THE MAGINOT LINE WILL SAVE US!:

French inch toward social reform: A majority say France's safety nets are broken, but they're divided on a solution. Last in a three-part series. (Peter Ford, 10/27/05, The Christian Science Monitor)

After more than two decades of jobless rates hovering stubbornly around 10 percent, France's chronic unemployment crisis "is the one big problem with the French social model," says John Martin, a senior official with the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. "If a social model should deliver a satisfactory labor market," says Mr. Martin, as European leaders gather outside London for talks about how to adjust their economies and social benefits, "this one has failed dismally for the best part of three decades."

Indeed, 68 percent of the French public said last month that their social safety net was broken. But they are divided over what to do about it.

Many are angry at what they see as hectoring from European Union leaders who have been urging big European nations such as France and Germany to apply free-market remedies (also known as the Anglo-Saxon model) to their flagging economies. And the French rejection last May of a putative European constitution - seen as paving the way for a more competitive, less comfortable Europe - was due in part to a reluctance to relax protective regulations and trim the welfare state. [...]

President Jacques Chirac, adept at feeling the national pulse, lashed out earlier this year at US-style unregulated capitalism as "the communism of our new century."
Stalled by lack of consensus

"The French won't change just because they are told that change is inevitable," says Marjorie Jouen, an analyst with the Paris based pro-European think tank Notre Europe.

They'll change because it is inevitable. Of course, by refusing to get ahead of the curve they're just making the change far uglier when it comes.

Posted by Orrin Judd at October 26, 2005 6:31 PM