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Politicus:
France's
power caste is tuned only to itself
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John Vinocur
International Herald Tribune
TUESDAY, JULY 12, 2005
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PARIS
What friend of France, wishing the republic well on Bastille Day - and
thinking of its no vote on a European constitution, its failed candidacy as
2012 Olympic host, and its sense of going nowhere as a wannabe world-player
- might not hope, this once, that the French power elite would go still on
the 14th of July, and just listen?
The issue is not the people, at home in a country that truly remains
exceptional in its beauty, style and ingenuity. Rather, the issue is large
parts of a leadership caste, so tuned only to itself, so played out, so
fearful of saying we've got to change our act, that it approaches autism.
The secretary general of Jacques Chirac's ruling conservative
party can say, very exceptionally, that he is fed up with the boss's
"socialistic monarchy," and Le Monde can write that the president
is "no longer a central element of European unity." But the country's
novice prime minister, Dominique de Villepin, decided a couple of weeks ago
(as if the referendum never took place) to send this hallucinatory message
to Europeans on France's
place in their lives:
"Never before have the peoples of Europe expressed with
so much force their hope to build a Europe
of values and determination. True to the continent's history and our vision
of the future, France
wants to advance with them along the path marked out by Jacques
Chirac."
The president himself, from the depths of a 77 percent
no-confidence rating in July's Le Figaro Magazine national poll, speaks to
the nation at midday on Thursday in a traditional exercise that's meant to
echo the cymbals and hoorahs of the morning's military parade down the
Champs-Élysées.
But what is he to say? That the economy will get better,
melting away French unemployment figures of 10 percent plus, although the
signposts point to more stagnation? That Europe looks to France for
a way out of its misery, when his audience knows Tony Blair has taken its
leadership in hand? Or that the country will defend the honor of its
"social model" against the locusts of Anglo-Saxon capitalism -
while somebody like Pierre Méhaignerie, once Chirac's justice minister,
insists this translates out to paying for 30,000 supplementary public
sector employees next year?
Of course, Chirac could insist what a fabulous job Villepin is
doing. Villepin has now proposed that Europe (as he says, rejecting petty
nationalisms "in the manner of France
and Germany")
adopt a kind of economic governance that would give politicians a lever
into the up-till-now independent European Central Bank.
In fact, France's
credibility for economic leadership in Europe
is nil.
Quite on their own, the French and Germans trampled the
European Union's Stability and Growth Pact when they couldn't hold the line
on its debt and deficit requirements. Because both countries ignored the
standards for economic reform contained in the EU's Lisbon Agenda, their
noncompliance became a demarcation line between members accepting the rough
edge of change or hiding in the no-growth status quo.
But where are the other mainstream French voices? In truth,
the opposition Socialist Party does not speak very differently from those
in power, loving the French social model and an imagined
French-place-in-the-world with a kind of passion more at home with myth
than reality. This is the autism of a political class whose greatest shared
conviction is a seeming notion that France can get away with
anything, as long as it listens only to itself.
People do notice. Bob Geldof, the poverty-appeal entrepreneur,
did. A few weeks ago, Geldof, who's Irish, told Time magazine:
"Actually, today I had to defend the Bush Administration in France
again. They refuse to accept, because of their political ideology, that he
has done more than any American president for Africa.
But it's empirically so."
More of the same reflexively closed French establishment mind
emerged when the International Olympic Committee's choice of a site in 2012
went to London
last week. Stupefaction was enormous here because the French Olympic
Committee, French politicians and the French media all agreed beforehand
that their application was the best. Against the fine instincts of a
supercharged delegation from the French power elite, any decision other
than Paris
by the rest of the world had to be malicious.
Yet even at its most incontestable, not much of the last
years' evidence of failure seems so obvious as to require a gentle rewrite
of the eternal, official Muzak on French "genius" and France's
"universal conscience."
Here's Philippe Douste-Blazy, a neophyte just sworn in as
foreign minister, going off 10 minutes later about how the world, by French
definition, is a multipolar place with Europe serving as a counterweight to
the United States.
No matter that France,
in rejecting the European Union's constitution, has lost any claim to
defining the EU's mission or European primacy, and the rest of Europe wants to take a pass on permanent confrontation
with the Americans.
No matter that in the Arab world, there are just traces now of
France's
onetime conceit that it held a special place of influence among Western
countries. The French are totally removed from the Israel-Palestinian peace
process, and in Lebanon,
they follow the U.S.
lead. As for Africa, Blair has left Chirac
in the dust to become the embodiment of the industrial world's concern for
its well-being.
Say all this in a gulp, pronounce the forbidden d-word for decline,
and if you're French, you can be labeled a defeatist or an agent of the
awful Anglo-Saxons. Still, the situation has become so obviously loopy that
Nicolas Sarkozy, a politician never troubled before by French pretensions
but who wants to be the next president, seems to think it worth the risk of
pointing out.
He said on Sunday: "I can't get around the idea of France
piling up the disappointments without stopping to ask if, just by chance,
it's not us who are wrong and the rest of the world that's right. If
everything the world does is bad and unfair and that everything we do
carries the seal of total genius? I'm calling for a tiny little critical
examination that won't hurt France's
image at all."
Should that approach, like stillness, be beyond reach or
official imagination on Bastille Day, a little general humbleness, call it
modesty, just might do for starters.
 Copyright
© 2005 The International Herald Tribune | www.iht.com
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