In May 2012, French voters rejected the liberalizing policies of Nicolas Sarkozy and elected his opponent, the Socialist Francois Hollande, president. In June 2012, the incumbent president's center-right UMP party was swept out of government in the ensuing parliamentary elections, giving way to a new center-left majority in the National Assembly. This book analyzes the contexts and results of the 2012 presidential and parliamentary elections in France. It assesses the legacies of the Sarkozy presidency that informed the 2012 electoral campaigns, scrutinizing his domestic social and economic policies on the one hand and European and foreign policies on the other. In turn, the elections' outcomes are also analyzed from the standpoint of various political parties and other institutional interests in France, and the results are situated within the broader run of French political history. Finally, the book examines the principal challenges facing the Hollande administration and new government of Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault, and assesses how effectively these have been met during their first year in office.

Is the West in Decline? is a collection of ten essays by prominent scholars of international relations and current history, many of them associated with the European Studies program of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. The essays explore the question of decline from several perspectives: theoretical, historical, counterfactual, and contemporary. Thomas Row's essay uses alternative history to show how an unfallen Habsburg Empire might have evolved into a state system resembling the European Union. Benjamin Rowland's essay on Oswald Spengler considers how the German historian's theory of decline could be applied to the West today. Several of the essays are country studies. Not all conclude that countries or state systems are in decline, or that the condition, if present, is irreversible. Writing about Germany, Stephen Szabo notes that only fifteen years ago, this currently robust country could have been seen as a clear exemplar of decline. Dana Allin's essay on the U.S. asks whether a course change, including retrenchment and overseas rebalancing, might reverse decline or eliminate it altogether. David Calleo's essay, among other things, looks at America's reserve currency status as a principal sustainer of American exceptionalism, and asks what might happen should the U.S. lose its "exorbitant privilege" as reserve currency provider to the international system.

Is the West in Decline? is a collection of ten essays by prominent scholars of international relations and current history, many of them associated with the European Studies program of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. The essays explore the question of decline from several perspectives: theoretical, historical, counterfactual, and contemporary. Thomas Row's essay uses alternative history to show how an unfallen Habsburg Empire might have evolved into a state system resembling the European Union. Benjamin Rowland's essay on Oswald Spengler considers how the German historian's theory of decline could be applied to the West today. Several of the essays are country studies. Not all conclude that countries or state systems are in decline, or that the condition, if present, is irreversible. Writing about Germany, Stephen Szabo notes that only fifteen years ago, this currently robust country could have been seen as a clear exemplar of decline. Dana Allin's essay on the U.S. asks whether a course change, including retrenchment and overseas rebalancing, might reverse decline or eliminate it altogether. David Calleo's essay, among other things, looks at America's reserve currency status as a principal sustainer of American exceptionalism, and asks what might happen should the U.S. lose its "exorbitant privilege" as reserve currency provider to the international system.

This book attempts to account for the resurgence of significant political movements of the Radical Right in France since the establishment of democracy in the country at the end of the nineteenth century. Taking to task historical treatments of the Radical Right for their failure to specify the conditions and dynamics attending its emergence, and faulting the historical myopia of contemporary electoral and party-centric accounts of the Front National, it tries to explain the Radical Right's continuing appeal by relating the socio-structural outcomes of the processes of industrialization and democratization in France to the persistence of economically and politically illiberal groups within French society. Specifically, the book argues that, as a result of the country's protracted and uneven experience of industrialization and urbanization, significant pre- or anti-modern social classes, which remained functionally ill-adapted and culturally ill-disposed to industrial capitalism and liberal democracy, subsisted late into its development.