Daniel A. Gordon

French and British Anti-Racists Since the 1960s: A rendez-vous manqué?

While immigration situations in France and Britain are often contrasted to each other, they are not mutually closed systems. This article asks to what extent anti-racist movements in the two countries interacted with each other between the 1960s and 1990s. Although one could be forgiven for thinking that the two operate in parallel and mutually incomprehensible universes, it suggests that there has been more exchange than meets the eye, by examining case studies ranging from the Mouvement Contre le Racisme et Pour l’Amitié entre les Peuples to the magazine Race Today, and the trajectories of individuals from Mogniss Abdallah to John La Rose. Though less immediately apparent than those from across the Atlantic, influences occasionally, at times surreptitiously, crept across the Channel. Nevertheless it concludes that this specifically Anglo-French form of transnationalism became more developed after, rather than during, what is classically considered the heyday of transnational protest in the 1960s and 1970s. It also argues that despite the much-vaunted French resistance to the ‘Anglo-Saxons’, influences in anti-racism in fact flowed more readily southwards than northwards across the Channel. From ‘Rock Against Police’ to the International Book Fair of Radical Black and Third World Books, there seems to have been an increasing willingness among some elements in anti-racism in France to allow a seepage of British ideas. By contrast, attempts to transplant French ideas, such as SOS Racisme, in the UK appear contrived, and only succeeded when the French influence was not made explicit.

Liquidating May ’68? Generational Trajectories of the 2007 Presidential Candidates

Nicolas Sarkozys successful 2007 presidential campaign culminated with an appeal to ‘liquidate’ the heritage of the revolt of May 1968. Through an examination of the trajectories of all candidates at the 2007 election, this article seeks to explain the controversy around Sarkozys remarks in terms of the broader impact of the ‘’68 years’ on a generation of both right and left born in the postwar period.

A ‘Mediterranean New Left’? Comparing and Contrasting the French PSU and the Italian PSIUP

This article argues that Gerd-Rainer Horns model of a ‘Mediterranean New Left’ encompassing both the French Parti socialiste unifie (PSU, 1960–1990) and the Italian Partito socialista italiano di unita proletaria (PSIUP, 1964–1972) needs to be significantly revised. It agrees that, half a century on from the events which gave rise to their foundation, this much misunderstood part of the political spectrum, midway between social democracy and the far left, is worthy of rescue from the ‘enormous condescension of posterity’, but questions how similar the two parties actually were. Major differences emerge, especially in the nature of each partys relationship with communism, with the philosovietism of the PSIUP contrasting with the PSUs evolution towards an anti-Leninist decentralist socialism of self-management. Yet, at the same time, important new evidence is uncovered about the concrete political and personal links that developed between leading intellectuals of the PSIUP and PSU, an example being the friendship of the Italian parliamentarian and theorist Lelio Basso with the journalist Gilles Martinet, later French ambassador to Italy. Other transnational links, both across the Mediterranean and to eastern Europe, are explored. Furthermore, the location of the roots of both parties in the 1940s generation of anti-fascist resistance calls into question prevailing assumptions equating the New Left with the youth of the 1960s, with wider implications for our understanding of the development of the European left across the twentieth century.

From May to October: Reassessing the 1968 Generation

The article reports on the resurgence of far left in France. There is a parallel between the reemergence of the memory of the Algerian war during the 1990s and the reemergence of the memory of another taboo subject, 68-era Trotskyism, in the early 2000s. Just as immigration controversies in France and civil war in Algeria brought back to the surface uncomfortable memories of decolonisation, so the renewal of the French far left in the present has brought its past into sharper relief. Arguably, this has undermined the credibility of the view that 1968 was simply a soft lifestyle revolt, for harder-edged ghosts are back to haunt us.

Quand la gauche se réinventait. Le PSU, histoire d’un parti visionnaire

It is unusual for a party so apparently puny in conventional terms, never exceeding four members of the National Assembly, to exercise as much influence over French political and intellectual life ...

Antisemitism, Islamophobia and the Search for Common Ground in French Antiracist Movements since 1898

The dawn of the twenty-first century was a testing time for ideals of a united front against racism in France, witnessing sharp disagreement among antiracists about the relative importance of antisemitism and post-colonial racism, including Islamophobia. A flashpoint for this debate was in 2004, when France’s best-known antiracist groups—Mouvement contre le racisme et pour l’amitie entre les peuples (MRAP), Ligue des droits de l’homme (LDH), Ligue internationale contre le racisme et l’antisemitisme (LICRA) and SOS Racisme—publicly broke ranks over precisely such a fault-line. This chapter aims to set this acrimonious debate in a much longer-term historical context, by asking whether the opposing positions of what have been termed the ‘Four Sisters’1 of French antiracism can be explained by truly irreconcilable approaches.

At home in postwar France: modern mass housing and the right to comfort

10). Dividing the book for instance in the three parts financial-economic issues, political-legal changes and sociocultural impacts could have been a more comprehensive access to the topics of the volume. To sum up and despite these minor criticisms, the edited book is a very crucial and timely contribution to the debate on the success of austerity measures in general and on the often told poster boy story of Ireland. It will hopefully lead to a new discussion on the short-term and longterm outcomes of specific crisis measurements and will stimulate new research on the various aspect of the crisis. The edited volume will surely be the starting point for future investigations into the topic of post-crisis Ireland and beyond.

Full Speed Ahead? The Trente Glorieuses in a Rear View Mirror

It is a historiographical commonplace to portray France during the so-called Trente Glorieuses of economic expansion after the Liberation, especially during the last of those three decades ending in the 1973 oil crisis, as engaged heart and soul in a project of full-throttle modernisation. The Fifth Republic under Charles De Gaulle and Georges Pompidou rolled up its sleeves and set to work tackling the countrys multifarious examples of historical backwardness. France ceased to be a nation of peasants, small-minded small business owners and bolshie workers, and instead dreamed of becoming one of confident technocrats, technicians and world-beating industrialists. Only after the end of the Trente Glorieuses , it is often assumed, did that dream of technologically based progress give way to greater scepticism, pessimism and environmental concern, for modernisation swept all before it until its assumptions were rudely challenged by the end of growth in October 1973 - or at least until they were by the political crisis of May 1968. While more critical perspectives on post-war modernisation are evident in recent historiography, notably on issues around planning in general and housing and the grands ensembles in particular, transport policy and the set of social experiences which it sought to shape have been relatively more marginal to our understanding. This review article seeks to explore how issues around transport, and their broader implications about the very nature of modern growth-oriented capitalist society, are leading the debate onto new terrain. The underlying purpose of several of the books under review is to cast doubt on the accepted narrative of the Trente Glorieuses . They do so, however, in two defiantly opposite directions: some defending the distinctly pro-car orientation of the post-war elites and others offering a more radical critique of this perspective.

Against Old Europe: Critical Theory and Alter-Globalisation Movements

in the Union has not declined in the past three years. The Commission and its relentless drive to further integration does not mobilise agency, invite engagement or inculcate the notion of a ‘project’ based on a widely shared sense of identity; the result is that, as the late Peter Mair put it in his Ruling the Void, ‘because we cannot organise opposition in the EU we are almost forced to organise opposition to the EU . . . . and become intrinsically Eurosceptic’ (2013, 7). But Euroscepticism is a cluster of attitudes and dispositions that are not easy to disentangle. There are clearly two underlying complaints: one unfolds in the vertical dimension of us versus Brussels with the claim that too many policy issues have been taken out of the arena of national politics and shifted to a European level where accountability is weak. The other is horizontal and related to the conflict between the two sides of the new European divide. In both scenarios, Offe argues, it is all about both economic and political injustices. Justified gloom, yes; but at the heart of this volume one glimpses a sense of hope that European ideals and the struggle for a social Europe are worthwhile. In the end, the author seems to be saying that although the Euro was a mistake, its undoing would be a greater mistake! This slim volume provides a clear-sighted analysis of what is the most vital geo-political question of the age, expressed in elegant, simple prose—an object-lesson in communication to the many authors who produce books stuffed with ever more theoretical neologisms—and to those many thousands of policy-makers, students, politicians and voters who will find here much to help them understand the embedded subtleties still to be resolved. One is left with the view that when the obituaries of the EU finally come to be written, as they surely will, it will be to this essay that the eulogists will turn first.

Les marches vues du Royaume Uni

‘Les marches vues du Royaume Uni’ in Francois Brun and Ahsene Zehraoui, eds, Les Marches pour l’Egalite et contre le racisme de 1983 a 1985, special issue of Migrations Societe, no. 159-160 (May- August 2015