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Right Time
Blocking the march of Jean-Marie Le Pen
[May 6, 2002] |
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Posted Sunday, April 14, 2002; 15.05GMT
Across the Rhine in Germany, where unions are mass organizations joined
in a single confederation, metalworkers negotiated the 35-hour week
on their own in 1995. If France's unions were similarly broad-based
and confident, they would be less prone to strike. France lost almost
2.5 million work days to strikes in 2000 and has averaged strike losses
10 times higher than Germany through the 1990s. Public employees in
France are particularly prone to walk-outs despite being protected
from lay-offs. The victims are members of the public, such as the
residents of Lyon who had to walk to work during the three-week strike
of public transport workers that ended earlier this month.
What needs to be done: The state has to stand back and leave
more scope not just for unions, but for all the organizations that
make up civil society.
Will it happen? Eventually, it must. Nicole Notat, outgoing
leader of one of France's most forward-looking union confederations,
has said that "the most ferocious partisans for state intervention
condemn the state to ineffectualness" because society is becoming
too complex for the French civil service to continue to perform —
and fund — its traditional paternalistic role.
The Regions
In the resurgent Mediterranean port city of Marseilles, shipbuilder
Raymond Vidil sounds a theme that has long been heard outside Paris:
the regions need more power. He says that it is still easier to mobilize
funds at the county level than at the more workable level of the region.
"Europe can't exist on an axis among capitals," Vidil says. "We're
in competition with the Piedmont in Italy, with Catalonia in Spain,
and we have to be able to act." In Toulouse, Mayor Douste-Blazy makes
the same point. "If [Catalan President] Jordi Pujol in Barcelona wants
to build a canal or an airport, he raises a tax. Here you have to
be a very, very good friend of the Minister of Transport." Paris comes
in for a scolding in Lille, too, where 665 handicapped children are
housed and schooled across the border in Belgium because the state
hasn't built local facilities for them in France. "It seems like we
get more and more control from Paris and less and less money," complains
Elisabeth Dusol, whose daughter Sophie spent eight years in a Belgian
boarding school for the handicapped. She is convinced that more local
control of the budget would help redress shortfalls before they become
acute.
France remains the most centralized state in Europe, and both main
candidates have vowed to give the nation's 26 regions more power.
Regional politicians say they've often heard such promises, but that
progress has been halting since François Mitterrand substantially
strengthened the regions 20 years ago.
What needs to be done: The regions should not represent
another layer of bureaucracy, but an active and more independent conduit
of public services and economic planning.
Will it happen? Fitfully. As the E.U.'s influence grows,
so will that of the regions. That doesn't mean Burgundy will ever
have the autonomy that Bavaria enjoys.
Cultural Diversity
Only with tweezers do French politicians approach the multiethnic
nature of today's France. That's hardly surprising, since the political
class has had limited dealings with France's millions of non-white
citizens. No member of parliament from the French mainland, no minister,
no prominent figure in either main political camp is of Arab or African
descent. And the politicians' helplessness shows. In a campaign visit
to the banlieue of Marne-la-Jolie in early March, Chirac found himself
showered with spit and disdain. For his part, Jospin admitted his
"naiveté" in thinking that he could resolve France's growing
crime problem by addressing unemployment without tackling the plight
of French minorities.
As a result, this important and growing segment of the population
isn't addressed directly as a group of voters, but obliquely as an
agent of insecurité. That fuzzy French term means crime, which
rose by more than 7.5% last year alone. Jospin and Chirac have both
proposed a new ministry of domestic security, meant to better coordinate
the activities of police and judges. But an administrative solution
alone, even if it channels more needed funding into the banlieues,
isn't likely to do the trick.
In a bow to France's egalitarian tradition, the state does not even
publish statistics on racial origin. But some experts contend that
same tradition has allowed it to elude facing up to widespread discrimination.
"French minorities are different from those in Germany or the United
Kingdom: in our heads, we really feel French," remarks Malek Boutih,
the president of the advocacy group SOS-Racisme. "Most of us
want the same thing everyone else does: a little house, two kids,
a dog and a couple of nights a month at the cinema," says Boutih,
whose parents came from Algeria. For more minorities to realize that
goal, it isn't enough for the economy to improve. Social and psychological
walls have to fall, too.
What needs to be done: A grand geste against the exclusion
of France's minorities from the corridors of power would be to name
a minister from their midst.
Will it happen? Not soon enough. Breaking into the closed
circle of the French élite has proven a tough task for women,
and will be even harder for minorities. But the effort is vital if
France's republican ideals are to be honored.
Those ideals have stood France — and the rest of the world —
in good stead for generations, and there is no reason why they should
not continue to be a beacon for future generations. Perhaps the disenchantment
of the current election campaign is a reminder that France's expression
of "liberty, fraternity and equality" needs to be adjusted to a new
reality. Those aims don't need to be protected by a paternalistic
state, directed from Paris, or based on an old template of a more
homogeneous French population. The people of France are perfectly
aware of that. Sooner or later, the politicians will be, too.
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