The Republic of Dissent

A wonderful and irritating country

Et oui:

It is an absurd exaggeration to say that French industrial workers spend only three hours a day doing anything productive. Yet it is also the case that the 35-hour working week, combined with an entrenched role for unions within companies and intrusive labour rules, gives little flexibility for bosses. (...) Yet the damage to France’s image may be harder to shake off. At a time when the country has lost competitiveness to Germany, the economy is sliding into recession, taxes are at a record high, and the government has conceded that it will miss its deficit-reduction target for 2013, genuine concerns about the prospects of turning things around are wide-spread. Clara Gaymard, the French head of GE, an American conglomerate which successfully manufactures high-tech industrial stuff in France, put it well in her response to Mr Taylor’s letter. Yes, she said, “France’s image abroad is poor”. But “we are both a wonderful country and a very irritating one.

Western disaggregation

Sugary excerpt of the morning is from Professor Kenneth Anderson:

I continue to find mystifying the Western academic international law world’s infatuation with the ideals of the diminishing importance of states and membership in states.  Particularly when that mostly seems to refer not to a universal aspiration, but only to the inability of the leading Western-states-in-decline to persuade themselves to exercise the coherence that makes states socially useful - and that largely through the cultural and class predilections of the political classes of those societies.  When are we going to see proper analytic attention to the Globalized New Class as a phenomenon?  In any event, the rising new powers understand that states are about coherence, and that the constant struggle of most states, most of the time, is to remain coherent and prevent “disaggregation” of the state into internal groups of power and “public choice” struggles for primacy and the resources of politics to economic ends.

Disaggregation is attractive to many Western intellectuals, I’d suggest, however, because our species-being, so to speak, has gradually come to be purely contractual free agency.  We gave up on any kind of “fiduciary professional” model of the intellectual when we discovered that we could leverage our knowledge skills, at least until China and India caught up, across a needy global economy.  It required freeing ourselves from the strictures of local communities; but the opportunities for globally marketizing our professional expertise being very large, we have moved a long, long way from RH Tawney’s post-war British model of the professional as community leader through expertise.

I'm flustered by Professor Anderson's use of the terms "West" and "Western" for I have no idea what he means or rather I don't think that the assumptions that he makes in using those terms are relevant or even justified. That said, Professor Anderson is simply dancing around the central issue, which is as Jean-François Bayart would that the State is the product of Globalization and neither its victim or nor its enemy combatant. The issue never really is whether the State matters, but rather what it can do and ought to do. Incoherence always occurs when there is an understandable and I would argue an useful disharmony between two.

Consumerism and sameness

I agree with Helmut Holzapfel on this:

A “distance-intensive” lifestyle has emerged and is taken for granted, at least in modern industrialised societies; it has become a typical way of living shaping attitudes and behaviour for part of the population. A distance-intensive lifestyle means large distances covered in ever-smaller units of time, not only in personal travelling, but by the products consumed. Even in health food shops, Argentinean honey or apples from oases in the Brazilian jungle are freely available. The lifestyle means constant availability and spatial accessibility for people and products: Australian or Californian wine, strawberries at Christmas, most likely from South Africa. People fly from Hamburg to Milan for an evening at the opera, and back the next morning. And they live in the suburbs in a detached house with a double or triple garage outside (an SUV is a must); the house is in a beautiful location, yet a blot on the landscape.(...)The disadvantages of the lifestyle gradually become apparent: being everywhere, people are increasingly nowhere. The freedom they search for far and wide means more than dependence on transport systems. Since everyone wants to get everywhere else, everywhere looks the same; same products, same supermarkets. And since everyone wants to go somewhere else and consume products from all over, transport infrastructure is congested. If we consume yogurt made from milk and fruit sourced all over Europe, we shouldn’t be surprised about a lorry jam on the motorway near London or Milan.

It's striking to realize that how identical ultra-consumerists are no matter their race, religion or ethnicity. After all, if buying and stocking stuff is one's 'religion' then all other variables such as race and ethnicity are not essential. For some reasons, that reminds me of the term 'poor white trash' used in the United States, which puts the emphasis on the fact that social condition is in fact more defining than race.

Salafism and American Protestant Fundamentalism

Oliver Roy on the similarities between Salafism and American Protestant Fundamentalism :

It is a mistake to think that the phenomena of religious radicalism (Salafism) and political radicalism (Al Qaeda) are mere imports of the cultures and conflicts of the Middle East. It is above all a consequence of the globalization and Westernization of Islam. Today's religious revival is first and foremost marked by the uncoupling of culture and religion, whatever the religion may be. This explains the affinities between American Protestant fundamentalism and Islamic Salafism: both reject culture, philosophy, and even theology in favour of a scriptural reading of the sacred texts and an immediate understanding of truth through individual faith, to the detriment of educational and religious institutions.

Roy's comparison is appropriate in my view because it emphasizes the fact that globalization has a lot to do with the rise of religious extremism. It is striking to realize that the less people feel in control, the more they are likely to turn to a vengeful God requiring them to be pure and to purify their world to make it more to their liking.

The duplicitous nature of Globalism

Michael Kimmelman on Globalism and the fact that it hasn't transformed the world into one big and unified society and made people the same:

(...)globalism, beyond banking, climate change and warfare, has always been a dubious concept, a misleading catchall for how the world supposedly works, to which culture, in its increasing complexity, gives the lie.
The integration of markets and the Internet have certainly brought billions of people into closer contact. Everybody has access to the same American movies and music now, and not just American, also Indian, Romanian, South African and Chinese. But far from succumbing to some devouring juggernaut, culture — and Europe, with its different communities and nations living cheek by jowl, is a Petri dish to prove the point — has only atomized lately as a consequence of the very same globalizing forces that purportedly threaten to homogenize everything.
(...)Nationalism, regionalism and tribalism are all on the rise. Societies are splitting even as they share more common goods and attributes than ever before. Culture is increasingly an instrument to divide and differentiate communities. And the leveling pressures of globalization have at the same time provided more and more people with the technological resources to decide for themselves, culturally speaking, who they are and how they choose to be known, seen, distinguished from others.

Unfortunately people tend to hang on to their differences when they fell that they have no choice about what is happening around them and that they are being forced to live and to be a certain way.

The rise of the malbouffe

Scary sign that even the French eating habits have been Americanized:

Today, France is the most profitable market for McDonald’s outside the US. In France this travesty is called malbouffe, literally junk food. French people try their best not to follow the American model in many ways, yet still Ronald McDonald and Colonel Sanders are threatening one of the characteristics of their culture that the French are most proud of.

A simple catch 22

Sugary excerpt of the day from John Gray's review of Jeremy Rifkin's latest book, The Emphatic Civilization:

(....) as civilisation has extended the reach of empathy beyond the family and the tribe until it covers all of humankind, the expanding infrastructure of industry and transport has needed ever larger inputs of energy, increasing entropy and wrecking the planet.Moving from hunting and gathering to farming, and then to industrial production, enabled humans to interact with one another as never before, but this increasing interconnection involved depleting the planet, a process that is reaching a climax just as civilisation is becoming planet-wide for the first time

Political entrepreneurs

Daniel Henninger argues in the Wall Street Journal that Obama's economic policies (particularly the jobs bill) will lead to the rise of political entrepreneurs and to the decline of market entrepreneurs who have made America America:

Market entrepreneurs like Rockefeller, Vanderbilt and Hill built businesses on product and price. Hill was the railroad magnate who finished his transcontinental line without a public land grant. Rockefeller took on and beat the world's dominant oil power at the time, Russia. Rockefeller innovated his way to energy primacy for the U.S.
Political entrepreneurs, by contrast, made money back then by gaming the political system. Steamship builder Robert Fulton acquired a 30-year monopoly on Hudson River steamship traffic from, no surprise, the New York legislature. Cornelius Vanderbilt, with the slogan "New Jersey must be free," broke Fulton's government-granted monopoly.
If the Obama model takes hold, we will enter the Golden Age of the Political Entrepreneur. The green jobs industry that sits at the center of the Obama master plan for the American future depends on public subsidies for wind and solar technologies plus taxes on carbon to suppress it as a competitor. Politically connected entrepreneurs will spend their energies running a mad labyrinth of bureaucracies, congressional committees and Beltway door openers. Our best market entrepreneurs, instead of exhausting themselves on their new ideas, will run to ground gaming Barack Obama's ideas.

I suspect that Daniel Henninger's dislike for the intervention of the state within the economy and his idolization of what he believes to be real entrepreneurship are narrowing his perception of reality. Nevertheless, reading his arguments forces one to wonder whether entrepreneurship in itself is always a good for a country and should be privileged over anything else whether it is based on politics or on the market. To put it differently, I wonder whether in an age where a lot of entrepreneurs can go wherever they want to innovate, governments have real policy choices if they believe in entrepreneurship as a good in itself.
In any case, to come back to Henninger's strong distaste for "political entrepreneurs," I wonder if his problem is more with the politics that they are following rather than politics itself. To phrase it differently, I wonder if Henninger would be saying the same time if Obama were Bush or the venerated Ronald Reagan.

The imperial reflex and the post 9/11 world

Pankaj Mishra argues convincingly, I have to say, that the United States and the "West" still have imperial reflexes, which are preventing them from acknowledging the realities of the post 9/11 world, an era where the East and the rest of the world are no longer scared of them and have their own ideas about how things are going to be. Sugary excerpt:

Decolonisation seems to have dented little the sense of superiority that since 1945 has made American leaders in particular consistently underestimate the intensity of nationalist feeling in Asia and Africa. In proposing cash bribes for the "moderate" Taliban, the Obama administration reminds one of FDR's bright idea about the original inhabitants of Palestine: "What about the Arabs?" he once asked the Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann. "Can't that be settled with a little baksheesh?"(...)The Chinese, Indians, Iranians and other emerging powers too have an idea of what they owe to themselves: the richness of the world that the west first claimed for itself. But while getting what they want, they won't claim the sanction of a superior morality and civilisation. Indeed, the long and appalling history of European hypocrisy in Asia and Africa may be why Beijing dispenses altogether with talk of Chinese values as its strikes deals with nasty regimes in Africa, and why even democratic India keeps mum about the advantages of regular elections as it tries to offset Chinese influence over Burma's military despots. 

Reading Mishra's article forces me to ask myself whether America's most influential mark on the world was that it made it so cool and often so stylish to be a hegemon that now every country wants to be one and to exercise power in the same way. I'm coming to the realization that the post 9/11 world is one with a bunch of countries who have fallen in love, whether they want to be admit it or not with the American style of power, even as they resents it when it affects them. America is John Wayne and we know that there was a time when every man, no matter where he came from, wanted to be John Wayne even when he hated the fact that he was killing "Indians" and shooting from the hip without much finesse, sophistication or awareness of the sensibilities of others.

Overcrowded Paris and French's rudeness

Nabila Ramdani argues that Parisians have the right and are in fact to be "rude:

Modern Parisians are in-your-face and surly not because of clichéd antecedents, but because they are increasingly being forced to live in a fast-paced, overcrowded, competitive city which gets more like London or New York every day. Coping with the demands of Anglo-Saxon globalisation (everything from sandwiches-at-your-desk offices to sweat-and-briefcase commuter trains) can't be done with a smile on your face. Instead, you have to be as snarly as the British and Americans are prone to be when confronted by deadlines, packed stations, and a rising cost of living.
The truth is that Paris is no longer defined by its tourist landmarks, trust-fund bourgeoisie, or intellectual and artistic cliques on the Left Bank. It's one of the biggest, most densely populated cities in the world, and it's increasingly open for business. Under such circumstances, its proud inhabitants are bound to get more than a little tetchy.

Am I wrong to feel that this infantilization of the Parisians is a bit condescending and based less on reality than on the whims and convictions of a self-satisfied person who feels cultured and refined for knowing certain things about Paris?

Globalization and exploitative racism

Interesting stuff from Lenin's Tomb (hat tip: Chris Dillow):

Occasionally, if you open the Economist or the FT, you'll read an argument that runs something like this: people shouldn't be bigoted toward immigrants, because by they do jobs that British workers won't do for pay that British workers won't accept. In a similar way, you often hear members of the Institute of Directors or the CBI explain that 'globalisation' and international outsourcing is an excellent thing because it gives jobs to hard-working people in Third World countries who work much harder, and are much less demanding, than spoilt, recalcitrant Western workers. This is the zenith of ruling class anti-racism, and it's just another argument for exploitation. And it is, of course, deeply racist toward the recipients of its supposed benediction.

I have to say that I know longer know what racism is and what being a racist means. I feel like the Supreme Court Justices when they were trying to rule on pornography and had to define obscenity. I'm puzzled and stuck in the middle of an intellectual Sahara on this issue.

Barbarity is the future

I love predictions of the coming of the "Apocalypse" or "dark times" especially when they are well formulated as it is this by Chris Hedges:

We stand on the cusp of one of the bleakest periods in human history when the bright lights of a civilization blink out and we will descend for decades, if not centuries, into barbarity. The elites have successfully convinced us that we no longer have the capacity to understand the revealed truths presented before us or to fight back against the chaos caused by economic and environmental catastrophe. As long as the mass of bewildered and frightened people, fed images that permit them to perpetually hallucinate, exist in this state of barbarism, they may periodically strike out with a blind fury against increased state repression, widespread poverty and food shortages. But they will lack the ability and self-confidence to challenge in big and small ways the structures of control. The fantasy of widespread popular revolts and mass movements breaking the hegemony of the corporate state is just that – a fantasy.
My analysis comes close to the analysis of many anarchists. But there is a crucial difference. The anarchists do not understand the nature of violence. They grasp the extent of the rot in our cultural and political institutions, they know they must sever the tentacles of consumerism, but they naïvely believe that it can be countered with physical forms of resistance and acts of violence. There are debates within the anarchist movement – such as those on the destruction of property – but once you start using plastic explosives, innocent people get killed. And when anarchic violence begins to disrupt the mechanisms of governance, the power elite will use these acts, however minor, as an excuse to employ disproportionate and ruthless amounts of force against real and suspected agitators, only fueling the rage of the dispossessed.

The problem with Chris Hedges is that he is too "religious" and therefore, my intent here is not to be demeaning, he believes in the greater purpose, in the grand design and that the future has to be bleak if the present looks a certain way because catastrophes are predetermined by the existence of certain elements/factors. I don't believe that. I'm a constant pessimistically  optimist.  I don't believe that the Dark ages are coming back or that barbarity is the future, I believe that the future doesn't look good, but I don't believe that we ever go back in times, which isn't a comfort for what may be coming might be worse for it is true that progressive isn't continuous. The interesting answer is of course, what happens when it stops. In short, my point is that all points of history are potentially point zero, a period when the unimaginable can happen and it can all end. The good news is that since everything is permissible (yes, God is dead) even though that does not mean that nothing is forbidden as always added Camus, everything, including the best and the worst, is still possible.

The Al Jazeera effect

Noah Bonsey and Jeff Koogler on the increasing influence of Al Jazeera on Mideast politics ore especially the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict:

For Americans seeking to understand Al Jazeera’s role in shaping public opinion, it is perhaps useful to compare the channel to Fox News or MSNBC. Al Jazeera largely reports the facts, but in choosing which stories to highlight and which guests to invite on regularly, it betrays a certain political perspective. Of course, whereas Fox News and MSNBC operate in a highly competitive media environment, Al Jazeera is the main source of news for a majority of Palestinians and is the most popular television channel in the Arab world. This maximizes its influence. Indeed, Al Jazeera’s dominance of the Arab media makes it a political force unto itself. In no place is this more true than in the Palestinian arena, where it focuses much of its news coverage and where its market share is particularly strong.

No wonder, the Obama administration has chosen to have closer ties with Al Jazeera through   détente rather than conflict and confrontation.

The globalization of literature

I agree with Tim Parks on this  (hat tip : Amtava Kumar) even though the same realizations take me some place else:

As a result of rapidly accelerating globalization we are moving toward a world market for literature. There is a growing sense that for an author to be considered “great,” he or she must be an international rather than a national phenomenon. This change is not perhaps as immediately evident in the US as it is in Europe, thanks to the size and power of the US market and the fact that English is generally perceived as the language of globalization, so that many more translations go away from it than toward it. However, more and more European, African, Asian and South American authors see themselves as having “failed” if they do not reach an international audience.
In recent months authors in Germany, France and Italy—all countries with large and well-established national readerships—have expressed to me their disappointment at not having found an English language publisher for their works; interestingly, they complain that this failure reflects back on their prestige in their home country: if people don’t want you elsewhere you can’t be that good. Certainly, in Italy where I live, an author is only thought to have arrived when he is published in New York. To appreciate how much things have changed one only need reflect how little it would have dented the reputations of Zola or Verga had they not achieved immediate publication in London.

The key point here is that globalization has widened not only the literary market, but it has also  shrunk it in the sense that taste has been homogenized and diversity hollywoodized. "International" writers write thinking about what they hope would be the english translation of their work and their "foreign" audience. In the Time of Zola and of Verga, writers didn't have the pressure to sell and more importantly, they didn't have the example of some of their peers who became incredibly financially successfully and widely influential by giving the masses what they want: "fast literature."

Defending the Chinafrique

With some reservations, I agree with Barry Sautman and Yan Hairong on this:

The Chinese, it is said, are in Africa only for natural resources, to feed China’s industry and huge population. To exploit the continent, they provide loans and aid to rogue regimes. They worsen the plight of Africans by dumping cheap, shoddy products in their markets and ruin local industry. Chinese investors pay Africans a pittance, in contrast to more ethical Western firms. Given all that, China can only be an obstacle to Africa’s development.      
It’s an exciting tale but, alas, the media have gotten it all wrong. It’s not mainly China that impairs Africa’s development, but a world system of neo-liberal capitalism, based on privatization, trade liberalization, and reduced social spending, into which China is now partly integrated. As part of the same world system, China and the West have many activities in common in Africa, but there are also some distinctly Chinese trade and investment practices and these are often more appealing to Africans.

"Africa" has a lot to gain by the involvement of China and that it is too easy and too sensationalistic to keep seeing Africa and Africans as objects of exploitations. It is never go when Africa is the place where hegemons, particularly formal colonial powers, are able to come and to serve their national interests without giving much in return and diversity and multiplicity are essential, That said, the focus as always ought to be elsewhere since development  remains the central question and that we knows that it cannot be accomplished by trading partners or even solely international trade.

There is nothing left to the Left of the Left

Sugary excerpt from an editorial from the Guardian on Oskar Lafontaine, the German Left, and its lessons from the European left:

But there is no disguising the continuing weakness and gradual decline of the German centre-left as a potential party of federal government. Failure to adapt to globalisation has produced weakness. Weakness has caused splits and the splits are reflected in further weakness.These current travails of the German centre-left are part of a wider European pattern of division and defeat. Something of this sort has happened in many EU nations. But they are also a cautionary tale for the Labour party. Those who believe that the only problem with the Labour governments is that they have not been left-wing enough, or that everything will be solved by a proportional representation system that would allow the left to "be itself again", need a reality check.

Hum, I have the strong suspicion that the argument made here is more circular than anything else. The problem for the Left in most industrialized countries is that it has lost It in the sense that it does not believe in Leftism for it really believes in Fukuyamamism and in the theory that we are living the end of history for there are no alternative to the market, capitalism, free trade and other goodies. I remember during the Ohio primary how stupid both Clinton and Obama were sounding when they were trying to convince the people that they were never really for NAFTA. What I wanted to ask them was "what's your plan B?" This isn't a cynical, but a realistic question for it seems to me that the Left solely believes in the heart, that it is better than the right because it is more compassionate (that's why Bush created compassionate conservatism. At the time I wondered what was the point of being compassionate if you are not helping fixing the ill that creates your self-serving compassion). The problem when the heart is at the heart of politics is that any policy becomes justifiable when the argument that the heart of the policymakers is in the right place becomes plausible for the media and the masses. Is there really nothing left Left to the Left? I don't think that's the real question for liberalism in the American sense of the word has stopped to be a political ideology, to be just a societal one where the compassionate are separated from the mean zealots like Sarah Palin and the greedy. Leftism has no backbone. It is too busy admiring its grandeur and nobility in the mirror.

Les mêmes choses

After reading the following assertions from Yasmin Alihbai-Brown, I am reminded how much the fact that the only connections that our times to race are racism, ethnicity, and identity blocks any forward thinking because the focus is placed on particularities and différence and on the erroneous assumption that self-derogation is solely ideological:

So much of the media is embracing the new world, and today's most popular TV programmes, especially reality shows, feature a cornucopia of racial types. Yet "ethnic" psychosis persists and is manifestly getting worse.
On Asian marriage sites or matchmaking newspaper adverts, third-generation British Asian men want "wheaten" brides. In black communities western features are craved, hair is straightened, skin lightened for reasons profoundly disturbing. Jet gets herself a pointy, long nose. Now, she says, she looks rich enough to shop in Waitrose.
Back in the 1960s the Black is Beautiful movement in the US spread across the world and made us proud to be who we were, even in Kampala, Uganda where I was growing up. I stopped ironing my hair to look like Jean Shrimpton's, and my African college room-mates went Afro. No more burnt hair in the sink and a new dawn, we thought. For a few decades, yes. Now comes globalisation spreading Starbucks and standardised western notions, and with it a surge in "ethnic" self-loathing and self-mutilation.
What is different now is the absence of any political and social fightback. Race is dispensable, can be wiped out if you can pay for the privilege.

Pirates as globalized individuals

Interesting excerpt from Antoine Garapon, I don't quite agree with him even though his metaphor is quite imaginative:

A pirate is the purest kind of rational agent, motivated solely by a desire for gain; free of loyalty towards any flag, he is subject to no system of taxation. In that sense, the pirate symbolizes the globalized individual, free of ties, who behaves solely in response to his animus furandi, his predatory instinct. Since pirates are hostile, a priori, to any legal constraints, they refuse to "play the game"; rather than feeling bound by the social contract, they create their own, accepting only the law that they have made for themselves. "In the modern liquid world, loyalty is a source of shame not of pride"; paying taxes somewhere appears on the debit side of the balance sheet: it is the sign of a lack of creative accounting ability. If there is any form of loyalty deemed worthy of respect, it is loyalty to one's group, and in particular to one's fellow professionals. Indeed, globalized law has its origins in such peer groups. Such law dissolves the ties between the effective standard and the symbolic institution: pirates are not just anti-political, they are anti-institutional too.

Berlusconi is everywhere

While Martin Amis compared Ahmadinejad to Reagan,  Slavoj Žižek compares him to Berlusconi:

To put it in Freudian terms, today’s protest movement is the ‘return of the repressed’ of the Khomeini revolution.
What all this means is that there is a genuinely liberatory potential in Islam: we don’t have to go back to the tenth century to find a ‘good’ Islam, we have it right here, in front of us. The future is uncertain – the popular explosion has been contained, and the regime will regain ground. However, it will no longer be seen the same way: it will be just one more corrupt authoritarian government. Ayatollah Khamenei will lose whatever remained of his status as a principled spiritual leader elevated above the fray and appear as what he is – one opportunistic politician among many. But whatever the outcome, it is vital to keep in mind that we have witnessed a great emancipatory event which doesn’t fit within the frame of a struggle between pro-Western liberals and anti-Western fundamentalists. If we don’t see this, if as a consequence of our cynical pragmatism, we have lost the capacity to recognise the promise of emancipation, we in the West will have entered a post-democratic era, ready for our own Ahmadinejads. Italians already know his name: Berlusconi. Others are waiting in line.
Is there a link between Ahmadinejad and Berlusconi? Isn’t it preposterous even to compare Ahmadinejad with a democratically elected Western leader? Unfortunately, it isn’t: the two are part of the same global process. If there is one person to whom monuments will be built a hundred years from now, Peter Sloterdijk once remarked, it is Lee Kuan Yew, the Singaporean leader who thought up and put into practice a ‘capitalism with Asian values’. The virus of authoritarian capitalism is slowly but surely spreading around the globe. Deng Xiaoping praised Singapore as the model that all of China should follow. Until now, capitalism has always seemed to be inextricably linked with democracy; it’s true there were, from time to time, episodes of direct dictatorship, but, after a decade or two, democracy again imposed itself (in South Korea, for example, or Chile). Now, however, the link between democracy and capitalism has been broken.This doesn’t mean, needless to say, that we should renounce democracy in favour of capitalist progress, but that we should confront the limitations of parliamentary representative democracy.

I don't shared this view point, but it is difficult to disagree with the assertion that the link between democracy and capitalism is been broken or at least is no longer self-evident. It is so sad to say and surely not sympathetic enough to say, but so far nothing that has happened in Iran has surprised me. The script has been followed. I think that the spectators are just waiting impatiently for the end of the movie while the actors still have to figure out how much they are willing to risk to change the script.

The sacredness of Dimanche

The Wall Street Journal on the possible enactment of a law making possible for some French businesses to open on Sunday especially those, which attract the majority of tourists in cities such as Paris:

For many French citizens, being able to shop and work on Sunday would improve the quality of their lives. Some workers, such as students, even prefer to work on weekends. Opening on Sunday is good for the job market too. Legislative backers say the measure could save 15,000 jobs.
France being France, the bill will not make it universally legal to trade on Sundays -- that would be too simple. It will merely allow more stores to open in tourist areas and cities of more than one million people. Businesses will need the regional prefect's authorization, and the measure makes it illegal to discriminate against employees who refuse to work on Sunday. Workers will be paid double for Sunday duty. Even so, the proposal is proving controversial. The Socialist Mayor of Paris, Bertrand Delanoë, said recently: "Sunday is a day of rest respected by most citizens and it must not be sacrificed by this vision of a de-regulated economy that does not take into account the family and personal lives of workers."
Au contraire. If France is going to emerge from the economic slowdown as quickly as possible, businesses need to be free to adapt to changing times -- including the ability to serve customers when the customers want.

I have to admit that I would love it if almost everything wasn't closed in France on Sundays, but I'm wondering if it is still possible for some countries to refuse Americanization (which I love) while hanging on to what make them unique. My guess is that once that law is passed, it is the beginning of the end for in a couple of years, everything will be open on Sundays in Paris and elsewhere because the thing about Americanization is that you can just taste bit of it especially when you like perpetual movement and speed.

Communism and Fukuyamism

Sugary excerpt of the day from Slavoj Zizek

To treat communism as an eternal Idea implies that the situation which generates it is no less eternal, that the antagonism to which communism reacts will always be here. From which it is only one step to a deconstructive reading of communism as a dream of presence, of abolishing all alienating representation; a dream which thrives on its own impossibility.
Though it is easy to make fun of Fukuyama’s notion of the End of History, the majority today is Fukuyamaist. Liberal-democratic capitalism is accepted as the finally found formula of the best possible society; all one can do is to render it more just, tolerant and so on. The simple but pertinent question arises here: if liberal-democratic capitalism is, if not the best, then the least bad form of society, why should we not simply resign ourselves to it in a mature way, even accept it wholeheartedly? Why insist on the communist hypothesis, against all odds?
It is not enough to remain faithful to the communist hypothesis: one has to locate antagonisms within historical reality which make it a practical urgency. The only true question today is: does global capitalism contain antagonisms strong enough to prevent its indefinite reproduction?

Defending globalization

Stubborn facts:

[...] globalisation promotes peace through two channels: one from the increased advantage peace holds for bilateral trade interdependence and the other from a country’s integration into the global market, regardless of the size of trade with each trading partner. "Globalisation" has been one of the most salient features of the world economy over the past century. Emerging markets and developing countries continue to integrate into the global trading system. World trade has increased rapidly, particularly since World War II — from 18% of world GDP in 1950 to 52% in 2007. At the same time, the number of countries involved in world trade has also increased significantly. However, despite the increase in the number of country pairs between which conflict is possible, the probability of dyadic military conflicts has decreased.

Although globalization is about more than trade is capitalism, it is more important today than ever to remember that the only real debate is about what kind of globalization does the world want and that it is as erroneous and as ideological to argue that the current economic crisis show that globalization is an ill or is dead as it was in the eighties to declare that there was no alternative to neoliberal globalization.

Defending Anglo-Saxon capitalism

It's hard job, but somebody has to defend religiously the Anglo-Saxon economic model and way of life. I'm not sure that John Ibbitson does a good job doing it. I'm not even sure that there is such a thing as an Anglo-Saxon economic model anymore:

Anglo-Saxon capitalism – investment-friendly, export-oriented, low-taxed and minimally regulated – has been competing with its continental alternative – highly regulated, wealth-distributing and state-controlled – since the late 18th century. The Anglo-Saxon version is better. Britain launched, led and sustained the Industrial Revolution, and the United States launched, leads and sustains the Knowledge Revolution. There've been downturns, but we are wealthier and healthier than we'd have been with, say, France in charge.(...) We all want to live in a society where every child gets a good education, the poor have food and housing, and medical care is available for all. But we should also want to live in a society that encourages good ideas by making capital easily available and rewarding risk. Henry Ford and Bill Gates had good ideas. Because they were born in America, we live in their world. (...)  Anglo-Saxon isn't a race, it's an idea, which is why Mr. Sarkozy will berate Mr. Obama's Anglo-Saxon economics without irony. The recession will end, growth will resume and emerging economies will move closer to the Anglo-American model, because history has proved it works. This truth should be beyond debate, although it's a heck of a job getting some people to see it.

I wish Ibbitson's confidence was about more than a superiority complex and a blinding ideology. That said, I think Ibbitson misses the real issues because he wants to take some shots at the so-called European/French capitalism and way of life without addressing the center question of the direction and the sustainability of the current framework of globalization.

Excess and punishment

Sean Collins has a great response in Spiked to the Time's cover article by Kurt Andersen arguing that the crisis is good for America because it will force Americans to stop their excesses and to learn healthier behaviors:

Andersen blames people for taking on excessive mortgage and consumer debt; in other words, for living beyond their means. In doing so, he ignores systemic factors, such as government promotion of home ownership, the Federal Reserve’s lowering of interest rates, and the general expansion of credit facilities. Moreover, it is not a sin for people to want to take a bet on their own future success (especially when offered credit at very low interest rates): it is a personal financial judgment call. People should have the freedom to make their own decisions, including those that prove to be unwise ones. (...) In 1978, Susan Sontag published Illness as Metaphor, in which she criticised the notion that one’s character causes disease. Today, people like Andersen blame character for the economic crisis, a kind of Recession as Moral Fable. In Andersen’s world, there are no larger economic forces in play, no credit derivatives, no state intervention. Just immoral individuals who are getting what they deserve, and who need to reform.

I have to say that all of the American-centricism and Eurocentrism of the elites and analysts covering the crisis frighten me and force me to the conclusion they have never understood the globalized world. This lack of understanding explains, in great part, why the West is failing to even recognize that a global crisis requires global solutions and that global solutions aren't ones, which just concern wealthy or emerging countries. I don't think somebody  has yet made the case that in globalized world, local policies mean zilch if the context isn't taken into account. It is strange but there is about to be a G-20 summit without African countries except of course for South Africa and that nobody, not even Africa's great white hope (Obama) , find that appalling.

Seeking reasons to make religious faith relevant

Since he started to answer to exclamations such as "Yo Blair!" and since he started to hang out with Berlusconi and Sarkozy, Tony Blair scares me. When he writes this, I wonder what has happened to him and I'm really starting to pity him:

In this globalised world, we are more than ever interconnected, but we are also more uncertain. What were firm boundaries of race, culture and identity are becoming fluid. In such a world the involvement of religion becomes ever more crucial. It can either play a positive role, helping to deepen understanding and working for the common good, or it can be exploited to become destructive, emphasising difference and reinforcing distrust of the “other”.
Religious faith and how it develops could be of the same significance to the 21st century as political ideology was to the 20th. It could help guide and sustain the era of globalisation, lending it values, and, in bringing faiths and cultures to a greater understanding of each other, could foster peaceful coexistence. Or it could be a reactionary force, pulling people apart just as globalisation pushes people together. Whichever route develops, it does mean that all leaders, whether of religious faith themselves or not, have to “do God”.

Old answers

Mikhail Gorbachev has a solution to the global financial crisis and it is the return of the State. The question, at this point, isn't whether to bring the State back or not, but how to bring it back and how much should it do. Paul Krugman has argued, for example, that Obama's stimulus package was too small. My guess is that he is right and that the Obama administration knew it or rather sensed it but figured that for political reasons, it had to start small and ask for more later when hopefully(here is that word again), things were getting better. There is the problem: the State to make a difference, politics and politicians have to be responsible and avoid petty calculations.

When speed and relentlessness become reassuring

Gideon Rachman gives Nicolas Sarkozy, who is also President of the EU, high marks for his leadership during the financial crisis:

By contrast, Nicolas Sarkozy has done well. “Reassuring” is not a word that generally applies to the hyperactive French president. But Mr Sarkozy has looked energetic and determined. Since France currently holds the presidency of the European Union, he has had the usually nightmarish task of trying to manufacture a joint European response. In the event, Sunday night’s summit in Paris was a much more decorous and successful occasion than many an EU crisis summit. By avoiding farce and presenting a united façade to the world, Mr Sarkozy saved the EU from further embarrassment.

I would like to agree with him, but I have some reservations not because I disagree with Sarkozy politically, but because I have the sense that what is being done will simply and temporarily contain the flames of the fire because doing more and being for once and when it is needed, revolutionary would mean to increase uncertainty and to cause more panic. I have this sinking feeling that the toughest decisions aren’t make and that the political lessons of this crisis aren’t learned because they would necessitate Sarkozy to change ideologically. However, we know that politicians, especially when they are relentless and obsessed with speed as Sarkozy is, don’t change ideologically. They remain cats or dogs while from time to time pretending to metamorphose into something else to speed things along.  

Globalized beauty

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown on racism, dark skin and globalized beauty:

For those who make and break images, decide who is gorgeous and who is not, light skin and hair and eyes easily please the eye, affirm superior human status. Racism is a given, an understanding infused through the business. Top model agencies will tell you that eager Asian, Arab and black models may look exquisite and flawless, but find it almost impossible to enter, survive or let alone thrive in that hostile habitat. I have written about this abhorrent exclusivity for more than 20 years and to do so again feels like failure.

The beauty and fashion industries still maintain a closed shop when it comes to the selection and promotion of models. In women's magazines, on catwalks, even shop dummies, dark skin is rarely seen. They say it is because customers are put off by such unexpected, outlandish images of loveliness even though a recent special issue of Italian Vogue featured only black models and was sold out worldwide.

[…] And now, with 21st-century globalisation, the ugly rejection of darkness is getting even worse. European definitions of attractiveness – from thin body shape to light colouring – are sweeping the non-western world, making most populations feel envious and sometimes desperate. Ten years ago beauty lightening creams had all but vanished from these places as native pride grew and health risks were better understood. Today these products are shifting like never before. A trader in Acton has just been convicted for selling banned, toxic, whitening creams which can cause burns and rashes.

The issue is a lot more complicated than Alibhai-Brown is willing to acknowledge for after all self-derogation has as many internal factors as it has external factors. It is impossible to watch this commercial of a popular lightening cream featuring a famous actor (Shahrukh Khan) and not to realize that the issue is about much more than the dark color of one’s skin.

Why France is essential to a relevant Left

After reading this long sugary excerpt from Dick Howard writing an article titled An International New Left ?, I have finally understood why France is essential to a relevant Left and why the problem today with both the Left and France is that she (I hate using such pronouns for countries but in this case it is warranted) is dizzied up by a president who doesn’t get her and shaken by citizens who doubt that francité can change the world (which I don’t doubt for a second):

Why France? France, in the shared imagination of critical Americans, incarnated the true revolution. It was the place where 1789 had become 1793, when a 'bourgeois' demand for political rights became a radical demand for economic equality that was finally consecrated in the first step toward a global revolution in 1917. The French revolutionary tradition was the more striking when contrasted to the liberal one that had given birth to the United States. In spite of its grand rhetoric, the latter had not even put an end to slavery in 1776 and was only now recognizing the injustice and social divisions that had condemned a part of the population to a segregated existence that was separate and unequal. For us, the myth of revolutionary France was further reinforced by the support found there for 20^th century anti-colonial movements, including that of Vietnam, where the U.S. had stupidly picked up a lost cause because of its reflexive anti-communist foreign policy. A reflection of the power of this symbolic myth that linked France and revolution: one of my first 'touristic' visits in Paris brought me to the Stalingrad metro station! Why? Because one of our basic criticisms of American liberalism was that it minimized the role of the Soviet Union in the defeat of Nazism. That a Parisian metro station would be so-named signified that political culture in France was not blindly enrolled in an anti-communist crusade.

France also represented for us the land of critical philosophy, principally that of Sartre (Althusser had only recently published For Marx and Reading Capital, and structuralism had not yet crossed the Atlantic [3]). Sartre was the anti-bourgeois par excellence. Although he was not really a political philosopher (despite his grand existential-Hegelian-Marxist Critique of Dialectical Reason [4]), his was a moral stance built on the denunciation of what he called 'les salauds,' who manipulated the freedom that is essential to the humanity of the individual (including their own). Sartre was the Voltaire of his time; and we young intellectuals in the U.S. demanded nothing better than, with Voltaire, to 'écrasez l'infâme' (although we wanted to find the material means to realize the task). In stark contrast, Anglo-American analytic philosophy, which confined itself to analyzing ordinary language and abstract logic, led only to the confirmation of existing social relations. [5]

Finally, Marx's work was available and hotly discussed in the French language, while it was scarcely translated in the U.S. (where, for example, I had no choice but to buy my three volumes of Capital in the English edition published in Moscow, as only volume 1 was easily available in U.S. bookstores). Indeed, this was the time (after de-Stalinization) when 'revisionists' in Eastern Europe were discovering the writings of young Marx, and Western critics were using them as weapons against the dominant ideology of the communist parties.

France is the only country, which at her best, when she doesn’t follow her seductive demons, can be Un-American or rather non-American without being anti-American by representing a way of life that isn’t so much contrary to the American way life but its necessary opposite because it shows that something as pleasing and as inspiring as the American one is possible. The point is that after seeing the adventures of Obama in Paris and watching disturbingly the show that he put with Sarkozy, I understood that the French Left, the American Left, the International Left are in trouble because they have lost France. France is no longer the country of Voltaire, Camus, and Sartre, but of Pascal Bruckner (what a pity!) and Alain Finkielkraut (who is a good leading intellectual to have if he has worthy adversaries to chastise his urge to be both extreme and simplistic).

Good but not better

The best article I read last weekend was the one in the Financial Times on former Czech president Václav Hazel in which he talked about his views of the world, his pro-Europeanism and his love New York. It is a fun read. Sugary excerpt:

Yes, of course it is a good thing that the Iron Curtain fell and that communism ended, but that still doesn’t mean that the world is a better place. The big differences between the developed world and the developing world are deeper than ever. The unifying forces of globalisation incite various forms of chauvinism or nationalism. Terrorists almost have the capacity to fire nuclear missiles. The world is full of various dangers, including ecological ones in the form of climate change, and so on. […] I’d say that it is a good thing that the world is no longer divided in two, but new superpowers are emerging, and who knows what this will bring? China today is more powerful than Russia. Russia is witnessing the rise of a strange, special sort of dictatorship with strong imperialist demands, albeit dressed more elegantly than before.

It is still not just Globalization, stupid!

Peter Thiel (one of the co-founders of PayPal) has an essay on Globalization on the Hoover Institution website, which is a good read because it makes interesting, but limited points about globalization and our times. Sugary except:

Classic investment strategies no longer work in a world where ordinary economic cycles are broken. The limits of a George Soros or a Julian Robertson, much less of an ltcm, can be attributed to a failure of the imagination about the possible trajectories for our world, especially regarding the radically divergent alternatives of total collapse and good globalization.

Seven years later, the markets have come full circle. The retreat towards tactical cleverness hides a lazy agnosticism about the most fundamental questions of our age. Because we find ourselves in a world of retail sanity and wholesale madness, the truly great opportunities exist in the wildly mispriced macro context — rather than in the ever-diminishing spreads on esoteric financial markets or products. Indeed, one could go even further: What is truly frightening about the twenty-first century is not merely that there exists a dangerous dimension to our time, but rather the unwillingness of the best and brightest to try and make any sense of this larger dimension.

[…] In every possible future, all of today ’s bubbles will burst, and their ideological scaffolding will prove to be but lint in the winds of history.

The waning of globalization in the near future will be a reaction to the excesses of the recent past.  Bubbles have begun to implode across the globe, laying bare the fraudulence of “China,” “technology,” “hedge funds,” and their like. As the world's economy weakens, so will support for the globalist orthodoxy, the political tenability of which rests heavily on the ability of the doctrine to literally deliver the goods. Some policymakers seem to sense this already, with the most immediately obvious of these being the Fed. In this view, the Fed ’s morally hazardous accommodations are best understood not as a perplexing and facile sop to bankrupt homeowners but as a desperate effort to stave off a recession that will end the debate on globalization for years to come.

Globalization became a buzzword applied to all things and used to reinforce the idea that there were no alternatives to a particular worldview and set of policies, which created both wealth and extreme inequality. The point is that few understand that in spite of the fact that globalization isn’t new; it is still relevant because it makes policy and investors’ choices even more essential than ever before because it is clear that markets aren’t fair and the invisible right seldom creates fairness and social justice.

Kerviel, Trading, and Poker

Christopher Caldwell on the Jérôme Kerviel affair and Trading:

The stars of the trading floor resemble the stars of professional sports. In both walks of life, there are a lot of “intangibles” – it is hard to break down the relevant gifts that go into making a superior performer. Sometimes you see a basketball player, with a clear path to an easy basket, attempt an absurdly elaborate reverse slam-dunk and miss. Coaches used to bench players for this kind of indiscipline. They do not any more, because they understand something about human nature.

Sport looks like a practical job, built around the accumulation of points. But inside players’ heads, sport is a heroic succession of brilliant stunts. It resembles a dream. That dream is a mighty force. The frame of mind that leads a player idiotically to mess up an easy basket is the same frame of mind that allows him to make 10 consecutive three-pointers as if he is in a trance. Coaches indulge their players because they sense that harnessed fantasy is often more practical than practicality.

Like athletes, traders tend to go for the gold, to follow their dreams, to trade to the extent of permissible risk. In such situations, the goal of their companies is not to kill that wild ambition by introducing a voice into traders’ heads saying: “I don’t feel right about this.”

I think that Caldwell has the wrong metaphor because I believe that trading is more like poker and that traders are more like poker players (I don’t believe that poker is a sport no matter what Espn says). The problem with trading is that like poker more the stakes are high, less the players are connected from reality because their focus is on the possibility of making a score and becoming the champ. In sports, in general, players know when they are losing and that you have to be good to be lucky, with poker and trading, players always believe that anything is possible and that you can overcome anything including stupid and risky decisions with luck.

Jérôme Kerviel, the French and the mépris of capitalism

Agnès Poirier’s reading of the Jérôme Kerviel and the Société Générale scandal:

Beyond the humour and self-derision that such a story provokes, Kerviel's coup and the way the French are taking it have revealed once again the very different nature of French attitudes towards haute finance, and towards capitalism in its most abstract form. Together, they are looked on with utter suspicion by most people in France.

[…]I remember how in school, when I was 13, we would all snigger at the concept of an ever-virtuous free market. "As if a free market didn't produce gross inequalities!" we would say on cue. The free market may have become a necessary evil for my generation, but most of us still agree that only strong state regulation can correct capitalism's inherent injustice.

[…]Of course, globalisation and the growth of the European Union have weakened the power of nations and the extent to which nation states can play solo in the world economy. Nonetheless, France continues to live a very French paradox: her schoolchildren are taught to despise capitalism, yet she remains the second-largest trading nation in Western Europe. France boasts some of the world's leading utilities and transport and construction companies, and yet maintains a large public sector, employing 4 per cent of her labour force - that is to say 864,000 people - in the country's 1,100 state-owned companies.

The question is: how long can France thrive on her contradictions? Perhaps as long as the French find Zidane's headbutt and Kerviel's ?5bn coup equally sublime.

France is probably the only developed country where Jérôme Kerviel could be regarded as Robin Hood precisely because the French look suspiciously not only at capitalism, but also at wealth, which to them isn’t as in America a sign of success, but of exploitation. The point is that most of the French still believe that the most of the rich make their wealth by exploiting the poor and by taking advantage of an unfair system. In America, someone who is rich is most of the times not ashamed of showing his/her wealth because s/he feels that it was earned. In France, people who earned too much are encouraged to feel ashamed of their wealth and to hide it because it is considered indecent to show it when too much people don’t have enough to live.

Globalization and French cheese

Michael Johnson has an interesting article on Globalization, modernization, and French cheese in the International Herald Tribune, which makes the point that it is difficult to mix tradition and commercialism.

The advantage of being a small country

Via Gideon Rachman, an interesting argument about the advantages that there is for a country in being small in the globalized world:

Globalisation has opened up markets across the world. China and India are getting richer largely because they have access to the markets of the developed world, not because of the size of their domestic markets. Small countries can trade their way to success even more swiftly. Think of Singapore or Switzerland.

Small is also no longer synonymous with insecure.

In Europe, many minnows have enhanced their security by joining Nato. This is sometimes denounced as free-riding. Belgium or Luxembourg can afford to be small, secure and smug – because they are under the security umbrella, proffered by big and generous Uncle Sam.

But joining a collective security organisation is not an absolute necessity for a small country. Ireland and Switzerland are not members of Nato – and neither appears to be in imminent danger of invasion.

The fact is large countries are now less instinctively expansionist than they were in the days of empire. These days, invading and occupying small countries can be a massive pain in the neck – as the US has discovered in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Since the traditional disadvantages of being a tiddly country are disappearing, you are just left with the advantages.

Above all, small countries tend to be more homogenous. This makes them less prone to civil strife or dictatorship. It also means higher levels of social trust – which may be why small Scandinavian states are willing to spend so much on health and education and fare so well on human development indices.

Governments in small countries also find it easier to craft and implement policy – an advantage that might be replicated in the US by federalism. Small, homogenous countries should also be less tempted to waste money on pork-barrel projects, designed to buy off discontented minorities.

The size of a country is less of an issue than its geography. I would argue that neither Singapore nor Switzerland if there were African countries or located next to Russia or to India or Pakistan. In other words, location is more important than size.

French Strikes and the poverty of riches

Marc Steel makes the case that the French strikes are an example of the poverty in rich countries. Steel argues that strikers are expected to accept globalization without making too much of fuss, to just work more and get on the program without the rich having the same obligation. Sugary excerpt:

The argument to scrap these "privileges" goes on to explain that they cripple the economy, making everyone worse off. So presumably the French should be more like the British, because we've been far-sighted enough to have much worse pension schemes, and our working week is on average 2.63 hours longer than the French one. So obviously that makes us better off. But even we're lagging behind truly modern economies, like Burma, where there are no pensions and people are forced to work all day and night or be whacked with a stick. They're rolling in it, the jammy bastards.

Seeing as the new government in France is determined to smash the culture of unearned privilege, Nicolas Sarkozy must be familiar with the characters at the top of the French rich-list. The No.1 spot in this list is a surprise, as you would imagine it must be occupied by a train driver from Lille with lots of stubble, but it turns out that it's Bernard Arnault, chairman of Christian d'Or, who's worth $21bn. He must be in a really outdated union.

[…] Sarkozy represents the frustrated wing of French business that wants their country to be handed to the same City types, their one per cent. Whereas some of the strikers appear to have grasped that when a government proposes cutting pensions, closing 200 courts, cutting 11,000 primary school teachers and privatising parts of the university system, these aren't random flights of madness but part of a pattern. And surely any policy that says, "The way we run our railways is outdated – let's run them more like the system they have in Britain", can't be allowed to succeed.

I agree with the sentiment expressed by Steel, but I think that the solution is to focus more equality and equity. For the key issue is France is not the sustainability and the reexamination of the privileges of certain French workers, but rather the sustainability and the examination of all privileges so that the French can make a decision about what type of society they wish to have.

The mirror always has two faces

Via the New York Times, this excerpt of an editorial lamenting the two sides of Sarkozy as if it expected with naïveté that Sarkozy would not be a complex figure:

The picture of a French president who jogs, vacations in New Hampshire and even seems comfortable around President George W. Bush is so unusual that it has earned Nicolas Sarkozy the nickname of "Sarko the American." That, along with France's toughened stand against Iran's nuclear appetites, won Sarkozy bipartisan applause in Washington this month.

It is certainly a relief to have a French leader who wants to improve relations with the United States. The two countries have plenty of common interests, including fighting terrorism, keeping Iran from developing nuclear weapons and nurturing democracy in Lebanon.

[…]Last week, days after his return from Washington, Sarkozy addressed the European Union Parliament, where he offered a worryingly old-style French program for building protectionist walls around an economically and demographically exclusive Europe. His approach would discriminate against foreign companies and third world farmers. And, as he has previously made clear, he will do all he can to keep Turkey out of the European Union. If Sarkozy's ideas prevail - a realistic possibility - they would inflict long-term damage on France and Europe.

Many Europeans, like many Americans, feel threatened by globalization. But the challenge cannot be met with Sarkozy's misconceived ideas, including designating threatened European companies as nationally backed contenders, and giving them special legal and economic privileges. That approach will see sheltered European firms fall even further behind newer and more efficient competitors from India, China and elsewhere.

[…] It would be nice to welcome a new French-American alliance. But first, Sarkozy will have to resolve the conflict between his enlightened trans-Atlantic overtures and his narrow protectionist vision for Europe.

I have a big problem with the New York Times editorial because it is acting as if it is discovering that Sarkozy has these views and that he is against the Turkey’s entrance into the European Union. One gets the impression that the Times believes that Sarkozy’s love for America means that he will forget politics and just do what is good for America or rather that he will forget that he is the Right Wing president of France, a country that is trying to find its place within a globalizing world. My point is simple: the New York Times and other American newspapers have turned Sarkozy into a superhero that is revolutionizing France focusing on his image and his love of America while forgetting that politics and governing are about substance and about the results of specific policies. Sarkozy is a politician with a backbone. This means that he isn’t an empty vessel, which will be filled with new ideas because they look chic and proper even though he does love glamour and the lights of the cameras. I’ve always argued that the only things modern and American about Sarkozy are his image, the way he does politics, and his belief in force and power. The New York Times should accept this reality instead of holding on to the myth of super Sarko. Thus, the lesson here is a simple one, Atlanticism and a love for America aren’t a sign of greatness and of progressivism, but can be signs of conservatism and potent populism.

Africa, money, and inequality

Jonathan Power has an article in the International Herald Tribune, one of the best articles I’ve read today. Its subject is Africa and it focuses on the amount of money from foreign direct investment from China and others that is flowing throughout the continent despite of its so-called poverty. Sugary excerpt:

As Chinese and Indian investors almost pour into Africa one wonders if their European and North American competitors have woken up to the fact that Rip Van Winkle is waking up in Africa.

The fact that a top Chinese banker brackets Africa with Asia is one more sign that the Asians themselves see what is happening in Africa as a repeat of what happened to them 20 and 30 years ago.

They can see the potential while Western commentators, their spurious words tasting of sour grapes, point an accusing finger at China in particular, accusing it of planning to rape Africa as the Europeans did a century ago.

This is not rape, by any stretch of the imagination. This is business opportunity. Africa in many countries is on the way to booming and Africa is looking for marriages of convenience with willing investors in railroads, toll roads, ports, motorbike and cement factories. Already there are over 900 Chinese companies working in Africa.

Power succeeds in demonstrating with his article is that Africa is not a doomed continent that is condemned to poverty and to underdevelopment. The key question remains however whether there will ever be a way to solve the inequality question by enabling more Africans to share the wealth of the continent. The main issue is that very few Africans and too many foreigners are benefiting from the resources of Africa and this fact makes them value stability above everything else instead of addressing more urgent matters through means that may cause instability in the short run, but then lead to more prosperity for all Africans.

Another French American

The American press is obsessed with finding reasons to believe that Sarkozysm is Americanization and to claim the key members of the French government as American. A good example of this trend is Amity Shlaes’s article on the French Finance Minister Christine Lagarde whom Roger Cohen called American in the International Herald Tribune. Shlaes compares inappropriately Lagarde with Cecilia Sarkozy and asserts that she is American in almost every way. Sugary excerpt:

Ms. Lagarde's charm is that she focuses on the smaller challenges, the micro issues of enterprise. She addresses those specific aspects of nations' relative competitiveness that executives themselves talk about in the first-class lounge — at least when they aren't checking for updates on Cecilia.

[...] Ms. Lagarde is cutting marginal taxes even as the U.S. seems intent on raising them. By proposing a ban on payroll taxes on overtime, Ms. Lagarde is ensuring that the more a worker works, the more he gains, just as Mr. Sarkozy promised in his campaign. Ms. Lagarde reckons that this step alone will add 0.3% to France's annual growth.

Finally, the Sarkozy administration is lowering the share of citizens' total income that can go to income taxes to 50% or less, from 60%. This puts France more in line with Germany. And it is another example of the French moving in the opposite direction of the Americans.

Ms. Lagarde is also demanding that English be used more as the language of business. After Mr. Sarkozy's ascent, France finally ratified the dreaded London Protocol, which ends a requirement that all patents be translated into French. She utters the syllables "Wal-Mart" without grimace, a sight that is as tantalizing to an investment banker as Britney at work is to a 14-year-old.

[…] Her relatively pro-entrepreneurial stance means she will be able to take advantage of pent-up demand to do business in France. After all, many companies have regretfully stayed away as long as a quarter of a century, ever since Francois Mitterrand laid out his crazy first agenda, nationalizing financial institutions and pushing through higher wages. All France need do is show it is serious to bring them back. And the person who understands that isn't Cecilia, but Christine.

Honestly, I don’t know what to say for it seems that these days that France is only worth anything if it resembles America or rather inspires to resemble America. There is no doubt that America is a great country, it is in my opinion the best country for the dreamers and the ambitions. Nevertheless, I think that the more globalized the world becomes, the more important it is that countries retain their own characteristics and that societies are allowed to be different. What bothers me is this increasing conventional idea that Americanization is the best and only way for a country to prosper. America is an exceptional nation . I don’t think that every country can be America even though they are all right to aspire to be American-like and to love American idealism.

Another British invasion

Melanie Reid writes in the Times of London about the British invasion of rural France. Many Brits are buying property in French villages attracted by the allure of traditional France and also by the fact that the land is extremely affordable.  The low price of the French country side makes it possible for many Brits not to buy their own farms and other pieces of land, but also to own a piece of the soul of the region and to make an immediate mark on its culture and identity. Sugary excerpt:

Meanwhile, back in the invading nation’s home territory, property investment brokers are stoking the fire. Searching for clever, undiscovered areas in France to buy? Look no further than the Pyrenees-Atlantiques, say the experts. Such areas are “highly accessible and attractively priced” . It’s easy, see? Adopt a general’s ruthless battle strategy for this bloodless invasion. Feel no guilt, question nothing. Don’t waste a minute worrying about the negative impact on poor old France. Just relish the almost sexual thrill of such disproportionate spending power. A ruined farmhouse for how much? Only €90,000? No wonder they call it property porn.

And so the British rush to the French countryside has become unstoppable. At a very conservative estimate, Britons now own 200,000 properties, with more than 100,000 residing full-time – double the figure of five years earlier – but the numbers are out of date almost as you quote them, for British migration to France is believed to be running at just over 40,000 a year. As a result, the average house price in France has risen by 120 per cent over the past ten years.

There is anger. My niece expresses a very moderate form of what is an unmistakeable mood. Even as the French appreciate the affluence that the British money brings, they resent the power of the invaders to displace their young and change their traditions. Who wouldn’t?

In some villages in southwest of France, a third of the houses are British holiday homes, and a lot of the rest are Dutch. For the deeply rural French, the immigration is insensitive and offensive, and some liken the British to the Algerians, gathering in ghettoes in the city suburbs. In some villages there has been an increase in votes for the far Right.

The important issues are ones of culture, identity and money and the question is whether everything ought to be for sale even in a free market society. The most alarming issue isn't that the Brits are “invading” rural France, but that they are the only ones able to afford a piece of the French soul and that the natives cannot. I am a strong believer in Globalization, but as I like to say one of its most disastrous consequences is that it has made some of the citizens in the “developed” world feel and almost (it is an exaggeration) like the ones of the “developing” word. The point isn’t that there exists a super-rich class or that some are able to buy cheap lands in different country, but rather that the gap between them and the rest is so wide that it enables them to buy culture and the best of life, while too many people can afford to do the same. In other words, I am not worry about the Brits in the Pays Basque, but rather about the natives who can no longer afford to keep lands that have been sometimes in their families for generations.

Revolution obsession

Roger Cohen is obsessed with the idea that Sarkozysm is going to revolutionize to americanize France. In his column, he gives a flattering portrait of one of the leaders of the Sarkozy Revolution, Christine Lagarde, the French Finance minister. Cohen calls Lagarde, an “American” and praises her plans to have the French think less and work more. Sugary excerpt:

France, she suggests, is changing in the image of a president whose approach "is not being constrained by rules, principles, protocol, straitjackets."

The country, long hung up in a left-bank bubble filled with quaint notions of reversing globalization, now wants "to take advantage of a globalized world, rather than be defensive."

To which I say, Hallelujah. Without a dynamic France, Europe cannot be revitalized, and a Europe in a Gallic funk is bad for everyone. If an overbearing America has been a problem, an underperforming Europe has been its complement.

[…] This revolution, she insists, must begin in the French head. Lagarde has become the anti-Descartes by declaring the French should think less to work more.

"What has escaped my critics," she says with a smile, "is that clearly before action, there must be thinking. But we have been splitting hairs and talking about the sex of angels for long enough. We know the solutions to all our evils. So let's roll up our sleeves."

Hallelujah - and, as we Anglo-Saxons say, Vive la France!

I wonder if Roger Cohen has read Mark Twain’s Great Expectations not let’s use a more current and French book, I wonder if he has read Dominique de Villepin’s new book on Napoleon Le Soleil Noir de la Puissance, 1796-1807 (The Dark Sun of Power). If Cohen had read those books, he would understand that great aspirations have not enough and that they almost lead to paralysis when one refuses to give them up when confronted with reality. Too many Americans such as Cohen who suffers from American-centrism only love revolution when they happen in other countries because they only like great changes when it doesn’t affect them. My contention is that Cohen wouldn’t like an American politician to call for another American revolution and would then be arguing that s/he was realistic and being to pompous by believing that s/he had to power to change who Americans are. The point is that it is easier to love radicalism when it has consequences on other people and when it is happening in a land that isn’t one homeland.

The West and power

Niall Ferguson has an interesting take on the relationship among Bush, Sarkozy, and Brown, the leaders of the United States, France, and Britain. He argues that their biggest challenge is not to get along with Bush with each other and to develop strong alliances, but rather to face up to the fact that the West is weaker and that therefore the sphere of influence of their different countries is as narrow as it has ever been:

France, Britain, America: They each have had their era of hegemony. Now, however, they all belong to the club of developed debtors, with combined current account deficits of $970 billion last year. Other members of this club are Australia, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, New Zealand, Portugal and Spain. Apart from Iceland, it reads like a list of ex-empires, with the former members of the British Empire (energy-rich Canada excepted) in the lead.
Collectively, the developed debtors had to borrow about $1.3 trillion last year. On the other side of this great global equation is the club of emerging exporters. According to the International Monetary Fund, more than 40% of the developed debtors' funding requirement last year was met by China, Russia and the Middle East.
The problem for the deficit countries is essentially that their people think the world owes them a living. Their politicians pander to this assumption by making a series of more or less incompatible promises: that expenditure on healthcare and education will always go up; that direct taxation will never go up; and that the assets against which voters borrow will never go down. The only way to fulfill these promises is to pump out ever more printed paper: bank notes, bills, bonds, stocks and the rest. The emerging exporters buy these. The net result must be a creeping transfer of financial ownership from West to East.
[…] So the big question is not whether Sarkozy or Brown will get along better with Bush, but what China's sovereign wealth fund will buy when it embarks on its first investment spree. By comparison with these sovereigns, the traditional sovereigns of the political world are starting to look about as powerful as, well, professors.
And the really bad news for these presidents and prime ministers? Not only are the stakes getting lower all the time, you guys don't even have tenure.

The difficulty with politicizing the European Union

Olaf Cramme has an article in Open Democracy on the European Union. He argues that the EU must become a more political union to avoid the rise of populism and alienation in Europe:

In particular, current EU management thwarts the idea of European citizenship, a concept which demands that individuals must feel that they understand and share ownership of the core mechanism of their society. The Canadian intellectual John Ralston Saul argues that "this sense of understanding implies that each of us has the self-confidence to wish to change our society for the better" (see The Collapse of Globalism [Penguin, 2005]). This, in turn, requires that citizens come to see political leadership as the ultimate expression of their belief in the reality of choice and change.

Technocratic dominance and management of Europe, in contrast, proclaims the inevitability of developments and their dynamics - and in doing so serves to drive individuals away from citizenship and, eventually, from the very idea of EU integration. Worse, the absence of choice magnifies the feelings of insecurity, leading to a political arena where false populism appears more and more tempting. The rise of demagogues across the European Union, and from different parts of the political spectrum, exemplifies this.

In Europe, only a few leaders seem to have recognised this dilemma. France's president, Nicolas Sarkozy, is one of them. When he made his first post-election visit to Brussels in May 2007 he hinted at his thinking on the role of the European Union in response to globalisation: "Europe has to protect its citizen, not to worry them. Europe has to prepare itself for globalisation - it can't just be overtaken by it. Globalisation can't be a Trojan horse in Europe" (see "Sarkozy to champion Europe in trade talks", Financial Times, 23 May 2007). At the European council meeting a month later, Sarkozy insisted on removing the principle of "free and undistorted competition" from Article 3 of the old constitutional treaty.

His motivation and intentions are clear. Sarkozy, despite a declared intention to liberalise the French domestic labour market, does not believe in the virtues of free trade and openness to globalisation. Rather, he regards protectionism as a solution to the unskilled-worker problem, and thinks that the European central bank should make stimulating growth and jobs a priority instead of fiscal and monetary prudence. This questioning of the merits of competition has secured him electoral support in France and won popular favour in other parts of Europe. But the larger point is that in projecting this view, Sarkozy is also saying that he wants a more political Europe - self-evidently one that reflects his analysis and worldview.

Does this mean the provisional end of European harmony? It certainly requires other players to take a firm stand on the issues in question and clarify their divergent positions. If this happened, the healthy result might be that clashing interests and perspectives might come more clearly to the fore and thus allow EU decision-making on how to tackle future challenges to be put to the test.

This is where Sarkozy's line of attack also has a constructive element. Europe, if it is to regain the interest of its citizens and include its citizens centrally in its deliberations, urgently needs a proper debate as well as choices about its political direction. The changes in favour of more democracy and subsidiarity, as envisaged by the "reform treaty", may be a step in the right direction; but of themselves they will hardly generate more enthusiasm for the union. Instead, decisions about a host of issues - managing the single market, the nature of social Europe, Europe's role in a multi-polar world, competition rules, economic redistribution - ultimately need a stronger political underpinning.

For Europe to become more political it has to choose what it is and that choice is difficult given the fact that it has different members with different interests and different visions of Europe and what it can provide for them. Moreover, European political leaders have to accept not to oppose to see the interests of Europe as a whole to their own national interests. The current feud between the European Central Bank’s (ECB) president Jean-Claude Trichet, who is a Frenchman, and Sarkozy is a good example of these tensions that exist between not only between national and European interests, but also between economics and politics. Sarkozy is criticizing the strong Euro and the ECB because he knows that more likely than not, France’s economy will not be able to grow for much of his term. Trichet and Europe are for Sarkozy the perfect scapegoats because a majority of French already fears that Europe isn’t representing their interests and is infringing upon their national governments.

Blaming the ECB is an effective way to shift responsibility from the lack of economic growth or for an economic slowdown from his government to a few European technocrats have weren’t elected by the people and who therefore have not interest in protecting them. Moreover, it is difficult to have a political European Union when there is no consensus on what the European Union is and when national political leaders are able to use Brussels a scapegoat for their own failings and their lack of political courage.

Europe, America, and Surrender

I’m currently reading and enjoying Perry Anderson’s article in the London Review of Books. Anderson offers a different look of Europe, which contrasts with the one usually given by those who argue that the twenty-first century will be the European Century. Anderson argues that Europe surrendered to the United States and that their differences are essentially ones of style rather than substance because Current European Leaders have bought into the American way since they haven’t know anything else and are therefore unable and unwilling to envion anything else. Sugary excerpt:

What has been delivered in these practices are not just the hooded or chained bodies, but the deliverers themselves: Europe surrendered to the United States. This rendition is the most taboo of all to mention. A rough approximation to it can be found in what remains in many ways the best account of the relationship between the two, Robert Kagan’s Paradise and Power, the benevolent contempt of whose imagery of Mars and Venus – the Old World, relieved of military duties by the New, cultivating the arts and pleasures of a borrowed peace – predictably riled Europeans. But even Kagan grants them too much, as if they really lived according to the precepts of Kant, while Americans were obliged to act on the truths of Hobbes. If a philosophical reference were wanted, more appropriate would have been La Boétie, whose Discours de la servitude volontaire could furnish a motto for the Union. But these are arcana. The one contemporary text to have captured the full flavour of the transatlantic relationship is, perhaps inevitably, a satire, Régis Debray’s plea for a United States of the West that would absorb Europe completely into the American imperium.

Did it have to come to this? The paradox is that when Europe was less united, it was in many ways more independent. The leaders who ruled in the early stages of integration had all been formed in a world before the global hegemony of the United States, when the major European states were themselves imperial powers, whose foreign policies were self-determined. These were people who had lived through the disasters of the Second World War, but were not crushed by them. This was true not just of a figure like De Gaulle, but of Adenauer and Mollet, of Eden and Heath, all of whom were quite prepared to ignore or defy America if their ambitions demanded it. Monnet, who did not accept their national assumptions, and never clashed with the US, still shared their sense of a future in which Europeans could settle their own affairs, in another fashion. Down into the 1970s, something of this spirit lived on even in Giscard and Schmidt, as Carter discovered. But with the neo-liberal turn of the 1980s, and the arrival in power in the 1990s of a postwar generation, it faded. The new economic doctrines cast doubt on the state as a political agent, and the new leaders had never known anything except the Pax Americana. The traditional springs of autonomy were gone.

I don’t agree with Anderson. To him, any cooperation or any sign of consanguinity between Europe and the United States is a proof of rendition, while he dismisses conflicts by explaining them away with the political vulnerabilities of the European leaders refusing to accept that they may precisely be the reflections of a disagreement over substance. For example, he argues that Chirac said No to Iraq not because he was against the war, but simply because of his political difficulties at home. I disagree for at the time, Chirac could have afforded to say Yes to Iraq if he wanted to for he had just won an election with over 80 % of the votes and knew that he was more than likely serving his last term as president. The mistake that Anderson is to start with the notion that Europe and the United States used to be very different parts of the world, and that Europe has become American because it has given up its ideals by becoming more liberal in the economic sense of the term. The equation of neo-liberalism with Americanization is a false one and as is the notion that Europe is only truly itself when it is different from America and when it disagrees with the US. Europe as other parts of the world has been globalized, but even in spite of this globalization, essential differences remains about because the social and political realities in Europe and America are different. All one needs to do is to examine the politics of Nicolas Sarkozy to understand that even the most American of European politicians may act stylistically as an American politician and may like American ideas, but will never dare to act as a true American free market politician. Sarkozy, for example, is not against the use of the State in the economy to create national champions as he did by supporting the merger between Gdf and Suez, two big French Gas companies. The point is that George Will was right when he asserted that there were some things, which American conservatives dislike about France such as its welfare state, that Sarkozy wasn’t going to change and when he wrote the following:

Sarkozy does know of Adam Smith and Friedrich Hayek, who was one of Margaret Thatcher's intellectual heroes. Sarkozy has, however, said, "I don't wake up every morning asking what Hayek or Adam Smith would have done." That is, unfortunately, obvious. A fountain of suspiciously opaque formulations (he advocates "regulated liberalism" and "humane globalization"), he is pleased that "the word 'protection' is no longer taboo." (When was it ever taboo in France?) He is committed to continuing protections of the most cosseted French faction, the farmers. When calling for a "genuine European industrial policy," he asks: "Competition as an ideology, as a dogma, what has it done for Europe?" Worse, he wants to curtail the independence of -- that is, politicize -- the one institution that can save France from itself, the European Central Bank, which can restrain France's ruinous preferences for a loose monetary policy and inflation as slow-motion repudiation of debt.

Thus, Anderson is wrong, even though he starts with the premise that Europe is different from the United States as it is from Africa, that convergences between the two can only be signs of surrender and of servitude, and that the twenty first century cannot be European if Europe isn’t essentially un-American. I can’t wait to read what Tony Judt, whom Anderson quotes at the beginning of his article will have to say about his argument for I’m sure that he will respond in the next edition of the journal.

Change and flux

Andrew Hussey has a good review in the Guardian last weekend of Graham Robb’s new book on France The Discovery of France. Robb is an expert of French literature; he has published several books on Baudelaire, which were excellent. In his latest book, Robb takes on French and argues that it is undergoing several changes, which are undermining its national identity and awakening old and tenacious regional identities. Sugary excerpt:

Although Robb eschews the orthodox map of French history, his book covers roughly the pre-Revolutionary period to the present day. This is the era usually defined as the France of heroic modernity - the years when French ideas, from Revolution to art, urbanism and poetry, were exported across the world as universal truths.

[…] It has become conventional to argue that France has been in slow, inexorable decline since 1900. This is true with regard to the loss of empire and political prestige around the world, but it is also true of all the formerly 'great' powers. What has really been happening in France, Robb argues, is the erosion of centralised political control in Paris as the plural identities of France - linguistic, cultural and even religious - re-emerge from the margins. It is rare these days to meet someone in Paris who does not refer back to their ancestry as a Breton, a Basque, a Catalan, a Corsican or (less glamorously) a Bordelais or Lyonnais. Even a generation ago such provincial origins would have been disdained by Parisians as rustic folklore rather than lauded as a badge of cultural integrity.

This phenomenon is the end point of what Robb describes with acuity as the 'colonisation' of France by Paris. This process is now in retreat, he says, revealing the true cultural map of the country. Like Welsh or Scots nationalism, this is a contentious and complicated issue, and Robb is careful to separate the parochial nature of the regionalist independence movements from anti-colonial struggles such as the Algerian war. Still, it is good to hear the nuanced voice of the Breton nationalist poet Pierre-Jakez Helias (Robb quotes him on the ambiguous nature of French identity) in a history of France. It is bracing, too, to be reminded of the 'Breton commandos' who broke into the Musee Grevin waxworks museum in Paris to smash up an effigy of the cartoon character 'Becassine' - a figure based on a Breton peasant girl - in the name of 'all Breton maids who had ever been exploited and patronised by Parisian employers'.

I look forward to reading Robb's latest book. However, I wonder if what he is describing is new and specific to France. I have the strong suspicion that regional identies resurface every time that the State is seen as ineffective and inefficient and is taking place all over Europe due both to globalization and Europeanization.

Cultural decline

The Times of London has an article about that French students are shunning French literature to focus on subjects that will lead them to have more rewarding careers. This trend is worrying the Education Minister Xavier Darcos who has decided to do something about it:

“We need literary people, pupils who can master speech and reason,” he said. “They are always in demand.” As for the aspiring economists and sociologists, they often ended up on overcrowded university courses with few openings in the employment market, he added.

However, traditionalists believe that the initiative is already doomed because of the widely held view among the brightest students that literary studies are a soft option for no-hopers. This trend is an affront to the rich literary heritage that has produced writers such as Molière, Voltaire and Victor Hugo, they say. There is also resentment that intellectual literati are losing their privileged status in a Gallic society that they say is being corrupted by television, the internet and globalisation.

The simple fact that the French government is worried about this issue shows in my opinion a key difference between France and the United States. A Secretary of the education could never make such a pronouncement because the primary focus of education in the US is not culture, but preparing students to become good professionals. In France, education (even though as this article shows things are rapidly changing) is still about becoming cultivated. This explains why its education system is a lot less flexible than the American one because it is believed that there are just some things that all students should know even if such knowledge may not help them in their future career. In the United States, the education system is very flexible, but unfortunately, reading is just considered a tool to learn something else more important such as math and science. Literature is a secondary subject because students believe that it will not lead them anywhere and because not reading is not only tolerated in the US, but acceptable.

Socialism and the brave new world

The New Left Review has a great article from Régis Debray on the history of socialism. Debray recounts the history of socialism, its evolution, and its culture. More importantly, he explains why modernity, specifically its means of communication, has led it to its crisis. Sugary excerpt:

[…] To explain: socialism was an attempt to establish a counter-medium of dissemination within a hostile milieu. Could the idea have become an ‘ideology’ if micro-circuits of solidarity had not established a mini-milieu for themselves, within this formless space? Cheap, sustainable information networks, alternative communities and counter-cultures that owed their capacity for resistance to the forces that besieged them from without. To jump the spark from written myth to social action, the electricians of workers’ emancipation had to disconnect the main cables and rig up makeshift wiring of their own. Methods of underground organizing served as a protective casing, to shield proletarian telegraphy from bourgeois jamming and interference. The romance of clandestinity was essentially a communicative pragmatism.

[…] the mediasphere seems to have stripped the diasporas of their former productivity. Dispersion used to favour intellectual creativity by stimulating written exchange. Bodies met less frequently but minds were in closer contact. […] Nowadays the militants socialize more and know less of each other’s ideas. More conversation means less controversy. The telephone destroyed the art of correspondence, and in the process diminished the moral stature of attempts at rational systematization; email has not restored it. Rarely do we pick up the phone to impart a complex sequence of principles and themes: we use it to chat. The general discourse has become indexed to the trappings of intimacy and private life. The cellphone, internet, laptop and plane are good for internationalization, but they render solidarity less organic—lethal for internationalism. They enlarge the sphere of individual relations but privatize them at the same time; they particularize even as they globalize. The cellphone is a permanent one-to-one. It drives the universal from our heads.

The crisis for socialism, then, is that even if it can resume its founding principles it cannot return to its founding cultural logic, its circuits of thought-production and dissemination. [Emphasis added].

I am not sure that I agree with Debray’s description of the crisis for socialism even though I agree with his assertion that “The demobilization of the citizen begins with the physical immobilization of the spectator.” I wonder if the crisis isn’t most of all one of lack of sophistication and of archaism. Let me explain why I mean. Although demobilization starts with immobilization, it is completed by powerlessness and a numbing nothingness created by the lack of tools to resist it, to get not only beyond the need for cellphones and television, but also the inability to use them to change the world.

Socialism is, my view, an outdated computer, which not only lacks the right software and hardware to connect to the internet and to be used as more than as typewriter. Thus, it cannot adapt to the age of spectacle and can only remain on the fringe of it by pretending that it is temporary and that eventually the world will adapt to it. For this reason, most socialist leaders of the last twenty five years have chosen courses to avoid confronting the disconnection of socialism from the brave new world. They have either ignored the socialist ideology once they got into power as Mitterrand did or they have attempted to create a great Satan to avoid fighting relevant, but unwinnable struggles since socialism no longer has effective solutions to the problems of our times as Chávez is currently doing by making the US responsible for all the ills of the world. In other words, socialist leaders when they have able to take power nowadays are either romantics who will create enemies to explain the world and socialism’s ineffectiveness or they are cold pragmatists that will use the socialist ideology and language to keep their political base, but will govern differently because they know the difference between poetry that is so to say political ideology and reality that is to say policy.

Sarko in Wolfeboro or an emperor in America

Sarkozy is spending his vacation in Wolfeboro, New Hampshire (He was invited by Michael Appe, a former vice president of Microsoft). He arrived last week and already an incident has happened with the press because he forgot that the American press may love him, but that they aren’t scared of him and will not respect his privacy. No wonder it rained early this morning in Washington, DC. Roger Cohen wrote the new following about Sarkozy’s visit:

Even, it seems, while on vacation. Here is the French president, a few days into his lakeside holiday in Wolfeboro, New Hampshire, jogging down a forest trail, chatting to journalists, swimming, cavorting, strutting his stuff.

Mon Dieu! So much for "la France profonde," the deep or essential France with which former presidents felt they must commune in their summer breaks.

When De Gaulle headed for his beloved Colombey-les-deux-Eglises, and Valéry Giscard d'Estaing went fishing in the Auvergne, and Mitterrand sojourned at Latché or with his mistress in Gordes, and Jacques Chirac stayed at the summer presidential residence in the Fort of Brégançon, they were making statements about their power: its roots, its latitude and its eternal essence.

Goodbye to all that. The world has moved on. Brands replaced mysticism. France got globalized. Sarkozy is not about to pretend otherwise. His aim is to shake his country from tired habits. Any means are good. […] With some coaching from Tony Blair, Sarkozy has intuited that politics these days is about style. Economic power lies with central bankers, global corporations and high-rolling masters of the universe. Military power is constrained by mutually assured destruction and the 24-hour news cycle. What remains are image, perception and identity.

I’m happy that Cohen is enjoying so much to bask into the sunlight of his fantasies about Sarkozy, but I wonder if his Sarkolatry isn’t blinding him to the fact that the new French president likes flash and bling a lot more than flair and substance and that because he cares so much about image, he might not globalize French as Cohen seems to want him to do. Image is almost everything, but it still hasn’t taken the place of policy.

German, language, Science, and dumbing down

Sign and Sight has an article on the efforts of Stefan Klein to ensure the future of German as a language of science. The article deals with the dominance of English in science and about its effects on German and German Scientists. Klein's argument is that the issue here is one of democracy and one of excellence because forcing people to speak English makes them less smart than when they were able to express themselves in their mother tongue. Sugary excerpt:

Today, scientists are headed towards a reversal of Pacioli's revolution. But how do they expect to win the sympathy of a public with which they no longer even have language in common? And will we soon reach a point where we no longer can discuss the results of new research in German because we can't find the vocabulary? Society is threatening to split: On one side will be those who employ an elite language, and on the other, all those who miss out on the latest developments. So the issue of whether German remains a language for science is not merely a question of national pride. It has to do with something far more momentous: democracy.
Anyone who only encounters scientific research in a foreign language pays a heavy price, even if he is a master of the idiom. "We are dumber in English" – this was the conclusion that researchers came to in Sweden and the Netherlands, where children were introduced to English on their first day of school. Lectures in English are part of every subject, but nevertheless, the test results are about ten percent lower on average than in courses taught in the mother tongue. In English seminars, students ask and answer fewer questions; they give the overall impression of being somewhat more helpless. Neither students nor teachers are generally aware of the problem, because they all overestimate their expertise in English.

I don’t usually feel sympathetic towards arguments against the use of English, but in this case, it is difficult not to agree with Stefan Klein because the issue is not as much preserving German as to preserving diversity of thought, culture, and communication. Language matters and although I have when people beat up on English, I understand the concerns that many have about uniformity and indeed dumbing down, which can occur by the use and the domination of one language in a profession. Language and diversity should not be sacrificed in the name of practicability for the simple reason that difference whether it is still one of language or of anything else is still one of the best ways that we have to ensure that we don’t become sheep and that we are constantly forced to defend  our ideals and to accept complexity.

Stop fighting over the Sixties !

Daniel Finkelstein has some worthwhile things even though self-satisfying to say about hippies, capitalism, the sixties, and love and freedom. His argument is that money can buy love and that on the contrary to what is believed capitalism that is responsible for the Sixties Revolution:

Because of the Sixties. It is even clearer now than it was at the time that this was a watershed decade. Forty years ago, it was thought that the generation gap between teenagers and their parents would be a permanent feature of modern life. Instead, there was just one generation gap, but the gulf yawns between those who grew up in the years before the Beatles and those who grew up after it.

The mistake is to regard this as the consequence of the counterculture. The real cause of the Sixties revolution was something much more powerful and much more widespread – capitalism.

Finkelstein isn’t totally wrong, but his argumentation is sad because it is useless attempt to rewrite history in other to justify the present, where some of creating a false dichotomy between the rich and the workers and the leftists and the freeloaders. Capitalism doesn’t need to be responsible for the Sixties revolution to be a force for the good, but it needs to about something more soulful than being rich. Finkelstein reminds me of Sarkozy with his attempt to say that only capitalism can create values and lead to freedom. It is a legitimate point of view to have, but it doesn’t justify a rewriting of history. Finkelstein makes me sad because he is the proof that the real battle for the future of the world and indeed of capitalism isn’t between the rich and the poor, but among the rich, among the caviar right and the caviar left. The poor don’t have the tools to fight because they are too hungry and ill equipped for an ideological and societal struggle. The middle class is too preoccupied by keeping the gains that it has made in the last decades and too worried about the future of its children. Only the rich have the time and the means to fight. The real battle is about how much to change the status quo. It opposes two groups of rich. The first one is the one which feels that it deserves to be rich and is so because it is better than everybody else (because of nature or because of God). Its members say to the masses, who are hungry “Let them cake”. The second group is made of people who feel fortunate to be rich, believe that being rich comes with both privileges and responsibilities. They are aware that the system can only work if it is based on merit and if the poor do not become roaches. I for one are tired of people who are still fighting over the sixties to justify the present and to reduce the alternatives that exist for the future.