The French Way (41 page)

Another option was playing the role of the hyperpower's partner—either prudently or unreservedly. But when France behaved as a cautious ally it forfeited its leverage with the United States. In the Gulf War, Mitterrand's hesitancy and search for a diplomatic alternative aroused Washington's suspicions and did not slow the march to
Desert Storm. In the end Washington led and Paris followed. In trying to control Saddam Hussein after the Gulf War, Chirac also oscillated between acting as loyal lieutenant and critic to the White House and achieved little in influencing Clinton's decisions. The alternative to caution—adopting the role of a loyal, fully committed partner—brought only slightly better results because this posture ran the risk of being taken for granted. During the Dayton Accord talks France was ignored and humiliated. In the Kosovo crisis the loyalty strategy earned a measure of cooperation and some consultation in military operations. But Chirac's courtship of Clinton and his offer of rejoining the Atlantic Alliance did not pay off. Bill said no to Jacques.

What remained as alternatives were acting without the hyperpower or engaging in brinksmanship. In Bosnia, at least until 1994, France, along with other Europeans, tried to pacify a combat zone without the United States. They had no success. In the end the Europeans and the UN had to call on NATO for help and, once engaged, the U.S. government ran military operations and dictated the settlement in Dayton to the dismay of many Europeans. The most extreme form of defiance, brinksmanship, occurred only once at the climax of negotiations over agricultural subsidies in the Uruguay Round of GATT negotiations. Paris encouraged rural protest and threatened to scuttle the entire round of trade talks. Such theatrics did not convince Washington, and Paris ended up conceding.

What was the lesson? Appearing as either the eternal Grinch or behaving as a loyal subordinate failed. Mobilizing other Europeans, especially through the EU, helped, but it was an uncertain and difficult route. The same was true for international institutions. In essence, when the hyperpower said “no,” it was “no” and France had to retreat. Uncle Sam was unreceptive to the entreaties, advice, blandishments, and threats of Marianne. So what was left was acting as a wise consultant to the hyperpower, avoiding confrontation, and, at the same time, building a multipolar/multilateral international system to supersede the unipolar order. But this “realism” would still have to face transatlantic
differences over such fundamentals as building a European pillar, dealing with the Russians, controlling rogue states, employing trade sanctions, and engaging international institutions. And realism would still have to overcome the mistrust that was common to governments on both sides of the Atlantic and remained firmly anchored in public perceptions—a mistrust that impaired cooperation.
¹⁹⁵

In international affairs, as in so much else, France measured itself against the United States during the final decade of the twentieth century. The compliment was not returned by the United States, which passed off the French with indifference and mistrust. For the French government and the French people, however, it was the United States, the overbearing, unreliable, and impetuous ally, that blocked their ambitions and denied them their rightful place and prestige in world affairs. Responding to the hyperpower defined French foreign policy: constraining America and attaining self-reliance was the standard of measurement for the country's success and identity.

When the G7 gathered in Denver, Colorado, in June 1997, President Bill Clinton, in an exuberant mood, invited Jacques Chirac, Helmut Kohl and other world leaders to don cowboy outfits. But the French president and the German chancellor declined the invitation; they refused to wear Western hats and boots. The Europeans held back in both dress and spirit. They were mildly offended at the way Clinton's economic advisers extolled America's success and lectured them about how they could profit from the new global economy. When reporters asked Chirac whether or not Europeans should adopt American recipes, he shot back, “Naturally not. Each has his own model, our structures are different. We have the greatest respect for others, but we have our traditions, our model, and we wish to hold on to it.”
¹
On board his return flight Chirac complained that he found the Americans
“un peu
too much.”
²

In domestic affairs America served as a foil to fin-de-siecle France in two ways, as a challenge and as a warning. On the one hand the example of American dynamism and its intrusion within the Hexagon made the French take notice of a worrisome gap between the two countries. The gap had economic, technological, and cultural dimensions and it commanded a response. In this sense America acted as an incentive for change. On the other hand America functioned as an example to be shunned. If the New World's successes—for example,
in economic growth—were admired, the ways Americans employed to attain such prosperity were to be avoided. America was simultaneously a model and an antimodel. France had to catch up without necessarily emulating the transatlantic giant. What the French accomplished in the 1990s was to adapt features of the American way, without admitting it, in an effort to find their own way forward. This chapter addresses policies of the Fifth Republic that were explicitly, or in some instances only implicitly, inspired by the American model. Americans, or Anglo-Americans, may not have been invoked when discussing reforms, but they were often present. The French used a coded vocabulary. Everyone knew that the economic doctrine of “ultraliberalism” or words like
precarite
or
flexibilite
when used in the context of employment meant
Beware, the Anglo-Saxons are coming.

A comprehensive examination of the American challenge is an impossible task in a single chapter, and I shall leave topics like immigration or gender, where America was at least indirectly involved, to others.
³
The dimensions I have chosen to present are economic and social policy, business practice, and cultural affairs. Even here I have been selective. Economic and social policy, for our purposes, will encompass issues like economic and technological competitiveness, unemployment, and the welfare state. In cultural affairs my focus will be on language—that is, the spread of American English—and on the audiovisual sector.

Economy and Society

The dilemma France faced in the 1990s was that it trailed the Anglo-Americans yet was unwilling, at least openly, to follow their lead. France lagged behind the “Anglo-Saxons” in several respects including adding jobs, developing an information technology sector, and attaining international competitiveness. It was distressing to hear the Americans boast about creating millions of new jobs, to read about talented
young French men and women, perhaps as many as 50,000, emigrating to Silicon Valley, and to learn of the purchase of equity in French companies by American investors. When the president of the huge California public employee pension fund arrived in Paris, his visit was likened to the arrival of the new masters of globalization—those aweinspiring CEOs who forced companies to give priority to short-term profits and retrench employees to raise productivity.
⁴
Even the nation's architectural symbols were seemingly in play: at a stormy meeting of the Paris City Council in 1998 the mayor had to reassure his colleagues that a bid by a subsidiary of General Motors to buy a controlling interest in the Eiffel Tower would not be accepted. The British were almost as threatening as their American cousins. It was upsetting to learn that the United Kingdom seemed to have surpassed France in gross domestic product (GDP). But it was downright embarrassing to watch young French workers and businesspeople cross the English Channel to labor in what they deemed a more favorable business climate. In the English town of Ashford, located on the Euro star rail line that linked the two countries, French entrepreneurs registered over three hundred French-owned companies, one of which was a bakery that imported dough and supplied the local Gallic population with baguettes. Even worse, famous
couturiers
like Givenchy and Christian Dior hired British designers.

At the same time that the Anglo-Americans were forging ahead France was encountering troubles caused by both the EU and globalization. On the one hand there were the adjustments forced by the pace of European integration, especially in readying for the coming of the Euro. After the Maastricht Treaty of 1992, which initiated the process that would lead to the creation of a single currency system for the EU, pressure mounted on France to meet the various “Maastricht criteria” for adopting the Euro, including keeping domestic inflation and budget deficits in check. On the other hand France faced problems stemming from widening foreign trade and globalization. The economy had become more thoroughly immersed in trade than at any time in
its past. National economic frontiers counted less and less and international competitiveness more and more. Meanwhile anxiety grew about the effects of globalization. Fears that foreign competition contributed to unemployment prompted a government investigation in 1993 that warned three to five million jobs in France were threatened by low-wage countries.
⁵

Anglo-American performance made certain domestic troubles seem worse. Unemployment was the number one problem. It had reappeared in earnest following the oil crisis of the 1970s. First one million
chomeurs
, then two million, and by 1993 over three million. During the 1990s French unemployment hovered around 11 percent in comparison to the United States, where it was half that. At the end of the decade the relative jobless rates were: France, 10.5 percent; the United Kingdom, 6 percent; and the United States, 4.2 percent. Despite economic growth in the late 1980s the private sector had created few jobs and then growth decelerated in the early 1990s. Double-digit unemployment rates became the rule after 1985, and for the young they reached as high as 25 percent by 1997. Whereas the United States between 1970 and 1995 had more than doubled the hours of work created in the private-sector services, a major employer of youth, in France they declined. And the French who were unemployed needed five times as long to find new work as their American counterparts.
⁶
Critics complained that the rigidities of the labor market and the high social payments for employers kept unemployment high by discouraging employers from hiring. Payroll taxes for health, retirement, unemployment insurance, and other charges paid by both employer and employee, were more than double those in the United Kingdom in 1990.
⁷

Unemployment was not the only domestic trouble. The welfare state had become expensive, and in some ways inadequate and inequitable. France was an outlier in the trends of the 1980s and ‘90s: instead of wholesale retrenchment, as in other advanced states, it increased social spending, even adding new programs. In social expenditures it moved near the top of the countries in the Organisation for
Economic Co-operation and Development by the late 1990s. Deficits in the social security system, most of which came from pensions and health care, increased rapidly in the 1980s and mushroomed in the 1990s, reaching 62 billion francs in 1995.
⁸
At the same time the system seemed to reward the haves and exclude the have-nots. Life in many of the grim suburbs or
banlieues
that surrounded major cities, marked by unemployment, drugs, crime, and desperation, testified to the failure of social policy. A closely related problem was the elephantine dimensions of the state and its budget. French total tax revenue as a percentage of GDP was much greater than that of the United States, and larger than that of almost every other Western European country. And French public expenditures as percent of GDP ranked among the highest in the EU.
⁹
Spending was inflated by the large number of employees on the state payroll, a good number of whom had been added under socialist governance in the early 1980s. It was estimated that over half the French population were civil servants or the parents, children, or spouses of one.
¹⁰
Some public enterprises, notably the national railways, ran huge deficits, and the practice of bailing out poor performers was often hugely expensive.

This ominous list of problems should not obscure the progress made on other fronts. Most notably, the adoption by President Fran-^ois Mitterrand after 1988 of the
franc fort
, requiring restrictive fiscal and monetary policies—which were scrupulously followed by his successors—had wrung most inflation out of the system.
¹¹
Equally important, the economy looked increasingly to the world. Since the 1960s, expanding trade, especially with other countries in the European Union; the entry of multinationals; and massive foreign investment, much of it from the United States, all opened the economy. France had become far more dependent on imports and exports than ever before. For example, when the Fifth Republic began, the part imports and exports played in GDP were 9.7 and 8.9 percent, respectively. By 1980 these shares had climbed to 26.5 and 24.2 percent.
¹²
By 1990 France had, on the basis of the percentage of production exported and the fraction of
consumption accounted for by imports, a far more open economy than either that of the United States or Japan (if somewhat less open than either that of the United Kingdom or Germany).
¹³
And for the first time in over a decade, after 1991 France began to run a trade surplus. Rates of growth in GDP, which had been miserable at the beginning of the 1990s and modest in the middle of the decade, accelerated from 1998 to 2000. Meanwhile, a succession of governments, both conservative and socialist, from the early 1980s on tried to reform the social security system by such means as controlling costs and reducing benefits—even while they added programs.

In fact, the French had much to brag about. They enjoyed the benefits of excellent and extensive public services like a splendid transportation network; the job protection afforded by a rigorous labor code; generous social rewards, including lavish unemployment benefits, hefty family allowances, virtually free education, high-quality medical care for which patients paid only a small share of costs, and substantial pensions for workers, both public and private, after forty years of service. Far more French workers could afford to take early retirement than Americans. And there was generous paid leave: whereas Americans had the stingiest vacation time in the industrialized West, averaging only two weeks after three years on the job, the French enjoyed five weeks of annual paid vacation—the longest in Europe—plus a guaranteed minimum annual income. The French benefited from one of the most comprehensive systems of social protection in the world. Moreover, economic sectors that were deemed either “strategic” or “prestigious” or formed part of the national patrimony benefited from state protection and often from subsidies. Farming and the cinema were examples. And when prominent firms including banks faced bankruptcy or hostile takeovers, the state frequently intervened, sometimes in defiance of EU rules on competition. For France the question became, Was there a way to close the gap with the Anglo-Americans without sacrificing this comfortable arrangement? Or, as a former minister of economics expressed the question, “How can we catch up with the United States,
without losing our souls, that is without sacrificing the solidarity that lies at the heart of the European model?”
¹⁴

Domestic problems like stubborn unemployment rates, the rigidities and costs of a paternalistic state, and lagging international competitiveness, especially vis-a-vis the Anglo-Americans, provoked introspection among public officials not unlike what France experienced during and after the Second World War. In 1990 the government planning commission summoned experts to answer the question, What would it mean to be French in the year 2000? The planners focused on the country's ability to meet challenges to practices like state
dirigisme
and to national identity. The disarray of national identity, as they phrased it, came in part from the loss of a universal political and cultural mission. The French voluntarist model of democracy, which featured the revolutionary process and the Republican state as guide and emancipator, had lost its pride of place to other political traditions, especially to Anglo-American liberalism: “It is no longer the French tradition of centralization and the revolutionary overhaul of society that appears at the heart of Western history; it is rather the less lyrical and less flamboyant Anglo-Saxon tradition of monitoring power and protecting against arbitrariness.”
¹⁵
Meanwhile the French state faced challenges from without by such forces as globalized markets and from within by those who believed democracy derived from civil society rather than from the state as liberator. Jobs and the standard of living, according to the planners, in a globalized world could not be guaranteed by the state but had to be earned through international competitiveness. The answer to economic catch-up was not less state but a different kind of state, one that would collaborate with and negotiate among economic actors: “It's the end of a certain historical role embodied after the Liberation in the form of French
dirigisme
.”
¹⁶
The planners advised moving toward a freer economy without, however, imitating the Anglo-Saxons. These forecasters proved prescient.