THE FRENCH SOCIAL MODEL IN TIMES OF
GLOBALISATION
Riccardo Brizzi
The 29th May 2005 took the lid off Pandora’s Box and out of it has
come the deep-seated fears of a France with an identity crisis, barely able
to recognise itself. 1 Used to the grandiose venture, the country is all at
once devoid of ideas, incapable of acting at a critical moment of history
when relations with the United States are at low ebb and Europe lies in
deadlock. Concomitantly, terrorism has raised its head once more and new
powers have pushed themselves onto the international scene demanding
the political and economic status that their demographic weight would
seem to warrant. France, then, is ill at ease, questioning itself and
increasingly doubtful. A nation that has always proudly stood as an
example to others, traditionally an exporter of ideas and values, now
realises it is condemned to look outside its own borders to learn a few
recipes from others outside the Francophone world - a realisation at odds
with Chirac’s proud remarks on the superiority of ‘French cuisine.’ 2
1.
ANXIOUS GLANCES ACROSS THE CHANNEL: ANY ALTERNATIVES TO
THE ANGLO -S AXON MODEL ?
Eyes are being turned primarily across the English Channel. Suddenly,
Blair has become omnipresent in the French political chatter, and
especially inside the ragbag gauche. Coming to power neck and neck with
‡
Contact with questions/comments: ricbrizzi@yahoo.it.
Jacques Julliard, Le Malheur français (Paris: Flammarion, 2005).
2
An expression ineptly used by Chirac just before allocation of the Olympics 2012 as
he was boasting of the alleged superiority of France over England.
1
INTERNATIONAL PUBLIC POLICY REVIEW , vol. 2, no. 1 (May 2006): 5-12. [ ISSN 1748-5207]
© 2006 by The School of Public Policy, University College London, London, United Kingdom. All rights
reserved.
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Jospin in 1997, the Labour leader has been eyed suspiciously in France,
though European socialism might have welcomed the man who ended the
seemingly absolute reign of accursed Torydom. With nearly ten years of
his leadership, the exponent of the ‘Third Way’, who has faced much
criticism from within his own party, has nonetheless come to stand as an
inevitable reference point wherever Frenchmen are concerned. Whether
these debates happen to be over globalisation, Europe or the social model,
the spectre of Blair has always been tangible. While he is still seen as
peddling too liberal a model – suspect, therefore 3 - and none of his
countless faults are overlooked (including failure to waive the ‘British
cheque’), it is coming to be admitted that the man’s dynamism and the
results he has achieved can no longer be ignored. British hostility to the
text was cited by many ‘yes’ supporters to bolster their own position;
though few later blamed the British leader when it was found that business
could not ‘continue as usual’ after France and the Netherlands had passed
their sentence without appeal. A sudden and surprising convergence of
views seems to have made Blair the new European leader – though the
distinct absence of alternatives counts for more than any whole-hearted
acceptance of his reform plans.
There are cases, found beyond the French frontier too, of Blair’s
proposed model being rejected as some kind of ‘hallowing’ of economics;
that this upstages the institutional and constitutional axis of the European
Union and would lead to the “definitive scrapping of the European
political project” as envisaged and worked for in previous decades.4 For
instance, the ex-secretary of Force Ouvrière, Marc Blondel, recently
wrote that France should not be busying itself with accounts and deficits;
that what is needed is “less pragmatism and more ideology.”5 However,
one might respectfully point out that, though heavily skewed by the
allowance for the CAP, the European budget (which the ‘Sapir report’ 6
dubbed ‘a historical relic’ in 2003,) has been by no means a futile
dissection of technicalities, but the working out of a proper political
programme as a guideline for Union policy over the next seven years.
Likewise, opening up a serious discussion of the European social model
hardly deprives Europe from its influential position as a political
institution, but is the only way to letting it find an answer to the
challenges being forced on it by today’s world. It was thus Blair’s 1st July
statement, one week before his opening address as British president of the
Union, spelling out the need to revise a ‘social model’ that tolerates
3
Christian Julienne, Le diable est-il liberal? (Paris: Belles Lettres, 2001).
Gian Enrico Rusconi, "Se cessiamo di essere Europa," Il Mulino 4 (2005): 617-618.
5
Marc Blondel, "Le système français est le plus juste que je connaisse," Le Point 1718
(2005): 50.
6
André Sapir, ed., Europa, un’agenda per la crescita. Rapporto Sapir (Bologna: il
Mulino, 2004).
4
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IN TE RN A T I O N AL P U BL I C P O L I CY R E VIE W
twenty million unemployed, which turned the Labour leader into a
protagonist of the debate preoccupying the French over the last year.
And to be honest, if compared to the hapless French model, the
Anglo-Saxon way cannot be denied a measure of success. The economic
pointers are set fair: good growth, low unemployment index, and high per
capita mean income. For all its undoubted distortions, Thatcherism left a
heritage of flexible income and employment conditions well suited to a
monetarist policy (the rigidity of monetarism needs flexible
accompanying social conditions). In the ‘Euro zone’, currency at once
became a ‘sacred cow’ raised to some meta-political plane, and the clearest
proof of this is that national governments can no longer play with deficits
in the balance. Such monetary rigidity, almost of necessity, calls for a
flexible variable on the side of employment and incomes.7 If one opts for
a right-wing economic policy, it ought to be flanked by a right-wing
‘social’ structure (it is worth noting that, in the last five years Great
Britain has doubled its public outlay on education and transport, and
increased its health budget by two thirds). In the Euro area, by contrast, we
have a contradiction which is laying bare all its limitations: on the one
hand, we have opted for the tightest of economic policies, left in the
hands of a central European bank that enjoys total independence; on the
other hand, we have kept up a level of social protection which refuses to
come into line with the standards required by flexibility. The Union thus
contains inside it a strange sort of ‘hybrid’: a ‘right-wing’ economic policy
and a ‘left-wing’ social structure. If that is possible when there are enough
resources to go round, it is not so in times of international recession; the
inevitable result is increasing stagnation and unemployment.
2.
THE END OF THE ‘DELORS MORTGAGE ’ AND THE FRENCH
IDEOLOGICAL DESERT
If France wishes to return to a leading role in Europe, as was argued in
a long editorial in Le Monde by Jean-Marie Colombani,8 it must start by
regaining legitimacy in the eyes of its own citizens. It is no accident that
the heated referendum debate is still being waged in a ‘domestic’ version,
mirroring the positions that crystallised on 29th May, but shifting the
object of debate from the European to the French social model, which is
the main ‘arraignee’ in today’s crisis. Designed to accompany the rebuilding and expansion of the Trente Glorieuses and never seriously
reformed, the French model proved unable to accommodate the crisis of
the Seventies and Eighties, let alone the new challenges of globalisation. If
7
Jean-Marc Ferry, "Face à la crise, quelles perspectives pour l’Union européenne?"
Politique etrangère, 3 (2005): 511-522.
8
Le Monde, "La France à son rang", September 13, 2005.
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it worked in the form of an adjunct to the original ‘mixed’ French system
of several decades back, it has failed to respond amid the global and
financial capitalism typical of this first sliver of the twenty-first century.
It has been some time since this subject occupied the centre of political
attention: we would have to go back to the end of the Seventies, at least,
just before the rise of Mitterand in 1981, when it was last a real pivot of
the debate. First the social-democrat watershed of 1983, and then a series
of swings and alliances gradually sucked it dry of interest, until it returned
to the scene in a leading part with the European referendum.
The one clear starting point, and the only clear issue in a welter of
confused arguments, seems to be the end of the ‘Delors mortgage’ on
French political life: the demise of what the philosopher A.M. Rieu has
dubbed “the delusion that has prevailed, to left and right, over French
political and social life ever since the late Seventies.”9 The same argument
has been voiced on the other side of the Atlantic by the political analyst
B.E. Barber in The American Prospect.10 Arising in the wake of the great
energy crisis, the Delors ‘delusion’ rested on the conviction that the
domestic markets should progressively unify to the point of achieving a
sole currency, with all other arguments shelved for future consideration.
His basic assumption was that the European peoples, French more than
any, would not accept growing integration of their economic systems
unless existing social policies were defended. However, contrary to those
predictions, this has actually proved to be a trap, slowing down social and
political harmonisation across the continent and giving rise to a sole
market far in advance of the political and social systems that have in this
way been shielded from all reform. Dissociating economics from politics
and social planning has produced a backlog that can only be made good by
thorough reform within each country’s national social system.
The withering away of the ‘Delors mortgage’ model has not been
accompanied by any alternative proposal. Even to set up a debate becomes
difficult now that the traditional political and ideological categories for
understanding the French political scene have suddenly collapsed. Political
practice at an institutional level both contradicts orthodox Gaullism,
which intended a popularly elected President of the Republic to keep the
French united, and goes counter to political science, which forecast that
presidential elections plus a two-tier uninominal general election would
provide France with a two-party system on British lines. Meanwhile,
ideologically the recent chapter of ‘political traumas’ has made
Rosanvallon, 11 Julliard and Furet’s theory of the gradually arising French
9
Le Monde, "Reconstruire l’Europe au-delà du oui et du non", September 7, 2005.
Benjamin R. Barber, "Dreamers Without Borders," The American Prospect, 8
(2005).
11
Pierre Rosanvallon, Le modèle politique français. La société civile contre le
jacobinisme de 1789 à nos jours (Paris: Le Seuil, 2004).
10
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IN TE RN A T I O N AL P U BL I C P O L I CY R E VIE W
‘democracy of equilibrium’12 less and less serviceable. In this light, the
‘No’ at the referendum had a destructive effect and tended to suggest a
relapse of ‘French fever.’ 13 For although the 21st April 2002 sounded as
an alarm bell, it was at least the outcome of a series of individual decisions,
few of which intended to bring about the collective result of dismissing
Jospin and favouring Le Pen, the 29th May 2005 came at the end of long
and heated nationwide debate, by contrast, and was the fruit of a long
collective rumination, not the fleeting whim of the individual.
3.
THE CULTURAL MORTGAGE OF ‘SOCIAL STATE- ISM’ OF A
GLOBALISED FRANCE
Another age-old tandem that seems to have bitten the dust is Siegfried
and Goguel’s movement-résistance, proposed as an explanation of political
developments since the Revolution. 14 The erruption of globalisation onto
the French debating ground has confounded the traditional parameters of
political life, making it hard to detect where party identities start and stop
and leading to a rift that runs right through the traditional political
families, dividing those in favour from those against globalisation.
The last election campaign showed how, at least in social terms, the
banner of conservatism has passed into the hands of the left wing, and the
radicals in particular, who staked everything on defending and preserving
social acquisitions. Take their ideas, their parties or their leaders, the
image of the moderate right and left wing as they seek allies within the
uninominal system, leaves an impression of chaos and in-fighting:
ideological (rather than electoral) pressure from the extremities, rivalry
between formations at the centre, difficulties within the dominant parties
(the UMP on the right and the PS on the left) riddled with splinter groups,
forced to seek allies and unsure about its leadership.
The cultural mortgage of ‘social state-ism’ has had a deep effect on
the two main moderate parties, the UMP and the UDF, whose liberalist
exponents seem only now to be emerging from a long silence and gaining a
hearing via that ‘great anomaly’ of French politics, Nicolas Sarkozy, who
has recently denounced that the French right has long been ‘under a
complex,’ culpably ‘going along with left-wing standard thinking.’ 15
Simplifying somewhat, there are two movements in the French right wing:
the liberals who favour decentralisation under Sarkozy’s lead, and the
12
François Furet et al., La République du centre: la fin de l'exception française (Paris:
Calmann-Lévy, 1988).
13
Michel Winock, La Fièvre hexagonale: les grandes crises politiques de 1871 à
1968 (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1986).
14
André Siegfried, Tableau des partis en France (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1930) and
François Goguel, Le régime politique français (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1955).
15
La Croix, "Villepin et Sarkozy, deux visions de la France", September 21, 2005.
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‘humanistes’ or ‘social’ current under Villepin, who has received President
Chirac’s official blessing, a gesture designed to discredit the renegade
dauphin and block the idea of ‘French-style Blairism.’ 16
In the opposite political camp the socialists weakened by the
difficulty of taking a stand on foreign policy in the face of Chirac’s
impeccable Iraqi dossier, imploded during the referendum campaign and
divided over the social issue, above all. Unlike the days of Mitterand, when
communists and socialists converged on a position of reformist equilibrium
à la Mendès France and Keynes, the left now shows signs of out-and-out
continental drift. Inside the socialist galaxy, split in two by the
referendum, the frictions of the past are coming to a head; the age-old
conflict is surfacing between the two ‘souls,’ reformist and hard-line. Right
from the times of Jaurès and Guesde, this cropped up at regular intervals
throughout the twentieth century: witness Blum against Déat and Faure
between the wars, Mayer versus Mollet in 1945, Rocard against Mitterand
at the end of the Seventies.17 It is still there to this day, as if reformism
hankers after social-democrat ideals and internationalism, while the hardline is grounded on a singular mixture of class struggle and nationalism.
The weak pact signed by the different socialist wings in Le Mans couldn’t
hide that the conference (18-20 November 2005) turned into yet another
round of score settling within the party, with an eye on the presidential.
History seems to be repeating itself with the showdown between Hollande
and Fabius, yet there is a historical difference. It concerns the fact that
socialist in-fighting in the past have always hinged on diverging views of
politics, whereas now they are divided in their lack of ideas. In an attempt
to escape from the European trend, through which social democracy 18 is
sliding to a position indistinguishable from the right, the archipelago of
the French gauche is asphyxiating in self-imposed inaction. The unions
doggedly criticise the French weaknesses and block all reform; the ultraleft dreams of halting globalisation, controlling the market and living
better while working less; and the reformists will not resign themselves to
Blairism, but cannot come up with alternatives.
Voting ‘No’ was beckoned as an option for those unconcerned with
future implications; it was likened to a basket gathering all the protest
generated by politics and how society is being run. France is not a tiny
village of Gauls besieged by Muslim or liberalist legions. The ‘No’ was a
gesture of refusal that packed little punch, not just because the Euro16
438.
17
Duo Caroli, "Deux clés pour la politique française", Commentaire, 110 (2005):
For deeper treatment see Claude Estier, Un combat centenaire: 1905-2005 :
histoire des socialistes français (Paris: Le Cherche Midi, 2005).
18
Pascal Delwit, Où va la socialdémocratie européenne? (Bruxelles: Editions de
l’Université de Bruxelles, 2004).
10
IN TE RN A T I O N AL P U BL I C P O L I CY R E VIE W
sceptics lacked the means to assuage the heartache they caused, but also
because it turned France into an onlooker. That was the worst service the
country could be rendered at a time when globalisation is calling for new
strategies of collective security in the economic, social and strategic fields.
The run-up to the presidential election, apart from the inevitable clash of
propaganda, will offer little chance of opening up a real liberal alternative
in a country, which has transformed a tradition more inclined to
governmentalism than nationalism into the ‘great anti-liberal power in the
European Union.’ 19 If France refuses to follow the British way, sacrificing
all thoughts of justice and social equality in favour of the market, it must
replace the present ‘ideological desert’ by an alternative model20 able to
win support and, more importantly, get results. France needs political
proposals – something quite different from today’s line-up, which looks at
the future in fear and pessimism, and thus opens doors to the politics of
resentment and anxiety. For a nation that claims to have roots in the
French Revolution – a truly universal event – the planetary provincialism
into which it is slowly sinking seems unpardonable nonsense.
REFERENCES
Bitterlich, Joachim. France – Allemagne: mission impossible? Comment
relancer la construction européenne. Paris: Albin Michel, 2005.
Blondel, Marc. "Le système français est le plus juste que je connaisse," Le
Point 1718 (2005): 50.
Caroli, Duo. " Deux clés pour la politique française," Commentaire 110
(2005): 438.
Delwit, Pascal. Où va la socialdémocratie européenne? Bruxelles:
Editions de l’Université de Bruxelles, 2004.
Estier, Claude. Un co mbat centenaire: 1905-2005: histoire des socialistes
français. Paris: Le Cherche Midi, 2005.
Ferry, Jean-Marc. "Face à la crise, quelles perspectives pour l’Union
européenne?" Politique etrangère, 3 (2005): 511-522.
Furet, François, Jacques Julliard, Pierre Rosanvallon. La République du
centre: la fin de l'exception française. Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1988.
Goguel, François. Le régime politique français. Paris: Editions du Seuil,
1955.
Julienne, Christian. Le diable est-il liberal? Paris: Belles Lettres, 2001.
Julliard, Jacques. Le Malheur français. Paris: Flammarion, 2005.
19
20
Libération, "La France, terre d’antilibéralisme", May 13, (2005).
Joachim Bitterlich, France – Allemagne: mission impossible? Comment
relancer la construction européenne (Paris: Albin Michel, 2005).
VOL. 2 ,
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1 — MAY 2 0 0 6
11
La Croix, "Villepin et Sarkozy, deux visions de la France," September 21,
2005.
Le Monde, "Reconstruire l’Europe au-delà du oui et du non," September 7,
2005.
Le Monde, "La France à son rang," September 13, 2005.
Libération, "La France, terre d’antilibéralisme," May 13, 2005.
Rosanvallon, Pierre. Le modèle politique français. La société civile contre
le jacobinisme de 1789 à nos jours. Paris: Le Seuil, 2004.
Rusconi, Gian Enrico. "Se cessiamo di essere Europa," Il Mulino 4 (2005):
617-618.
Sapir, André. ed. Europa, un’agenda per la crescita. Rapporto Sapir.
Bologna: il Mulino, 2004.
Siegfried, André. Tableau des partis en France. Paris: Bernard Grasset,
1930.
Winock, Michel. La Fièvre hexagonale: les grandes crises politiques de
1871 à 1968. Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1986.