I read a piece
about
France,
and the mentality of social cohesion. I don’t know how accurate it is (coming
from a Briton), but I found it very interesting. I think that there exists a
similar mentality in
Greece.
In theoretical terms, this mentality is wrong. However this is a case where one
wonders whether the happiness of the people in a certain period of history
counterbalances the negative economic indicators.
…She
must feel very strongly to give up a day's pay, I asked. "We don't lose a day's
pay," she said, "it's our right to strike - it would be an outrage if the
government stopped our pay for exercising our right." Then what about the cost
of the journey to
Paris
and her overnight stay? "The union pays that," she said. And where does the
union get its funding? "From the government," she adds. I came to see that what
I was reporting on was a government-funded demonstration... against the
government. There is something revealing in this, something revealing about the
condition of
France.
British friends say to me: "You keep saying the French economy is in deep
trouble but look at
France!
Everything works: great railways, terrific health service, good schools,
wonderful restaurants, a 35-hour working week. It can't be that troubled?"
France loves its avantages acquis, but they become expensive and
France
is living beyond its means.
It has spent
more than it has raised in revenue for 29 consecutive years. Its public debt is
twice the size of
Britain's
and every year, debt servicing (paying the interest alone) is eating more and
more of the country's national budget. But so far it has been the fate of
reforming governments to be thwarted by the solidity of public opinion and the
festive spirit with which public sector workers take to the streets. One
frustrated right-wing member of the national assembly told me: "We French don't
do reform, we do revolution. Nothing changes until everything changes. We are on
to our fifth republic and the Americans are still on their first."
There is,
though, sound reason for this and it seems to me to lie in
France's
history. French governments have a horror of confrontation, of dividing the
French against themselves. In a book published last year, the British historian
of France, Alistair Horn, quotes General de Gaulle likening French society to
the geometrical arrangements of a classical French garden. "The observer takes
delight," the general remarked, "in the garden's magnificent harmony." "And
that," the historian adds, "the pursuit of harmony, is what
France
is all about." This idea that there is a pact in French society, a social
contract, is a kind of sacred cow in French
political
life. Reform might well be urgently needed but French governments recoil from
anything that endangers social harmony, national unity. It is both admirable and
debilitating.
All too often,
in the French experience, it means indeed that nothing changes until everything
changes. Reform falters until everything is swept away in a revolution and the
entire constitution is begun again from scratch.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/4588160.stm