VIVA LA WHATEVER :

Chirac has won big but it will mean so little (Tim Hames, May 06, 2002, Times Online)

General de Gaulle reputedly argued that politics was "too serious a matter to be left to the politicians". The bizarre events of the past fortnight in France would have confirmed his instincts. Jacques Chirac, his self-appointed protégé, has duly earned his second term and by an enormous margin. But rarely can a personal victory have been so pyrrhic. This was less a ballot than a negative referendum on his opponent. When the question is: "Would you like to be thought a Fascist?", there could be but one answer.

If the voters still harboured any doubts then every institution in French society was mobilised to remind them of their duty. Business, the trade unions, the Roman Catholic Church, actors, footballers, the media and even the tourist board hammered home the message. Other than digging up the corpse of the General and displaying it at the President's campaign rallies, the process could not have been any more explicit. France has voted against something, but for absolutely nothing.

Well, the French have restored their national honor, completely burying the only popular politician who is telling the emperor that he has no clothes. The most disturbing note in this article is the following :

One candidate and one contender alone, Alain Madelin, offered the electorate full-blown market liberalism. It was he exclusively who endorsed the Anglo-Saxon economics that are commonplace in the United States and Britain. He was the sole politician willing to denounce the "cultural exception" for blocking US imports, embraced by every other party, as the fraud that it is.

M Madelin does not lack courage, eloquence or talent. Yet his reward was 3.9 per cent of the ballots cast by his fellow countrymen. That is more of a rounding error than a number. I did (a little) better than that in a domestic science test 25 years ago. This advocate of change was outvoted by the likes of two mad Trotskyites, a spaced-out Green and an aristocrat standing on a hunting, shooting, fishing ticket.

The unfortunate reality is that, despite the acres of political space left for M Madelin to occupy, the free market has no constituency to speak of in his nation. It has a role in French politics not dissimilar to that played by Antarctica in the planet: it may well look huge on the map but virtually no one wants to live there. Even if M Madelin were to be appointed by M Chirac as his Prime Minister, he would not have the slightest chance of imposing reform on the natives.

It is not the strength of neo-Nazism but the weakness of neo-liberalism that is the curse of our continent. The far Right will always exploit social tension but it cannot provide any solutions. When it finds itself in a Cabinet - as in Austria and Italy - the limits of bluster become all the more apparent. The neo-liberals, in sharp contrast, have answers aplenty to Europe's economic malaise but cannot get close to office.

Francis Fukuyama is none too popular in blogdom these days, but it is worth returning to the argument that he made in his great essay and book The End of History, that human experience and the 20th Century in particular demonstrate that liberal democratic protestant capitalism offers the optimal way of arranging our political, social, and economic systems. Thomas L. Friedman extended that argument in his book, The Lexus and the Olive Tree, where he equated globalization with the process of converting to the type of system (at least the economic system) that Mr. Fukuyama described :

The driving idea behind globalization is free-market capitalism--the more you let market forces rule and the more you open your economy to free trade and competition, the more efficient and flourishing your economy will be. Globalization means the spread of free-market capitalism to virtually every country in the world. Globalization also has its own set of economic rules--rules that revolve around opening, deregulating and privatizing your economy.

Yet what has Europe done to adjust to this reality? Practically nothing.

The nations of Europe continue to be overly protectionist (particularly where agriculture is concerned), to be overly regulated, to be overly dependent on government services, to be too bureaucratic (and, with the EU, getting more so, rather than less), and to depend far too much on immigration. But the major parties of the Right, like the Tories in Britain or Chirac's party, have offered no challenge to any of these problems. Like the Republican Party of the 1940's and 50s, they have made their accommodation with the Welfare State and show little interest in charting a different course, even though the ship of state resembles the Titanic.

So now we have the bizarre spectacle of France--which may be as distant as any state in the West from the free market model--casting 100% of its votes for parties of the Right, in order to maintain the sclerotic status quo. What hope is there for Europe when "conservatives", who to warrant the name should feel a yearning for freedom coursing through their veins, do not advocate privatization of government and other free market reforms? I fear, none.

(via Mike Daley)

Posted by Orrin Judd at May 6, 2002 7:14 AM