Remaking The Hexagon

The New France In The New Europe

Gregory Flynn, Yves Meny

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000309621
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Politik

In this volume, distinguished French and U.S. historians, economists, and political scientists explore the dimensions of France's current crisis of identity. Although every European nation has been adjusting to the dramatic transformations on the continent since the end of the Cold War, France's struggle to adapt has been particularly difficult. Responding to a mix of external and internal pressures, the nation is now questioning many basic assumptions about how France should be governed, what the objectives of national policies should be, and ultimately what it means to be French. Rather than focusing explicitly on the problem of identity, the contributors offer differing perspectives on the issues at the heart of the country's debate about its future. They begin by examining how France's historical legacy has influenced the way the nation confronts contemporary problems, giving special attention to the manner in which past traumatic experiences, socioeconomic and cultural traditions, and the belief in French exceptionalism have shaped current political thinking. They then consider how favoring a more open approach to trade and building a strong franc have changed the culture of economic policy and created dilemmas for the rule of the state as a guarantor of welfare. They go on to explore changes in elite structures, the evolution of the party system, and the spillover of new political conditions that are driving France's efforts to establish a strong national identity in the area of trade. Finally, the contributors examine the central influence of the changing international framework on France's self-definition, on its security policies, its relationship to the European Union, and its basic perceptions of the state and sovereignty. They also consider how the answers to these questions are affecting France's relationships with the outside world and the overriding policy dilemmas faced by all the European nations.

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Remaking the Hexagon

Gregory Flynn

All of the nations of Europe have had difficulty adjusting to the dramatic changes that have transformed the continent in recent years, but none more than France. In the case of France, the changes in the European context have coincided with deep-seated structural changes in French politics and society. Europe has emerged from its division during the Cold War and new questions are being raised about the purpose and form of European integration. Together with the challenges of modern society and the demands of contemporary economic management, these new conditions are forcing a reexamination of many assumptions about how France is governed, the objectives of national policies, and ultimately what it means to be French. The result has been a national preoccupation with French identity.¹

At first blush, the outside observer may be forgiven for viewing all this with a certain cynical skepticism. There is nothing new about France's preoccupation with its own cohesion and its own role and image. At numerous moments throughout the last century France has been both deeply divided over political and social issues affecting the very heart of the nation's character and distressed by its decline internationally. Since World War II, France has endured not only the humiliation of defeat and the consequent deep, emotional divisions separating those who resisted from those who collaborated, but also the indignities of decolonization and the fratricide it engendered at home. Under the Fifth Republic, however, France has also witnessed a phenomenal economic, social, and political renaissance; this was accompanied by an assertiveness abroad that constantly sought to remind others as well as itself that it remained a major international force. Thus, national identity has been a consistently revisited issue for the French during the last fifty years.²

This book has not set for itself the task of resolving either the philosophical or the methodological issues associated with the study of French national identity.³ Rather the group of scholars gathered here have had another agenda: to understand better why France has seemingly had such difficulty as it seeks to chart its course into the next century. The challenge of remaking the hexagon, that is refashioning the French approach to governance and the management of international relationships in response to structural changes in society and the international system, is substantial, but on the surface at least, no more substantial than that faced by many other countries. It would certainly seem, for example, that the magnitude and difficulty of adjustment for Germany after reunification is greater than that faced by France. And yet the public proclamations of France's difficulties would seem to imply that something particular has been transpiring in this country.

To explore the underlying dimensions of this problematic, the authors of this volume have undertaken an examination of today's France from the perspective of history, economics, comparative politics, and international relations. They share a belief that some of the answers to France's current difficulties lie in its history, some in its competitive position and approach to economic management, some in its political structures, and finally, some in a changing international role.

In the first part of this volume, three historians explore how the different legacies of history are affecting the way France confronts the issues with which it is currently challenged, specifically how past traumatic experiences, socioeconomic and cultural patterns, and the traditions of an assimilationist state shape the approach to contemporary political dilemmas. The second part of the book then looks at how the choices in favor of a more open stance toward trade and a strong franc have changed the French approach to economic policy making and have brought to a head many of the political dilemmas about the role of l'état providence, the state as a guarantor of welfare. The third part of the book examines the changing domestic political milieu: changes in elite structures, particularly the disappearing barrier between bureaucratic and political elites; the attempts and failure of the party system to modernize; and the fusion of a perceived loss of economic and social control at home with the uncertainties of the international environment, resulting in widespread pressure for the political class to erect new barriers to the threats from the outside world. Finally, the book examines directly how the fracture of the international framework of the postwar world has affected French security thinking, the country's relationship to the European Union and the future of European integration, and ultimately, basic notions of the state and sovereignty.

One of the most interesting results of this exercise has been that no matter what the original formulation of the questions, most of the authors ultimately came around to the same underlying theme: to understand the problems they were discussing, it was necessary to understand that they were dealing with challenges to French identity. Independent of their various points of departure, several authors actually end up explicitly taking the analysis beyond the problems with which they started to argue that the core problem involves concern about how domestic and international change have called into question what it means to be French. And for those authors that do not, they well could have, as their analyses point in the same direction. This book did not start out to be an analysis of French identity, but a book about the challenges of change to French economic, social, and political structures; and yet it has ended up with challenges to identity as a central theme. This opening chapter provides a structure that helps tie together the different strands of that identity theme.

The current identity crisis of the French may not be the most acute the nation has had, in the sense that failure to deal with today's crisis of identity does not threaten the nation in the same way crises of the past may have; France is not on the verge of even a cold civil war. In an important way, however, France does face a profound crisis of identity in the sense that France is today being forced to confront directly a central element in the glue that has held the nation together in the past - specifically, the nature and role of the French state. The changes to the world in which France must navigate as a nation have made it necessary to modify the traditional role of the French state. The good news is that the state no longer appears to be an indispensable element in the glue holding the nation together —France has been in the process of becoming less "exceptional" in this regard for some time. Nonetheless, the transition toward a less centralized, less homogenizing state will be rough and encounter considerable opposition.

Historically, France has not been like other nations, at least in regard to the special relationship between the nation and the state. France has often been referred to as the state that was in search of the nation, in juxtaposition to Germany, the nation in search of a state. While the comparison may be overdrawn, there is no doubt that the French state has played a critical role in molding if not creating the nation. As modern France was created out of the many peoples that inhabited its lands, a powerful, centralized state helped to bring a nation into being where none had previously existed.⁴

Even in recent times, many French have gone so far as to contend that a strong, centralized state was essential to France's existence as a nation. Indeed, as late as the early 1980s when the Socialist Government introduced decentralization into political life once again, it was not at all uncommon to hear the argument that this was the beginning of the end of France, that the French did not possess a sufficient commitment to what they shared in common to override that which divided them. The fact that this statement was an exaggeration did not stop some people from believing it. The myth of the state and the myth of the nation have been intimately interwoven in France.

Part of the explanation for this intimacy is to be found in the fact that the main threats to sovereignty in France, as Stanley Hoffmann reminds us in his chapter in this volume, historically came from within. The role of the state in uniting the nation was reinforced by the depth of the political divisions over how the nation should be governed. After a point, a united French nation clearly existed in the sense that key loyalties of its peoples were given to the central authorities of the French state (as opposed, for example, to the regions). But the contending visions of that France were sufficiently at odds with one another that there was a constant need to reknit the nation together. Something had to substitute for the absence of a shared image, and the state, which helped society to function as a whole, performed this role.

Today, France is no longer divided, at least not in the same way, by the demons of the past, which long plagued it. These legacies are discussed in the chapters that follow by both Jean-Noël Jeanneney and Alain-Gérard Slama. To be sure, traumas such as that of World War II and Vichy are still very much alive in French political life and will seemingly remain so for some time, even though the number of those with personal involvement in the events is rapidly declining. But even though these traumas continue to affect the political agenda and the political fortunes of individuals, the divisions they create almost certainly do not challenge the condition of the French nation in the same way as did past divisions over the Revolution, the institutions of the Republic, or even modernization. The need for the state constantly to knit the nation together is no longer there. The challenges to the French nation today are of a different order than they have been in the past. These challenges are linked, however, to the fact that the Jacobin state has served as a key element in the glue for so long that for many it has become identified with the nation itself.

The basic challenges to the French nation today are new and originate from within and from without. Internally France no longer confronts either direct challenges to its institutions or the challenge lo modernize, but rather it faces the challenges that come from the consequences of successful modernization. This is not to say that modernization is either complete or even. As is made clear in several chapters that follow, particularly those by Ezra Suleiman and Yves Mény, there is considerable unevenness to the modernization process, especially when it comes to political structures themselves. Ina broader sense, however, France has indeed modernized; the last several decades have witnessed a profound transformation of the country's economic, social, and demographic patterns. And with modernity has come a set of problems, also experienced in other countries, that originates in the breakdown of traditional structures and values, and a fragmentation of economic and social life.

These problems pose a double difficulty for the French. On the one hand, the modernization process erodes qualities that have been associated with the character of the nation and that helped bind it together. Richard Kuisel discusses these at length in his chapter on "The France We Have Lost." Something has been left behind that helped France to identify itself. In a sense, that is what the debate in France over modernization - a debate that has had more than one phase and has occurred at more than one moment over the past century — was about. For some, there would be not only winners and losers with modernization, but substantial elements of France's coherence as a nation would be jeopardized. For others, most importantly Charles de Gaulle in the period after World War Π, failure to modernize was seen as having been responsible for France's relative decline in Europe, a decline that itself challenged another element central to French identity — its role among the first rank of nations. Stopping the clock thus also carried a substantial risk, and in many ways World War II had brought this lesson home to a larger number of French. Nonetheless, modernization has diluted or dissolved many features of what it meant to be French and it is not yet obvious what will replace them as elements in the bonding agent of the French nation.

The other problem modernization has posed stems from the mismatch between the problems created by new economic and social fragmentation and the capacities of a highly centralized state. The Jacobin state coped well with the challenges of integration in nineteenth century France and it may well be true that postwar modernization could not have occurred as effectively in the absence of a strong state role. The problems of contemporary economic and social management, however, are much less susceptible to being dealt with effectively through solutions imposed from or even designed by the center. Economic decision making demands a flexibility that is hard to reconcile with ministerial leadership and state ownership. The problems of modern society demand a sensitivity and tolerance that is hard to reconcile with the aspiration for conformity. France thus faces a situation where its state remains strong, but where the state's capacities to deal with the new range of problems are weak.

The challenges to France from beyond its borders are no less intense, although they too differ fundamentally from those encountered in the past. Historically, the most important dangers for France from the international environment were threats to its independent existence, were military in nature, and came from its neighbors. Today, the challenges cannot really even be expressed in terms of independence (which may well be why the word has taken on special meaning in France's search for a response to the new conditions), they are more economic than military in nature, and they are diffuse in origin. Changing international conditions have made it far more useful to think of challenges to France in terms of the country's ability to achieve national goals rather than its ability to preserve its independence. France's existence is not really threatened at all today, but in both military and economic terms, France, along with the rest of Europe and much of the rest of the world, has become dependent on others for its ability to achieve basic national goals. The threats are not to its borders, but come through its borders. Interdependence has made borders porous.

Interdependence poses a range of difficulties that are not unique to France, but they have a special effect on France because of the way France has chosen to represent itself to itself. What is distinct about the French case concerns the special power and prestige that was vested in the national state, and the expectalions that the state should be able to respond to the new conditions. The French are particularly uncomfortable with the notion of forces operating within the state that are not subject to the state's control. The control of national territory has been particularly important in France, stemming from the nature of the struggle to unify the French nation. Indeed, national borders have had a particular symbolic value in France that goes beyond that of most countries because they have served not only or even primarily as a means of distinguishing from "the other" or "the foreign" but more importantly as a means of declaring the unity of that which lies inside the borders. Indeed, France may well be the only country to have adopted a geometric figure - the hexagon ~ as an expression of the nation and its identity. No other nation refers to itself in terms of the shape of its borders. A challenge to French borders, even one that does not try to change the borders as such but simply makes them permeable, is thus an important challenge to the way the French nation has chosen to represent itself. The need for welldefined limits between France and the outside world is thus unusually strong and this need is increasingly difficult to fulfill.

The capacity of the French state to play the role it has traditionally played is thus challenged from without as well as from within by the changes that have taken place over the postwar period. As that role has been central to France's self definition as an etat-nation, it is the identity of France that is indeed challenged by these new conditions. The range of challenges can best be understood in terms of three basic issues: the state as the agent of assimilation; the state as the guarantor, as well as provider of last resort, of wealth and welfare; and the state as protector. Each of these three goes to the heart of the specific compact that the French have made with their state and thus the sources of loyalty to the state, a core of most definitions of identity. The chapters that follow provide evidence of the various ways in which each applies, but the following discussion highlights how the analyses relate together around the issue of identity.

The first and in many ways deepest challenge to the French sense of nation comes from the difficulties the country faces with its traditional doctrine of assimilation. The most observable dimension of this problem concerns the failure to integrate into French society many of those who have come to France from abroad, most specifically those from the former colonies. France's approach to immigration paralleled its approach to its colonies. Based on a mission civilisatrice, French policy foresaw a transformation of local populations through education and an extension of French culture. Individuals from the colonies would gradually become French. As French men or women, their ability to integrate easily in the metropôle was assumed. The reality, of course, is that France today faces the same problem as many other countries with large immigrant populations: ghettoization (in this case sub-urban); disputes over rights; and a backlash on the Right.

This is a real problem in contemporary France, and at the same time, it is only a piece of a much larger problem. France's approach to its colonial experienee was governed by the same doctrine of assimilation that guided the unification of the nation under the Republic. It is not only immigrants that challenge the French state's ability to be an agent of assimilation, but the evolution of the economic and social system of the country itself. As Alain-Gérard Slama explains in his chapter, the challenges to France are no longer those that required a central, homogenizing state, nor is such a state well adapted to dealing with the issues of the new agenda. The state is being required to move from acting as the agent of assimilation to playing the role of arbitrator between different interests and the guarantor of the rights of different groups. This is far more like the role of the state in other Western countries, but a major change for France. As Slama points out, the transformation carries the risk that attempts to regulate will become a form of authoritarianism, given that the French state has only limited experience as an arbitrator and an underdeveloped instinct to act as such.

Even if this fear is not realized, the process of France moving from one conception of the state to another will force a parallel adjustment of national identity: from a homogeneous to a more heterogeneous concept of the nation, from a society with a dominant culture to a multicultural society. The problems France will confront along the way are likely to be profound and divisive. It will require a further evolution of the relationship between the state and society in France, a modification of the basic compact between the people and the state. The Jacobin state was the centralized expression and expressor of the common will, indeed of what it meant to be French. The tasks of articulating the common will and of continuously reknitting the nation will move from the state to the political system, a system that may not, as will be discussed below, be well prepared for this task (for precisely the same reason that the state was vested with this role to begin with). The glue that binds the new France together will clearly be a blend of old and new elements, the precise chemical formula for which has clearly not yet been discovered.

The second basic challenge concerns the role of the state as a provider or at least guarantor of welfare and economic security. Perhaps the single most important blow to the French psyche during the last deca...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables and Figures
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Remaking the Hexagon
• Part One The Weight of History in France Toda
• Part Two Challenges to French Economic Orde
• Part Three Social Change and Political Institution
• Part Four France in the New Europ
• About the Contributors
• About the Book
• Index