Response on Sarko

Roger Cohen
From Roger Cohen blog

A lot of facile comparisons here of Sarkozy to George W. Bush. Sarko strikes me as different in almost every way: more media-savvy, less tolerant of illegal immigration, more interventionist on the economy, firmly pro-choice, against the death penalty. I could go on. What Sarkozy has the courage to demonstrate, unlike the vast majority of the French poltical class in recent years, is an absence of a priori prejudice toward the United States. This is so refreshing it amounts to a breakthrough. From Paris, Rulf writes (comment 13) that Sarkozy is a “dangerious parvenu.” People who make it, wherever they come from, are not called “parvenus” in the United States. The term reeks of a closed system, which is what Sarkozy is in many ways striving to overcome. I tend to agree with Herbert Rubin (comment 147) that “France had allowed itself to become irrelevant and socially reactionary in support of arguments long settled elsewhere.” I’ve been amazed by some of the debates on globalization in France in recent years. The notion that the process could somehow be rolled back made me think of people sitting around in the 1920s saying the world would be a lot nicer without the automobile. Globalization, like cars, is here to stay; the question is how to adjust to it, prepare people for it, and spread opportunity to the widest swathe of the world’s population as possible. Sarkozy strikes me as a realist about the way the modern world functions.

I find the usual measure of dripping disdain from Europe (Sylvia Ullmo in comment 123) and Canada about the United States. Ullmo writes that “most of the time you are so deeply ignorant of other people’s culture and mores that you…expect them to learn by American rules.” She thinks I’m “elated” that Sarko is going to make France “think and behave like the US.” Nonsense. The oldest (conservative) trick in the book is to say that any attempt at reform that would actually end the crippling and chronic scourge of unemployment in France amounts to an attempt to “Americanize” the country. The French welfare state will be alive and well way beyond Sarkozy. But as Britain, the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden and to some degree Germany have shown, welfare should not involve making it more attractive not to work than to work, unattractive to hire, and near impossible to fire. If you reward people for not working, tax business owners to the point where employing anyone is near suicidal, and provide lifetime job security, you end up with unemployment in the 8 to 10 percent range, which is where France has been for a very long time. Everyone knows this, but nobody’s been prepared to talk about it. Which brings us to French hypocrisy.

Several readers raise this issue — David in Portland, Oregon (comment 132) and Bill Nicodemus (comment 40), among others. This is a complex issue. I am a Francophile, have been since I first lived in Paris in the 1970s. Over the years, however, my love of France has been tested by what I saw as intellectual dishonesty on a range of issues: unemployment; the confrontation of freedom and totalitarianism during the cold war (even Solzhenitsyn’s account of the Gulag did not convince all the French left of what Moscow stood for); the place of Vichy in the country’s history (we had to wait for Jacques Chirac to declare in 1995 that “Yes, the criminal folly of the occupiers was seconded by some French, by the French state”); the defeat-into-victory narrative of World War 11 and France’s liberation; and the growing gap between French power and French ambition. The pretense of virtue as a camouflage for looking facts in the face amounts to hypocrisy. Of course, France has no monopoly on this. Still the country needed a leader ready to use straight, declarative sentences about difficult issues.

As I said in my column, I am waiting to see how far and effectively Sarko translates words into action. I don’t like his policy on Turkey — I am firmly in favor of Turkish membership of the EU. I don’t like the needless burnishing of the French colonial past. I’m watching his immigrant policy carefully. But the cheap shots against him — “his kind of modernity stinks of old ideologies from the 1920s-30s” (Anais Prosaic, comment 71) are just that: cheap shots. As Bob Nelson writes from Calais, France, (comment 26), “at least he is making France move.” That is good for France (hence Sarkozy’s very high approval ratings) and good for a world that needs an active, confident, outward-looking government in Paris.