La France selon William Pfaff

Une des plus sûres références de qualité, de mesure et d’appréciation se trouve dans les écrits de l’historien et commentateur américain William Pfaff. Habitant à Paris, c’est un fin connaisseur de la France, — sans doute bien meilleur que nombre de Français (dito, de Parisiens).

Il faut donc lire son texte d’analyse sur l’élection de Nicolas Sarkozy, paru le 14 juin dans le New York Review of Books et également disponible sur son site personnel.

L’analyse que fait Pfaff de la situation française est remarquable. Le “malaise français”, dit-il, est (était? — la campagne des présidentielles a peut-être changé cela) politique et nullement économique. Cela lui permet notamment de tracer un tableau de la réelle situation française, du point de vue économique qui fut mis en cause. Les “déclinistes” français devraient s’y intéresser.

«The main foreign interest in this election outcome has concerned future French economic and foreign policy. A certain amount of nonsense has already been said about the economy, a New Yorker article claiming recently that the French system had to be rescued “before it crashes.” The country, it said, has stalled. Its growth is minimal. Its protectionist policies are disastrously out of touch with the global reality, let alone with the realities of the European Union.... Its business, beyond the realm of luxury labels and designer clothes that the rich will always pay for, is not competitive.

»The French problem has been a well-recognized failure to deal with recent social and structural difficulties, including immigrant unrest and persistent unemployment. However, France is a leading exporter of construction, municipal, and financial services. Air France–KLM is the biggest and most successful European airline. France possesses Europe's most extensive high-speed rail infrastructure and is the principal exporter of high-speed rail technology.

»France remains in other respects the leading high-technology country in Europe. With Russia absent from civil aviation and British Aerospace (BAE Systems) now effectively an American company, the Pentagon its largest customer, France arguably is the second-ranking aerospace power in the world, concentrating much of Western Europe's defense, aerospace, and electronics industries, including Airbus and Arianespace (which controls 40 percent of the world's satellite-launching market)—both of them French initiatives in which France remains the most significant actor. Moreover, the Dassault company is a principal military and business jet producer and a leader in computer design. France is also the world's leading exporter of nuclear energy technology and nuclear electricity plants (78 percent of France's own electricity is nuclear-generated). It will take a while for the economy to crash.

»France underperformed the EU average in GDP growth last year but outperformed Germany for the entire 1996–2005 period (2.2 percent average annual growth compared with 1.1 percent for Germany). It is expected to be above the EU average for all of 2007 with a forecast 2.4 percent growth. At 2.2 percent, inflation is not an issue. At just under 10 percent, unemployment, although improving, remains stubbornly above the EU average, the result of France's much-discussed and real difficulty in introducing greater flexibility in its labor markets.

»Much of the French left remains wedded to a Malthusian notion of work (there is a limited amount, which must be shared out; thus the thirty-five-hour work week) and it has a misplaced faith in demand-side policies of subsidizing employment and raising the minimum wage to stimulate consumption. These reappeared in Ségolène Royal's election platform, but they have also characterized the Chirac government's initiatives on employment; its demand-side experiments in giving incentives to companies to hire and expand ran into popular resistance. Sarkozy has promised immediate action to correct all of this (he has published his “100 days” of planned reforms) but the problems, and the inertia of the system, remain considerable.

»Relatively high taxation, including an only partially capped asset-based wealth tax, as well as an inability to give youth a sense of opportunity, in part because of a traditional commitment to the virtues of formal academic achievement, have led to a well-publicized if somewhat exaggerated exodus of the well-to-do, the entrepreneurial, and the ambitious. Tax exiles are now reported to be uneasily considering whether it is safe to return.

»France nonetheless remains the second-most-powerful economy in continental Europe, behind Germany, which is larger and more populous. Its attraction to international business remains such that during the 2003–2005 period (the latest for which figures are available) it received three times more foreign direct investment than Germany and two and a half times more than Italy.»

Mis en ligne le 15 juin 2007 à 07H03