[Mb-civic] A French Lesson for the Ages - Jim Hoagland - Washington Post Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

A French Lesson for the Ages
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By Jim Hoagland
The Washington Post
Sunday, April 2, 2006; B07

The French and protests go together like horse and carriage, love and 
marriage and other natural partners. But look again at the million and 
more demonstrators who have taken to the streets in France in recent 
days. In their marching and shouting, there is a hidden message for us 
all about coming generational and cultural conflicts.

France has moved into one of its periodic dangerous seasons, in which a 
conservative government acts as if its fate and economic future depend 
on facing down or outlasting massive street protests. Both 1789 and 1968 
remind us how such calculations can misfire in France.

Protesters have filled the streets this spring to define themselves and 
their nation more clearly and aggressively than most of the world would 
ever care or dare to attempt. The young rebels follow the Cartesian 
rigor taught in the universities that they are boycotting: I protest, 
therefore I am.

This struggle concerns, as so many things in France do, identity. The 
French are a society of individualists who take pride in an ideology of 
solidarity. Their idealized concept of social cohesion is under such 
intense pressure from the forces of globalization that it must be 
proclaimed in the streets if it is to survive at all.

For all its Francocentricity, this labor upheaval sounds echoes of the 
recent demonstrations staged by Hispanic immigrant groups in the United 
States and our own debate over alien workers. In most developed 
countries, the forces of globalization are changing the rules and even 
the nature of work -- just as demographic patterns are eroding the 
Industrial Age's implicit social contract between the young and the old.

Politicians naturally respond to the challenges posed by the easy flow 
of goods, people and ideas across frontiers by pretending they can 
resolve these challenges with isolated exercises of political will and 
legislation. The harsh anti-

immigrant laws proposed by the U.S. House of Representatives defy not 
only common decency and humanity but the very way the global economy 
works today. The House legislation proves that change is too important 
to be left to politicians, as do France's attempts to tinker with the 
social model that is in deep trouble.

These global connections need to be grasped and articulated to divide 
more equitably the prosperity that globalization brings for some and the 
burdens of unemployment or low wages that others experience.

Hidden in the French protests is a looming conflict between the economic 
interests of the young, who are just starting careers, and of their 
elders, who are in or moving into retirements that almost no 
industrialized country has set aside the funds to finance.

The springtime confrontation in France also stems from narrow local 
factors such as internal power struggles, missteps by President Jacques 
Chirac's embattled government and wishful thinking that the country's 
expensive and generous social welfare system can be maintained forever 
without big sacrifices. This is, after all, a public that has been 
educated by political leaders of both the right and left to distrust 
free-market reforms.

Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin thought that he could do something 
for France's young when he rushed labor law changes through Parliament. 
His objective was to cut youth unemployment, which is double France's 
overall joblessness rate of 10 percent, and to show that the government 
had swung into action after rioting last autumn by unemployed immigrant 
youths.

But the young concluded that Villepin was doing something to them, not 
for them. By giving private employers the right to fire workers under 26 
without cause within two years of their being hired, the government in 
effect denied younger workers labor protections that are deeply 
entrenched for their elders. Chirac offered Friday to soften the 
legislation's harshest features, but his proposal was rejected as too 
little too late by protest leaders.

Gray-bearded academics and other seniorish citizens have rushed to the 
streets to join Villepin's political foes and union leaders in showing 
support for the students. How could they, in good conscience, do otherwise?

A broad generational conflict over the allocation of resources is taking 
shape in many industrial nations as their working populations age. In 
the United States, the profligacy of galloping budget and trade deficits 
has convinced many younger workers that they will never have the kind of 
Social Security protection their parents enjoyed.

It is time to forge global and generational social contracts to 
recognize and mitigate the inequities that a new world of change 
fosters. By raising their voices, France's young and America's migrants 
have called attention to that need.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/31/AR2006033101713.html
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