HOME	Where the World's Views of America Come into Focus

By Guy Sorman*

June 9, 2005

Le Figaro - Home Page (French)    

In the 1980s, the world took a turn that the French missed: in Great Britain, the United States, the USSR, China, Brazil, Europe and Scandinavia, it was clear that the political-economic model of social-statism was exhausted. Originating in the great crisis of 1930, it produced vast bureaucratic states, nationalist ideologies and controlled economies. Societies were smothered. An alternative was offered: the liberal solution. It wasn’t new, but it proved efficient and fair.

In adopting it, the big developed countries revived growth and full employment. The poor of China, India or Brazil pulled themselves out of misery. In France too, the liberal solution was considered; at the end of the 1970s, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing and Raymond Barre turned us toward this new track to bring us up to speed with the rest of the world.

Alas, Mitterand was elected in 1981 in a time when he himself said the ideas he incarnated were no longer up to date. The modernization of the state and the liberalization of the economy were thus frozen for fourteen years. Time marched on without us. Ever since, France has gone forward two times slower, with twice as much unemployment as comparable Western economies.

Apart from the electoral discord (Mitterand in France versus Thatcher in Great Britain and Reagan in the United States), a single local reason has always made our conversion to the liberal solution difficult. Due to the numerical importance of the public sector, a quarter of employees have no interest in an evolution away from the statist model they so benefit from. The political class, for its part, has little interest in alienating this core part of the electorate, without which no one could come to power or stay there very long.

Clearly the public discourse will never mention its mediocre benefits but dresses them up in noble terms: public service French style! It is necessary that the model be national to dissimulate its trivial nature. Belonging nearly entirely to the public sector, the talking class – the one that monopolizes education, public discourse and political commentary – spends its time disqualifying the liberal solution as being Anglo-Saxon.

This is a horror and a historical error. French liberalism contributed greatly to France’s intellectual influence and prosperity, from Turgot to Raymond Aron. Go explain to the Chinese, the Polish and the Indians that they have been Anglo-Saxon ever since they joined the market economy!

The liberal solution, no more Anglo-Saxon than socialism was Russian, is a humanism that espouses national cultures. A French government that links itself with the liberal solution (as Edouard Balladur successfully did in 1986) does not become less French, and it would finally adopt a strategy coherent with the ambitions it displays.

Employment? It grows only as a function of world growth, which we haven’t mastered, with the European market that we have partially mastered, and with labor regulations that we have completely mastered. For a given level of world growth (determined largely by the United States, whose good health is to our advantage), the government can thus act on employment by further integrating into Europe. Thus the Bolkestein directive, which calls for increasing our export markets, is favorable to employment.

The most efficient purely national action on employment would be partial deregulation of the labor market. What we know but don’t say loud enough is that the current rules, which are excellent for those who already have a job, guarantee that those who don’t won’t find one. Unskilled young people and children of immigrants are victims of this corporatism that exacerbates unemployment and the inequality of opportunity.

Why don’t governments dare to try? One explanation has to do with the short time frame of politics and the long time frame of economics. A government that has at most two or three years can deny the decline because it is slow. We are descending by parachute. The European market protects us from American or Asian competition. The globalization of large companies feeds cities with profits reaped elsewhere and the euro keeps us from falling into inflation. The current generation will not suffer the decline: It is the next generation that will suffer all the bad effects.

Let us imagine all the same that, like Blair or Schroeder, the government were to adopt the liberal solution. It would suffer the unpleasant consequences, public sector strikes and insults from academics. But aren’t these already happening?

The effects on employment? They would be beneficial, but not for two or three years: This is the slow pace of economics, a thankless science. The government would probably be gone before its policies generated benefits, but it would have saved the country by bringing us into the universal economic model. Breaking this taboo of a French model could provoke ungratefulness more than reelection. But, certain precedents come to mind, when truth came before ambition: Georges Clemenceau, Charles de Gaulle, Jacques Delors, Raymond Barre.

* Essayiste.