The French Don't Know Their Place (In the Global Economy)
Parsing the Deglobalization Debate
Article Summary and Author Biography
In the run up to this month's elections, the thesis that globalization is more of a threat than an opportunity has made a comeback in French politics. This is surprising given that the country is highly dependent on the global economy and has benefitted from it more than most.
SOPHIE MEUNIER is a Research Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University.
Essay
Anti-Americanism and a stubborn Gaullist independence in foreign policy have often marked French political discourse. These traits are coming to the fore once again in France's wildly popular antiglobalization movement. Today, a complex mix of political, economic, and cultural reasons explains the French resistance to "Anglo-Saxon global capitalism." If sustained, France's stand could become a model for other countries seeking an alternative to the new, American-style world economy.
Snapshot
François Hollande's victory over Nicolas Sarkozy in this weekend's presidential election seems so certain that the French press has already moved on to speculating about the legislative elections that will take place in June. In those, fringe candidates will win some victories, setting the tone for French and European politics.
Leader of the National Front Party, Marine Le Pen. (Pascal Rossignol / Courtesy Reuters)
An April 23rd, 2012 update to the original article: Over the weekend, the French electorate voted to send socialist presidential candidate François Hollande and conservative incumbent Nicolas Sarkozy to a runoff election, which will take place on May 6. Voters turned out in droves -- an estimated 80 percent of all those eligible cast a ballot. Still, their overall message is murky.
To be sure, Sarkozy's 27 percent (behind Hollande's leading 29 percent) can be interpreted as a vote of no confidence in the sitting president. That outcome was generally expected -- first, because Sarkozy's personal behavior and demeanor had started to rub the French the wrong way, and second, because it is not easy to be an incumbent in a time of economic crisis. But less apparent is what the far right National Front's 18 percent of the vote signals. Or the Left Front's 11 percent. Indeed, tallying up the votes on the left and right misses the point.
The real divide in this round was not between the left and right but between openness and closure. Sarkozy, Hollande, and François Bayrou (the centrist candidate who received nine percent of the vote) all adhere to the idea that France benefits from globalization -- even if they don't say so -- and are supportive of continuing the adventure of European integration. But the National Front's Marine Le Pen and, to a lesser extent, the Left Front's Jean-Luc Mélenchon represent "la France du non," those voters who turned down the European constitution in 2005 and believe that the key to a better future is reasserting sovereignty. These voters feel that they have lost their country. For them, France has been taken over by immigrants at home, by Eurocrats in Brussels, by technocrats in the international institutions, and by financiers in the global markets. They would like to send a loud message against the status quo...
