Fallout from the French Regional Elections

The Left has triumphed in France's regional elections over the weekend. While turnout was at an all-time low, it is still a significant indictment of Sarkozy's agenda three years into his Presidency. While his administration has weathered the economic crisis fairly well, there has been a shortage of tangible achievements. He has also been hampered by self-inflected distractions, like the national identity debate and his attempt to put his son in charge of the country's most important economic development zone. Yet one should not necessarily view the results as a ringing endorsement of the Left, which is still facing a crisis of leadership, and Sarkozy will still be favored to win a second term in 2012.

The BBC has a good roundup of the results and their significance.

The Pat Buchanan of France?

Gérard Longuet, majority leader in the French Senate, let one slip yesterday when he rejected the nomination of a French official of North African descent to head the High Authority Against Discrimination and For Equality, saying he was not "of traditional French descent." As offensive as the comments of our own majority leader regarding the president's skin tone were, these comments are of a different order of magnitude and cut straight to the core of the debate over national identity that has gripped the country.

The full quote was this: "It is better that the head be of traditional French descent, someone who will feel a greater burden to welcome all of our compatriots. Examples would be natives of Brittany and Lorraine -- who are mostly of Italian or Moroccan descent -- who struggle to open themselves up to outsiders. If you make only a symbolic nomination, someone actually from the outside, you risk endangering the mission."   

Somewhere in there, you can make out the point he is trying to make: that since it is "traditional" French who struggle most with integration, naming someone from a "traditional" background would do most to evoke their sympathies. The irony, of course, is that by excluding the nominee, Malek Boutih -- a former head of SOS Racisme and a functionary in the Socialist Party who was born in France -- from the "corps francais traditionnel" (the term he actually used), he is preempting the very mission he is ostensibly attempting to defend.

Reaction has been strong and swift, with one anti-discrimination association declaring "the return of psychologically repressed racism," while others have accused him of attempting to advance the UMP's efforts to to siphon off votes from the Front national. 

Ultimately this will amount to a mini-crisis, with no serious long-term implications--indeed, none of the coverage of the incident was among LeMonde's top 10 most viewed stories this morning. But each new incident like this further widens the trust gap between France's minority and majority populations.

Greener Grass in Milwaukee

 Does America need its own Malraux to save the arts? 

LeMonde previews an art exhibition at the Inova contemporary art museum in Milwaukee that was produced using money from a French program called FRAC, short for Fonds régionaux d'art contemporain. The exhibit, "Spatial City," features installations inspired by Utopian Franco-Hungarian artist Yona Friedman that examine the tensions inherent in planned, idealized architecture. The exhibit itself has gotten mixed reviews, but the LeMonde preview illustrates the challenges of providing subsidies for the arts. The FRAC fund is a state-sponsored effort to showcase mostly French artists' work in other countries. In France, the reporter says, the FRAC has been criticized (unfairly, in the reporter's and my opinion), as another instance of heavy-handed, state-sponsored meddling in creative expression, the kind that became notorious when André Malraux was culture minister under Charles De Gaulle in the 1960s. As the reporter points out, this contrasts sharply with the situation in the U.S., where art is almost exclusively funded through private foundations and businesses, and where the inherent instability in this arrangement is frequently lamented. Given the especially acute peril in which arts funding in the U.S. currently finds itself, Americans will undoubtedly welcome this and any other state-subsidized art exhibit, even if the state in question is an ocean away. As for the French -- habitually insecure as they are about their culture's declining value in the world -- they can take pride in the fact that their art is still in demand outside the Hexagon, even if it comes stamped with La Marianne.

French Cafe Life Under Threat

Café culture is dying in France, according to the BBC. Sadly, this is not surprising. When I was in France, one of the first Starbucks on the Left Bank had just opened. By the time I had left, it was going gangbusters. People want coffee to go, and more of it. I hardly ever went to a café, and neither did many of my friends, French or otherwise, because it wasn't worth the price for a small espresso cup, and it didn't fit into our schedules--people don't do homework in cafés. The woman in this WSJ article says it best: "I don't like the French brasserie -- you can go in to the same place day after day and the waiter will still look at you with a long face." Starbucks now has over 50 locations in and around Paris and Lyon, and will be able to weather the recession much more effectively than mère-et-père storefronts. Given the decline in prestige Starbucks has been experiencing recently in this country, it's difficult to know whether they'll stick around in France. But it is unlikely that the cafés classiques, once gone, will come back.

Europe Tries Its Own "Day Without Immigrants"

To demonstrate their importance in generating economic activity, immigrants in France, Italy, and Greece are planning a single-day strike. LeMonde reports that organizers are taking their inspiration from a similar strike in the US in 2006, which resulted in pending immigration legislation being withdrawn. I vaguely remember this occurring, and it is true that no legislation passed, but it was likely more due to the fact that the 2006 elections brought in Democrats to Congress. Given the regularity of strikes in these countries, it is difficult to know how much this one will stand out relative to the one that occurred stateside.

Another "Faux Débat" Over Muslims

Not much to say about the Halal-being-served-at-Quick story lodged into the news cycle this morning, other than to note that the blogger at the end of LeMonde's story is correct when he argues that the real issue is over the presence of Muslim culture, and not "discrimination" (there are already a handful of Kosher Quicks in service). I would also point out that the US has long operated Halal-friendly chains, especially at KFC and Popeyes. McDonalds and Subway have also experimented with Halals in the past. Here's a handy list of fast food chains serving Halal:

[List]

Stark Futility

LeMonde this morning has an report (FR) on how attempts to address school violence have become cyclical -- or rather, causes the government to run in circles. Since the 1980s, "a dozen" different government white papers seeking to tackle violence in schools have been published. Yet as several recent high profile incidents in France show, they do not seem to have had too great of an effect. While the scale on which France must confront this issue is minimal compared to the US, its suggestions about the limits of government's ability to effect reforms are instructive.     

Picking Your Analogies

The fiscal crisis in Greece has proven an excellent test of the moral fiber of the EU, and it now appears that a clutch of wealthier nations, led by Germany, are one way or another going to bail the country out. For those in favor of increased European integration, that is a huge step. Yet it has also revealed where European civil servants stand in the EUs ongoing identity crisis. Consider the analogy made by Jean-Claude Trichet, head of the European Central Bank, as quoted by the Times:

After being peppered with questions about Greece on Thursday, Mr. Trichet responded: “I doubt that, in a press conference, Ben Bernanke would have a question on Alaska or Massachusetts.”

It turns out this is bad reporting: the EU is actually legally barred from staging any kind of Federal Reserve-style bailout of an individual European state even if it wanted to. In any event, as the Times goes on to point out, the EU is still a long way from becoming "the United States of Europe" -- the central government is still far too weak.  US states maintained strong regional identities until the end of the Civil War, 75 years after the Constitutional Convention.  The Lisbon Treaty entered into force two months ago. It is going to take many more confidence-building measures like a coordinated, multi-state bailout to build a strong, central European government.

France's Struggles with Diversity

Interview (FR) with the head of the Representative Council of Black Organizations, who discusses the need for a law to actively promote diversity in French society. At the end of the report, the interviewee, Patrick Lozès, talks about how much progress America has made in the last 40 years -- developments that we would directly attribute to Title VI (prohibiting Federal discrimination in government employment and services) and Title VII (prohibiting discrimination in the hiring of workers) of the 1964 Civil Rights Act; France would certainly benefit from having its own versions of these.  Of course, that act was preceded by large-scale marches and protests; a similar movement has yet to emerge in France. Difficult to say why this is so. Perhaps it is because the discrimination that Blacks in France face is more subtle and less uniform than something like a "whites-only" drinking fountain. More broadly, we seem to be living in an age of leader-less mass movements (no one was really at the head of the Iran protests). So in a situation that would seem to call for a King-like figure, it is not that surprising that none has emerged.

France's Social Elevator Stalls

Just wanted to briefly mention an issue from a few weeks back, when the association of grandes écoles rejected (reg. reqd.) the government's call to impose quotas for admitting students from modest backgrounds. Ironically, such quota systems are illegal in the US. However, France is well behind America in its efforts to promote affirmative action (currently only one grande école, Sciences Po, aggressively practices "positive discrimination"), and quotas are viewed as a necessary if imperfect means for increasing diversity both in the academy and among the professional class.  Whether President Sarkozy is committed to pushing these reforms through is unclear.  Though his government proposed the quota reforms in the first place, his new initiative to boost French universities' standings in national rankings will almost certainly take priority.  According to Valérie Pécresse, minister of higher education, the university system that is supposed to serve as a social elevator has become "stuck."  It appears that will remain so for the foreseeable future.

Burqa Roundup

Given that a majority of French favor some form of restriction on wearing it, the measures proposed by the parliamentary commission to ban the burqa in public facilities seems likely to pass after the March elections.  This despite the fact that Sarkozy's UMP party is currently trailing (FR) in polls behind leftist parties, and is dead even with the Parti Socialiste.  If positing this debate was supposed to serve as a political red herring, it has not worked.  It has also earned the opprobrium of the Times, which sees the measure ostensibly as the other side of a coin shared with the Taliban.     
       
The most profound take I've read on the issue is an op-ed published by Abdennour Bidar, a philosopher (yes, in France one is still allowed to list "philosophe" as one's profession), in which he compares the decision to wear the veil as equivalent to a young adult's decision to look "goth," or  simply to dress trendy.  All of these are responses to what he sees as "a hypocritical discourse that hides a fearsome uniformity of consciousness and attitudes behind a superficial notion of 'tolerance.'"
 
There is a chance that the measures won't pass after all, if the Constitutional council decides to rule that the measures would violate civil liberties, as was recently suggested (FR) by one of France's premier constitutional scholars.

The Legacy of "Carlos"

In an apparent act of surrender to the Western bourgeois judicial system, Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, better known as "Carlos" ("the Jackal" epithet was actually added by the media after it was mistakenly reported that the eponymous Frederick Forsyth novel was found in his belongings), is suing a French film crew to defend his name.  Now 60 years old, the convicted terrorist is worried that a documentary about his exploits currently in production will distort his reputation.  According to the Washington Post's report, he has demanded final review of the finished product in order to protect against infringements on his name and "biographical image."

It's difficult for Millenials to get a good grasp of how influential and visible Carlos' efforts were during his '70s and '80s heyday, given how mythologized he has since become.  His most high-profile act was taking an entire OPEC meeting hostage for several days (there's an amusing reenactment of this on YouTube).  His body count is well into the hundreds.  He was only arrested after the French intelligence service lured him to a surgeon in Sudan, capturing him while he was asleep.

Yet there were far more international terrorist acts committed during the years in which Carlos was active (and again, I stress the qualification of international, which is to say committed by foreign parties), which may have diluted his notoriety somewhat. What's more, these acts usually did not involve as many casualties as the more infrequent but significantly more violent acts of terror we witness today.  Take a look at this Wikipedia list of notable hijackings since 1950, and how many end with "no victims" (though this is clearly meant in the physical sense, and not the financial or psychological).  It is true that the terrorists were marked by a more glamorous, intellectualized worldview.  Yet they can be said to have been bound up, relatively speaking, in more material and parochial demands like the liberation of Palestine or Kashmir.  Meanwhile, the ecumenical nihlism of present-day terrorists has, sadly, made many of them household names.        

Your Sunday Morning Skewering of French Narcissism

Funny consideration of whether the French have a bit too high a regard for their current cinema.  The description of contemporary French comedies as tending towards "inconsequential, plotless twaddle" set among the haute-bourgeoisie is spot on, as any of these films can attest.  At the same time, the reporter asks, perhaps French reviewers' impulsive protectionism of French cultural standards might be preferable to what he sees as a British obsession with the new at the expense of appreciating older or more traditional artistic tropes. Still, it's a fairly superficial analysis of the language of modern film criticism (depending on where you look, you can find an American reviewer calling the "The Tooth Fairy" "inspirational") that I think also obscures the differences in the generational makeup of British and French reviewers, the latter of whom  are generally older.

Majority of French in Favor of Banning Burqa.

According to an Ipsos (FR) poll.

LeMonde Criticizes US over Aggressive Haiti Response

Bit of a rap on the knuckles (FR) this morning from LeMonde's Washington correspondent, who accuses the Obama administration of allowing arrogance to get in the way of efficacy in its response to the relief effort in Haiti.  At least that is how they are spinning a little noticed report in USA Today published Sunday.  Evidently when the first US Air Force convoy landed in Port-Au-Prince, they found the airport in chaos.  "One day after the earthquake struck, relief planes were coming in from all directions, landing on a first-come-first-served basis and getting too close to one another on the ground. Nobody was coordinating. Aid wasn't moving. The air-traffic control tower was damaged and unsafe."  That description would seem to justify the US's decision to unilaterally take command of the airport and all air traffic control operations.  But according to LeMonde's correspondent, this led to French, Italian, and Brazilian planes getting rerouted to other airports in the region "without any higher authority justifying" such actions.  If the UN had been able to step in, she sniffles, they would never have allowed the US to take such actions. 

Sadly, I think this article illustrates how routine taking potshots at the US has become in much of the international community.  Difficult to imagine similar accusations being leveled against an American-led response to a disaster pre-9/11.

Taking a Stand Against School Violence

Unlike the US, most countries, including France, are still highly sensitized to violence in their schools.  Several weeks ago, an 18 year old student was stabbed at his high school outside of Paris.  Hospitalized for several days, he eventually succumbed to his wounds.  The national ministers of education and the interior were immediately dispatched to the school to meet with school officials.  The education minister, Luc Chattel, also called (FR) for a nationwide moment of silence to be observed the following week.  Then, yesterday, 4,000 persons, including the President of the Ile-de-France region, took part in a march (FR) in remembrance of the victim, the son of Tunisian immigrants.  In an interview, Chattel, said what he feared most was not that violence was on the rise, but that such incidents are at risk of becoming banalisé (FR).  Hard to know when the US passed that point, but we are certainly well beyond it now.

French Socialsts Also Oppose the Burqa

Many many not realize this, but the PS has also come out firmly against the Burqa, which they call a "prison for women."  However one feels about that statement, it is another remind that this debate only serves to distract from the Muslims who are truly locked in place--namely, those living in the suburbs of France's largest cities without jobs.

Carbon Tax Holdup in France Proves Recession Still Most Powerful Voice in Politics

In case anyone thought the French government was somehow more enlightened about climate change and environmental legislation than America, the news (FR) that the carbon tax originally proposed by Nicolas Sarkozy is about to be shelved should convince them otherwise.  The actual politics on this are a bit convoluted: Sarkozy had initially sought a 4.5 cent tax per liter on fossil fuels, and also would have raised domestic gas bills by 7 percent.  France's Constitutional Council, which must approve such measures, rejected it, ruling that the tax disproportionately affected middle class consumers and left France's biggest industrial polluters untouched.  So the bill was referred back to the National Assembly for revision. Now, under pressure from Sarkozy's own cabinet officials, the Assembly is suspending indefinitely the revision process that was supposed to have occurred.  As the report above indicates, these cabinet members cited the effect that a carbon tax would have on economic performance as the reason why it should be seriously reconsidered.  What this demonstrates is that the true culprit behind the failed Copenhagen talks is bad timing: environmental reforms are usually best discussed after a global recession.

H1N1: Final Scores

As usual, the Swedes win, with nearly 60% of their population vaccinated against the virus.  Otherwise, embattled Health Secretary Kathleen Sibelius and doubly embattled Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano will be pleased to know that many other countries botched (FR) their vaccine roll outs.  For France's part, the announcement by Roselyne Bachelot, the country's health minister, that the government was recalling 50m doses of vaccine has provoked outcry (FR) that tax dollars were wasted.  If this is any indication, Americans angry about the vaccine shortage may not have tolerated too much vaccine either.

Update: LeMonde diagnoses (FR) the situation more thoroughly (FR), blaming an aggressive policy by the state to minimize risks but that lacked a complementary media campaign exhorting citizens to get vaccinated.

Fraternité at Work?

Le Monde documents (FR) recent measures by Socialist mayors to address public disorder in urbanized areas. What struck most me was how a strain of fraternité seemed to underpin many of the reforms being discussed. The idea of volunteer citizens on call to diffuse an escalating situation, which has the additional effect of minimizing police presence, could work only in a society that, in theory, treats solidarity as a paramount virtue. Hard to say whether such efforts would be effective in some of the tougher U.S. projects, where levels of violence and drug trafficking are several orders of magnitude greater than what the average French cité experiences (mostly arson to cars and buses and petty vandalism). And certainly one must be careful not to exaggerate the French neighborhoods in question as tightly-knit communities. But American mayors could definitely stand to take some cues from these initiatives.