"While race has played a fundamental role in the development of the American nation, it is possible to argue that the French nation has been denned, at least in part, against racial thinking. Instead, culture, understood as a shared worldview and common customs, has come to dominate not only French self-definitions, but also French views of the rest of the world. While race has not been entirely absent from French thinking about difference, competing notions of what constitutes French culture and about who can participate in the community denned by that culture have played far more significant roles than ideas about race in debates about French identity."