This chapter analyzes foreign policy change in France since 1990, focusing in particular on defense policy, official development assistance and international cooperation. We argue that French foreign policy has mainly been characterized by three different types of change: adjustment changes, program changes and goal changes. Although the fundamental goals of French foreign policy evolved relatively little over the past thirty years, we show that France adapted its priorities and restructured its foreign policy tools following the end of the Cold War. We highlight that France developed a comprehensive approach to foreign policy, integrating various instruments and tools, and built up numerous strategic and defense partnerships. Our empirical analysis shows that some of these changes have been dramatic (such as the professionalization of the armed forces in 1996), while others have been incremental (e.g. the shift from formal, multilateral agreements to more informal and minilateral forms of cooperation). Such changes converge toward the ambition to make France great again in a context where new global actors do compete with the expected leadership of successive French executives.

This chapter focuses on public-policy analyses through the lens of agenda-setting. Approaches in this tradition assume that no objective fact is a problem in itself and that any problem needs to be constructed. Problems are necessary preconditions to policy change, but decision-makers’ attention is limited and the competition for attention is fierce. Kingdon has proposed the most useful framework to think about the conditions for reaching the political agenda: feasibility, acceptability in the policy community, costs, public support and receptivity among decisionmakers. Baumgartner and Jones’ research program has developed an influential coding system to classify attention by topics. This has allowed for the study of agenda-setting dynamics. They have shown that policy change tends to be characterized by Punctuated Equilibria: most policies are stable most of the time and when they finally change, they will tend to change radically. This program has been extended to more than 20 countries within the Comparative Agendas Project (CAP), providing a unique opportunity to compare agenda-setting dynamics across various institutional settings and situations. To illustrate the possibilities of CAP data, this chapter studies in detail the role of media and lawmaking in France, the UK and the US. We compare, in particular, environmental issues and issues related to police and justice. In line with classical media studies, we look at the extent to which the media may influence agenda-setting and lawmaking. The analysis shows that the relation between media and lawmaking in the area of environmental politics present no clear pattern. They feature attention peaks at different times, while following no clear trend. Police and justice present higher average levels of attention in the three countries, but – again – do not present univocal patterns. While attention has increased in France and the UK, the correlations with the lawmaking agenda are at best temporary. Overall, our quick analysis confirms that the driving forces of media and lawmaking diverge and that their relation, where it exists, is conditional on other factors that we do not observe here. This type of agenda-setting perspective provides the possibility to look at system-level dynamics and to understand the interaction between different topics. This chapter has illustrated some of the possibilities of this type of data that has allowed a renewal of the study of agenda-setting.

Cet article, qui s’inscrit dans la lignée des travaux sur les agendas politiques, interroge l’évolution de la défense comme priorité politique au niveau européen et donne quelques pistes de réflexion sur sa place après la crise sanitaire.

Face à l’épidémie de Covid-19, de nombreux acteurs se sont mobilisés pour contenir la crise sanitaire : en première et deuxième ligne, nous trouvons caissiers, commerçants, enseignants, forces de l’ordre, industriels, livreurs, militaires, sapeurs-pompiers, soignants, travailleurs sociaux… Cet article s’intéresse plus particulièrement aux acteurs de la défense – les forces armées comme les industriels de l’armement – en Europe. Il compare le rôle que ces acteurs ont joué en France et dans quatre de ses pays voisins, à savoir l’Allemagne, l’Italie, l’Espagne et le Royaume-Uni, dans la stratégie globale de lutte contre le Covid-19.

Book review of "The United Kingdom’s Defence After Brexit. Britain’s Alliances, Coalitions, and Partnerships", edited by Rob Johnson and Janne Haaland Matlary (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019, pp. 261, ISBN 978-3-319-97168-1)

The end of the Second World War marked the beginning of a new and multifaceted international order. While geopolitical tensions between the Eastern and the Western bloc persisted until 1991, the post-World War II period was characterised by economic openness and collective efforts to promote peace and the rule of law. With the United States (US) providing hegemonic leadership, fostering cooperation and advocating »free world« values, the second half of the 20th century saw a proliferation of regional and international organisations: indeed, a number of multilateral institutions were founded, including the United Nations (UN), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) – the predecessor of the European Union (EU) – and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). After the end of the Cold War, this order continued to spread, and countries in East Asia, Eastern Europe and Latin America became increasingly integrated into the global economy. Thus, new international organisations were created (e.g. the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 1995 and the G20 in 1999) while pre-existing ones continued to expand, both in terms of their size and fields of operation (such as the EU, which began as a purely economic community with six member states in 1958 and has now become an organisation consisting of 28 members that covers many policy areas, from environmental protection to external relations and security).

Ce numéro de la revue Les Champs de Mars, qui réunit universitaires et praticiens, porte sur la diversification des coopérations de défense au XXIe siècle. Dans l'introduction, nous proposons une typologie propre aux coopérations d’aujourd’hui : celle-ci classifie les coopérations de défense en fonction de 1) leur niveau (bi-, mini- ou multilatéral) ; 2) leur objectif (particulier ou général) ; 3) leur durée (temporaire ou permanente) ; 4) leur domaine (fonctionnement ou investissement) ; 5) leur cadre (institutionnalisé ou non). Devant une telle variété de formes de coopération, il est nécessaire de s’interroger sur leurs différentes visées, qui peuvent en partie expliquer leur diversité. Plus précisément, s’agit-il de coopérer pour s’assurer plus de légitimité ou plus d’efficacité ? Peut-on combiner les deux ? Quels types et formats de coopération doivent être privilégiés pour y parvenir ? Les articles du Dossier, qui couvrent différents types et formats de coopération de défense au XXIe siècle, interrogent leur légitimité et leur efficacité tout en prenant en compte les spécificités régionales des cas étudiés. Les articles du Forum, quant à eux, étudient plus particulièrement les coopérations de défense de la France et montrent l’intérêt de combiner – au lieu d’opposer comme c’est souvent le cas – différents formats de coopération, afin de gagner à la fois en efficacité et en légitimité. Ces contributions sont complétées par une série de recensions et de lectures critiques des ouvrages les plus récents abordant les coopérations de défense au XXIe siècle. Enfin, la postface revient sur les coopérations de défense comme objet d’étude majeur des questions stratégiques et propose un programme de recherche pour le futur.

Si les premières formes de coopérations supra-étatiques apparaissent en Europe dès le XVIIe siècle lors de grandes conférences diplomatiques pour la paix, le multilatéralisme dans son acception actuelle remonte au milieu du XIXe siècle et ne se concentre pas uniquement sur les champs de la défense et de la sécurité. Il s'agit d'un processus de coopération entre plus de deux États impliquant une forme d'institutionnalisation, souvent dans le cadre de régimes ou organisations internationaux dédiés.

Punctuated equilibrium theory (PET), first proposed by Frank Baumgartner and Bryan Jones (1993), explains how the same institutional setup, usually preventing new policy issues from gaining political attention, is also responsible for the occasional outbursts of attention that cause disproportionately large policy shifts. PET has been successfully applied to a wide range of public policies and has increasingly generated cross-sectional and cross-national analyses, which aim at understanding and comparing the causes of stability and change in different political systems. However, the focus of these studies has mostly been on domestic policies, with only very little attention for PET in foreign policy analysis. The aim of this chapter is to show that PET is not only relevant in the realm of domestic politics, but also useful for studying and understanding foreign policymaking. Therefore, we explain PET, its main concepts and how it has evolved over the past two decades. We then apply and test PET in a foreign policy context by looking at yearly changes in attention to foreign policy issues and examining the relationship between changes in foreign aid allocations and the size of aid administrations. We come to the conclusion that PET constitutes a unique tool to examine why certain foreign policy issues move up and down the political agenda and how different political actors influence each other in this process.