Beyond the Republican Mold:Difference Politics and the Americanization of French PoliticalTheory.

This paper will propose an interpretation of the way French political theory has become increasingly influenced by its American and Canadian counterparts to include notions of culture and identity in theoretical and sociological analyses of immigration and integration. While French authors have been extensively read and discussed in many fields of North American social and political sciences for quite a long time, France was until very recently suspicious, if not outright hostile, to ideas and theories developed on the other side of the Atlantic regarding the inclusion of minorities and their rights. A strict understanding of the French Republican model of integration and assimilation contributed to a widespread rejection of American and Canadian ideas regarding integration, and specifically multiculturalism and minority rights, which were often accused of leading to notions of communitarianism, and, by extension in a traditional French understanding, to racism. While it is true that such ideas were never unanimously accepted in North America, they were almost universally and strictly rejected in France, and not seriously taken into consideration and extensively discussed: ‘communitarianism’ was mainly used as a slogan, its philosophical underpinnings were not rigorously challenged. Yet, if it took 17 years to see John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice translated and discussed in France, the debate in the country has progressively opened to new considerations regarding identity and politics and the organization of pluralism. In this paper I will analyze the rise of this new acceptance, focusing particularly on the ongoing debate regarding secularism in French schools and the most recent stages of the Muslim veil controversy in the country. I will thus propose a discussion about the circulation of ideas and theories across the Atlantic, and see how images of North American theories are shaped and organized in recent French political thought. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]