Analysis : The French Malaise

France
The after­math of the attacks in Paris, France, has seen a pour­ing of emo­tion from around the world and a deep reflec­tion within Europe itself. Whilst politi­cians and the media have gone into over­drive regard­ing the cul­prits and Mus­lims gen­er­ally, Europe has a long and dif­fi­cult his­tory with those who do not espouse their val­ues. The global media gave extended cov­er­age to the unity march that took place in Paris on Jan­u­ary 11, attract­ing over 3 mil­lion French citizens.[1] The fact so many peo­ple felt the need to demon­strate in the name of national unity indi­cates there is a deeper prob­lem in French soci­ety. In fact, the deep divi­sion within French soci­ety has been a glar­ing fact for some time. Whilst RO con­cen­trates on global affairs with a focus towards the Mus­lim world, France, as a power in the world, has been in a pro­found cri­sis for some time, that is effect­ing its inter­nal cohe­sion and capac­ity to engage glob­ally. France’s domes­tic pol­i­tics have impacted its inter­na­tional affairs and this can be seen from a num­ber of areas.
France estab­lished a strong state in the cen­tre of Europe in 1789, through what came to be known as the French rev­o­lu­tion. The French gov­ern­men­tal struc­ture, pre­vi­ously a monar­chy with feu­dal priv­i­leges for the aris­toc­racy and Catholic clergy, under­went rad­i­cal change to form a nation state based on the Enlight­en­ment. France at the dawn of Cap­i­tal­ism was lead­ing change in Europe. Many French philoso­phers and intel­lec­tu­als gained social, polit­i­cal and philo­soph­i­cal influ­ence on a global scale. Voltaire, Denis Diderot and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Charles de Sec­on­dat, Baron de Mon­tesquieu, all described the sep­a­ra­tion of pow­ers and were all a cat­a­lyst for gov­ern­ment and soci­etal reform through­out Europe. But with two bru­tal occu­pa­tions in both world wars, France ceased to be a key power in the world and has been on a down­ward tra­jec­tory ever since. This has cre­ated cre­ated a an inse­cure France who is very pes­simistic about the future of its nation. For decades, Euro­peans ago­nised over the power and role of Ger­many — the so-called Ger­man ques­tion — given its impor­tance to Euro­pean sta­bil­ity and pros­per­ity. Today, how­ever, Europe is talk­ing about “the French ques­tion,” Der Spiegel, one of Europe’s largest news mag­a­zines in 2014 called France the ‘sick man of Europe.’[2]
After WW2 France per­ceived the United States and par­tic­u­larly the US dom­i­nance of Euro­pean for­eign and defence poli­cies through NATO, as a threat that could make Paris irrel­e­vant. At the time, the French saw their coun­try as a key world power that did not need hefty alliances, and that needed to stand apart from the United States. French pol­icy cen­tered on Euro­pean inte­gra­tion as France attempted to strengthen itself through Europe. Dur­ing the Gaullist era, In 1950 France pro­posed a com­mu­nity to inte­grate the coal and steel indus­tries of Europe — two ele­ments nec­es­sary to make weapons of war. But despite being the cen­tre of the EU, France has lost many of its colonies to the US, espe­cially in Africa. The US has cur­tailed French ambi­tions in Lebanon and even in Dar­fur – a region both France and Britain trum­peted in order to frus­trateUS plans in the south of Sudan. The US not only sep­a­rated South Sudan it even brought those loyal to it to power in Dar­fur. France only has a ten­u­ous hold over Mali after a US trained cap­tain con­ducted a coupagainst the French backed gov­ern­ment in 2012. Across the world France has lit­tle polit­i­cal pres­ence and with the rise of nations such as China, Japan, Brazil, Mex­ico and Turkey, French cit­i­zens strug­gle to com­pare the past with the present.
The French estab­lished a social demo­c­ra­tic nation with the threat of com­mu­nism dur­ing the cold war. This com­bined the free mar­ket with a large cen­tral gov­ern­ment pres­ence in the econ­omy. This involved the direct own­er­ship of com­pa­nies in key sec­tors of the econ­omy, such as min­ing and steel pro­duc­tion, oil and gas, aero­space and auto­mo­bile man­u­fac­tur­ing, but espe­cially the sec­tors that pro­vided social ser­vices such as health and edu­ca­tion. These sec­tors in which a few com­pa­nies employed large num­bers of employ­ees were con­sid­ered vital to the national econ­omy. Leg­is­la­tion made it extremely dif­fi­cult for such com­pa­nies to lay off per­son­nel. France also put in place wealth redis­tri­b­u­tion poli­cies such as very high taxes on com­pa­nies and indi­vid­u­als with high incomes. This was used to finance an elab­o­rate wel­fare sys­tem. With an econ­omy built on social democ­racy, this was never sus­tain­able as it sti­fled eco­nomic devel­op­ment, it actu­ally caused high unem­ploy­ment and the wel­fare state led to huge debts. These social wel­fare pro­grams since the fall of the soviet Union been a cen­tral fea­ture in the French econ­omy in order to main­tain social cohe­sion, but they are no longer sus­tain­able as French debts now exceed the coun­tries eco­nomic out­put. France must bor­row $367 bil­lion a year just to roll over its debts. With around 10% of the work­ing pop­u­la­tion con­stantly unem­ployed or refus­ing to work, France draws upon immi­grant work­ers from its for­mer colonies to the jobs French peo­ple refuse to do. The Euro­pean sov­er­eign debt cri­sis has only exac­er­bated this and as a result a grow­ing num­ber of French believe that peo­ple from other cul­tures are threat­en­ing their national iden­ti­ties and liveli­hoods. Jacques Chirac set up the Stasi com­mis­sion in 1998 to research and pro­pose poli­cies on the decline of sec­u­lar­ism in France, even­tu­ally lead­ing to the veil ban in 2010. The French also tried to start a dis­cus­sion in 2009, when then-President Nico­las Sarkozy launched a pub­lic debate on “what it means to be French” — an exer­cise that degen­er­ated into a debate about the role of Mus­lims in the country.
Despite 85% of the French pop­u­la­tion being white, 9 mil­lion immi­grants (6 mil­lion — North Africans (10%), 2 mil­lion, Blacks (3.5%), and 1 mil­lion Asians (1.5%) are threat­en­ing the social fab­ric of every­thing France stands for. French his­tory and colo­nial his­tory con­sist of spread­ing French cul­ture and hav­ing its colonies actu­ally like its cul­ture. The French are noto­ri­ously sensitive—if not defensive—about France’s stature in the world. The French state spends vast amounts of money to prop­a­gate the French lan­guage and French cul­ture. But this has been on a down­ward tra­jec­tory since WW2. In the African inte­rior, Haiti, Syria, Lebanon and Québec the French lan­guage has all but ceased to be the lan­guage of choice, replaced mainly with Eng­lish. The French have never got over Alge­ria, as the coun­try showed it was less French as the decades went by, even attempt­ing to usher in an Islamic gov­ern­ment in 1991. With French Impe­r­ial ambi­tions effec­tively ended in North Africa the demand for labour resulted in Mus­lims com­ing to France for eco­nomic rea­sons and not to join in a cul­tural trans­for­ma­tion. The attacks that took place in Paris on 7 Jan­u­ary 2014 con­firmed that France has failed to make suc­ces­sive decades of Mus­lim migra­tion French. Con­sid­er­ing the French role in bring­ing enlight­en­ment val­ues to Europe this is a fail­ure of epic proportions.
The malaise at the heart of France is the fact that French cul­ture is in decline and even migrants to France never embraced what it meant to be French. Despite blam­ing the for­eigner for the malaise France is under, this is more telling of French cul­ture than the for­eigner. Accord­ing to researchers, the French have been abnor­mally unhappy for decades, con­sis­tently fail­ing to match their sat­is­fac­tion lev­els with their qual­ity of life. Research car­ried out since the 1970s con­sis­tently reveals France as a depressed, para­noid nation which con­sumes more anti­de­pres­sants than the rest of Europe and suf­fers one of the continent’s high­est lev­els of sui­cide.[3] Even the French mil­i­tary, for long a sym­bol of French global strength is in decline. The mil­i­tary is strug­gling with 45-year-old refu­elling air­craft, 28-year-old armoured vehi­cles, 30-year-old heli­copters and a fleet of tanks of which as few as 50% are actu­ally in work­ing order. Even the nation’s nuclear capa­bil­ity, another sym­bol of French strength fun­da­men­tally rests upon its small nuclear sub­ma­rine fleet, just barely large enough to sus­tain a con­tin­u­ally patrolling pres­ence of one boat
Whilst the attacks in France have been con­demned by all, these have now con­firmed the malaise at the heart of France. Many within France con­sider French cul­ture to be dead. Whilst France at the dawn of Cap­i­tal­ism was lead­ing change in Europe, today most thinkers, new ideas and philoso­phers come from the US. This has cre­ated a very inse­cure France who has become very pes­simistic about the future of the nation. Whilst much of the blame has for long been directed at its small migrant pop­u­la­tion it is France that has failed to impose its cul­ture on them and the world and this malaise has now per­me­ated all sec­tion of the country.
[1] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-30765824
[2] http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/taking-stock-of-a-france-that-has-fallen-sick-a-982106.html
[3] http://beyond.blogs.france24.com/article/2013/03/28/french-miserable-depressed-happiness-senik-0

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