts a perspective which contrasts with some of the more established analytical approaches in Anglophone studies of Franco-German relations.
2. 2.
   Importing and systematically analysing the rich historiographic scholarship available in German and French language through the established analytical framework of ‘diffusion’ in IR: so far, IR scholars studying diffusion have largely focussed on contemporary phenomena of transborder normative change involving transnational agents (such as international organisations, NGOs, or epistemic communities). Doing this, they have neglected the occurrence of diffusion in bilateral relationships, especially in their historical width. The emerging strand of Historical IR reminds us, however, that IR phenomena do have a history, and that mobilizing historiography using the conceptual lenses of IR can be both empirically and theoretically fruitful.
3. 3.
   Producing potentially generalizable insights on the influence of specific diffusion mechanism and actor constellations on the outcome of diffusion: the history of Franco-German relations can be considered an ideal ‘natural experiment’ to observe, for example, the degree to which intergovernmental competition and conflict can increase or decrease the ‘success’ of normative diffusion.

Conceptually, this book relies on a working definition of diffusion as a process that occurs when political norms and ideas in a given country are modified by political norms and ideas that originate from another country. This definition privileges a dyadic hermeneutic perspective through which international and transnational actors are seen rather as media than as independent agents of diffusion. In an important conceptual article of 2012, Etel Solingen (2012) sketches out an analytical framework enabling to understand diffusion across diverse geog...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 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
• Back Matter