LIFE IS A CABARET

Europa: 50 years of rationality interrupted in France (Richard Bernstein, International Herald Tribune, June 3rd, 2005)

Now French thinkers are among the last to recognize something else: that economic liberalism and free-market economics are the best ways to ensure that countries will be, as Fabius put it, "social" and "human." French thinkers have been caught many times in the past having ideas more or less independent of any empirical basis - preferring lofty Cartesian speculation to fact-finding, or expecting reality to conform to concept rather than the other way around.

And so, the steady bashing of the "Anglo-Saxon model" was largely unaccompanied by any serious examination of the Anglo-Saxon world.

Never mind that France has suffered 10 percent unemployment for a quarter of a century and that British levels are currently about half of that, even as British social services at least rival those of France. As the French lawyer and commentator Nicolas Baverez pointed out, in the 1970s the British GNP was 25 percent less than that of France; now it is 10 percent higher. Ireland, once the poor man of Europe, has a higher per capita income than France.

But the French chattering classes hardly examined those facts, burying them under the comforting conviction that the French "social" and "human" system was superior and had to be defended.

This is an idea that both Chirac and Fabius reiterated ad nauseam from their opposite sides of the constitution debate, never bothering to define terms or to refer to any concrete circumstances. Examination turned into catechism. Ditto for the concept of globalization, which was denounced repeatedly, demonized, presented as an unmitigated scourge, but never explained.

As Le Monde's Alain Frachon put it: "There was a new ritual: you had first to declare yourself against liberalism in order to gain the right to speak in the public arena."

Or, as the much reviled former EU commissioner for the internal market, Frits Bolkestein, put it in The Financial Times: "How social is an economic model that throws up 12 percent unemployment as in Germany, or 10 percent as in France?"

The French, as always, thought they were defending what they call "les acquis," the things earned over the decades of struggle for social justice. And, as the political philosopher Pierre Hassner reminded me, citing Aron, the French have always put more stock in égalité than in liberté.

"The tendency, when the going gets bad," Hassner said, "is to close the doors and try to find scapegoats" - the latter in the latest instance being Brussels, or ultraliberalism, or the Anglo-Saxon model, with nary a suggestion that there might be some French fault at work as well.

The big difference with past behavior is that the French have spent the last 50 years building Europe as part of an entirely rational and reasonable effort to defend their national interest. Why they have departed from that tradition seems to have to do with what Serge July, editor of Libération, called "delirium." It has little to do with French tradition.

We all have to hope, for the sake of la gloire, la patrie, and the rest of us, that they will come to their senses. As we "Anglo-Saxon" ultraliberals used to say years ago, watching the French sing "La Marseillaise" at that critical moment in "Casablanca": Vive la France.

The French always come to their senses in American movies.