Suchergebnisse

Pendant la guerre froide, les sportifs américains sont mobilisés pour diffuser la culture américaine. Leurs tournées passent par les bases américaines d'Europe occidentale mais vont jusqu'en URSS dans le cas des Harlem Globe Trotters. Les sportifs noirs bénéficient de cette intégration du sport dans la propagande américaine. Toutefois, s'ils se voient ouvrir les portes de grands clubs comme Jackie Robinson chez les Brooklyn Dodgers, ils profitent de leur nouveau statut pour lutter pour les droits civiques dans les années 1960 et 1970.

International audience ; This article examines the role of women in public diplomacy operations on and around U.S. military bases in France, especially during the Cold War. It aims to illustrate the diplomatic role of military officers' wives in France and shows the vested interest of the military establishment in cooperating with civilian offices of public diplomacy. The more the United States demonstrated its leadership on the global scene, manifested by a wave of unprecedented military incursions into foreign territories, the more tight government control gave way to a strategy focusing on informal contacts between women of both countries at the local level. This article argues that military wives, often considered a traditional instrument of America's effort to engage with foreign populations, contributed to the 'parabellicist' approach in U.S. public diplomacy, a strategy which aimed to generate 'a nation in arms', as has been suggested. The article contends that women's social and cultural initiatives intended not to influence French women by pushing American values, but to support the U.S. national security effort from the bottom up, which was the most critical challenge underlying the 'American Century' in France.

Cet article s'intéresse à l'utilisation des sports américains à des fins diplomatiques lors de la Seconde Guerre mondiale. À partir de 1941, le sport contribue au développement de la puissance militaire américaine en soutenant l'effort de guerre sur le home front. S'appuyant sur son expérience dans les conflits et incursions militaires passés, l'armée américaine en appelle aux sportifs pour s'engager sous les drapeaux et protéger la sécurité nationale, mais aussi pour soigner la vitrine de recrutement de l'armée à l'intérieur des Etats-Unis. Dans les médias, les sportifs militaires deviennent les parangons des vertus patriotiques. En parallèle de cette construction médiatique intérieure se développe une politique de diffusion extérieure reposant plus spécialement sur le basketball.

International audience ; This article focuses on America's use of sports for diplomatic purposes in the course of the Second World War. From 1941, sport contributed to advancing America's military power by the support given to the war effort on the home front. Drawing on America's experience in past conflicts and military incursions, the US military called on athletes to sign up, not only to serve in national defence but also to promote recruitment. Athletes in the military were showcased in the press as symbols of patriotic virtue. While this domestic media construction was ongoing, the United States also developed the use of basketball in its foreign policy. ; Cet article s'intéresse à l'utilisation des sports américains à des fins diplomatiques lors de la Seconde Guerre mondiale. À partir de 1941, le sport contribue au développement de la puissance militaire américaine en soutenant l'effort de guerre sur le home front. S'appuyant sur son expérience dans les conflits et incursions militaires passés, l'armée américaine en appelle aux sportifs pour s'engager sous les drapeaux et protéger la sécurité nationale, mais aussi pour soigner la vitrine de recrutement de l'armée à l'intérieur des Etats-Unis. Dans les médias, les sportifs militaires deviennent les parangons des vertus patriotiques. En parallèle de cette construction médiatique intérieure se développe une politique de diffusion extérieure reposant plus spécialement sur le basketball.

The establishment of US military bases in France in the 1950s under the terms of the North Atlantic Treaty (NATO) is subject to political and sociocultural criticisms. Political, first of all, with respect to French sovereignty and the NATO issue as a whole, but also sociocultural, emerging from the difficulty for the French to share their daily lives with the GI's. On the outskirts of the military bases, contacts between the two populations triggered issues relating to the identity of the "Other," which led to important strain between the French and Americans. The US Department of State and the US Department of Defense designed specific programs to improve transnational contacts as well as an "authorized" image of the military they could then display to the French. Air shows, open houses on the bases, or sporting events between French and American teams demonstrate the existence of a cultural policy in the hands of the military in particular allowing for a "spectacle of the Other", in the words of sociologist Stuart Hall. But this aspect of American diplomacy interrogated the relationship between the military and diplomats on matters of cultural policy. We must therefore question this depiction of otherness, both by the media's construction of otherness as well as by the "spectacle of the Other." In this study, we will place specific emphasis on basketball at the US Air Force base of Chambley-Bussières in the Lorraine region. This analysis is based on a close reading of the US National Archives, but also NATO Archives and documents from the French Ministry of National Defense. We aim to expose the strategies implemented through cultural policy to understand otherness, and to determine specific aspects of American cultural policy in France during the Cold War. ; Dans les années 1950, l'implantation de bases militaires américaines en France, en vertu des termes du traité de l'Atlantique Nord, fait l'objet de deux types de critiques. Critiques d'ordre politique d'une part, portant non seulement sur le respect de ...

International audience ; The purpose of this paper is to assess the projection of the US military establishment on French sports culture during the Cold War, when American soldiers were stationed in army bases across the country. After World War I, the War Department agreed to assist private organizations in setting up sporting events – especially basketball games and tournaments – to keep up army morale. But after World War II, from the onset of the Cold War until the 1960s, times were harder for the GIs in France: in rural areas, where US military bases were located, their presence was often contested and led to important disputes over issues of culture, sovereignty and national defence. As a consequence, France became the setting of drastically changing US military diplomacy in Europe, orchestrated by the Department of Defense, in cooperation with the United States Information Services (USIS), a network established by the State Department in the postwar years.As we intend to demonstrate, the entire US cultural diplomacy network revolved around the needs of the military stationed in France. Sport, and especially basketball, was pivotal in the political promotion of American culture to the French. In 1954, the failure of the European Defense Community led to a change in public diplomacy objectives: the fear of European dislocation was partly countered by better planning of sporting events organized both on and outside the bases. This paper is set at the crossroads of political and cultural history, will introduce original USIS, NATO and French archives as well as some oral history interviews. It analyses two promotional events – the Armed Forces Day and the GI Basketball All-Star Game, which took place on Chambley Air Base in the mid-1950s – and attempts at showing how specific cultural reflexes were eventually passed on to the French.

This paper examines the current feud between the two main actors of professional basketball in Europe - FIBA Europe and Euroleague Basketball - from a socio-his­torical perspective. It aims to delineate the diplomatic negotiations and organiza­tional shifts in European sport competitions in relation to the growing influence of US basketball during the Cold War. Through an analysis of official reports and the press, as well as interviews with members of the European Parliament, this paper shows that basketball has acted as an informal sporting corollary to the 1957 Treaty of Rome, promoting the European community by way of a meritocratic system of sports competitions between teams or nations. The rivalry under study shows that the hegemonic post-Cold War US market-based model has challenged the ideas be­hind a "European model of sports", ultimately putting the recent legislatures in a quandary about the initial consensus behind European integration.