To the extent that the French enjoy a natural advantage, it is in their inefficiency: They are the world’s most efficient producers of structured indolence. They are the kept women of the global economy; their status depends, in part, on their practical uselessness.
Reinvent the British and you get a global finance center, edible food and better service. Reinvent the French and you may just get more Germans.
That’s Michael Lewis writing opinion for Bloomberg:
Aug. 6 (Bloomberg) — A few years after Margaret Thatcher came to power and launched what at the time seemed a futile war to compel the English people to embrace business values, I found myself dazed and confused in a London corner shop.
Down one aisle and up the other, I paced but found no trace of what I’d come for: the world’s finest pseudo-cookies. The shelf that once held those delicious McVitie’s wafers coated with milk chocolate was now stocked with less desirable items.
At length, I went to the middle-aged shop owner and asked where she’d hidden my favorite treats — this gift from the gods to those of us who want to pretend our cookies are merely crackers.
We used to stock those,'' she said, sweetly,but we kept running out, so we’ve stopped.”
Right then I thought: Thatcherism is doomed. The English will never embrace efficiency, or money-making, or the-customer- is-always-right mindset, or any of those uneasy values that underpin modern capitalism.
I was wrong, obviously. The English have not merely embraced commercial values but have become so thoroughly imbued with them that London has displaced New York as the world’s money hub. A nation of people once embarrassed to complain that their soup was cold is now among the first to demand to speak to the manager.
But that was England, and those were the English. This is France, and these are the French.
…From this safe distance — 6,000 miles away — it’s hard not to admire Sarkozy’s audacity. Here’s an elected leader, serving at the pleasure of the French people, who has taken it upon himself to do the one thing certain to induce despair and hatred in the hearts of those people: force them to become more productive.
Inflicting market values upon the British circa 1980 felt a bit cruel, but visiting it upon the French circa 2008 feels almost like an unnatural act, like forcing a cat to fetch.
Of course, it’s possible to change a society and to drag it into the global economic monoculture. Mrs. Thatcher showed how: Break up collectives and make people feel a little bit more alone in the world. Cut a few holes in the social safety net. Raise the status of money-making, and lower the status of every other activity. Stop giving knighthoods to artists and start giving them to department-store moguls. Stop listening to intellectuals and start listening to entrepreneurs and financiers.
Enjoy…
A HOWL of rage is expected today from French taxi drivers, shopkeepers, civil servants and other protected sectors when President Nicholas Sarkozy receives a revolutionary plan for recasting the face of France.
The reforms are urgent because “France remains very largely a society of connivance and privileges,” Mr Attali says, in a leaked draft of the report.
Now this is a real French revolution — exciting to say the least! Is it really possible to overturn the socialist privileged?
The scheme, which Mr Sarkozy has promised to enact, would abolish regulations that ensure the comfort of trades and professions but stifle the economy. It would also mean opening the frontiers to immigration, building 10 large new cities and scrapping France’s 200-year-old departements, or counties.
The “300 decisions for changing France” have been devised by a team of 40 experts headed by Jacques Attali, 64, an economist-writer who served in the 1980s as ideas man to Francois Mitterrand, the late Socialist president.
Mr Sarkozy gave Mr Attali a mission after his election last May to find a way to “unleash the economic growth that France is lacking”. Mr Attali, whose high-spending ways forced his resignation 15 years ago as head of the London-based European Bank of Reconstruction and Development, promises that his package will add 1per cent to annual growth. It will also cut unemployment by more than three points if enacted over the next year, he says.
The reforms are urgent because “France remains very largely a society of connivance and privileges,” Mr Attali says, in a leaked draft of the report.
Some of the 300 ideas follow paths that Mr Sarkozy has already trod in his attempt to lift the anti-competitive burdens that drag on prosperity.
These include a revolution in higher education, cutting labour charges and loosening the job protection that feeds unemployment. Others are so counter to Gallic tradition that many doubt that Mr Sarkozy will fulfil his pledge to Mr Attali: “What you propose, I shall carry out.”
Teachers, a group devoted to regular strikes, are aghast at the idea that their performance should be rated by their pupils.
The Attali group proposes the unheard of idea of letting retailers and traders sell what they want, where and when they want. At present shops are not allowed to sell at a loss except during twice-yearly sales.
Retailers are not allowed to negotiate prices with suppliers and Sunday opening remains a rare exception.
France’s shortage of taxis would be solved by the abolition of tight quotas and the authorisation of minicabs, a scheme denounced by the National Taxi Owners Federation as aggression. Hairdressers would also be freed from protective quotas, as would veterinary surgeons and the legal profession. All are preparing a ferocious riposte to the ideas, 20 of which have been highlighted for urgent action.
The Socialist opposition has already denounced the scheme as blatant Anglo-Saxon capitalism.
“There is not a single word on salaries,” said Benoit Hamon, a Socialist MEP. “They want to boost the economy but they’re not doing anything for French people’s wallets.”
Marine Le Pen, deputy chief of the far-right National Front, said Mr Attali should be renamed Attila because “this is a precise and organised plan for ensuring the death of the French nation as we know it”.
Mr Attali has also come under attack from Mr Sarkozy’s side. Some MPs are suspicious of the intellectual about whom Mitterrand used to say: “I don’t need a computer; I’ve got Attali.”
As the plan was leaked this week, members of Mr Sarkozy’s cabinet began disowning aspects. Health Minister Roselyne Bachelot told pharmacists there was no chance they would lose the chemists’ monopoly over the sale of non-prescription medicines.
Civil service unions, already due to strike this week against other reforms, are expected to take a dim view of Mr Attali’s plans for the rapid shrinking of ministries, a sharp drop in public spending and the creation of British-style public service agencies. Resistance is growing against the proposal, made twice in the past two decades, to scrap the 100 departements through which France has been administered since its 18th-century Revolution. To simplify the layers of French government, Attali suggests running the country through its 26 regions and urban councils.
Sweet & sour: everything about president Sarkozy’s visit to the United States that could be sweet—his personal popularity, a giant boost to the prestige of France, the benefits of good relations with a major world power—was turned sour in the French media.
From Paris Nidra Poller surveys print and TV media coverage of Sarkozy’s visit to America. Example:
Prime time news gave the spit-in-his-eye treatment to President Sarkozy’s address to Congress—a few snatches of his speech with applause and standing ovation, revised by an anchorman who reminds viewers that George W. Bush is an unpopular has-been and someone else—certainly a Democrat—will be in the White House next year. Nevertheless, the privately-owned TV channel TF1 presented an exclusive interview of President Bush by Patrick Poivre d’Arvor. The president was relaxed, alert, personable, coherent and, yes, eloquent. He was by far the more sophisticated of the two. Poivre d’Arvor asked questions flavored with French vinegar, and Bush replied with good humored intelligence. He defended his choices, including of course the liberation of Iraq, while understanding that “people don’t like force…that’s normal.” He praised Sarkozy in terms that contrast sharply with French anti-Sarkozy sarcasm: “He’s intelligent, has a lot of energy, he’s a lot of fun to be around…and he’s serious.” Poivre d’Arvor opined—with downcast eyes, nose, and mouth—that the United States had lost its reputation as a land of freedom and is seen today as an oppressive nation. Bush laughed heartily. “That’s absurd! » Defending his record—liberating 25 million Iraqis and perhaps creating a Palestinian state—he reminded Poivre d’Arvor that the judgment of history will fall when he is no longer of this world. In the meantime, he doesn’t let himself be swayed by polls, he does what he thinks is right. And, he concluded, the Republican candidate is going to win in 2008, because we are tough on terrorism and advocate tax reductions.
Much, much <more>
Or have they — it isn’t clear to me what they have actually agreed:
U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner spoke Friday of a common front against Iran’s nuclear program that included support for new sanctions against Tehran.
During a joint press conference with Kouchner in Washington, Rice said the United States and France agree on how to pressure Iran to abandon its nuclear ambitions.
“I think that there’s, essentially, no difference in the way that we see the situation in Iran and what the international community must do,” Rice told reporters.
The two countries were doing groundwork for a new UN Security Council resolution at a meeting in Washington on Friday of political directors from six major nations that have been trying to negotiate with Iran — Russia, China, Britain and Germany, as well as France and the United States.
The French government under President Nicholas Sarkozy has shifted the country’s policies more in line with the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush, who had a frosty relationship with Sarkozy’s predecessor, Jacques Chirac, highlighted by France’s vocal criticism of the Iraq war.
In a candid interview on French radio last week, Kouchner re-enforced France’s tough stance on Iran by declaring his country should prepare for war if Iran obtains nuclear weapons.
<more>
The President’s prescriptions for the ailing French welfare state are hard to argue with. Now if only Mr. Sarkozy bothers to apply them.
In unveiling his domestic reform agenda in Paris yesterday, Nicolas Sarkozy called for “a new social contract” for France. His proposed revision of French socialist tradition going back to Jean-Jacques Rousseau is nothing short of revolutionary. His ability to deliver will make or break the Sarkozy presidency.
Mr. Sarkozy, true to character, came out swinging. The new President declared that those empty French political shibboleths — “social dialogue” and “solidarity” — “can’t be an alibi for inaction.” France’s generous welfare support and special privileges for insiders is “unjust” and “financially untenable,” “discourages work and job creation,” and “fails to bring equal opportunity.” The result: France’s jobless rate in the euro zone’s highest.
The President wants “a new social contract founded on work, merit and equal opportunity.” He then promised to loosen restrictions on working hours and toughen up requirements to receive unemployment benefits, to ease hiring and firing rules and ease incentives to retire early. By the end of the year he plans to cut back the costly benefits enjoyed by public-sector workers.
Cautious optimism is in order. Over the summer, his new government moved gingerly. An autonomy plan for universities was watered down. A law assuring minimum transport services during strikes, intended to weaken the unions, was as well. On the plus side, wealth and income taxes were cut and the inheritance tax abolished. Fine. But considering his strong mandate and dominance of parliament, Mr. Sarkozy didn’t overachieve.
The details of yesterday’s proposals are sketchy but potentially provide a foundation to build on. Echoing a frequent promise, the President said the law mandating a work week of a maximum of 35 hours ought to be further relaxed to let the French — perish the thought — “choose work over leisure.” His government has already made overtime tax-free. Inexplicably, Mr. Sarkozy refrained from pulling the plug on a law that’s come to symbolize France’s slothful ways.
The President showed more political courage in calling for an end to state-guaranteed job security at private firms. Such legal protections discourage companies from taking on new employees and spur outsourcing. By backing a new work contract, he sided with the almost 10% of the workforce out of a job — the so-called “outsiders” — against the majority of protected “insiders.”
Upping the ante, Mr. Sarkozy took on the most coddled insiders of all, public-sector workers. State employees retire earlier with full and often better benefits than the rest of the population, which picks up the tab. Train conductors, for example, legally stop work at 50 thanks to a rule drawn up early in the 20th century when they shoveled coal into engines. French conductors who sit inside the air conditioned cabins of modern bullet trains don’t face similar hazards.
…
Mr. Sarkozy’s long-awaited speech sets the stage for most important political battle in his first term. Whatever the President does in the next five years, he can’t claim to have succeeded unless France breaks out of its economic slumber. His equally ambitious foreign policy depends on it, too. For if Mr. Sarkozy can’t get domestic reform right, he won’t have the credibility to lead on Iran or make up with the U.S.
<more [$]>
This is encouraging — a Jerusalem Post bulletin on Iran’s nuclear weapons program:
French President Nicholas Sarkozy called Wednesday for sanctions on Iran to be tightened if the country does not adhere to the West’s demands to cease its nuclear agenda.
If Iran attains nuclear weapons, Sarkozy warned, a road to an arms race will be paved that could endanger Israel and southeast Europe, he said during an interview with a German magazine.
Sarkozy announced that France will join the official US-led struggle against head of the International Atomic Energy Agency Mohamed ElBaradei, who recommended that Iran be allowed to enrich uranium in some of its nuclear plants.
On Tuesday, American officials urged allies to back a formal protest against ElBaradei, saying his comments could hurt UN Security Council efforts to pressure Teheran over its enrichment program.
“We were indeed surprised by several comments from Mr. ElBaradei over the weekend,” said French Foreign Ministry spokesman Jean-Baptiste Mattei. “We share the gist of concerns expressed by our American partners - along with several other partners, for that matter.”
Over the past two weeks, ElBaradei has publicly said he believes it is too late to force Teheran to scrap its enrichment program as demanded by the Security Council, and argued instead for implementing inspection safeguards to prevent an expansion of the program.
Via Glenn Reynolds.
Very good news on Sarkozy’s new cabinet — la France may actually reform. I will be more optimistic if the center-right wins next month’s parliamentary elections:
Nicolas Sarkozy promised rupture and ouverture. Now the new French President is moving fast, per those catch phrases, to “break” with old ways of doing things and “open up” government.
His cabinet, unveiled Friday, shows how much his election two weeks ago has shaken up France’s political system. Only two members of the government headed by Prime Minister François Fillon finished the elite state training school, ENA. Among the prominent opposition figures on board is Socialist Bernard Kouchner at Foreign Affairs. Seven women, including a Justice Minister born to a Moroccan father and Algerian mother, give the streamlined 15-member cabinet a fresh look.
These changes aren’t, on current evidence, just cosmetic. Mr. Sarkozy is building an activist, hands-on presidency. The French people gave the new President “an exceptional legitimacy” by turning out in record numbers and awarding him 53% of the vote, Mr. Fillon said on the national network TF1 Friday night. Mr. Fillon said his job is to implement the Sarkozy agenda. This government offers the best opportunity to reform France in decades.
Mr. Fillon comes to the task with a good track record, the rare minister in the previous government who managed to pushed through tough changes by overhauling pensions. This experience will come in handy in neutralizing the unions and other vested interests opposed to reform.
Mr. Fillon said the priority was to pass a law letting the French work longer than 35 hours a week tax-free — an effective tax break and a run around the workweek law. Tax breaks on home purchases and the revocation of inheritance taxes are also imminent. “We won’t get growth without structural reform,” he said.
The choice of Dr. Kouchner sends a strong signal on foreign policy. In a best-case scenario, former President Jacques Chirac’s approach — anti-Americanism mixed with cynicism — will be buried fast. As the co-founder of Doctors Without Borders and a globally recognized champion of human rights, Dr. Kouchner brings a moralistic streak to the Quai d’Orsay. He is the rare French politician who spoke out in favor of deposing Saddam Hussein and has long championed humanitarian interventionism — neoconservatism by another name. Though a Socialist, until the party expelled him Friday, he is an ideological free agent and France’s most popular public figure. His presence in the government deals the Socialists another blow before next month’s parliamentary elections, which the center-right is expected to win.
…
The appointment of Christine Lagarde to Agriculture may be good for the Doha trade negotiations. A former Chicago-based head of a major U.S. law firm, and previously in charge of France’s external trade relations, Ms. Lagarde is a good negotiator who’s not wedded to farm interests. She’ll have to stand up to them to get the Doha round back on track.
In his instructions to the new government Friday, Mr. Sarkozy said he wants it to “carry out all the reforms at the same time.” Changing France is easier said than done. But Mr. Sarkozy is the first French President to say so forcefully, and begin to do so this fast and early. The good news is that the majority of the French want him to keep it up.
Read the whole thing.
Tigerhawk invested a good bit of effort to type out key paragraphs from the campaign book “Testimony” of French president-elect Nicolas Sarkozy. Thanks, mate!
France’s friendship with the United States is an important and lasting part of its history. I stand by this friendship, I’m proud of it, and I have no intention of apologizing for feeling an affinity with the greatest democracy in the world. It goes without saying that this friendship does not prevent either side from making its own assessments and taking independent action. And since this goes without saying, I don’t feel it necessary to run around chanting it every chance I get. It often seems to me that the more you assert your independence with words, the less independent you are in reality.
France and America are bound together by unbreakable historical links. People often forget that the Revolutionary War, which led to the creation of the United States, was long and difficult, and that its outcome was uncertain for some time. But France was right there at America’s side for the decisive battle of Yorktown in 1781, and it was a young Frenchman, Lafayette, who led the final attack on the English camp. [The French navy’s victory over the British off the Virginia coast represented the only victory of the French over the British during the entire 18th century. - ed.] Without French support, history might well have followed a different path, one that would have been less favorable for the development of human freedom. [”Sarko” conveniently omits Napoleon III’s invasion of Mexico in 1863, which was calculated to gain leverage on the United States while it was divided by civil war. The victory of the Mexicans on Cinco de Mayo may have saved us from intervening French perfidy. But let’s cut Mr. Sarkozy some slack — all politicians take liberties with history to make their point, and his point is ultimately gratifying. - ed.]
In the twentieth century, it was America’s turn to protect France’s freedom on several occasions. In 1917 and again in 1944 hundreds of thousands of young Americans crossed the Atlantic to pull Europe back from the verge of collective suicide. The French cannot forget that it was the Americans who liberated them from Nazi barbarity and who put an end to the bloodletting that this regime inflicted on the whole of Europe. For the forty years that followed the war, during which another kind of totalitarianism — communism — engulfed Eastern Europe, it was the military alliance with the United States that enable France and Western Europe to preserve their freedom. After centuries of hatred, after the Holocaust, European nations embarked upon one of the most ambitious projects of their common history: to create a zone of peace, unity, and solidarity. The United States was always at the forefront of this project, supporting it politically and financing it with the Marshall Plan, which protected Europe from Communist imperialism.
I am particularly sensitive to this gift of liberty in several ways: as a Frenchman, as a political leader who has always worked to promote freedom, and finally as a son who wants to honor his father, who settled in France in 1948 after fleeing Communist Hungary.
France and America, then, stood side by side to defeat the two deadliest forms of totalitarianism in world history. And now at the start of the twenty-first century, the United States and France again stand together in the same camp against a serious threat to global freedom. It was the United States that was attacked by Islamist terrorists on September 11, 2001, but it could just as easily have been France. Indeed, many French citizens died that day in the Twin Towers. Terrorists do not distinguish among free societies. They want to destroy or subjugate them all, without distinction.
Every time that terrorism strikes — whether in New York, Madrid, Beslan, Tel Aviv, Casablanca, Amman, or London — it is freedom that is the target. Facing such a threat, free countries have no choice but to pool their forces and work together….
This book presents my analysis of the difficulties France faces. It outlines my proposals for putting France back on the path toward economic growth, social justice, and modernity. [What, exactly, is “modernity” code for, in this context? - ed.] And it addresses many of the common domestic, international, economic, and social challenges that advances democracies like France and the United States must confront.
…
Read the whole thing at Tigerhawk. You’ll find that Sarkozy may just rescue France from it’s death spiral.
One need not be familiar with Friedrich Hayek’s “The Road to Serfdom” to surmise that such comprehensive sway over a country will gradually become counterproductive, and worse. The more absolute their power, the more the enarchs have tended to run France in their own interest, while assuaging the citizenry with bribes of all sorts. One such bribe, rhetorical but no less effective for that, has taken the form of nationalistic posturing, usually directed against the United States; a favorite slogan of the enarchs is that France’s mission is to uphold and protect a superior continental civilization based on the welfare state against the Anglo-Saxon model of “predatory” free-market capitalism. Structural problems–an aging population, swelling immigration, the public debt–have been ignored.
“Enarchs” are graduates of the Ecole nationale d’administration [ENA]. Michel Gurfinkiel, the president of the Jean-Jacques Rousseau Institute in Paris, gives a fascinating short history of how the enarchs have come to rule France at every level and what that has meant to French economy. Just one brief example:
…But more disquieting developments have been surfacing over the past two decades.
Whereas most big French companies have been profitable for years, the French GDP has been growing very slowly or not at all. What this means is that French industry and services derive the bulk of their revenue from activities overseas rather than from the domestic economy. In fact, some companies have already drawn the logical conclusion and moved out: a flagship French company like Renault is now registered in the Netherlands.
As for those remaining at home, they are not able to provide enough jobs for the present working population of approximately 30 million. And so about 9% of French residents are unemployed–roughly twice the rate in Britain, Ireland, the Scandinavian countries, Japan or the United States. Among able-bodied persons under 24, the unemployment rate jumps to 22%. To top it off, over 50% of today’s jobs are thought to be more “virtual” than “actual,” i.e., they fail the test of rational business management. According to an index compiled by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the average number of hours “effectively” devoted to work is only 617 yearly for France, as against 801 in Britain and 865 in the United States.
How do the French cope with this? Simple: They rely on an ever-expanding welfare state that takes care of the unemployed, the poor who are beyond any prospect of a viable job, the uneconomical state-run companies, and the supernumerary petty civil servants or “public-convenience” workers. And this does not count the various handouts and incentives, usually in the form of tax rebates, bestowed by the government on companies that agree not to shut down and move elsewhere.
There is much to mull over here. But Gurfinkiel ends with a weakly optimistic note: perhaps the end of the enarchs reign is near?
…So what chance, really, is there for a change in 2007? Interestingly enough, three of the four presidential front-runners as of the end of March–Messrs. Sarkozy, Bayrou, and Le Pen–were not enarchs. And Ms. Royal, though an enarch, seemed to have fallen out of touch with that milieu. Of the four, Mr. Sarkozy, openly pro-American and a (cautious) critic of the welfare state, was probably the only candidate to have given serious thought to France’s necrotic condition, hinting at various constitutional reforms–from the abolition of the prime minister’s office to a stronger parliament and stronger parliamentary commissions, not to mention progressive cuts in the civil service–that would bring the republic closer to the American political model. Not to be outdone by Mr. Sarkozy, Mr. Bayrou announced in early April that, if elected, he would abolish the ENA altogether.
But now that a reform-minded president has been elected, who will assist him in carrying out his declared program, when enarchs and other state servants are all there is?
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