Une des plus s\u00fbres r\u00e9f\u00e9rences de qualit\u00e9, de mesure et d’appr\u00e9ciation se trouve dans les \u00e9crits de l’historien et commentateur am\u00e9ricain William Pfaff. Habitant \u00e0 Paris, c’est un fin connaisseur de la France, sans doute bien meilleur que nombre de Fran\u00e7ais (dito<\/em>, de Parisiens).<\/p>\n<\/p>\n \tIl faut donc lire son texte d’analyse sur l’\u00e9lection de Nicolas Sarkozy, paru le 14 juin<\/a> dans le New York Review of Books<\/em> et \u00e9galement disponible<\/a> sur son site personnel.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n \tL’analyse que fait Pfaff de la situation fran\u00e7aise est remarquable. Le malaise fran\u00e7ais, dit-il, est (\u00e9tait? la campagne des pr\u00e9sidentielles a peut-\u00eatre chang\u00e9 cela) politique et nullement \u00e9conomique. Cela lui permet notamment de tracer un tableau de la r\u00e9elle situation fran\u00e7aise, du point de vue \u00e9conomique qui fut mis en cause. Les d\u00e9clinistes fran\u00e7ais devraient s’y int\u00e9resser.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n \t\u00abThe 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.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/p>\n \t\u00bbThe 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 FranceKLM 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.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/p>\n \t\u00bbFrance 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.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/p>\n \t\u00bbFrance underperformed the EU average in GDP growth last year but outperformed Germany for the entire 19962005 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.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/p>\n \t\u00bbMuch 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 S\u00e9gol\u00e8ne 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.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/p>\n \t\u00bbRelatively 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.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/p>\n \t\u00bbFrance 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 20032005 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.<\/em>\u00bb<\/p>\n<\/p>\n <\/p>\n \tMis en ligne le 15 juin 2007 \u00e0 07H03<\/p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Une des plus s\u00fbres r\u00e9f\u00e9rences de qualit\u00e9, de mesure et d’appr\u00e9ciation se trouve dans les \u00e9crits de l’historien et commentateur am\u00e9ricain William Pfaff. Habitant \u00e0 Paris, c’est un fin connaisseur de la France, sans doute bien meilleur que nombre de Fran\u00e7ais (dito, de Parisiens). Il faut donc lire son texte d’analyse sur l’\u00e9lection de Nicolas… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"neve_meta_sidebar":"","neve_meta_container":"","neve_meta_enable_content_width":"","neve_meta_content_width":0,"neve_meta_title_alignment":"","neve_meta_author_avatar":"","neve_post_elements_order":"","neve_meta_disable_header":"","neve_meta_disable_footer":"","neve_meta_disable_title":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[5327,2687,3446,1131,4590],"class_list":["post-68905","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bloc-notes","tag-declinisme","tag-france","tag-malaise","tag-pfaff","tag-sarkozy"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68905","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=68905"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68905\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=68905"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=68905"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=68905"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}