As the title indicates, the panel covers a long chronological “take.”
The overall objective is to delineate patterns –- or examine the breaks or shifts – in the relations between France and the United States, rather than establish any kind of causality between “Enlightenment” and “Irak II.” It is obvious, however, that the most recent pole of this long chronological spectrum, “Irak II,” informs -- as a more or less intrusive background – the individual analyses of the three panelists. For Example, Kristin Ross’s paper “proposes an understanding of recent French anti-Americanism by returning to the social turbulence of the 68’ years,” while Jean-Philippe Mathy’s objective is to look at the most recent debates provoked by the war in Iraq through the lens of “less recent moments of tension, like the 1920’s and the Cold War,” and Alice Kaplan questions “the mythology of a beneficent American liberator” by “revisiting the romance of the American GI liberating France.” Ultimately the panel’s rationale could be summarized by the following question: does the most recent turn of Franco-American relations constitute a paradigmatic shift or is it just “business as usual?”