Jonah D. Levy examines the transformation of French economic policymaking and state-society relations during the last quarter of the 20th century. He argues that France needs an active, empowering state to engage with civil society.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • In this “ambitious and challenging” (The New York Review of Books) work, the bestselling author of Monsoon and Balkan Ghosts offers a revelatory prism through which to view global upheavals and to understand what lies ahead for continents and countries around the world. In The Revenge of Geography, Robert D. Kaplan builds on the insights, discoveries, and theories of great geographers and geopolitical thinkers of the near and distant past to look back at critical pivots in history and then to look forward at the evolving global scene. Kaplan traces the history of the world’s hot spots by examining their climates, topographies, and proximities to other embattled lands. The Russian steppe’s pitiless climate and limited vegetation bred hard and cruel men bent on destruction, for example, while Nazi geopoliticians distorted geopolitics entirely, calculating that space on the globe used by the British Empire and the Soviet Union could be swallowed by a greater German homeland. Kaplan then applies the lessons learned to the present crises in Europe, Russia, China, the Indian subcontinent, Turkey, Iran, and the Arab Middle East. The result is a holistic interpretation of the next cycle of conflict throughout Eurasia. Remarkably, the future can be understood in the context of temperature, land allotment, and other physical certainties: China, able to feed only 23 percent of its people from land that is only 7 percent arable, has sought energy, minerals, and metals from such brutal regimes as Burma, Iran, and Zimbabwe, putting it in moral conflict with the United States. Afghanistan’s porous borders will keep it the principal invasion route into India, and a vital rear base for Pakistan, India’s main enemy. Iran will exploit the advantage of being the only country that straddles both energy-producing areas of the Persian Gulf and the Caspian Sea. Finally, Kaplan posits that the United States might rue engaging in far-flung conflicts with Iraq and Afghanistan rather than tending to its direct neighbor Mexico, which is on the verge of becoming a semifailed state due to drug cartel carnage. A brilliant rebuttal to thinkers who suggest that globalism will trump geography, this indispensable work shows how timeless truths and natural facts can help prevent this century’s looming cataclysms.

The True Wealth of Nations arises from the conviction that implementing a morally adequate vision of the economy will generate sustainable prosperity for all. It sets forth the beginnings of an architecture of analysis for relating economic life and Christian faith-intellectually and experientially-and helps social scientists, theologians, and all persons of faith to appreciate the true wealth of any nation.

Challenging the conventional narrative that the European Union suffers from a "democratic deficit," Athanasios Psygkas argues that EU mandates have enhanced the democratic accountability of national regulatory agencies. This is because EU law has created entry points for stakeholder participation in the operation of national regulators; these avenues for public participation were formerly either not open or not institutionalized to this degree. By focusing on how the EU formally adopted procedural mandates to advance the substantive goal of creating an internal market in electronic communications, Psygkas demonstrates that EU requirements have had significant implications for the nature of administrative governance in the member states. Drawing on theoretical arguments in favor of decentralization traditionally applied to substantive policy-making, this book provides insight into regulatory processes to show how the decentralized EU structure may transform national regulatory authorities into individual loci of experimentation that might in turn develop innovative results. It thus contributes to debates about federalism, governance and public policy, as well as about deliberative and participatory democracy in the United States and Europe. This book informs current understandings of regulatory agency operations and institutional design by drawing on an original dataset of public consultations and interviews with agency officials, industry and consumer group representatives in Paris, Athens, Brussels, and London. The on-the-ground original research provides a strong foundation for the directions the case law could take and small- and larger-scale institutional reforms that balance the goals of democracy, accountability, and efficiency.

From Zinedine Zidane to Michael Jordan and from Marie-José Pérec to Lance Armstrong, over the last thirty years, numerous individuals have emerged through the global sports industry to capture the imagination of the French public and become touchstones for the discussion of a host of social issues. This book provides new insights into the evolution of the global sporting spectacle through a study of star athletes, emblematic organisations, key locations, and celebrated moments in French sport from the mid-1980s to the present day. It draws on a wide range of sources, from film, television, advertising, newspapers, and popular music to cover key developments in sports including football, motorsport, basketball, and cycling. Sport here emerges as a privileged site for the discussion of the nature of contemporary nationhood, as well as for the performance of France's postcolonial heritage. Simultaneously, sport provides a platform for the playing out of concerns over globalisation, and, in a time of post-industrial uncertainty, for nostalgic reminiscences of an apocryphal bygone era of social cohesion. The exploration of these themes leads to new understandings of the ways sport influences and is implicated in broader social and cultural concerns in France today.

In Recasting Welfare Capitalism, Mark Vail employs a sophisticated and original theoretical approach to compare welfare states and political-economic adjustment in Germany and France. He examines how and why institutional change takes place and what factors characterize economic evolution when moving from times of prosperity to more austere periods and back again. Covering the 1970s to the present, Vail analyzes social and economic reforms, including labor policy, social-insurance, and anti-poverty programs. He focuses on the tactics and actions of key political players, and demolishes the stagnation argument that suggests that France and Germany have largely frozen political economies, incapable of reform. Vail finds that these respective evolutions involve interrelated changes in social and economic policies and are characterized by political relationships that are continuously renegotiated—often in unpredictable ways. In the process, he presents a compelling reconceptualization of change in both the welfare state and the broader political economy during an age of globalization.