|
 How
is it that France, not long ago one of the economic leaders of postwar
Europe, has reached the state that it is in today? What is wrong in
modern France?
Endemic unemployment,
stuck enduringly round the 10% mark, an explosion of poverty in the
suburbs and poor urban areas, falling purchasing power for most French
households, a serious brain drain among its educated elites,
particularly researchers and young managers, strikes that have
sometimes left cities like Marseilles without public transport
for up to a month, lorry drivers blockading roads and petrol depots, a
Corsica ferry hijacked by its sailors in the framework of an industrial
dispute, af nightly rioting in poor suburbs
sprawled around cities both large and small, across the country, or
students blockading universities in protest against new employment laws.
All this in a country that is still a
great place to live, a country whose workforce has one of the highest
hourly rates of productivity in the whole of Europe, whose secondary
education system and health service – despite budgetary
problems - are still the envy of many other countries, whose high-speed
rail network is the best in the world, whose motorway system is now one
of the best in Europe, whose high-tech and aerospace industries are
world leaders, where a university education is remarkably cheap and
open to any high-school graduate, whose top business schools are among
the best in the world, and where art and culture flourish.
For five decades after the second world
war, France was seen as one of the motors of Europe and the great
bastions of democracy in the western world. It was an image that the
French establishment was remarkably good at presenting to the outside
world, and one that was at least founded in reality. In the aftermath
of the second world war, just one of the major nations in Continental
Europe held its head high (carefully sweeping memories of Vichy under
the carpet) as a champion of liberty and resistance to fascism: France.
This was the Europe in which the Common Market was first launched, a
grouping of six European nations, three big, three small.
In this postwar Europe, with two of the
big member states still shouldering the massive burden of guilt for
their recent pasts, unwilling to assert their positions, it fell to the
third to embrace the role of natural leader of the new European
community. France. And thus it was that the Common Market grew and
developed in Cold War Europe as an emanation of French power and
influence….. but also as a reflection of the French model of
power, centralised, bureaucratic and to a large degree unanswerable.
Until recent years, there was a virtual
national consensus in France regarding the value of French "models",
social, political and economic, and to a large extent even today,
intrinsic faith in them remains high. It was not until the final years
of the twentieth century that there was any serious mainstream
questioning of these models. Before then, the voices of criticism, some
of them quite strident, came from edges of society, from the political
fringes, but were classically disregarded or sidelined by the
establishment. Not even the events of May 1968, the great flashpoint of
France's postwar history, did anything to really change the situation.
Apart from pulling France's youth rather belatedly into the "swinging
sixties" and prompting some much needed reforms to higher education,
May 68 really did little to change France. In spite of the
revolutionary fever of the time, France in 1975 was not markedly
different from France in 1965. The system, the Fifth Republic, survived
intact.
Given the power and nature of the French establishment, this was hardly surprising.
Hidden by the strong rhetoric of
democracy and equality that is the hallmark of political argument in
France on both the left and the right, there lies the unpleasant
reality that France is possibly the most elitist of all developed
nations; and for anyone who considers that elitism rhymes with cronyism
and is a far cry from equality, the fundamental flaw in the French
model begins to become apparent. The system is built partly on the
basis of a myth.
In most developed countries and indeed
developing countries too, the nation's future elites – the
future politicians, leaders of industry, senior civil servants
– are educated along with the not-so-elites in universities,
the pinnacle of most education systems. Not so in France, where the
nation's elites are siphoned out of the system often before leaving
their lycée, and cosseted through selective and highly
elitist "grandes écoles" far from the rough and tumble of
ordinary university life. If it doesn't start at home, the separation
between France's elites and the rest of the population starts at high
school, graduating from a "grande école" being a natural
stepping stone towards many of the top jobs in France, particularly in
the public sector. The old-boy (and to a lesser degree
old-girl) networks of these schools run through the upper echelons of
the French civil service, political parties of right and left, the
armed forces, the media, culture and industry alike, an "elite" whose
webs of influence make the concept of "the establishment" in
English-speaking countries sound very informal.
Britons and Americans who get to know
France, having been fed the image of France as the great champion of
"liberty, equality and fraternity" are often more than surprised to
discover France's preoccupation with its "great families",
the post-revolutionary and post-imperial aristocracy of modern France,
the barons of industry and their fortunes, many of them (like the
Dassaults, the makers of Mirage jet fighters) with intimate family ties
into the highest echelons of the state and politics.
Until the 1990's, most French people
would probably have been surprised too. Beyond the circles of left-wing
students, the Communist party and Le Canard Enchainé (the
French equivalent of Private Eye), few people gave the question much
thought. After all, since the elites controlled most of the media,
political parties and much of the French establishment, and had no
interest in sawing through the branch on which they were seated,
questioning of the system per se was very limited.
Far from questioning the system,
France's elites – notably through the control of the media
and education – ensured that the "French model" and "French
values" were perceived by ordinary Frenchmen and women as
major sources of national pride, superior to those of other nations and
in particular superior to the American and British models.
Given the nature of the education system in France, doing so was not difficult.
For generations, education in Britain
and many other countries has involved teaching students not only to
learn facts, but to question them too.
Not so in France. Secondary education
here is largely a transmission of facts from teacher to student,
including learning by rote. In terms of how much knowledge students
actually acquire, the system is perhaps more efficient than the British
system. But in terms of teaching them to think for
themselves, to participate and to react, to develop the individual, the
French system is certainly far less successful. This is deliberate; the
lycée system in France was designed under Napoleon as a
means of ensuring the education, by the state, of the educated classes
who would ensure the functioning, development and perpetuation of the
nation, the state and its institutions, including the army. In this it
has been remarkably successful, just as it has been, until very
recently, in ensuring respect by ordinary French men and women of
French institutions and the French system in general.
Even though the French Revolution was a
bloody event that led to a period in French history known as the
"Terror", and subsequently to the replacement of the monarchy by an
equally authoritarian Empire under Napoleon, "la Révolution"
is remembered to this day as the greatest event in French history, as
if it were still the defining moment for modern French society to this
day. The expression "republican tradition" and the slogan "Liberty,
Equality, Fraternity" have both been used ad nauseam by successions of
French elites to instil into the French people the idea that those
governing them were the direct successors of the original
revolutionaries, and that somehow France and the French Model were
unique democratic achievements in a hostile world.
These are France's great myths, and the
problem is that to a large extent not just the French people in
general, but also a large part of the French establishment, not to
mention French intellectuals, came to believe them.
Serious problems in French society, when
they existed, were pushed under the carpet. As early as the 1960's,
voices were raised here and there against the social risks inherent in
France's suburban development model of "grands ensembles", vast
soulless apartment block developments on the outskirts of towns and
cities, "les banlieues", concrete jungles for the new urban poor. A new
word, "Sarcellite" (from the Paris suburb of Sarcelles) entered the
French language, with the meaning of "suffering from the problems of
suburban tower block development". Yet the policy of building
huge tower block developments, often with minimal amenities tagged on
as an afterthought, continued well into the 1980's. Today, a lot of
these areas are ghettoes to ethnic minority communities…
though one must not call them "communities" in France,
because "community" is a dirty word, as if strong communities were a
threat to national unity.
Problems in "les banlieues" have been
part of French life for the best part of 30 years, but successive
governments have largely turned a blind eye to them. To publicly
recognise the extent of the failure of both French suburban development
schemes, and French integration policies, would have been to publicly
admit that the French way of life, the French social model, and indeed
France itself were not actually all that they were made out to be, and
not necessarily superior to the American model or the British model.
And that would have been a fatal assault on the great French myths.
Even today, the extent to which people
in France believe that their country is more democratic, more just,
more socially tolerant and more welcoming than others, is quite
surprising, even among educated and informed people. That is what they
have been told. And until the mid nineties, it was a myth that very few
people of any influence in France were interested in shooting down; it
is almost as if there was an unwritten consensus between the left and
the right, both politicians and intellectuals, that rocking this
particular boat was of no advantage to anyone, and least of all to the
elites themselves.
It is hardly surprising, under such
circumstances, that France in the 1990's reacquired a reputation that
it has carried at various points in history, that of an "arrogant
nation". Arrogance comes naturally, when a nation and its
elites fool themselves into believing that they and their system are
somehow superior and hold the moral high ground compared to other
nations. No one should have been surprised, given the self-imposed myth
of the superiority of the French model, when the French
hectored the Austrians on electing Haider, the Italians for
electing Berlusconi, and Tony Blair for challenging that great French
EU emanation, the Common Agricultural Policy.
Yet paradoxically, it is within France
that the curses of elitism and arrogance have done their greatest
damage, for it is these qualities that lie at the root of France's
current ills. Clearly, governments and administrations and an
intellectual establishment that arrogantly fool themselves and their
people into thinking that their "models" are best do little to adapt
these models to changing circumstances. In the age of the nation state,
each nation had its own model, and different models worked in different
countries. That age has passed, but France's elites have refused to
recognise the change, carrying blithely on as if the French model would
see off all potential problems.
It has not. While it has succeeded
marvellously in maintaining in France a massive army of civil servants
and public sector workers, a vast self-perpetuating bureaucracy of some
5 million employees (no one knows exactly how many), it has failed to
ensure the economic vitality of France in a competitive international
environment, and largely failed to integrate a second generation of
immigrant origin. With unemployment running at over 20% among 18-24
year olds in general, and 40% of the active population in many of the
low-income suburbs, home to most of France's ethnic minorities, the
recent explosion of violence was, with hindsight, a disaster just
waiting to happen, the consequence of over thirty years of failure to
question, failure to heed the warnings, and tinkering on the edges
instead of addressing the issues.
Yet all is not bleak. Until the mid
nineties, questioning the fundamental validity of the French model of
society was tantamount to social blasphemy. Those who did so were
branded as irrelevant, extremists or misguided; or, perhaps the
greatest of insults, they were accused of wanting to impose "anglo
saxon" models and rampant economic liberalism in place of the social
justice of the French model. In recent years, things have begun to
change. The nation's leading newsmagazines and papers have increasingly
highlighted the need for fundamental reform in France, and the enormous
difficulty that France has in achieving such reform. Books such as
"L'Arrogance Française", by Emmenuel Saint-Martin and Romain
Gubert, a 2003 best seller, have set in train a wave of questioning.
The 2005 rejection in a popular referendum of the European Constitution
by French voters was seen in France less as a rejection of the European
ideal, as defined by the Constitution's author former French president
Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, than as a serious vote of no
confidence in the way France itself is being run.
Though many in positions of influence or
authority initially claimed that the outbursts of violence in
French suburbs were fomented by riff-raff and drug-dealers, which
doubtless bore an element of truth, the root causes of the problem,
massive unemployment and failed social integration, have also been
recognised. Whether or not France is capable in the short
term of enacting the measures necessary in order to eliminate the
causes is open to doubt.
In the long term, things will change. At
last, the consensus in France is coming round to acceptance of the view
that all is not well, the French models are not as good as they have so
long been made out to be, and that fundamental changes are essential.
And they are coming.
For decades, proposals to make
fundamental changes to the way things are done in France have
floundered on the sandbanks of resistance from vested interests, be
they lorry drivers protesting against increased fuel costs or teachers
and students protesting against changes to the education system. The
entropy of the French system seemed overpowering. Yet in 2003, the
government did manage to push through a highly unpopular reform of the
state pensions system, raising the retirement age for many categories
of workers and reducing the opportunities for early retirement. Though
hundreds of thousands of employees, particularly in the state sector,
took to the streets in protest, the reform went through.
Many other reforms, fundamental changes
to the "French system", are still required; and slowly but
surely, at last, thing are starting to move in the right direction.
Talk of wall-to-wall overhaul of French labour law, the famous "Code du
Travail" an arcane and highly complex system of rules, restrictions and
exemptions, is no longer a taboo subject... though still very sensitive with unions and young people. Fiscal reforms designed to
encourage initiative and investment and reduce France's heavy tax
burden, are also underway, albeit in a fairly piecemeal manner. And
most important of all, the rock solid belief in the superiority of the
French model has been seriously dented.
The rioting in French suburbs in Autumn
2005 may have been a ghastly moment of alarm for France; but it will
also have been yet another wake-up call. Finding a new social model for
France is now beginning to be seen as a national priority that will
preoccupy the nation's decision makers for the foreseeable future.
France's delusions of grandeur have been shattered. From now on, there
can be no masking the need for change. Not even among the nation's
elites.
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