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Path dependence and chance steered towards a focus on French politics. After a doctoral thesis on the concept of solidarity in nineteenth-century political thought, my research acquired a political economy emphasis. It broadened out from France and implicit comparison to West European explicit comparison, culminating in a professorship at Oxford University to promote European postgraduate political studies in 1993 until my retirement in 1998, when I returned to Hull University as a Research Professor. Collaboration was a crucial part of comparative work, whose findings were tested by an in-depth knowledge of France.

This chapter argues that the pervasive sense of national decline among French public opinion can only be appreciated if it is judged against the elevated height of state self-esteem over previous centuries. Since the stabilization of the political regime in the second half of the twentieth century, the state has regressed as the overarching and unifying political framework, reversing its traditional standing. Now, many of the traditional state culture’s assumptions are no longer valid, creating a disjunction between expectations about what the state should do and what it can do. While those who speak on behalf of the state endeavor to sustain the myth of its sovereignty, their credibility has become increasingly implausible as the long process of state-building has been unwinding. Thus, France remains exceptional in terms of its norms and ideas about the state, even if it is no longer exceptional in terms of the behavior of the state.

Sartori, G. (2005) Parties and Party Systems: A Framework for Analysis. Colchester: ECPR Press. Parry, G. (2005) Political Elites. Colchester: ECPR Press. Lukes, S. (2006) Individualism. Colchester: ECPR Press. Kaplan, M. A. (2005) System and Process in International Politics. Colchester: ECPR Press.

The Fifth Republic sought to overcome the previously excessive subordination of government to parliament by constitutionally imposed procedural rules in the anticipated absence of stable parliamentary majorities. Despite their existence, governments have used the package vote, control over amendments and the rules governing oral and written questions to ministers to avoid parliament enforcing ministerial accountability. The government's stringent control of the budgetary process has led to the ambitious 2001 procedural reassertion of National Assembly financial control, which is gradually coming into operation by 2006. Parliament has been playing an increasing role in European Union legislation.

The reluctance of British political science to continue an earlier comparative politics tradition did not deter Gordon Smith from steering a path between a predominant false particularisation and a minority push towards false universalism. A comparison of the first and fifth editions of Politics in Western Europe shows the continuing thrust of a political sociology approach, with political and social structures and forces having priority over constitutional and institutional provisions. Unapologetically 'old-fashioned' in eschewing law-like generalisations, comparison's prime purpose is to improve our understanding of individual countries: in Gordon Smith's case, it started and finished with Germany.

(1999). Incomparable comparatist (Vincent wright, 1937–99) West European Politics: Vol. 22, The Changing French Political System, pp. 6-9.

Lindblom's hypothesis that in market‐oriented systems businessmen predominate over statesmen is tested in relation to the way French firms have switched partners since the 1980s. Instead of a dirigiste—style special relationship with government, they have formed multinational partnerships. The implications of the new competitive context, under the pressure of delocalisation panic, are considered, prior to the examination of the effects of nationalisation and privatisation on the national identity of firms. The virtual bankruptcy of Credit Lyonnais is examined as an example of state‐dependent capitalism, and the impact of EC competition policy is considered. The partial industrial disengagement by the French government in favour of market competition reinforces the applicability of Lindblom's hypothesis to the relations between firms and state in France.

Attempts to simplify by dichotomizing the complexity of French political traditions, either in an attempt to achieve intellectual clarity or from a polemical urge to promote guilt or virtue by repulsion and association, have been numerous since the French Revolution. There have been more historically sensitive efforts to respect the variety within each component of the left/right duality. In particular, Rene Remond's distinction between three French rights - ultra-racist legitimist, Orleanist, liberal and Bonapartist nationalist - had much to commend it when first formulated in 1954. However, in later editions he sought to force Gaullism into this tripartite straightjacket while warning that “Historical rapprochements are normally only the most subtle form of anachronism.” A presupposition of this chapter's deliberate use of hindsight to see nineteenth-century Bonapartism through the twentieth-century phenomenon of Gaullism is that it allows us to offer a retrospective corrective to ill-considered attributions of either ignominious or glorious ancestry. While acknowledging that the Bonapartist nationalist right incorporated minority left-wing elements, Remond argued that dependence upon its predominantly right-wing support pushed it rightward under Napoleon, Louis Napoleon, Boulanger, and de Gaulle. He was prepared to accept that in theory Bonapartism “lent itself to many interpretations. Political Janus, its ambiguity allowed within limits some scope for adaptation. In 1849 it could, almost equally and with equal likelihood, have given birth to a left-wing or right-wing Bonapartism.”

There is a French national predisposition to describe as true in principle what the wide awake realise as unlikely to be true in practice. This is particularly the case of its constitutions, which prescribe norms rather than realities. Couched in abstractions that elevate clarity of aspiration way above vulgar practicalities, Article 1 of the Fifth Republic’s Constitution asserts that ‘France is an indivisible Republic (…)’ an affirmation that is made with all the more conviction because of the divisions which continue to bedevil French politics and society. Out of a desire to attain an undisputed national unity and community that evades its grasp, the French political system has subjected democratic institutions and practices to the stifling constraints of a statism disguised by the seductive appellation of Republic (Levy 2006, Introduction and Conclusion) (I had not anticipated that the title of my book, The One and Indivisible Republic, would be taken literally by some (Hayward 1974)).

The contested but inescapable concept of sovereignty is our starting point in an investigation of power struggles at the summit of the European Union (EU). Uneasy references to pooled, shared and split sovereignty collide with sovereignty’s connotation of the purported unity and indivisibility of a supreme coercive power. At the interface between law and politics, sovereignty is the focus of an ‘ongoing dialectic’ between them in a polycentric EU whose variable boundaries are non-exclusive territorially and where sovereignty is functionally limited (Walker 2003:20; cf. 22–4). The results are ‘constitutional collisions’ between ‘sovereignty-encroaching claims’ in a context of ‘contingency, ambiguity and disagreement’ with, ‘profoundly unforeseeable and unintended consequences’ (Walker 2003:26, 28). It is a constitutional discourse that dares not speak its name for fear that would formalise explicitly on open-ended process of ‘shifting alliances and competitions between different geopolitical strategies and different substantive policy aspirations’ of the member states (Walker 2003:27; cf. 30).

The Euro crisis catapulted the European Union (EU) into its most serious political crisis since its inception, leaving it simultaneously torn between opposing demands for more sovereignty and solidarity. In order to save the Euro and ultimately the European integration project itself, the EU and its core policy actors oscillated between partial disintegration, which prepared for the possible exit from the Eurozone of one or several highly indebted member states, and deeper integration in the form of a fiscal union that was agreed in principle in December 2012 by all 27 member states with the exception of Britain.

Solidarity is a moral or legal obligation towards strangers going beyond fraternity or friendship. It is derived from the Roman law concept of the joint liability of citizens for debt (obligatio in solidum) (Brunkhorst, 2005, p. 2; cf. pp. 55–6, 64). It signifies specific shared responsibility but does not necessarily imply that the responsibility is shared equally. It can be extended to a general citizen commitment to the community public good. In the late eighteenth century, Graeco-Roman civic solidarity was conflated with a secularised Judaeo-Christian conception of fraternity in the American and French constitutional rights of man and the citizen. These rights gradually became the egalitarian foundation of first the democratic state and then the welfare state as the normative basis of national unity.

Book reviewed in this article: Mark Thatcher, The Politics of Telecommunications. National Institutions, Convergence and Change

During this period the President of the European Commission lost his pivotal institutional position as power shifted from the followers of Monnet to the defenders of member state sovereignty. National governments had democratic legitimacy which the initiating, goal-setting Commission lacked and de Gaulle enforced their veto over important innovations. A mixture of shared sovereignty in some matters and retained sovereignty in others meant that the Council of Ministers and later the European Council assumed greater prominence. Insider strategic innovation, using the Community Method personified by Delors as Commission President and the Single European Act, marked the triumph of binding agreements, but his successors were unable to sustain the past integration impetus.

Forces of institutional inertia and confederal fragmentation are unlikely to overcome the logic of leaderlessness without an external crisis. The Commission has difficulty achieving administrative coordination and concentrates upon facilitating piecemeal, intergovernmental agreements within the constraint of a diminutive EU budget. The competition commissioner assertiveness in enforcing its regulatory powers contrasts with defensive Common Agricultural Policy reform. The rotating presidency of the Council of Ministers conforms with the confederal consociational nature of the EU. The European Parliament is weakened by the continuing national basis of political parties and enlargements weaken European identity. Humdrum muddling through rather than dramatic disintegration or heroic transformative integration is the likely prospect.

Piecemeal power-sharing by nation statesmen has inconspicuously promoted incremental complex change over time, and this has produced outcomes of imprecise parentage. The result is a polycentric European Union of member-state elites making consociational confidential concessions lacking democratic legitimacy, which has prompted populist hostility. Public acquiescence is secured by an increasing tendency to lead from behind, which relies upon humdrum rather than heroic decision-making. Surreptitious integration through action traps that lead further than it is at first apparent, and successive enlargements that seem boundless have created uncertainty about community and purpose. Veto groups constrain the capacity for non-covert change. Federalist ambitions have been replaced by the implicit acceptance of confederal tension between limited integration and residual sovereignty.