Une Certaine Idée

A wolf in sheep's clothing

2006-08-08T23:38:00.000+02:00

Le Monde publishes a short interview with Eric Labaye of McKinsey (the management consultants) in which Labaye decries

France

’s lack of vision in facing globalisation.

Labaye thinks that France is at its nadir, and that reforms are moving forward sluggishly.

The root of the problem is a lack of education in economics, Labaye believes: only a third of French people accept the market’s right to exist; the rest scorn it.

Meanwhile, companies are attracted by France’s technological know how but turned off by its introspection and inflexible labour laws.

Labaye is hopeful, however: France has always known how to adapt, often through crisis. All that’s needed is well-channelled energy.

The man from McKinsey could have been, shall we say, more punchy.

“Adapting to challenges through crisis” is really shorthand for sporadic social upset, occasional loss of sovereignty and frequent bloodshed.

On the other hand, convincing France that market economics are a good idea is like converting Iran to Judaism. It won’t happen overnight. France is a deeply conservative country in which entitlements, once acquired, are sacrosanct.

What Labaye should really be calling for is someone who can, with time, explain carefully why spiralling debt and deficits can’t go on forever.

Or a wolf in sheep’s clothing, someone pretending to be a socialist, who can stealthily foist market ideas onto the French population (as Blair did to Old Labour).

What France doesn’t need is arrogant leaders who drive through reforms without discussing them first, and then wonder what hit them when people rebel.

The problem is, France doesn’t have much time and do the right people exist?

Douste Blah-Blah

2006-08-07T21:26:00.000+02:00

It’s a wonderful thing that, after a long absence,

France

can once again help sort out a dangerous and bloody conflict.

But it’s a pity that the man spearheading that effort is foreign minister Philippe Douste-Blazy.

Last week, he described Iran as a “great country, a great people and a great civilisation which is respected and which plays a stabilising role in the region,” a little odd given that the French government along with the Germans, British and Americans has been trying to disarm the rogue state.

One senior diplomatic official in Jerusalem said Douste-Blazy's comments should earn him the “Hugo prize for science fiction. What planet is he on? It's not Planet Earth if he thinks Iran is a stabilising force.”

When they met, Ehud Olmert, prime minister of Israel, described Douste-Blazy as “very charming” and that they would easily see eye-to-eye on…football.

Douste-Blazy is not, you could safely say, the best qualified man for the job. He doesn’t speak any foreign languages, not even English, which is a bit of a handicap for a foreign minister nowadays.

On occasions he has confused Taiwan with Thailand, Croatia with Kosovo, and has made lots of other gaffs including this delightful one.

It’s no wonder that Chirac has a civil servant follow Douste-Blazy ready to record any cock-ups.

His experience as a country doctor in the Pyrenees mountains in the southwest of France hasn’t exactly prepared him for his variegated brief, unless of course his secretary is feeling under the weather.

Speaking of whom, she has also been doing her bit to advance Franco-American understanding.

On the Friday of our last bank holiday weekend, Douste-Blazy was relaxing at his home near Lourdes, when a phone call from an American woman disturbed the peace.

Douste-Blazy’s secretary, a little uneasy in English, informed the great man that there was “some English-speaking woman by the name of Weiss or Race or Zeiss” on the phone, and that should she put her through?

Douste-Blazy, who after years practising medicine knows the importance of a proper work-life balance, told his secretary that, no, he would call back on Tuesday. And being a polite man, he did.

Monkeys and worms

2006-08-07T01:49:00.000+02:00

At the end of the end of the World Cup two football giants left the pitch ignominiously, a Brit limping and blubbing, a Frenchman expelled for headbutting an Italian.

Next year, two other erstwhile stars retire. In doing so, Blair and Chirac will confirm Enoch Powell's dictum that "all political careers end in failure."

It's difficult to decide who is more execrable.

My own French friends would almost unanimously plump for Chirac. Untreated Blair spin spores have somehow wafted over the Channel.

The English would be more even-handed, either in a spirit of fair play or, more likely, after years of reading anti-Chirac xenophobic vitriol churned out by the tabloids.

I can't make up my mind.

When Chirac became president some thought he would be too much of a chien fou (crazy dog), an unpredictable, pure political opportunist with a sometimes shady past.

But after the dreary end of the Mitterand years, Chirac's pledge to mend the "social fracture" was appealing.

In the end, the gap between promise and outcome was large.

During Chirac's reign, France has shed its position as one of the top five world economies, economic growth has been lacklustre, and unemployment has stayed stubbornly high.

Last year mostly immigrant hoodlums torched cars in weeks of rioting. This year students staged often violent protests against laws designed to shake up the labour market.

Gilded French youths leave their grandes ecoles to take up well paid jobs in New York or London, many of them never to return.

Attempts at reform have been cowardly, and France's public debt is spiralling out of control in a manner akin to that of some emerging markets ten years ago.

On the foreign policy front things are just as bad.

Although the latest French role in Lebanon is encouraging, it is the swansong of an approach that lost France its Great Power status, above all in Europe, besides alienating the US in the manner of its resistance to the Iraq War.

People do laud Chirac for his attacks against racism, but these didn't stop far-right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen reaching the second round of 2002's presidential elections, a feat which may be repeated next year. Only one or two Arabs or blacks can be found in token positions of economic or political power.

Chirac's end may not be pleasant. Investigating judges are probably sharpening their knives for the day he loses presidential immunity from prosecution.

Across the Channel, Blair also scores highly in execrableness.

When elected in 1997 Blair exuded a kind of smarmy charm, labelled charisma at the time, that made a change from his predecessor's dullness.

He proclaimed that he was a "just a straight kind of guy" and shamelessly appropriated aspects of the lurid, emotional aftermath of Princess Diana's death.

What has he really achieved? He inherited a vibrant, deregulated economy and along with his finance minister has wound up British business in red tape.

Education reforms have failed to stem the inexorable dumbing down of Britain. The Home Office (interior and justice ministry) is going through its worst crisis for generations.

As for foreign policy, read this excerpt from an article in the Financial Times by Sir Roderick Braithwaite, sometime UK ambassador to Moscow, head spy and foreign policy wonk.

Mr Blair’s prime responsibility is to defend the interests of his own country. This he has signally failed to do. Stiff in his opinions, but often in the wrong, he has manipulated public opinion, sent our soldiers into distant lands for ill-conceived purposes, misused the intelligence agencies to serve his ends and reduced the Foreign Office to a demoralised cipher because it keeps reminding him of inconvenient facts. He keeps the dog, but he barely notices if it barks or not. He prefers to construct his "foreign policy" out of self-righteous soundbites and expensive foreign travel.

Mr Blair has done more damage to British interests in the Middle East than Anthony Eden, who led the UK to disaster in Suez 50 years ago. In the past 100 years – to take the highlights – we have bombed and occupied Egypt and Iraq, put down an Arab uprising in Palestine and overthrown governments in Iran, Iraq and the Gulf. We can no longer do these things on our own, so we do them with the Americans. Mr Blair’s total identification with the White House has destroyed his influence in Washington, Europe and the Middle East itself: who bothers with the monkey if he can go straight to the organ-grinder?

For supporters of the war like me it has been especially difficult to stomach Blair's craven failure to extract a decent payback for British support or to influence meaningfully the conduct of postwar reconstruction.

Blair and Chirac will step down next year, Blair restless and bored on the rubber chicken lecture circuit, Chirac to an old age troubled by the irksome consequences of past scrapes with the law.

I can't decide who is worse. Sadly, and more importantly, I don't know if their successors will be any better.

Ex Libris

2006-08-04T00:21:00.000+02:00

You don’t just have to have been to the dreaded Ecole Nationale d’Administration (ENA), to get to the top in French politics. You also have to run off a few tomes, as an article in last week’s Economist points out.

Many French politicos have been prolific scribblers. Prime minister De Villepin wrote eight books on subjects as diverse as poetry and Napoleon, several whilst holding public office.

“MAM” (Defence Minister Michèle Alliot-Marie), has also been pounding the keyboard lately, as have all the top beasts in Socialist Jurassic Park.

Nicolas Sarkozy, interior minister and presidential candidate for 2007, has just published a book that seems as full of vapid guff as the others.

What’s more, le Canard Enchaîné, France’s leading satirical newspaper, accuses him of channel stuffing. He apparently sent unwanted copies to bookshops, billed for them so as to inflate sales, and will pay back shopkeepers for unshifted stock only months later.

This is standard practice according to the Canard.

Still, if the Economist is right, over a third of French people claim to read political books at least occasionally.

This is a staggering figure, compared to England, where revealing intellectual tendencies is like coming out of the closet and no politicians write whilst in office.

Israel / Lebanon

2006-08-04T00:11:00.000+02:00

Although not directly connected to France, I think this comment is excellent. It comes from Greed and Fear written by Chris Wood, investment strategist at CLSA in Hong Kong.

The recent bounce in stocks has also occurred in the context of continuing grim newsflow from the Middle East. The usual chattering classes have been busy condemning Israel’s disproportionate reaction while ignoring the reality that the Hezbollah missiles are deliberately launched from residential areas.

The realpolitic of the situation is that Israel has no choice but to respond in the toughest way. Anything else will be interpreted as an admission of weakness in the Arab world.

But the really grim newsflow from the Middle East is not from Lebanon but from Iraq. Reading detailed accounts of the sectarian strife going on in that unfortunate country is truly shocking.

Still it is hard to find such accounts, with one or two honourable exceptions such as The New York Times, because Iraq has disappeared from the headlines because massacres of Sunnis by Shiites, or the other way round, are no longer news as most people would rather read about various nauseating celebrities.

GREED & fear does not want to get into the rights and wrongs on Iraq since it is fundamentally a rather sterile debate, revealing more about proponents. own particular political prejudices than what is good or bad for that country.

The point for investors to note is that, based on the current trend, the Bush administration will be soon having to contemplate a formal partition of the place. Still such an outcome is still not inevitable. The sectarian strife is apparently restricted to only three out of Iraq’s 18 provinces while the Iraqi currency, the dinar, has been stable so far this year. So George Bush Jnr should try to keep his nerve.

Meanwhile, there is one political positive from a Western standpoint coming out of the current mayhem. That is that the growing spectacle of Sunni-Shiite strife in the region raises the potential for that old colonial game of playing divide and rule. But does Washington have the necessary diplomatic expertise?

To ALL France's glories

2006-08-03T07:33:00.000+02:00

France

is a perplexing and challenging place. To understand just how much, stand in front of the Palace of Versailles.

With your back to the Avenue de Paris, flanked on both sides by royal stables that exactly mirror one another, a dramatic vista will greet you.

In front, beyond the vast carpark packed with overweight tourists and trash-peddling Senegalese, through the iron and gilt gates and amid a wide, cobbled drive, stands a towering statue of the Sun King, Louis XIV, astride a rampant charger.

Behind him, further up and funnelled between two giant, jutting wings of the Palace lies a black and white marble-paved courtyard on whose far side is the Hall of Mirrors.

At sunset, bolts of sunshine are beamed through the building down the avenue.

Something ain’t quite right however. Written at the end of each abutting wing are the words “A TOUTES LES GLOIRES DE LA FRANCE” (To all France’s Glories) in huge Roman letters.

It’s pretty obvious that any country that can build a wonder such as the Palace of Versailles must have had its fair share of gloires, so why deface the marvel to restate the fact?

Also, why write “toutes” (all) the gloires? Why not just write “Aux gloires de la France”?

Was Versailles’ graffiti artist concerned that certain gloires would get missed out? If so, which ones?