Canadien ‘‘Gauchisme?’’ ... Oui.

The French rejection of the constitution owed something to the xenophobic right that does not hesitate to quote Fascists like Charles Maurras, but it was above all a victory of the left. Socialists voted no by a clear majority, joined by a motley crew of leftists with visions of the Paris Commune, a return of 1917 or 1968, the defeat of capitalism and — somehow — full employment. The rhetoric of this revolutionary left, articulated most menacingly by the baby-faced Trotskyist and Neuilly postman, Olivier Besancenot, is suffused with idealism. But its real face is more prosaic and reflected in the polls that show that more than 65 percent of those who voted no think there are too many foreigners in France. Whatever happened to the Communist International? This French left, behind its ‘‘progressive’’ slogans, is one that is generally closed to the world, bent on the defense of its privileges, suspicious of foreigners, small-minded and caught in an often hallucinatory time warp. ‘‘The victory of the no was a victory of the fonctionnaire-rioter,’’ said Alain Finkielkraut, the writer and philosopher. He was referring to the cohorts of state employees ready to take to the streets to defend the 35-hour work week and cradle-to-grave welfare that they saw threatened by a supposedly ‘‘neo-liberal’’ European constitution. These fonctionnaire-rioters are big on talk of ‘‘fraternity.’’ Their true face, however, was suggested recently by the outrage that met the government’s suggestion that the traditional holiday on the day after Pentecost Sunday be given up to raise money for the elderly. Such inconsistency, to put it kindly, does not prevent this class with its pseudo-revolutionary fellow travelers from defining the discourse of France, despite the existence of a parallel country that is industrious and competitive. As a result, political debate here often has a surreal quality. It is only in France that ‘‘globalization’’ is still discussed with such earnestness, portrayed as something that could somehow be blocked or made to go away. Most other nations decided a decade ago that an open, technology-driven world was here to stay and the best course was to get with competing in it. But here the debate continues as if the clock could be turned back. A similar fantastical quality is evident in the discussion of high unemployment, running at just over 10 percent, or double the rate of Britain. For several years now, France and Germany have been in a deflationary cycle of almost Japanese proportions that has revealed a crisis of what was once known as Rhineland capitalism — market economies with high degrees of social protection. Everyone knows the central nature of the problem: Systems that are too rigid, that encourage people to collect unemployment benefits while working in the cash-only underground economy and that are burdened with taxes making hiring prohibitively expensive and investment elsewhere attractive. But instead of a serious debate on these issues, one that might have examined the European countries from Spain to Scandinavia that have slashed unemployment, France has been treated to a deluge of delusional nonsense from the left about the sufferings of the poor, precarious and persecuted in places like Britain, a country portrayed as having abandoned its welfare system altogether. As a result, potential middle ground has been eroded and a fine word — liberal — has become unusable without the prefix ‘‘neo’’ and a dismissive sneer. Instead of debating alternatives, France has moved toward the culture of a ‘‘pensée unique’’ — a sole acceptable thought pattern whose lexicon is that of a left for whom the word ‘‘social’’ is the benign other face of a hated liberalism. How has this been possible under a supposedly right-wing president, in office for a decade? The answer, as Alexander Adler, a political analyst put it, is that: ‘‘The conservative party in power has not done its job. Instead of trying to persuade people of the merits of market forces, it has tried to placate anti-market forces.’’ http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/05/31/news/globalist.php

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