Since the nineteenth century, France, not unlike the United States, has experienced significant immigration and, as a result, great flux. Yet, the French public discourse and policy instruments concerned with ethnic and racial diversities evolved in sharp contrast to those in the United States. Whereas U.S. nation-building incorporated the recognition of ethnoracial identities, with all of its trials and tribulations, the French nation's trajectory assumed a unitary form. Recent developments, however, point to changes in the Republic's projection of its identity and its citizenry. An analysis of school teaching finds that the Republic is now re-envisioned as open and tolerant of diversity, though more from a universalistic, normative perspective—increasingly indexed at the transnational level—than from a perspective that privileges France's immigrant and colonial past.

No abstract

No abstract

Through an investigation of policy documents and reports from post‐1989 Romanian education reform, this article argues that what came to be known in the early 1990s as a ‘post‐socialist condition’, characterized by exuberant nationalism, needs to be rethought. Rather than an exceptional path, Romanian education displays conspicuous synchronization with wider world trends, while some peculiar national narratives in explaining reform failures persist. Instead of becoming more nation‐focused (as predicted by prevalent conceptualizations of ‘Eastern’ types of nationalism), discourses of educational reform opened up to the world, most notably through the mediation of Europe. Since the end of the nationalizing decade of the 1990s, educational texts have consistently invoked global themes of adaptation. Narratives about the mission of mass education and reform priorities encapsulating officially‐sanctioned projections of the nation became outward‐looking, in contrast to the self‐referential rhetoric of socialist times. The changing patterns of Romanian nation‐building are reflective of trends across the world, pointing to a reconsideration of the exceptionalism often associated with Eastern Europe.