You are in:
- Archives » 2006 » April 2006
Wake Me When It's Over
One of most common slogans chanted by protesting students in recent weeks was "rêve générale" - general dream. Part contemporary situationist slogan, part play on words on the ritual trade union warcry of "greve generale" - general strike - it says rather a lot about how the students and their supporters see the world.
For the most part, we're not talking about idiots. Students the world over are renowned for leftish naivete - what a terrible world it would be if all teenagers were fierce conservatives - but they're rarely thick. Furthermore, they're not isolated. France's media is ruthless in suppressing anti-State, liberal values, but all those students who read Libé also read the international internet, and many of them are aware, more than their counterparts in the trade union movement, of the real world outside France.
But they choose to deny it. Yes, all the evidence from economists as far afield as the US and India demonstrates that Labour markets must be less rigid, that some liberalisation is necessary to boost the struggling French economy, that only by encouraging businesses to take on workers of their own accord can the nation's staggering levels of youth unemployment be reduced.
These aren't threats from sinister US gurus who have been reading too much Ayn Rand - they're recommendations from the European Union, which France alone sees as a neo-liberal conspiracy against its social model.
Moreover, many understand that France's benefits system - retirement in your fifties if you're a public sector worker, when you can look forward to a fat state pension for a good thirty years - is unsustainable. Even though the main solution to most of France's problems always seems to be "make the rich pay for it", there's a dawning realisation too that squeezing business for even more tax has its limits. The rich can flit to London or the US, business doesn't need any more encouragement to move out of the country. France has lost 300,000 of its youngest and most talented to Britain already. Thousands more have fled to Switzerland and Belgium - Belgium! - to avoid France's punishing wealth tax, a relic of Communist influence in the post-war era.
But what's happened in France is a mass escape from this reality. Yes, the hated Anglo-Saxon system - liberalism, in one shape or form - is how the rest of the world is organising itself. Even the EU is beginning to shake off its old French dirigisme and is cheerleading neo-liberalism. Even in France, the private sector that embraces globalism and liberalism is one of the world's most successful.
While the "alternatives" to liberalism - hard-man leftist authoritarianism in Latin America, peasant agrarianism in France and the most benighted regions of the developing world - are subject to regular, fawning coverage in the French press, no-one seriously wants to live under a Chavez or in a mud hut. Perhaps the general dream is that somehow these disparate strands of anti-liberalism can arrange themselves on the world stage to offer an alternative to liberal democracy. That might explain the extraordinary support "Social Forums" enjoy among French students and the media industry.
But most of all, Reve Génèrale is the opposite of a warcry. It's a demand to be left in peace, under the covers, while the world outside goes about its business. After all, what's a dream but something that happens when you're sleeping?
