Reform Is Perceived as a Universal Threat in France

John Vinocur is back for the second installment of his new Politicus column in the International Herald Tribune. He writes that France and Germany find reform doesn't get any easier.

Is it possible for France and Germany to reform — despite the word's new certification as both terrifying and a vote-loser — and stop what is seen in some places as their decline as poles of allegiance and emulation in Europe?

The presumptive answer is mostly yes, say the countries' most aggressive heralds of decline, depending on the price in comfort the two societies and their politicians are willing to pay. But as President Jacques Chirac of France acknowledged last week (he could have been speaking for Germany, too), a national undertaking that requires leaving a cozy, risk-averse, statist couch for a more open, more competitive, more growth-oriented world is a very awkward business.

In Chirac's case, this statement followed a sharp defeat in regional elections that was mostly a protest vote against his government's tentative jabs at reducing the enormous cost of the French public sector's overhead. …

All [that is proposed under the r-word] is far, very far, from the kind of grand, bold politics and dramatic change that is being demanded by the German and French critics who describe their countries as being locked in decline.

This week, the fastest-rising book on the main German nonfiction best-seller list, at No. 5, is called, in rough translation, Germany, the Decline of a Superstar [by] Gabor Steingart … It follows a spate of books in France last fall that focused on the argument that the country was a diminishing force in Europe. Now, Nicolas Baverez, the author of the most notable of the French books, France in Free Fall, has returned to his theme with new intensity in two major articles …

Baverez (La France qui Tombe), an economist, historian and lawyer, who is sometimes described as a French nationalist, attacked Chirac in time for the elections for avoiding the most urgent reforms, and in a long, separate article in the current issue of the review Commentaire said the failure of the French-German couple signified the eventual "takeover" of the EU by Britain.

Baverez believes Germany's situation is a more positive one than that of France, an idea that Steingart — who has not read Baverez — shares to the extent he thinks the critical role of the press in Germany is far stronger.

The essence of France's current negative exceptionalism, Baverez contended in a recent telephone conversation, was in its homogeneity. That meant "a political class, left or right, that is completely fused with the highest level of the bureaucratic establishment. It's a total monopoly and it extends to culture and the media."

Extrapolating from Baverez's view, this signified that most change in France was perceived as a universal and indiscriminate threat because virtually everyone's self-interest, through unions, state benefits and the vast public sector, was wired into the system. …

And that, malheureusement, includes the nominatively independent press.