This course begins with the assumption that important areas of politics
and policy-making in France can no longer be understood solely from the
perspective of the French political system. Although there has been a
considerable debate about the nature of policy-making at the European
level, as well as the direction in which this process is moving, there
can be little doubt that there are few policy-making areas in France that
are not touched in some way by the evolution of "Europe" during the past
half-century. Between common European policies and policy-making
structures, and harmonized policies marked by "European standards" that
constrain domestic choices, French policy-making has been gradually
transformed by the evolution of Europe. This course will permit us to
view the system of European governance through the prism of the French
political process.

In this course, we will first analyze the relationship between European
governance and the French political system. We will examine the evolution
of EU governance during the past twenty years, and the role of France in
transforming the European governing system. We will focus particularly on
how and why the role of France moved from resistence to closer union
under de Gaulle to a prime mover of a more integrated system under
Mitterrand. We will then discuss how policy-making in France has adapted
to European governance. We look at the changes in the constitutional
arrangements of the Fifth Republic, and then at the process of
policy-making. We will analyze the evolution of traditional structures-
institutions, political parties, interest groups- and then the dynamics
of the political system.

In the second part of the course we will examine five policy arenas, and
analyze the different ways that European and domestic processes interact.
In each of these arenas we will look at the impact of the evolution of
European union, the interaction of French and European institutional
actors, and the development of an interactive policy-making process.
Finally, we will analyze the relationship between process and policy in
each of these arenas.

This course consists of readings, lectures and discussions. All readings
from books and articles will be made available to you in the reserve
reading room of Bobst Library. Many of the articles are also available
on-line, through jstore. You will also be required to follow French
politics either through a regular consultation of The Economist (weekly),
or Le Monde on-line: (http://www.lemonde.fr/), or both. Other web-sites
relevant to this course and for your own research will be given to you
during class. There will be a take-home examination that will be returned
by e-mail. Each student will also be responsible for either a critical
review essay or a research paper of 20-25 pages on a topic of his or her
choice (I will explain the difference to you, and I will also give you a
list of suggested topics). If you would like to work with survey data,
data sets will be made available.