Llewellyn
King
Read Llewellyn's bio and previous columns
April 23, 2009
The French
Connection: Bashing an Ally
France really got it
in the neck last weekend. Mon Dieu! On the great tea bag dumping
day, Dick Armey, once House majority leader, warned us against creeping
socialism and revealed his great fear: “I don't want to be France.”
During the jolly
protest against one-was-not-quite-sure-what, it became apparent that
there is fear and trembling somewhere in the right wing (the French gave
us left and right as a political division, based on the left and right
banks of the Seine River in Paris) that the Republic, and all it stands
for, will be subsumed by French values if the wanton spending of
President Barack Obama continues.
This is serious
stuff, and we should be on our guard. Next thing you know, our
supermarkets will be filled with hundreds of unpasteurized cheeses
(Pasteur was French, but he never persuaded his countrymen that
unpasteurized cheese could be lethal); our women will be wearing
haute couture; and tres fast, comfortable trains will be
whipping us between cities. Boeing will be merging with Airbus and
small, efficient cars will be rolling out of Detroit.
Worse, our culture
will be trashed. NASCAR will give way to Le Mans. And our schoolchildren
will be corrupted by learning that Toqueville, author of Democracy in
America, was French; as were Lafayette, Rochambeau and many other
heroes of the Revolutionary War. Worse still, they will learn that it
was not the French but the perfidious Brits who necessitated the Boston
Tea Party in 1773; and those same awful monarchists burned the White
House in 1814.
It was the French
who gave Jefferson a deal on Louisiana, and the British who held onto
Canada.
France just does not
get a sympathetic hearing in the United States. The problem is not
enough French passed through the Port of New York at Ellis Island. They
gave us the Statue of Liberty, but were not front-and-center among the
immigrants. Ergo there is not a large Franco-American organization to
cry foul when the country that stood by us many times when it counted is
slandered by Francophobes like Fox's Bill O'Reilly. Remember, O’Reilly
organized a boycott of French goods and services during the Second Gulf
War. Mercifully, it was ineffective. Remember also that the French
contributed 93,000 troops to the First Gulf War.
Behind the French
bashing is a belief that France, which leads the world in
railroad technology and nuclear power, and has a vigorous defense
manufacturing base, is a cesspool of socialism. It is an act of faith on
the right that this ill-defined malady, socialism, has had France by the
throat since the country withdrew from Algeria under President Charles
de Gaulle. In fact, since the present French constitution – the
Constitution of the Fifth Republic – was adopted in 1958, only the
Mitterand government was really socialist. Only 15 out of 50 years of
recent government have been left-of-center. The rest have been center or
right-of-center, as is the case now with Nicolas Sarkozy.
However, France does
have a statist problem. The blame lies not with its Communist Party and
its left-of-center deputies, but with its education system and its
prestigious Ecole Nationale d’Administration, created by de Gaulle to
democratize access to the senior civil service.
This system
puts the best-and-the-brightest of French youth on a career path toward
public service.
If you put all your
talent into government, they will do what talent otherwise would do in
the private sector: Grow the company. In France's case, the state has
been grown by people who were educated to that as a patriotic duty.
Ergo, social
services are very complete in France – truly extending from the cradle
to the grave. But France cannot afford its social contract anymore.
Globalization has made the French state, comforting as it is for the
French, unaffordable. Couple that with low birth rates and aggressive
trade unions and France has a dark cloud over its future – the same dark
cloud that hangs over the United States, Japan and Germany, for
instance. Maybe, it is a little darker in France because of its public
service unions. Vive la difference, but it is not that great.
© 2009 North Star
Writers Group. May not be republished without permission.
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