France is a Basket-Case, Says Everyone (Apparently)
Alex Higgins
April 29, 2007
If you’ve never read an article in the US or British press about the state of the French economy, society and body politic, you should read one. And only one. Because when you’ve read one, you have pretty much read them all.
In fact, to do you a favour, one sentence should just about cover it. Charles Trueheart, writing for the fine US current affairs and literary journal, ‘The Atlantic’, begins an article on French Socialist Party candidate Segolene Royal like this:
France is mired in an antiquated economic and social system, overtaxed and overregulated, underemployed, congenitally immobile when not sporadically violent.”
There you have it. You can read all day about France without ever coming across a different perspective.
France has high unemployment, which has remained at a steady 8% for more than a decade. For young people it is even worse, with a 22% youth unemployment rate. Growth rates are lower than in most of its neighbours, and the national debt higher. France’s ethnic minorities are largely marginalised and subject to discrimination in employment and poor social conditions, the central factor in the countrywide riots of the autumn of 2005.
These factors combine to create both a sense that France is in trouble and that major changes in social and economic policy are required - a sense of unease that all the major presidential candidates have made a part of their rhetoric.
In London, Washington and New York, the analysis of France is simple and unchanging. France suffers because it has failed to make its economy more like those of the USA and Britain. This failure is the result both of the French public who suffer from the “delusion” (to quote 'The Economist') that their distinctive social policies aren’t rubbish, and from the cowardice of their political class too gutless to lay out to the French public just how deluded they are. 'The Economist' concludes, more in sorrow than in anger:
The choice belongs to France. A bold effort at renewal that could unleash the best in the French? Or a stubborn defence of the existing order that will keep France a middling world power in economic decline? The latter would inspire neither admiration, nor terror, nor hatred, nor indifference, just pity.”
That was written this time last year, but this year’s analysis hasn’t changed. Newsweek’s Rana Foroohar diagnosed the French disease thus:
The causes are well known: An artificially high minimum wage, which discourages companies from creating new jobs. A two-tiered labor system in which its nearly impossible for younger, less-qualified workers to find secure employment. High payroll taxes and regulatory red tape that make it extremely difficult to start and run new businesses.”
These things continue because of “a magical thinking” and “an article of faith” among Europeans in general and the French in particular. Foroohar continued, “the statistics speak for themselves…” which may be true, but not leaving anything to chance, she chose her statistics from a narrow range of topics.
The US and British press are sometimes a little circumspect about the kind of change and reform they are always urging, but what they mean is France needs a government that will dismantle workers’ rights legislation, hammer the unions, slash the welfare budget, give tax breaks to foreign companies and extend the working day. Occasionally, it is acknowledged that such changes will be “painful” ('The Economist' again), but necessary. They are usually very vague about who these measures will actually cause pain to, and who they will help, for good reason.
No opportunity is allowed to pass - if a tree falls down in France, the demands for such a neoliberal economic transformation are heard immediately. During the riots of 2005, Newsweek declared on its cover, with burning Parisian streets in the background: “Memo to Europe: Ready to Change Now?”
Needless to say, few mainstream US commentators appreciate such patronising gloating when directed at the US by the European media. Inside, 'Newsweek' recommended in three separate articles changes in employment laws and a shift towards the US economic model. There was no disagreement or expression of any alternative views. Quite how or why US-style employment laws would prevent riots is left to the imagination.
Forward a couple of years and 'TIME' magazine has a cover story on why so many young French people are leaving the country for places like London. The reason of course, is that France is so awful.
That might be something of an unfair simplification of their argument – but not nearly as unfair as their constant, one-note denigration and caricature of France.
Apparently, much of the US and British press are just incapable of acknowledging the existence of any other perspective on the French economy except maybe to deplore their delusions and Gallic pride. But as many serious problems as the country has, the image of a France in crisis and a superior US-British model is the product of a very partial selection of economic and social data.
Virtually all indicators of living standards put France ahead of Britain and the US. Infant mortality in France is 4.26 per 1,000 live births (compared to 5.16 in the UK – greater than the EU average of 5.1 and 6.5 in the USA). Life expectancy in France is 79.6 years – compared with 78.38 for the British and 77.71 for the US. In UNICEF’s assessment of the well-being of children and young people in developed countries, France did not fare especially well – but by some considerable margin, Britain ranked rock bottom, just below, of course, the United States.
Poverty in France has fallen by 60% in the last thirty years – a staggering contrast with the US and Britain, where it has risen substantially since the 1970s, with limited periods of decline during the Clinton administration and Blair governments. 6.1% of the French population lived in poverty in 2001 – in the US it is rarely less than twice that, and usually more. That is without considering the fact that France has a stricter definition of poverty than the US.
The US has the worst level of hardship for its poorest of any developed country. Except Britain, where poverty exceeds that of its former colony, Ireland, and where the child poverty beats the competition. The dynamic economy of the city of London, so celebrated on both sides of the Atlantic and by TIME’s French entrepreneurs has a majority of its minors living below the poverty line:
Forty-one per cent of children in Greater London are in poverty, compared with 31% nationally and 37% in the north-east. This is largely due to unparalleled levels of poverty in inner London: 53% of children in inner London are living in income poverty.”
French babies survive more often than ours, they go on to live longer lives, with greater happiness and freedom from material hardship. Is this worth a mention, at least somewhere in any of the coverage of France in the Anglo-American press? The fact that these figures are almost always ignored says a lot about the priorities of those who stand in judgment of France and indeed, say they pity it.
How about instead of mocking France from across the Channel and the Atlantic, we take time to consider those abysmal social stats of ours? Instead of laughing at the French, we might just feel a twinge of embarrassment and shame. We might also spot a few answers to our pundits’ eternal conundrum of why so much of the French population doesn’t want the changes we recommend.
Famously, French workers do a 35-hour week which remains popular because it gives workers the chance to spend time with their families and generally enjoy life outside of the workplace. Newsweek’s International Editor Fareed Zakaria - an often more insightful commentator - describes “the dreary work environment in French companies” while an 'Economist' editorial sees “a chilling lack of ambition” in the fact that most young people in France want a secure job for life. Well, everyone is entitled to their opinion, but another view of what makes life dreary for American and British workers, and has a chilling effect on their families, is the fact that they work more hours than all their counterparts in the developed world. Zakaria wrote:
The average Frenchman works 24 percent fewer hours than in 1970. The average American, by contrast, works 20 percent more.”
Excellent point, except Zakaria thinks it’s a good thing that American workers have had more of their time taken away from them (and for lower wages).
Take even the riots. The widespread destruction of cars and property by the young men of the banlieus that rocked France for two weeks in 2005 did reveal an ongoing legacy of unemployment, poverty and racism. But they also had a combined death toll of zero. Compare that with, say, the riots in LA in 1992, in which 54 people were killed by looters, rioters and the police.
Did the US political class courageously take on the issues brought to the surface by this outburst of destruction and violence? Not unless you count President George Bush I’s visit where he made a speech of official resolution, as his son would in New Orleans 14 years later, before both disappeared back to the life to which they are accustomed.
And to continue on the subject of the “sporadically violent” French. Out of every 100,000 people, in the last year of available figures, an average of 1.64 French people were victims of murder – in Britain the number was 2.03. In the USA, it was 5.9 - still at the level of a humanitarian disaster, after a decade of falling crime rates and despite a voracious penal system that has consumed over 2 million Americans. Gun massacres are weak social indicators, but it is topical and perhaps worth noting in passing the fact that events like the Hungerford, Dunblane, Wichita, Columbine, Red Lake High School, Goleta Postal, Capitol Hill, Nickel Mines, Trolley Square and Virginia Tech massacres do not have any French equivalents.
French social life may be less dysfunctional, and French capitalism isn’t really gagging either. France is criticised for its lack of entrepreneurship and social mobility – Rana Foroohar actually wrote that social mobility in Europe “had stalled”. This is pretty staggering given that social mobility in Britain and the US is significantly more frozen than in Western Europe. Researchers at the London School of Economics found that:
"[S]ocial mobility in Britain is much lower than in other advanced countries and that it is declining", and "put the UK and the US at the bottom of a social mobility league table of eight European and North American countries".
Perhaps such off-base criticism of the French model is the origin of the urban legend in which George Bush declares that, “the problem with the French is they have no word for entrepreneur”. Bush didn’t really say that, but US media pundits have come close. Meanwhile, as the 'New Statesman' noted last week, “the companies on the French CAC 40 stock-market index have pulled in record profits.”
There is plenty that is wrong with France, but it’s highly questionable whether France is in a worse state than its leading detractors in the developed world. The constant barrage of clichés in press coverage of French politics here and in the US is a lazy act of groupthink on the part of our hacks at best, and at worst a mendacious and determined pursuit of a very particular and rightly unpopular economic agenda, rather blatantly reflecting the class interests of the authors.
The changes in France they want won’t be painful for them, but they will be painful for the poorest, just as they were in Michigan and Yorkshire.
References and links:
The Royal Oui?’, Charles Trueheart, ‘The Atlantic’, March 2007
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200703/trueheart-france
France Faces the Future’, Leader, ‘The Economist’, April 1st, 2006
http://www.economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm?story_id=6744226
It’s About Jobs’, Rana Foroohar, ‘Newsweek International’, November 21st, 2005
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10018664/site/newsweek/
The French Exodus’, Peter Gumbel, ‘TIME’, April 5th, 2007
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1606909-2,00.html
Capital of Child Poverty’, Declan Gaffney, ‘The Guardian’, November 19th, 2002
http://society.guardian.co.uk/socialexclusion/story/0,,843075,00.html
(More recent figures suggest child poverty in London is lower than this, though still shockingly high: http://www.londoncouncils.gov.uk/doc.asp?doc=16740)
Europe Needs a New Identity’, Fareed Zakaria, ‘Newsweek International’, November 21st, 2005
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10019771/site/newsweek/
UK low in social mobility league, says charity’, Matthew Taylor, ‘The Guardian’, April 25th, 2005
http://www.guardian.co.uk/britain/article/0,2763,1469685,00.html
Other statistics come from the CIA World Factbook and the French INSEE
In fact, to do you a favour, one sentence should just about cover it. Charles Trueheart, writing for the fine US current affairs and literary journal, ‘The Atlantic’, begins an article on French Socialist Party candidate Segolene Royal like this:
France is mired in an antiquated economic and social system, overtaxed and overregulated, underemployed, congenitally immobile when not sporadically violent.”
There you have it. You can read all day about France without ever coming across a different perspective.
France has high unemployment, which has remained at a steady 8% for more than a decade. For young people it is even worse, with a 22% youth unemployment rate. Growth rates are lower than in most of its neighbours, and the national debt higher. France’s ethnic minorities are largely marginalised and subject to discrimination in employment and poor social conditions, the central factor in the countrywide riots of the autumn of 2005.
These factors combine to create both a sense that France is in trouble and that major changes in social and economic policy are required - a sense of unease that all the major presidential candidates have made a part of their rhetoric.
In London, Washington and New York, the analysis of France is simple and unchanging. France suffers because it has failed to make its economy more like those of the USA and Britain. This failure is the result both of the French public who suffer from the “delusion” (to quote 'The Economist') that their distinctive social policies aren’t rubbish, and from the cowardice of their political class too gutless to lay out to the French public just how deluded they are. 'The Economist' concludes, more in sorrow than in anger:
The choice belongs to France. A bold effort at renewal that could unleash the best in the French? Or a stubborn defence of the existing order that will keep France a middling world power in economic decline? The latter would inspire neither admiration, nor terror, nor hatred, nor indifference, just pity.”
That was written this time last year, but this year’s analysis hasn’t changed. Newsweek’s Rana Foroohar diagnosed the French disease thus:
The causes are well known: An artificially high minimum wage, which discourages companies from creating new jobs. A two-tiered labor system in which its nearly impossible for younger, less-qualified workers to find secure employment. High payroll taxes and regulatory red tape that make it extremely difficult to start and run new businesses.”
These things continue because of “a magical thinking” and “an article of faith” among Europeans in general and the French in particular. Foroohar continued, “the statistics speak for themselves…” which may be true, but not leaving anything to chance, she chose her statistics from a narrow range of topics.
The US and British press are sometimes a little circumspect about the kind of change and reform they are always urging, but what they mean is France needs a government that will dismantle workers’ rights legislation, hammer the unions, slash the welfare budget, give tax breaks to foreign companies and extend the working day. Occasionally, it is acknowledged that such changes will be “painful” ('The Economist' again), but necessary. They are usually very vague about who these measures will actually cause pain to, and who they will help, for good reason.
No opportunity is allowed to pass - if a tree falls down in France, the demands for such a neoliberal economic transformation are heard immediately. During the riots of 2005, Newsweek declared on its cover, with burning Parisian streets in the background: “Memo to Europe: Ready to Change Now?”
Needless to say, few mainstream US commentators appreciate such patronising gloating when directed at the US by the European media. Inside, 'Newsweek' recommended in three separate articles changes in employment laws and a shift towards the US economic model. There was no disagreement or expression of any alternative views. Quite how or why US-style employment laws would prevent riots is left to the imagination.
Forward a couple of years and 'TIME' magazine has a cover story on why so many young French people are leaving the country for places like London. The reason of course, is that France is so awful.
That might be something of an unfair simplification of their argument – but not nearly as unfair as their constant, one-note denigration and caricature of France.
Apparently, much of the US and British press are just incapable of acknowledging the existence of any other perspective on the French economy except maybe to deplore their delusions and Gallic pride. But as many serious problems as the country has, the image of a France in crisis and a superior US-British model is the product of a very partial selection of economic and social data.
Virtually all indicators of living standards put France ahead of Britain and the US. Infant mortality in France is 4.26 per 1,000 live births (compared to 5.16 in the UK – greater than the EU average of 5.1 and 6.5 in the USA). Life expectancy in France is 79.6 years – compared with 78.38 for the British and 77.71 for the US. In UNICEF’s assessment of the well-being of children and young people in developed countries, France did not fare especially well – but by some considerable margin, Britain ranked rock bottom, just below, of course, the United States.
Poverty in France has fallen by 60% in the last thirty years – a staggering contrast with the US and Britain, where it has risen substantially since the 1970s, with limited periods of decline during the Clinton administration and Blair governments. 6.1% of the French population lived in poverty in 2001 – in the US it is rarely less than twice that, and usually more. That is without considering the fact that France has a stricter definition of poverty than the US.
The US has the worst level of hardship for its poorest of any developed country. Except Britain, where poverty exceeds that of its former colony, Ireland, and where the child poverty beats the competition. The dynamic economy of the city of London, so celebrated on both sides of the Atlantic and by TIME’s French entrepreneurs has a majority of its minors living below the poverty line:
Forty-one per cent of children in Greater London are in poverty, compared with 31% nationally and 37% in the north-east. This is largely due to unparalleled levels of poverty in inner London: 53% of children in inner London are living in income poverty.”
French babies survive more often than ours, they go on to live longer lives, with greater happiness and freedom from material hardship. Is this worth a mention, at least somewhere in any of the coverage of France in the Anglo-American press? The fact that these figures are almost always ignored says a lot about the priorities of those who stand in judgment of France and indeed, say they pity it.
How about instead of mocking France from across the Channel and the Atlantic, we take time to consider those abysmal social stats of ours? Instead of laughing at the French, we might just feel a twinge of embarrassment and shame. We might also spot a few answers to our pundits’ eternal conundrum of why so much of the French population doesn’t want the changes we recommend.
Famously, French workers do a 35-hour week which remains popular because it gives workers the chance to spend time with their families and generally enjoy life outside of the workplace. Newsweek’s International Editor Fareed Zakaria - an often more insightful commentator - describes “the dreary work environment in French companies” while an 'Economist' editorial sees “a chilling lack of ambition” in the fact that most young people in France want a secure job for life. Well, everyone is entitled to their opinion, but another view of what makes life dreary for American and British workers, and has a chilling effect on their families, is the fact that they work more hours than all their counterparts in the developed world. Zakaria wrote:
The average Frenchman works 24 percent fewer hours than in 1970. The average American, by contrast, works 20 percent more.”
Excellent point, except Zakaria thinks it’s a good thing that American workers have had more of their time taken away from them (and for lower wages).
Take even the riots. The widespread destruction of cars and property by the young men of the banlieus that rocked France for two weeks in 2005 did reveal an ongoing legacy of unemployment, poverty and racism. But they also had a combined death toll of zero. Compare that with, say, the riots in LA in 1992, in which 54 people were killed by looters, rioters and the police.
Did the US political class courageously take on the issues brought to the surface by this outburst of destruction and violence? Not unless you count President George Bush I’s visit where he made a speech of official resolution, as his son would in New Orleans 14 years later, before both disappeared back to the life to which they are accustomed.
And to continue on the subject of the “sporadically violent” French. Out of every 100,000 people, in the last year of available figures, an average of 1.64 French people were victims of murder – in Britain the number was 2.03. In the USA, it was 5.9 - still at the level of a humanitarian disaster, after a decade of falling crime rates and despite a voracious penal system that has consumed over 2 million Americans. Gun massacres are weak social indicators, but it is topical and perhaps worth noting in passing the fact that events like the Hungerford, Dunblane, Wichita, Columbine, Red Lake High School, Goleta Postal, Capitol Hill, Nickel Mines, Trolley Square and Virginia Tech massacres do not have any French equivalents.
French social life may be less dysfunctional, and French capitalism isn’t really gagging either. France is criticised for its lack of entrepreneurship and social mobility – Rana Foroohar actually wrote that social mobility in Europe “had stalled”. This is pretty staggering given that social mobility in Britain and the US is significantly more frozen than in Western Europe. Researchers at the London School of Economics found that:
"[S]ocial mobility in Britain is much lower than in other advanced countries and that it is declining", and "put the UK and the US at the bottom of a social mobility league table of eight European and North American countries".
Perhaps such off-base criticism of the French model is the origin of the urban legend in which George Bush declares that, “the problem with the French is they have no word for entrepreneur”. Bush didn’t really say that, but US media pundits have come close. Meanwhile, as the 'New Statesman' noted last week, “the companies on the French CAC 40 stock-market index have pulled in record profits.”
There is plenty that is wrong with France, but it’s highly questionable whether France is in a worse state than its leading detractors in the developed world. The constant barrage of clichés in press coverage of French politics here and in the US is a lazy act of groupthink on the part of our hacks at best, and at worst a mendacious and determined pursuit of a very particular and rightly unpopular economic agenda, rather blatantly reflecting the class interests of the authors.
The changes in France they want won’t be painful for them, but they will be painful for the poorest, just as they were in Michigan and Yorkshire.
References and links:
The Royal Oui?’, Charles Trueheart, ‘The Atlantic’, March 2007
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200703/trueheart-france
France Faces the Future’, Leader, ‘The Economist’, April 1st, 2006
http://www.economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm?story_id=6744226
It’s About Jobs’, Rana Foroohar, ‘Newsweek International’, November 21st, 2005
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10018664/site/newsweek/
The French Exodus’, Peter Gumbel, ‘TIME’, April 5th, 2007
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1606909-2,00.html
Capital of Child Poverty’, Declan Gaffney, ‘The Guardian’, November 19th, 2002
http://society.guardian.co.uk/socialexclusion/story/0,,843075,00.html
(More recent figures suggest child poverty in London is lower than this, though still shockingly high: http://www.londoncouncils.gov.uk/doc.asp?doc=16740)
Europe Needs a New Identity’, Fareed Zakaria, ‘Newsweek International’, November 21st, 2005
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10019771/site/newsweek/
UK low in social mobility league, says charity’, Matthew Taylor, ‘The Guardian’, April 25th, 2005
http://www.guardian.co.uk/britain/article/0,2763,1469685,00.html
Other statistics come from the CIA World Factbook and the French INSEE
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