One Million Page Views

According to Google Analytics, this blog has now received over one million page views since its inception in May of 2007. StatCounter, the other statistical source I use, counts somewhere in the 800,000s, probably because it uses different criteria to determine what counts as a "unique" page view. In any case, the number of views is larger than I ever expected when I started this blog. Thank you all for reading, and please keep coming back.

Lagarde To Be Placed Under Investigation

The head of the IMF may have to receive combat pay in the future. It's a dangerous occupation. Christine Lagarde's predecessor ended up in jail (briefly), and now Le Monde reports that Mme Lagarde herself will soon be placed under official investigation in connection with the Tapie Affair. You may recall that M. Tapie was the beneficiary of a sweetheart deal in settlement of a lawsuit, a deal on which Mme Lagarde was required to sign off in her previous position as French minister of finance. The deal was probably not her idea, nor even to her liking, but would she be IMF chief today if she hadn't signed it? Probably not, given that it was backed by then president Nicolas Sarkozy, whose support was instrumental in getting Lagarde appointed to the IMF. You do what you have to do, but sometimes it comes back to haunt you. How good the evidence of wrongdoing against Lagarde  is remains to be seen, however. It may be a long road to a conviction, and the investigation hasn't even begun, so it would be foolish to lay odds.

Open Markets Help French Agriculture

According to Eric Adam, an advisor to the National Assembly:

En effet, si l’agriculture, est encore tenue à l’écart de la crise économique européenne, c’est grâce à son ouverture sur l’extérieur. Qu’il s’agisse des céréales, des produits laitiers et plus récemment de la viande bovine, tous doivent leur redressement au marché mondial. Pour mémoire, la moitié de la production française de blé est destinée à l’exportation. Du côté de la viande bovine, la consommation française est en baisse constante et les exportations ont progressé en 2011 de 9% et principalement vers les pays tiers. Enfin, l’industrie laitière exporte près de 30 % du lait collecté.
Selon France Agrimer, en 2011, les exportations de produits agroalimentaires ont enregistré une hausse de 15% par rapport à 2010. En comptabilisant les importations, l’excédent commercial de ce secteur est le deuxième plus important derrière celui de l’aéronautique et atteint un record historique de 11,6 milliards d’euros pour l’année 2012. Avec une part de marché mondiale de 6,5% dans l’agroalimentaire, la France se situe au même niveau que le Brésil et devant l’Allemagne.

The German Social Democrats: A Model for the Future of the Left?

The German Social Democratic Party, the SPD, is about to celebrate its 150th anniversary. Le Monde devotes an interesting article to the party's history, drawing a certain number of contrasts with the French Socialist Party. This one intrigued me, especially Helmut Schmidt's bon mot:

Entre les Français et les Allemands, ce sont en fait deux conceptions de la politique qui s'opposent. "Les Français croient au primat du politique. Ils aiment penser qu'au lendemain d'une élection, tout peut changer. L'Allemagne est plus proche de la réalité. Helmut Schmidt avait même eu ce mot impensable en France : "Celui qui a des visions doit aller se faire soigner chez le psychiatre"", analyse Klaus-Peter Sick. Un réalisme qui explique sans doute également la proximité du SPD avec le mouvement syndical allemand : une autre caractéristique qui rapproche le SPD du Labour britannique et le distingue du Parti socialiste français. Celui-ci n'a toujours pas eu son "Bad-Godesberg", un congrès au cours duquel le SPD, en 1959, a abandonné la vulgate marxiste et assumé son réformisme.

On the other hand, as Le Monde notes in its next sentence, pragmatism is not without its disadvantages, and it doesn't always help to win elections. A second article ponders the trans-European effort to conceive of a new future for the social-democratic left, which seems to have run out of ideas. It seems that there is a new "Progressive Alliance" within the Socialist International, but this is not necessarily heartening to American Democrats who have witnessed the marginalization of the self-styled "progressive" faction within the Democratic Party over the last 50 years. The Progressive Alliance seems rather cool on the EU, a direction that admits of several interpretations, some hopeful, others less so.  A Dutch scholar, Prof. J. M. De Waele, has this to say:

En réalité, les crises ne sont pas bonnes pour elle [la gauche sociale-démocrate]. Elle est apte à partager les fruits de la croissance, pas les effets de la crise. Et elle est, sauf rares exceptions, incapable d'élaborer une alternative pour les vrais perdants de la mondialisation. Elle doit, par ailleurs, bien admettre que le cadre européen qu'elle défend n'est pas protecteur.

He goes on to say that what the left needs to do is to rethink its approach to globalization. It must admit that it cannot preserve the current hierarchy of labor in Europe and must instead adapt to the new competitive landscape. I have been making this argument for some time, though admittedly it's easier to make in general terms than to translate into specific policies. But there are some things that clearly can be done now: facilitate industrial restructuring, fund job retraining for displaced workers, encourage new investment, provide additional funds for education, government-backed R&D, increase opportunities for young researchers. This is not neo-liberalism, Government must play an active role, but it must not cling to the past in a haze of nostalgia for the achievements of the Trente Glorieuses. For one thing, those years did not seem entirely glorious at the time. For another, they ended in 1975. It's time to move on.

French Historian Shoots Himself Inside Notre-Dame, Invoking Heidegger and Renaud Camus

Dominique Venner, A French historian and extreme-right-wing activist, former member of the OAS, shot himself inside Notre-Dame, apparently to protest what he considers to be the Islamization of Europe. He invoked Heidegger and Renaud Camus in his suicide note:

Dans son dernier post de blog, intitulé "La manif du 26 mai et Heidegger", il affirme que "les manifestants du 26 mai [contre le mariage gay] auront raison de crier leur impatience et leur colère" mais que "leur combat ne peut se limiter au refus du mariage gay".
Selon lui, "le 'grand remplacement' de population de la France et de l'Europe, dénoncé par l'écrivain Renaud Camus, est un péril autrement catastrophique pour l'avenir".

University Reform: After Pécresse, Fioraso

University reform: always a contentious subject in France. The Collectif des Universitaires had no use for Mme Pécresse's LRU and has even less use for Mme Fioraso's reform of the reform, which it claims is a continuation and exacerbation of the LRU in all but name. The rhetoric of its diatribe is so overheated, however, that one's skeptical hackles are raised from the outset.

Nevertheless, a more temperate piece by Le Monde's Nathalie Brafman also makes the point that the proposed Fioraso Law does not represent a break with the spirit of the Pécresse Law:

Le texte que défendra Geneviève Fioraso, la ministre de l'enseignement supérieur, ne revient pas sur l'autonomie des universités entérinée par la loi relative aux libertés et responsabilités des universités de l'ex-ministre Valérie Pécresse, votée en 2007. "Ce n'est pas une loi de rupture", a assumé le rapporteur de la loi, Vincent Feltesse (PS, Gironde).

So it all comes down to what you think autonomy has accomplished. If you believe the Collectif, it has paradoxically made universities more dependent than ever on the ministry of education, shrunk their budgets, prohibited the replacement of retiring professors, and established "petty potentates" at the local level, wreaking havoc with the selection process and enforcing mediocrity.

These charges will likely get little hearing in the forthcoming debate, however, because the question of whether some courses will be taught in English (in order to improve French students' facility with the language) will monopolize the attention of the nation's representatives, even though fewer than 1% of courses are affected. This is one of those initiatives that, though well meant, probably won't accomplish much. Real competence in a foreign language takes more than sitting passively through a course or two taught in that language. But is the harm really so great? Why not try the experiment? Does this initiative really "sign the death warrant" of the language of Racine, as some critics (hysterically) claim? Asked and answered.

Marine Le Pen Breaks Her Back

Marine Le Pen broke her sacrum (base of the spinal column) when she fell into her  own empty swimming pool. She says it was an accident. ... One awaits further details of this story with some considerable interest.

Book Attacks French Elite

Peter Gumbel, a British writer who teaches in Paris, has launched an all-out assault on France's elite:

In the name of “meritocracy” and “equality”, he says, France has built a system for selecting and formatting its political, administrative and business leaders which makes “Eton and Oxbridge” or the “Ivy League” look like a utopian experiment in social levelling. The “Grandes Écoles” – elite colleges, devised by Napoleon two centuries ago and re-invented after the Second World War – have become a machine for perpetuating a brilliant but blinkered, often arrogant and frequently incompetent ruling freemasonry.
“It’s a system that is able to produce a tiny number of brilliant and charming men and women who constitute the ruling class. Whether they are competent as leaders is another matter,” Gumbel writes . “The entire selection process leaves the vast majority of the population frustrated, de-motivated or feeling discarded.” In a sense, Mr Gumbel is saying nothing new. For decades, the French themselves have grumbled (as only the French can) about the pernicious stranglehold on government and big business of the products of the Grandes Écoles and especially the so-called “énarques”.

Movement on Europe?

Jean Quatremer reports that Angela Merkel is prepared to make significant changes in Europe's governance structures and treaties. François Hollande has given signs of thinking along similar lines. Both leaders are said to have been shocked by the clumsy handling of the Cypriot crisis at the European level.

I would be astonished, however, to see any movement on this front before the German elections, where Merkel now has to deal with unexpected problems, including a scandal in the leadership of the CSU, coalition partner of her CDU. Quatremer is no doubt reporting leaks from technical advisors in both governments. The political challenges to be overcome are enormous, and will remain so even after the German elections. Still, it is reassuring to think that there is movement on the issues of economic governance, banking reform, and treaty revision, all of which are necessary to preserve the euro.

James Galbraith's Plan for Europe

Jamie Galbraith thinks that what Europe needs is not a stimulus plan but a "stabilization plan." Specifically, he thinks that the Eurozone needs an expansive social protection plan, like Social Security in the U.S., providing equal benefits to all member countries' citizens and financed jointly by contributions from each. The word "stimulus," he says, gives the wrong idea of what true Keynesian economics is about, which is smoothing across the business cycle.