From British magazine The Economist -
France faces the future
Mar 30th 2006
From The Economist print edition
The country's politicians need to level with the French people on the need to embrace change
“THE French constitute the most brilliant and the most dangerous nation in Europe and the best qualified in turn to become an object of admiration, hatred, pity or terror but never indifference.” Thus did a young Alexis de Tocqueville describe his motherland in the early 19th century. His words still carry a haunting truth. Over the past few years, as other western democracies have shuffled quietly along, France has by turns stunned, exasperated and bemused. This week's massive one-day protest, drawing 1m-3m people on to the streets, was no exception (see article). This particular stand-off, between the centre-right government of Dominique de Villepin and those protesting against his effort to inject a tiny bit of liberalism into France's rigid labour market, may be defused. The Constitutional Council was due to rule on the legality of the new law on March 30th. But the underlying difficulty will remain: the apparent incapacity of the French to adapt to a changing world.
On the face of it, France seems to be going through one of those convulsions that this nation born of revolution periodically requires in order to break with the past and to move forward. Certainly the students who kicked off the latest protests seemed to think they were re-enacting the events of May 1968 their parents sprang on Charles de Gaulle. They have borrowed its slogans (“Beneath the cobblestones, the beach!”) and hijacked its symbols (the Sorbonne university). In this sense, the revolt appears to be the natural sequel to last autumn's suburban riots, which prompted the government to impose a state of emergency. Then it was the jobless, ethnic underclass that rebelled against a system that excluded them.
Yet the striking feature of the latest protest movement is that this time the rebellious forces are on the side of conservatism. Unlike the rioting youths in the banlieues, the objective of the students and public-sector trade unions is to prevent change, and to keep France the way it is. Indeed, according to one astonishing poll, three-quarters of young French people today would like to become civil servants, and mostly because that would mean “a job for life”. Buried inside this chilling lack of ambition are one delusion and one crippling myth.
The delusion is that preserving France as it is, in some sort of formaldehyde solution, means preserving jobs for life. Students, as well as unqualified suburban youngsters, do not today face a choice between the new, less protected work contract and a lifelong perch in the bureaucracy. They, by and large, face a choice between already unprotected short-term work and no work at all. And the reason for this, which is also the reason for France's intractable mass unemployment of nearly 10%, is simple: those permanent life-time jobs are so protected, and hence so difficult to get rid of, that many employers are not creating them any more.
This delusion is accompanied by an equally pernicious myth: that France has more to fear from globalisation, widely held responsible for imposing the sort of insecurity enshrined in the new job contract, than it does to gain. It is true that the forces of global capitalism are not always benign, but nobody has yet found a better way of creating and spreading prosperity. In another startling poll, however, whereas 71% of Americans, 66% of the British and 65% of Germans agreed that the free market was the best system available, the number in France was just 36%. The French seem to be uniquely hostile to the capitalist system that has made them the world's fifth richest country and generated so many first-rate French companies. This hostility appears to go deeper than resistance to painful reform, which is common to Italy and Germany too; or than a desire for a strong welfare state, which Scandinavian countries share; or even than a fondness for protectionism, which America periodically betrays.
The limits to change by stealth
A common feature unites France's underclass rioters and the rebellious students, as well as the election of the far-right Jean-Marie Le Pen into the run-off of the 2002 presidential election. This is the failure of the French political class over the past 20 years to tell it straight: to explain to the electorate what is at stake, why France needs to adapt, and why change need not bring only discomfort. This failure has bred a political culture of reform by stealth, in which change is carried out with one hand and blamed on outside forces—usually globalisation, the European Union or America—while soothing words about protecting the French way are issued on the other. After a while, the credibility gap tears such a system apart. The French voted for Mr Le Pen in part because they were fed up with the stale mainstream political class. The banlieues exploded because unemployed minorities were fed up hearing that they did not belong. The students and trade unions are in revolt because they do not trust the government to protect them.
Part of the blame for this lies squarely with President Jacques Chirac. He has presided for nearly 11 years, during which mass unemployment has never budged below 8%, France's wealth per person has been overtaken by both Britain's and Ireland's, and public debt has jumped from 55% of GDP to 66% (France's per capita wealth has been the third-slowest growing in the OECD, ahead of only Germany and Greece). The liberal instincts he once betrayed as a reformist prime minister in the mid-1980s have long since evaporated. His support for the prime minister's new jobs contract has been tepid at best. His chief preoccupation seems to be to avoid shaking the conservative French consensus, and even that unambitious objective has been missed. It is a measure of how wasted his presidency has been that one of his own ministers, Nicolas Sarkozy, and a 2007 presidential hopeful, can today make speeches that deplore “two decades of immobility” and call for a “rupture” with the status quo.
But the president is not to blame alone. Nobody on the French left dares to challenge the prevailing paleo-socialist wisdom, and Ségolène Royal, the most popular of the would-be presidential candidates, was roundly derided for confessing faint admiration for Britain's Tony Blair. On the right, Mr de Villepin at least had the courage to try to counter the logic of job protection, but elsewhere has scarcely demonstrated an embrace of open markets. Perhaps the closest France has to a new-generation leader prepared to try to reconcile French public opinion with globalisation is Mr Sarkozy. This week he declared that France could no longer “maintain the illusory barrage of a so-called model that each day shows itself to no longer work, nor protect anything or anybody”. But even Mr Sarkozy has proved a hard-core national protectionist when it comes to special pleading by French industry. All the while, he and Mr de Villepin's obsessive rivalry over the succession continues to sap France's ability to get policy right.
History will judge France harshly if its political class fails to find the courage to help the country equip itself for the 21st century. More than that, France's turmoil has implications beyond its own borders. An uncertain France is an uncertain partner for its allies, both in Europe and beyond. Within the EU, having rejected its draft constitution last year, the French no longer seem to know what they want. They still seek to project their influence through Europe, but will have difficulty doing this while they are so consumed by internal strife at home, and while they still struggle to come to terms with Europe's internal market. Can countries like Ukraine or Belarus be blamed for wondering what Europe can offer them while France, a founder member, is so unsure itself? The worry is that the more that France struggles to define a role for itself in the world, the more it will in turn be tempted to fasten on its social model as its raison d'être, and so cling to a discredited creed.
The choice belongs to France. A bold effort at renewal that could unleash the best in the French? Or a stubborn defence of the existing order that will keep France a middling world power in economic decline? The latter would inspire neither admiration, nor terror, nor hatred, nor indifference, just pity.
economist.com
France faces the future
Mar 30th 2006
From The Economist print edition
The country's politicians need to level with the French people on the need to embrace change
“THE French constitute the most brilliant and the most dangerous nation in Europe and the best qualified in turn to become an object of admiration, hatred, pity or terror but never indifference.” Thus did a young Alexis de Tocqueville describe his motherland in the early 19th century. His words still carry a haunting truth. Over the past few years, as other western democracies have shuffled quietly along, France has by turns stunned, exasperated and bemused. This week's massive one-day protest, drawing 1m-3m people on to the streets, was no exception (see article). This particular stand-off, between the centre-right government of Dominique de Villepin and those protesting against his effort to inject a tiny bit of liberalism into France's rigid labour market, may be defused. The Constitutional Council was due to rule on the legality of the new law on March 30th. But the underlying difficulty will remain: the apparent incapacity of the French to adapt to a changing world.
On the face of it, France seems to be going through one of those convulsions that this nation born of revolution periodically requires in order to break with the past and to move forward. Certainly the students who kicked off the latest protests seemed to think they were re-enacting the events of May 1968 their parents sprang on Charles de Gaulle. They have borrowed its slogans (“Beneath the cobblestones, the beach!”) and hijacked its symbols (the Sorbonne university). In this sense, the revolt appears to be the natural sequel to last autumn's suburban riots, which prompted the government to impose a state of emergency. Then it was the jobless, ethnic underclass that rebelled against a system that excluded them.
Yet the striking feature of the latest protest movement is that this time the rebellious forces are on the side of conservatism. Unlike the rioting youths in the banlieues, the objective of the students and public-sector trade unions is to prevent change, and to keep France the way it is. Indeed, according to one astonishing poll, three-quarters of young French people today would like to become civil servants, and mostly because that would mean “a job for life”. Buried inside this chilling lack of ambition are one delusion and one crippling myth.
The delusion is that preserving France as it is, in some sort of formaldehyde solution, means preserving jobs for life. Students, as well as unqualified suburban youngsters, do not today face a choice between the new, less protected work contract and a lifelong perch in the bureaucracy. They, by and large, face a choice between already unprotected short-term work and no work at all. And the reason for this, which is also the reason for France's intractable mass unemployment of nearly 10%, is simple: those permanent life-time jobs are so protected, and hence so difficult to get rid of, that many employers are not creating them any more.
This delusion is accompanied by an equally pernicious myth: that France has more to fear from globalisation, widely held responsible for imposing the sort of insecurity enshrined in the new job contract, than it does to gain. It is true that the forces of global capitalism are not always benign, but nobody has yet found a better way of creating and spreading prosperity. In another startling poll, however, whereas 71% of Americans, 66% of the British and 65% of Germans agreed that the free market was the best system available, the number in France was just 36%. The French seem to be uniquely hostile to the capitalist system that has made them the world's fifth richest country and generated so many first-rate French companies. This hostility appears to go deeper than resistance to painful reform, which is common to Italy and Germany too; or than a desire for a strong welfare state, which Scandinavian countries share; or even than a fondness for protectionism, which America periodically betrays.
The limits to change by stealth
A common feature unites France's underclass rioters and the rebellious students, as well as the election of the far-right Jean-Marie Le Pen into the run-off of the 2002 presidential election. This is the failure of the French political class over the past 20 years to tell it straight: to explain to the electorate what is at stake, why France needs to adapt, and why change need not bring only discomfort. This failure has bred a political culture of reform by stealth, in which change is carried out with one hand and blamed on outside forces—usually globalisation, the European Union or America—while soothing words about protecting the French way are issued on the other. After a while, the credibility gap tears such a system apart. The French voted for Mr Le Pen in part because they were fed up with the stale mainstream political class. The banlieues exploded because unemployed minorities were fed up hearing that they did not belong. The students and trade unions are in revolt because they do not trust the government to protect them.
Part of the blame for this lies squarely with President Jacques Chirac. He has presided for nearly 11 years, during which mass unemployment has never budged below 8%, France's wealth per person has been overtaken by both Britain's and Ireland's, and public debt has jumped from 55% of GDP to 66% (France's per capita wealth has been the third-slowest growing in the OECD, ahead of only Germany and Greece). The liberal instincts he once betrayed as a reformist prime minister in the mid-1980s have long since evaporated. His support for the prime minister's new jobs contract has been tepid at best. His chief preoccupation seems to be to avoid shaking the conservative French consensus, and even that unambitious objective has been missed. It is a measure of how wasted his presidency has been that one of his own ministers, Nicolas Sarkozy, and a 2007 presidential hopeful, can today make speeches that deplore “two decades of immobility” and call for a “rupture” with the status quo.
But the president is not to blame alone. Nobody on the French left dares to challenge the prevailing paleo-socialist wisdom, and Ségolène Royal, the most popular of the would-be presidential candidates, was roundly derided for confessing faint admiration for Britain's Tony Blair. On the right, Mr de Villepin at least had the courage to try to counter the logic of job protection, but elsewhere has scarcely demonstrated an embrace of open markets. Perhaps the closest France has to a new-generation leader prepared to try to reconcile French public opinion with globalisation is Mr Sarkozy. This week he declared that France could no longer “maintain the illusory barrage of a so-called model that each day shows itself to no longer work, nor protect anything or anybody”. But even Mr Sarkozy has proved a hard-core national protectionist when it comes to special pleading by French industry. All the while, he and Mr de Villepin's obsessive rivalry over the succession continues to sap France's ability to get policy right.
History will judge France harshly if its political class fails to find the courage to help the country equip itself for the 21st century. More than that, France's turmoil has implications beyond its own borders. An uncertain France is an uncertain partner for its allies, both in Europe and beyond. Within the EU, having rejected its draft constitution last year, the French no longer seem to know what they want. They still seek to project their influence through Europe, but will have difficulty doing this while they are so consumed by internal strife at home, and while they still struggle to come to terms with Europe's internal market. Can countries like Ukraine or Belarus be blamed for wondering what Europe can offer them while France, a founder member, is so unsure itself? The worry is that the more that France struggles to define a role for itself in the world, the more it will in turn be tempted to fasten on its social model as its raison d'être, and so cling to a discredited creed.
The choice belongs to France. A bold effort at renewal that could unleash the best in the French? Or a stubborn defence of the existing order that will keep France a middling world power in economic decline? The latter would inspire neither admiration, nor terror, nor hatred, nor indifference, just pity.
economist.com