Sister Republics: Security Relations Between America and France

"David Haglund's Sister Republics tells the story of the behaviorally "special" relationship between the United States and its first ally, France. Historians and political scientists have characterized interactions between the two "sister republics" in the sphere of security and defense policy in radically contrasting ways: either the two comport themselves in a highly cooperative fashion as befitting their status as old allies and great friends, or they are bitter rivals, often revealing their alliance ties to be, at best dysfunctional, and at worst destructive. Haglund approaches this analytical tension differently, splitting the difference between the above polar positions. He makes two significant points. First, suboptimal cooperation represents the default position in the two countries' security and defense relationship, making them neither great friends nor great antagonists. Instead, their relationship is a reasonably adequate one, and while it could certainly stand improvement, it is unlikely to experience any amelioration. Second, "culture"-specifically "strategic culture"-can tell us a great deal regarding the origins and consequences of suboptimality in their cooperation and why "improvement" so often turns out to represent an elusive goal. While there is a vast scholarly corpus on the Franco-American relationship, Haglund is the first scholar to analyze the Franco-American special relationship through the prism of strategic culture. The usefulness and value of his study is its invocation of those cultural factors that have gone into endowing bilateral ties with their enduring quality of suboptimality. Haglund addresses in some detail the most relevant of the cultural sources of Franco-American suboptimal cooperation in security and defense relations. He concludes by asking why we should conceive the relationship essential, how one might theorize it through strategic culture, and whether things might have turned out differently between the two countries had different individual leaders been in power"--