15.1.07

LINK: Via Jacob Levy, I discovered this bizarre story about France and the UK in 1956. I'm sure there's a very interesting angle here on the shifting meaning of sovereignty over time. But mostly: weird.

UPDATE: Now that I think about it, the story constitutes a piece of evidence for Krasner's "sovereignty doesn't really mean that much, national interest does" theory. It'd be worthwhile for someone with more energy than me to look into exactly how serious this negotiation was--I can't help but think there's a very interesting IR article that could come out of it, especially (as the article points out) given the future direction of French politics and the traditional narrative of the growth of the EU (though I claim nothing concrete about the last; my exposure to EU and pre-EU politics largely comes through Andrew Moravscik's work, and that only tangentally).

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