Section Thématique n° 3
L’Etat de la France.
La « fin d’une exception » mise en perspective comparée ?

The French State and its territorial challenges

Alistair Cole
University of Cardiff, Wales, UK coleA@cardiff.ac.uk A renewed interest in studying the State is one consequence of research into governance which has been in vogue for the past 20 years. Contemporary governance is typically analysed as a loosening of older forms of vertical command, as the weakening of traditional models of state authority and as the creation of a porous institutional and ideological environment that is more welcoming to endogenous innovation and externally driven changes (Le Galès, 2002, Kooiman, 2003, Loughlin, 2009). The decline of the state lies at the heart of the otherwise distinct literatures on rescaling, multi-level governance and international political economy (Cole and Palmer, 2008; Faure and Muller, 2005). Rather than a weakening of the state, per se, some argue that the type of state activity has changed (Levy, 2006). Arguably, states can be more effective as regulators than they ever were as distributors of services. The French case, traditionally viewed as the exemplar of a powerful state, is a particularly interesting one to confront arguments about convergence and isomorphism with the resistance of national administrative and institutional structures and state traditions (Di Maggio and
Powell, 1991; Schmidt, 2002). This article focuses upon one core dimension of these broader debates about State decline: the territorial challenges to the State and its strategic responses to these.

Reflecting upon the French state and its territories is facilitated by a set of preliminary hypotheses, or, in our preferred terminology, frames that set out to elucidate one or more dimensions of state reconfiguration. Our first policy frame is that of convergence. In some accounts, European countries are converging under the impact of the common pressures of