There was a time, not so long ago, when France played an undeniably leading role in the political construction of Europe. Of course, Europe was then perceived in Paris as the instrument to prolong “French Greatness” through other means.
Is France today playing the leading role again, but this time in Europe’s inexorable decline?
Of course, the French are not the only ones to take to the streets to demonstrate their frustrations with the long-delayed reform process. The Greeks are pretty good at it, too. And Italians and Spaniards, not to mention Belgians engaged in an irresponsible divorce — all are contributing their fair share to the process of decay.
Yet France remains a special case. The “Great Nation” — as she sees herself, and likes to remind smaller members of the European Union that she is, in case they have forgotten — plays a unique role both in objective and subjective terms.
For France is the inheritor of both the great statist tradition incarnated in the pomp and glory of “Versailles,” and the great historical moment that is its flip side, the “French Revolution.” Taken together, they form the power to constrain and the power to contest.
What is so remarkable in the present French maelstrom is how predictable it was in retrospect. The difficulty of reforming France — difficulty, not impossibility, for the reform process will probably go through, though at what cost we do not know — is the product of a series of “unfortunate encounters.”
The first encounter is constituted by the triangle between very weak trade unions, a very unpopular president and a largely irresponsible opposition.
Trade unions are desperate not to lose their base and are not so much leading as following, with the risk of behaving irresponsibly, while still not acting radically enough for the extremists.
Contrary to the British prime minister, David Cameron, who is new in office and governs in coalition with the Liberal Democrats, Nicolas Sarkozy appears used and rejected after only three years in power.
To say, as some of his propagandists do, that the French president is just a scapegoat for the opponents of reform is at best an exaggeration. Sarkozy has unnecessarily and irresponsibly contributed to his own self-isolation. He is rejected at least as much for his “essence” as for his incarnation of badly needed but highly unpopular reforms.
As for the opposition, it could have behaved in a united, clear and responsible manner. The least one can say is that it did not, preferring to play a populist wait-and-see game aimed at consolidating its own power rather than defending the long-term interests of the country.
The second “unfortunate encounter” is between the fear of the people and the cynicism of the elites. When one sees young high school student representatives on French television explaining why they take to the streets (in order to defend their own future pensions), one is seized by a deep sense of fatalism.
Their fear of the future, their lack of confidence in themselves, contrast sharply with the combination of energy and hope that characterize their young Chinese and Asians counterparts.
Instead of pondering how to rehabilitate the nobility of work, the French are calling it “exploitation,” and desperately defending their right to a second life — after work. Having abandoned any hope of changing their first life, they cling to the duration of the second one.
The problem is that the “fear of the people” is not contained or at least balanced by the pedagogic clarity and courage of the elites.
The elites have become so terribly cynical, and so visibly so, that it is difficult to believe them when they claim they are acting for the public good and not in defense of their own interests. Nicolas Sarkozy, whatever he says or does, will have difficulty being accepted as a modern-day Cincinnatus, ready to relinquish power to return to the noble serenity of private life after imposing the right reforms in his country.
And yet for a Frenchman who spends his life studying the complexities of the world, France remains a fascinating country. Nowhere else, it seems, is the contrast between the high quality of life and the moroseness of the citizens pushed to such an extreme.
The quality of public services — with the exception of education, which has been declining for some time — is remarkably high, from the health system to public transportation. And the quality of life in such a huge, diverse and rich country remains remarkable, even if France has become more of “a place to be” than a “place to do.”
A few days ago I had the opportunity to compare life in two emerging countries, traveling from Kazan, the capital of the autonomous republic of Tatarstan in Russia, to Marrakech in Morocco. Of course the living conditions there had nothing to do with France — in every sense of the term, life was far more difficult there than in this “Great Nation.” But the two emerging countries did have something else in common — a glimmer of hope.
This is not the case in France, a country that seems keen to cling to her “Gold Medal in Moroseness.”
Is this France a symbol and a factor of the broader European decline? Or is the problem something uniquely French, which stands in stark contrast with the other Big Nation, Germany, and provides a model of what Britain must avoid as it embarks on the path to reform?
Dominique Moïsi, senior adviser at the French Institute for International Relations (IFRI) and the author of The Geopolitics of Emotions.