The French Way (44 page)

The Left

On the left politicians were more outspoken about their disdain for America's “new economy.” Some socialist parliamentarians attributed most of France's troubles to its “progressive Americanization,” which they described as “growing individualism, the impoverishment of the state, the omnipotence of television, intemperate consumer spending
and the emerging power of lobbies.”
⁶¹
Pierre Beregovoy, the socialist prime minister from 1992 to 1993, contrasted the mixed economy of France, which he described as combining economic competitiveness and social protection, with the American system that “dissolved soli-darity.”
⁶²
To the left of the Socialist Party, the Mouvement des Citoyens (Citizens Movement) led by Jean-Pierre Chevenement, was adamant about preserving the Jacobin alternative with its powerful state and nationalist agenda, and scorned its socialist allies like Michel Rocard, who expressed admiration for America. And some of the members of the Green Party were even harder on the Americans than were the socialists. They attacked the United States for its indifference to the environment and its advocacy of market-driven globalization. Noel Mamere, who would become the Green Party nominee for president, described American society in the harshest possible light, damning it for its bigotry, ignorance, and violence and outrageously asserting, for example, that the United States had more gun shops than it did gas stations. Mamere concluded his polemic titled
Non merci, Oncle Sam!
with the remark, “[R]eally, perhaps it's not so unseemly to declare oneself for the time being as…simply anti-American.”
⁶³

American ways were ostensibly unacceptable to the socialists and their leader at the fin de siecle, Lionel Jospin. In the 1997 legislative campaign that brought them to power the socialists and their allies, the communists, the Green Party, the Citizens Movement, and others, gave their conservative opponents the tag of “hyperliberalism.” Since this phrase was a code for Anglo-American economic practices, America, the foil, figured in the election. Jospin accused his opponents of preparing “a liberal purge” featuring cuts in public sector jobs, accelerated privatizations, dismantled public services, and loss of social protection. The choice, as he phrased it, was between liberalism, which inevitably brought the “uncontrolled reign of money” (America) or a more humane society in which the general interest ruled (France).
⁶⁴

Jospin endorsed economic reform during the campaign but warned against those who would submit to the market: “Market forces
are now working with such violence, with such harshness, with such political support, that I fear if we don't take notice the country will tip completely over to one side….I want open socialism, not unbridled liberalism.”
⁶⁵
While he called for an “evolution from statism and old-fashioned centralism toward initiative, decentralization and forms of
autogestion”
(self-management), he cautioned against a “rupture with public service, with the values that founded the republic.” Jospin pledged he would create 700,000 jobs in the public sector, introduce the thirty-five-hour workweek, and fight for a “social Europe,” which meant maintaining existing benefits and labor protection. He advised against trying to mimic the market practices of Americans because French capitalism was much weaker and lacked the means; in doing so the French might jeopardize their major industrial achievements like those in aviation, space, and nuclear power. “That might please the Americans, but where is our interest [in doing this]?” he added.

Edouard Balladur and Alain Juppe, the former and the incumbent prime minister in 1997, had to respond to Jospin's campaign in the legislative elections. Of the two the former was more explicit. Balladur defended liberalism, but called for “inventing a French liberalism” that did not copy “the Anglo-Saxon model,” one that helped create jobs and made France competitive in the international arena yet would not harm “a society of justice and equity.”
⁶⁶
Balladur's call for “a liberal turn” was rather too explicit for Juppe, who offered a similar program without the liberal vocabulary. When the votes were counted the conservatives and free-market liberalism had lost the election and the socialists and their allies took charge.

As head of government after 1997 Jospin clarified his position by distinguishing the market economy from the market society: “We accept the market economy because it is the most effective means—provided it is regulated and managed—of allocating resources, stimulating initiative, and rewarding effort and work. But we reject ‘the market society.' For although the market produces wealth, in itself it generates neither solidarity nor values, neither objectives nor meaning. Because
society is far more than an exchange of goods, the market cannot be its only driving force. So we are not ‘left-wing liberals.' We are socialists. And to be a socialist is to affirm that the political should take precedence over the economic.”
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Jospin refused to “give in to the fatalistic idea that the neo-liberal capitalist model is the only one available,”
⁶⁸
for “capitalism is a force that moves, but it does not know where it is going.”
⁶⁹
Rather, Jospin asserted, “we can shape the world according to our values,” meaning constructing an economy and society that conformed to French national traditions and institutions such as that of social solidarity. To this end he continued to extol dirigisme, though he preferred to call it
volontarisme
, referring to an active state that “can clear away or navigate around the archaic forces standing in the way of changes that society wants.”
⁷⁰
The state, Jospin felt, should lead the way in combatting unemployment, promoting innovation, directing investment, and assuring a fair distribution of economic wealth.
LEtat-providence
was the term he preferred for the welfare state because it suggested activism.

In this vein socialist officials made the case that globalization represented the unbridled force of the market and benefited Americans more than others. “Managed globalization”
(mondialisation maitrisee)
became the slogan of the late 1990s. It evoked the notion of tying the American hyperpower down with international rules and organizations, such as making it honor treaties like the Kyoto Protocol and taxing international financial transactions to mitigate their volatility. Socialists championed the WTO as a replacement for the GATT because it could better bind the “world company,” as French satirists labeled the United States. Speaking in Brazil, Jospin—after noting the beneficial effects of globalization—emphasized how it increased inequalities among peoples and threatened cultural diversity; he called for governments to take charge and “humanize” the process rather than leaving it to the fate of “so-called natural economic laws.”
⁷¹

Despite these criticisms of the market, Jospin broke with socialist orthodoxy by endorsing the market economy. His declared aim
was constructing a new balance between state and market that would advance “a collectively constructed modernity”—one that addressed issues of production as well as those of redistribution.
⁷²
Thus he endorsed the privatization of capital in order to create jobs and improve economic competitiveness and in fact carried out large-scale privatizations as well as cutting taxes and placing caps on health spending. To be sure, the socialists refused to label selling off public companies as “privatization”; instead they called it “involving the private sector” and they secured it against foreign—that is, Anglo-American—takeovers.

His move toward the market economy forced Jospin to pay some attention to America. In the summer of 1998, accompanied by three of his ministers, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Claude Allegre, and Hubert Vedrine, the prime minister made his first official visit to the United States, after which he confessed that he was impressed with America. Jospin admitted that job creation in the United States produced skilled positions in the service and high-tech sectors rather than only low-paid, dead-end jobs. France, he acknowledged, had much to learn from American economic dynamism, its competitive spirit, and the vitality of its research and innovation.
⁷³

Yet back home he distanced himself from America, distinguishing “capitalism” (America) from a “market economy” (France) and, in order to camouflage domestic reform, declared priority must be given to republican solidarity. The pay-as-you go pension system based on the principle of
repartition
(sharing out) was in crisis, but Jospin refused to do more than tamper with it: he called repartition “the symbol of the solidarity that links the generations. It is one of the most important terms of the nation's social compact.” There would be no pension reform “on the model of certain Anglo-Saxon countries—that is not our approach.”
⁷⁴
He introduced a voluntary long-term saving scheme for workers, which was heavily subsidized by tax breaks, that served as a de facto form of private pensions, yet he rejected any notion that they were either pensions or that he was following the Americans. Instead of labeling them “pensions” Jospin insisted they be called
epargne retraite
,
or retirement savings. President Chirac disagreed with his prime minister and dared to speak of these as “pension funds
a lafrançaise''
⁷⁵
Private-sector initiatives aimed at curbing unemployment that seemed like Anglo-American practices failed to win commendations from the Jospin administration. The government winked at short-term, flexible contracts that skirted the labor code and accounted for the vast majority of jobs created in the private sector by the late 1990s. But officially ministers in the Jospin government distanced themselves from such practices; they complained that these kinds of jobs were too “precarious” and unfortunately resembled what the Americans were doing.
⁷⁶
Similarly, when young French men and women flocked to London to take service-sector jobs, the Jospin government seemed to suggest unemployment was preferable to such unskilled “McJobs.” “We want quality jobs, not low-paid ones,” explained an adviser to the labor minister Martine Aubry. “Our model is certainly very heavy and costly, but it guarantees our solidarity.”
⁷⁷

Meanwhile the government continued to rely on subsidies or direct handouts to relieve unemployment. Jospin's ministers were unapologetic. “When the private sector does not do the job, I would like the public sector to do it,” explained finance minister Strauss-Kahn in 1999. “The goal is economic and social inclusion: there are now 179,000 youngsters who are not on the streets, who are integrated into society.”
⁷⁸
Most emphatically the Jospin government confronted the Anglo-Americans and satisfied the left wing of the Socialist Party by adopting the thirty-five-hour workweek in 1998. This attempt to create jobs by legislating a shorter workweek seemed like dirigisme at its worst and made no sense to President Clinton's economic advisers in the United States.

Jospin refused to embrace America even after his 1998 transatlantic trip. During his second visit, a year later, while addressing the financial press in New York, he dismissed the concerns of American business about the thirty-five-hour workweek and, speaking of globalization, scoffed, “One doesn't replace the dictatorship of the proletariat with
that of shareholders.”
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Even the socialist-liberal Strauss-Kahn ridiculed the panacea of relaxing the labor code preached by the Americans: “We have no interest in Anglo-Saxon flexibility that entails for us the risk of a social implosion.”
⁸⁰
Attacking America, or at least distancing his policies from the Anglo-Saxons, made it easier for Jospin to liberalize quietly. “Flexibility” advanced in the field of employment in the 1990s with increasing part-time and temporary jobs, irregular work schedules, and firm-level contracts.
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Baiting America served as an effective political screen.

At the end of the decade Jospin's government tried its hand at one type of American-inspired reform. There was rising concern about the gap between the French and the Americans, as well as others, in the development of new technologies and about the drain of technical talent to the United States and Britain. France wanted to reach the cutting edge of biotechnology, information technology, and similar sectors of the so-called “new economy.”

The lag with the Americans in developing the information technology (IT) sector was especially distressing. When Jospin became prime minister in 1997 no one in his office was using e-mail; only 2 percent of the French population could access the Internet; and only one in four, mainly large-scale, businesses had Internet connections. Far fewer French households had Internet access than in the United States or in many other European countries like Sweden and the Netherlands. Even La Villette, the national showcase for science and technology, banned the Internet from its displays. In the early 1980s the French had adopted their own, digital, text-based system called Minitel that, using the national telephone network, performed tasks like offering train schedules and making online purchases. Minitel acted as a brake on the Internet, because users, service providers and France Telecom, which operated the service, were reluctant to abandon a popular and profitable technology, but it was also a catalyst because it provided experience in using an interactive network.
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Despite objections about introducing what some derided as an “Anglo-Saxon network,” Jospin acted.