Why France is failing

Michel Gurfinkel has written a superb, long commentary for The Wall Street Journal about the condition of France. The key to that country's slow decline, he reckons, is the "constitution behind the constitution": the state bureaucracy.

It has been estimated that since the 1970s, 70% of all members of Parliament have been civil servants of some sort, including university professors - almost all universities are state-run - and high-school teachers. When it comes to cabinet members, almost 90% are enarchs. Out of 17 prime ministers since 1958, six have been enarchs and another nine have been civil servants or former civil servants, former military men, or former employees of state-run companies. Among presidents, only one, Mitterrand, was a private person; the other four were essentially state servants, and two of them, Messrs. Giscard d'Estaing and Chirac, were enarchs.

He goes on to say:

The more absolute their power, the more the enarchs have tended to run France in their own interest, while assuaging the citizenry with bribes of all sorts. One such bribe, rhetorical but no less effective for that, has taken the form of nationalistic posturing, usually directed against the United States; a favourite slogan of the enarchs is that France's mission is to uphold and protect a superior continental civilization based on the welfare state against the Anglo-Saxon model of "predatory" free-market capitalism. Structural problems - an aging population, swelling immigration, the public debt - have been ignored.

So shouldn't we be more disturbed at the massive growth of public-sector jobs over the last decade in the UK? Aren't those 5.9 million public sector employees a lobby-group for French-style stasis?

Robbie Millen

Comments

[David Moss]

Not one of your difficulter questions.

In that connection, Simon Jenkins has one of his best ever in today's Guardian, http://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Column/0,,2075240,00.html. It may be bad in France but look at the state we're in.

You may also enjoy this from Mark Steyn: http://www.nysun.com/article/53941.

And in connection with Mark Steyn, I cannot recommend too highly his coverage of the Conrad Black trial, updated two or three times a day: http://forums.macleans.ca/advansis/?mod=for&act=dis&eid=52.

It helps to take one's mind off the absurdist play currently running at Westminster.

[Simon Stephenson]

"The more absolute their power, the more the enarchs have tended to run France in their own interest"

Rather a sweeping statement from Mr Gurfinkel, don't you think? Completely incapable of being proved either right or wrong, but, just in case it is wrong, doesn't this render invalid all those parts of the article whose substance relies on it being true?