French binge

The election in France reminds us of the instability of political democracy. Four years ago the socialists were all but wiped off the map. On Sunday the reversals did almost as much to the French Right. A wild oscillation, bringing to mind the experience of Canada in recent years. The Progressive Conservative Party was all but wiped out there and now Mr. Chretien advocates policies not so different from those of Mr. Mulroney. What happened just now in France is another bout of what Albert Jay Nock dubbed the "substitution of political for economic means of self-advancement." If you want higher income, don't struggle to make more mousetraps. Vote for the government that will give you more. Last fall French truckers struck. Their demands? Retirement at full pay at 55. (Why not 45?)

Consider the promises of M. Lionel Jospin. To begin with he will shorten the work-week to 35 hours. Reflect . . . There are 13 per cent unemployed in France. So if you shorten the work week by 13 per cent, doesn't that suggest that a demand for the services of the unemployed will spring up? Neat. The difficulty is that people who believe this are playing games, moving blocks around and whinnying over the prospective results, which do not materialize. They are thinkers in the sense that those who would lift the common prosperity by the simple expedient of lifting the minimum wage are thinkers.

True, light was shed in the otherwise capricious exercise of democratic power. It is light shed on the whole idea of the common currency, the so-called euro. Consider the basic quarrel:

The Maastricht Treaty specifies that to qualify to join in the European Monetary Union a country must not, in the two years before joining, undergo a budget deficit higher than 3 per cent of the gross domestic product. The socialists indirectly, the Communists explicitly, transformed the economic discipline of Maastricht into an attempt by Germany's Bundesbank to take con- trol of the economy of Europe.

Now there is a sense in which this suspicion is correct. The German mark is strong notwithstanding the welfare state and German unemployment (11 per cent). If the voice of Maastricht is the voice of Germany and if the voice of Germany is the voice of the Bundesbank, then it follows that the 3 per cent requirement is imperialistic German economic activity. On the other hand, Germany is not asking of its prospective euro partners anything it isn't requiring of itself.

But the kind of thing that looms in France is exactly the kind of thing Maastricht thought contingently to cope with. The model, as advanced by the Europeanists, is a great geopolitical pool within which economic weaknesses are quickly sensed and palliatives instantly extravasated to the rescue. If France suffers from symptoms of a depression, what it needs to look after itself is what will flow to it from its seamless economic frontier: labor, capital, enterprise. What Maastricht seeks to guard against is any opportunistic fiddling with its own currency by individual nations. It is very easy to increase the volume of French exports (in the short run) by devaluing the Franc. But under Maastricht, a partner loses this option inasmuch as there is only one currency, the euro; and its value cannot be changed for the particular convenience of any one country. When in 1992 the British devalued sterling, the quick economic nourishment that resulted persuaded many Brits that local control of the currency is indispensable to the full exercise of sovereignty; and the suspicion of life under euro -- and the hostility toward its political understructure -- has brought on what will almost certainly guarantee that the plebiscite ahead will doom Maastricht, or shorten its reach.

The French will now proceed not quite along the lines of Francois Mitterrand, who in his first three years all but destroyed the burgeoning French economy, but in the statist direction. The long-term consequences will be the end of Maastricht as envisioned, and one more lesson in political realism. Strategically attentive observers will be wondering whether the French elec- tion of last Sunday will cool off in time for the voters in other European democracies to contain their own appetite to substitute political for economic means of self advancement.

COPYRIGHT 1997 National Review, Inc.
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