Tear gas, running battles with the police and an overnight occupation of the Sorbonne. French students last week reminded us once again that nobody does protest with the elan of the French. It's a tradition, but the curious paradox of these riots is that they are mounted to preserve the status quo.
French students claim they are fighting for every under-26-year-old in France; for equality and solidarity; for an idea of the left, France and Europe. Put like that, it is intoxicating stuff. They are resisting a measure which the government and the international consensus say will tackle France's No. 1 social problem: that more than one in five French young people is out of work.
The proposition is that to help the young into employment, they have to be easier to sack. If you want employers to hire young people whose skills and aptitude to do the job are an unknown quantity, says the center-right government of Prime Minister Dominique Villepin, then it has to be made easier for employers to fire them if they prove incompetent. It proposes that the country's under-26s should, for two years after employment, be sackable with no compensation and no reasons given. As a result, it predicts, youth unemployment would fall by more than 20 percent. The students do not believe him. The planned Contrat Premiere Embauche (contract of first employment) has become totemic of everything France hates. It treats workers unequally. It drives a coach and horses through the principle of solidarity. It creates systemic insecurity. It is the kind of policy embraced by the European Commission in Brussels and "les Anglo-Saxons." It is anti-French.
In a different context, it might work as the government predicts and be politically acceptable, but in today's context, it is condemned to fail. Withdrawing rights from people when unemployment is already high is close to impossible. It can only be done when times are good, demand is rising and unemployment is falling, but the trouble is that nobody has any clear idea how to get there.
I have thought for some time that the French should create a British approach to mortgage borrowing and house prices to fuel some rise in demand, but that, too, is seen as far too Anglo-Saxon, liberal and individualistic. We are witnessing a cultural tragedy unfold. The French carry a Utopian ideal in their collective heads about what it means to be French. They are self-appointed defenders of Europe's real republican virtues of liberty, equality and fraternity. Their rightful place is as Europe's leaders, and the state, embodying an idea of France, is the nation's master puppeteer.
None of this works in 2006. The state, as all others in Europe, is circumscribed by global market forces. France is only one of 25 EU member states and the way liberty, equality and fraternity have been delivered since the 1950s has to be recast.
French students find themselves in the same ambiguous position as their country. Their only solution to the challenge of modernity is to defend the status quo to the last, even if it is evident it is malfunctioning. French national policy is the same. On Friday, L'Oreal bought Body Shop, following a well-beaten path of the French buying British companies. On the same day, the French government passed legislation making it almost impossible for British or other foreign companies to do the same in France.
Villepin has also established 10 strategic sectors that are to be no-go areas for European buyers and forced Gaz de France to merge with another French company to save it from Italian takeover.
All of this is in flagrant breach of basic EU law. The government is behaving inter-governmentally just as the students are, aggressively trying to preserve an indefensible status quo to maintain a utopian idea of France.
But it is undermining the very fabric of the EU. Next week, European heads of state meet to advance the so-called Lisbon agenda, by which Europe committed itself to becoming the most dynamic, competitive, knowledge-based economy in the world by 2010. It is an empty farce, made more farcical still by the evident implosion of the EU's political will.
British Eurosceptics will delight, but a stagnant, angry, drifting Europe is not in Britain's interests. France and the French have lost the plot. This is not just a crisis for them, but for Europe. If France goes absent, the EU will lose its drive and purpose. And that is exactly what is happening.
In their recent op-ed “Trump Should Rein In Taiwan” in Foreign Policy magazine, Christopher Chivvis and Stephen Wertheim argued that the US should pressure President William Lai (賴清德) to “tone it down” to de-escalate tensions in the Taiwan Strait — as if Taiwan’s words are more of a threat to peace than Beijing’s actions. It is an old argument dressed up in new concern: that Washington must rein in Taipei to avoid war. However, this narrative gets it backward. Taiwan is not the problem; China is. Calls for a so-called “grand bargain” with Beijing — where the US pressures Taiwan into concessions
The term “assassin’s mace” originates from Chinese folklore, describing a concealed weapon used by a weaker hero to defeat a stronger adversary with an unexpected strike. In more general military parlance, the concept refers to an asymmetric capability that targets a critical vulnerability of an adversary. China has found its modern equivalent of the assassin’s mace with its high-altitude electromagnetic pulse (HEMP) weapons, which are nuclear warheads detonated at a high altitude, emitting intense electromagnetic radiation capable of disabling and destroying electronics. An assassin’s mace weapon possesses two essential characteristics: strategic surprise and the ability to neutralize a core dependency.
Chinese President and Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Chairman Xi Jinping (習近平) said in a politburo speech late last month that his party must protect the “bottom line” to prevent systemic threats. The tone of his address was grave, revealing deep anxieties about China’s current state of affairs. Essentially, what he worries most about is systemic threats to China’s normal development as a country. The US-China trade war has turned white hot: China’s export orders have plummeted, Chinese firms and enterprises are shutting up shop, and local debt risks are mounting daily, causing China’s economy to flag externally and hemorrhage internally. China’s
US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) were born under the sign of Gemini. Geminis are known for their intelligence, creativity, adaptability and flexibility. It is unlikely, then, that the trade conflict between the US and China would escalate into a catastrophic collision. It is more probable that both sides would seek a way to de-escalate, paving the way for a Trump-Xi summit that allows the global economy some breathing room. Practically speaking, China and the US have vulnerabilities, and a prolonged trade war would be damaging for both. In the US, the electoral system means that public opinion
RSS