The Hindu Business Line : Shrugging it off, a la France

Whatever your preference, you can never go wrong with a French Burgundy. Last week, I was at Dijon, the age-old capital of Burgundy, in France — one-time hang-out of the dukes of Burgundy, who were among the richest people in the late Middle Ages and who bestowed on the city a dazzling legacy of art, goldsmithy, and tapestry.

For a strict vegetarian like me, it has to be delightful Burgundy red, from the pinot noir grape, paired superlatively with lots of green salad, Dijon mustard, goat cheese and a long thin loaf of French bagutte bread. The bistro's plasma television was blaring. The two remaining French presidential candidates — Nicolas Sarkozy and Segolene Royal — were holding a 140-minute live debate. I was among an audience of about 20 million people around the globe who watched the only face-to-face televised debate between Royal and Sarkozy in the campaign, that had started in a plausibly chivalrous manner two months ago. Evidently, it has now degenerated into a punch-up. For those of you familiar with René Goscinny's `Astérix the Gaul', the television debate looked like a rural community fight where any beneath-the-buckle kick is considered `even-handed' in order to slander or hammer your challenger over the cranium!

As I write, 50 million people have registered to cast their ballot at the second round of polls on Sunday, May 6. As you read this, you may already have the outcome of the French presidential elections.

In the fray

The candidate of the Socialist party, Segolene Royal, 53, hopes to become the first woman President of France. She asserts France needs a shake-up in the way it is governed in order to confront the future. Royal wants to increase the minimum wage and `review' the 35-hour work week. She also promises to create 500,000 jobs for young people and introduce a measure to encourage employers to hire high-school graduates.

Sarkozy has been combating accusations that his hottest campaign proposal — to create a Ministry of Immigration and National Identity — is intolerant, narrow-minded, racist and xenophobic.

Far from globalisation

A key topic in the presidential elections is immigration. Many illegal immigrants face the threat of deportation. Whatever the outcome of the elections, to me, it seems like France is a long way away from the fantasy of globalisation. Scandinavian countries such as Denmark, Norway and Sweden have shown that there is an alternative way to much-needed immigration and globalisation. These countries are exceedingly integrated into the global market. But they are highly successful economies that still provide strong social protections and make high levels of investments in people.

They have been successful in part because of these policies, not in spite of them. Full employment and strong safety nets enable individuals take more risk — with the commensurate high rewards without unduly worrying about the downside of failure. These countries have not discarded the welfare state but have fine-tuned it to meet new burdens of globalisation. Ostensibly, France does not want to do the same.

French Social Model

Socialism is well entrenched in France. France has charitable pensions, unemployment benefits, protectionist trade policies, and rigid hiring and firing laws, all dubbed the `French social model' by its admirers.

Government enforced 35-hour work weeks, two-hour lunch breaks, and nearly half of GDP devoted to welfare programmes characterise this `social model.' The result of these policies is a stratified society in which a large minority is shut out from the job market and one in which minimal economic growth occurs.

Immigrants and `making it'

Immigrants into France may be blessed with social programmes so charitable that they need not work, but they can seldom `make it' in France. The welfare state discourages work. Lack of employment increases the sense of seclusion that many already feel and may contribute to a depressed outlook on the future that spreads from one generation to the next.

Finally, even those immigrants in France who do `make it,' are regarded as `outsiders'. Since French national identity is based largely on a common heritage and a secular worldview, it is very difficult for `native' Frenchmen to accept someone who is of North African descent, even if he or she was born to a third generation French family unit in Paris.

In France, the last 25 years have been marked by stagnant economic growth, rising unemployment, and a reduction in the standard of living.

A type of social model that has left 20 million unemployed, diminished productivity rates, that on any relative index of a modern economy — skills, research, development, innovation, patents, and information technology — is sliding downhill.

Take it with a shrug

As the 20th century began, France was an empire in control of 10 per cent of the world's surface — very busy, colonising and exploiting. Over the centuries, Gallic snobbishness, conceit, arrogance and smugness have matured and seem unanimously accepted as part of their national character. Even so, its display goes just about without any notice, except for a shrug — even by the French themselves!

It is this gauche pride, along with their own self-awareness of their habitual, almost casual misdeeds, that prompt them to commit some kind of `hara-kiri' or, shall we say `self-destruction'.

In fact, General de Gaulle declared at the start of his memoirs, "I feel instinctively that providence has created France for complete successes or exemplary misfortunes."

While we, in India, are not as faultless, pray we never descend to the level of the French.

(The author is a former Europe Director, CII, and lives in Cologne, Germany. Feedback may be sent to mohan.murti@t-online.de)