Far be it for me to write a diary on French politics when there are French bloggers here far more qualified than I to do so. But the election of Macron as President, and now his appointment of a conservative as prime Minister are events of EU wide significance. He has been welcomed with open arms by Chancellor Merkel, and has disabused those who thought he might favour Eurobonds or more radical measures to counter the imbalances within the Eurozone.
So is he just a French version of Tony Blair, come 20 years later? Certainly his abandonment of the Socialist party, his creation of a new centrist En March party, his embrace of liberal democratic market led reformist policies, and now his appointment of a conservative prime Minister are reminiscent of Tony Blair’s “third way” policies of the 1990’s and early 2000’s.
But what made Tony Blair so deeply unpopular in left wing circles was not just his penchant for liberalising markets and privatising public services, but his poodle like craving for approval from establishment figures like the Queen and US President George W. Bush, and eventually his total complicity in the establishment of a false Casus Belli for war with Iraq.
It seems unlikely that Macron will repeat those mistakes, at least not quite so obviously, but will he repeat Hollande’s mistake of advocating reasonably progressive policies and then folding abjectly in the face of German opposition? He must know that the European project is on borrowed time, and even the united opposition to the hard right English nationalist forces behind Brexit can only do so much to cover up glaring deficiencies in the EU and Eurozone itself.
The Eurozone, in particular, cannot go on from crisis to crisis in Greece and Italy caused by structural imbalances in the balance of trade between Germany and Club Med states. The hard right undermining of democratic norms in eastern Europe can only be ignored or down played for so long. The European parliament cannot live for ever on it’s few conspicuous successes such as the near elimination of roaming charges.
The success of the EU in maintaining relative peace and prosperity for the last 60 years cannot be taken for granted and has been given a new lease of recognition in the wake of Brexit. But what forward looking vision is the EU going to embrace in the wake of the departure of its most recalcitrant member?
The nationalist backlash in much of the EU is in part a reaction against a seemingly unaccountable Brussels bureaucracy taking decisions not to the liking of local elites. But that has always been something of a red herring: EU decisions are made by consensus, usually unanimously, and rarely against the opposition of individual governments. National elites like to blame Brussels for measures they have themselves either actively or passively supported.
Brexit has demonstrated that this is no longer a low risk way of deflecting opposition onto a larger bogeyman elsewhere. There can be real consequences if the rubes take these blame games too seriously. But there are also real reasons why the European project in general no longer commands the affection and respect it once did: Chief among these have been the failure to deal with structural imbalances within the Eurozone, the imposition of austerity on already impoverished populations, and the failure to deliver any major new additional benefits of membership in recent years.
If the EU had been an outstanding success in weathering the storms of the post 2007 financial crash, in coming to the aid of beleaguered member states, or in dealing with the refugee crisis, far fewer citizens would be questioning its leadership and institutions now. It’s all very well looking competent when compared to Trump or May, but really, that is too low a bar to set: the EU needs to set out a positive vision of where it seeks to be in 10 years time, and what it proposes to do to realise that vision.
Would it be too much to ask that in that time the EU could develop common educational, training, child protection, healthcare, procurement, public administration, social welfare, employment rights, equality norms, foreign policy, security and civil defence, sustainable energy, transport, environmental conservation, and infrastructural entitlements, policies, facilities and services which individual member states could opt in to or out of if they so choose?
Much of what is currently done by each national government is no different or very little different from what other national member state governments do in these areas. By pooling research capabilities, experience of best practice, quality of service measurement and administrative tools each member state could aspire to be the best in any or all of these areas providing real, visible, and sometimes measurable benefits to the citizenry at large.
Individual member states could opt to lead, participate, or opt out of participation in each policy area to avoid a need for unanimity slowing progress to a snail’s pace. Agreement on the scope of each initiative – on what should be common to all, and what is best left to local initiative to fashion in accordance with unique or diverse circumstances would be key to avoiding over-standardisation of policies or services.
Above all over-centralisation in Brussels should be avoided. Peer-to-peer decision making processes, perhaps led by a different lead member state in each area would ensure than any such initiatives remain grounded in the real needs of real citizens on the ground. Thus Denmark might lead the Sustainable energy policy area, whilst France led language training and mutual recognition of qualifications. Each project would create a series of online administrative tools and computer systems which other countries could adopt and adapt to their particular circumstances within agreed guidelines.
The focus of such projects should be to assist mobility between member states of workers and pensioners by enabling transferability of health benefits, pension payments, tax administration, car insurance, qualifications recognition, and residency rights etc. Economies of scale would enable better tools to be developed and administered at reduced per capita cost. A best practice developed primarily in one country could be quickly expanded to include all who opted in.
No doubt there will be many controversial areas where either vested interests or genuinely unique circumstances prevent some or many countries opting in to a particular policy area. It will be partly down to the skill of the lead member state in developing processes acceptable and useful to many others.
However one thing seems certain: the EU can no longer rest on past glories and must add value to the daily lives of its citizens in many areas, and on an ongoing basis. Such processes cannot be entirely led by a centralised bureaucracy and should seek to leverage the enthusiasm, energy, experience and expertise within member states.
In some ways, the experience of participating in such projects will have its own rewards: ensuring greater mutual understanding of what is proposed, better design and development, greater identification with its success, and greater pride in its achievement.
The EU badly needs to achieve an ongoing stream of at least minor successes which can make a real (and sometimes measurable) improvement in the quality of life of its citizens. It must seek to involve as many local, regional and national players in this process as possible in order to avoid bottlenecks in a centralised bureaucracy and a lack of identification with a project in member states. Participation must remain voluntary at a national level to avoid accusations of a Stalinist centralism taking hold of the Union.
Above all, an over-arching initiative must be launched to breath new life into an ageing Union, and this cannot come from Brussels alone. It’s time to let lose the energy in our regions, our younger people and in our current centres of expertise. HQ doesn’t always know best, and modern theories of organisational design emphasise the importance of local centres with relative autonomy and freedom to innovate. It doesn’t have to be ideologically driven, although it can be.
If Macron and Merkel are looking to breath new life into the EU, they must first place their trust in centres of expertise outside their own narrow dirigiste and “énarque” led administrations. An EU of 27 Members states must tap into the energies and experiences of all if it is to grow organically and develop into a major force for good for their own citizens, and for the world at large.
Nice rant Frank, written from the Irish heart!
I do miss the essentials of policy though: finances, military and foreign policy.
The unbridled enlargement for (NATO) political motives followed by the financial crisis of 2008/2009 has shaken the EU’s principles of the original six states.
First we are confronted by West Germany’s reunification with economic ties to a new Russia, the eastward expansion to cover all of the Warsaw Pact occupied states after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
No one is waiting in Europe for an elitist Franco-German axis after Brexit. Macron talks about renewal of EU treaties. The French still have a strong foothold in Africa as a former colonial power. Under Hollande, France has been fighting Islamic terror in Mali and surroundings.
Areva has a checkered past inside France and certainly in Niger. Amazing that Macron picks a former Areva lawyer as his Prime Minister.
Many refugees are a burden from the former colonial empires in the Middle East, Africa and Asia. The conflict in Iraq, Libya and Syria was an evil act by the US and Europe. We are paying the price with the far-right and nationalist movements. After military violence, a path to fascism is just a short cut.
I remember a conference I was at in Eindhoven in 2008. Maybe it was at the peak of optimism about the Euro project.
There was a minor disagreement, and one of the presenters asked another what the Dollar was selling for. The Europeans in the room nodded approvingly. At the time I thought it was a bizarre thing to be proud of: the exchange rate is a means to an end, not an end by itself. But no matter: there was a sense of common purpose among the Europeans: a confidence their time had come.
Two years later the confidence was gone. The Germans were running the continent, and one could sense something profound had changed. The British seemed smart for having kept the Pound. The economic crisis had exposed a political one, and both had taken an enormous toll on the self-confidence I had seen a bare 2 years earlier.
The same was true in the US of course as well. It was, after all, we who had screwed everything up.
Except it wasn’t all on us. Everyone screwed up. The US, the Germans, the UK. Everyone.
So now comes a really great paper that shows how in the US the opening of trade with China resulted in rapid increases in debt in those areas affected most directly.
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2808981
This was how everyone missed the rise of the forces of populism. It was papered over with debt. Workers lost jobs and tried hanging on to their standard of living with credit cards.
It was all destined to fail, because the system could no longer deliver what it had.
The United States has been governed in mostly the same way for about 225 years. In all of that time there was one constant: things got better for the average person. Oh there were wars and depressions. But one struggles to find even a 20 year period where income did not rise.
Until 1978. Since 1978 in the US the average wage for those in the bottom half of the income bracket has gone up 8%. In American History there is nothing similar.
The equation before was always the same: liberal democracy means rising incomes.
And so economic stagnation fuels anger that creates a crisis in trust in our institutions. In Europe one sees something similar.
The simple truth is in this point of time democratic governments do not know how to raise the living standards of their people (except by making lots of mercedes).
You write we need some small successes. You write the truest words of the time.
Because the crisis in the West is far more profound than we are willing to admit.
And one sees it personified in Macron. He stands for what my class wants and values: tolerance and a global outlook.
It is view of the World living on borrowed time. Macron is Blair who is Clinton who is Merkel. They represent the triumph of free market economics. There is nothing Macron is going to propose (with the exception of the environment) that is going to help reverse the stagnation.
I watched French TV the night of the First Round. Someone said the danger was Macron ’17 = Le Pen ’22. No one on the show I watched thought Macron had a plan to fix the underlying problem.
And each day these problems fester is a day that makes the populist ascendency more likely.
Time is not on Macron’s side.
It is a common illusion to believe that household living standards can keep on rising in a world with a rapidly expanding population and a finite and depleting set of resources.
In addition globalisation has a re-distributive effect from richer to poorer nations where the workforce in many poorer nations can compete effectively on price once they enter the globalised economy. Thus the workforces of China and India and the far east gain, while wages are depressed or fail to rise in many first world economies.
There is a further redistributive effect from labour to capital as an almost unlimited supply of labour competes for a limited demand for labour which is further depressed by automation and the finite purchasing power of consumers on depressed wages.
The winners are those with capital and or with skill sets of which there is a limited supply. The losers are almost everybody else – unless you happen to be in state or sheltered employment.
That the losers should seek to redress their loss of market power through political means is understandable, but perhaps also doomed to failure – there are only so many wars of exploitation you can start to redress their losses, and, as demonstrated by the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria these wars come with increasing costs and declining benefits.
So instead we get demagoguery and fake news and the pretence that electing a Trump or Le Pen or voting for Brexit can reverse these trends.
Europe can survive and prosper on 1-2% growth because the population is ageing and growing by only 0.25% p.a. However that doesn’t address the re-distribution of power and wealth from workers to capital which can only be addressed by political means.
So far political elites have been able to deflect blame from themselves onto external bogeymen like the EU, unfair trade deals, free trade etc. I wonder how long that can last…
I disagree. There is no reason that resources have to be finite and dwindling.
North Africa used to be Rome’s imperial breadbasket.
Middle East, Central Asia used to be exceptionally prosperous, culturally sophisticated regions about 800-1300 years ago.
Every grand movement of nomads (up to Huns, Mongols) reflects a shift of resources, you may bet.
The post-WWII egalitarian prosperity was a temporary thing. Notice that Reagan, Thatcher came right after the famous Club of Rome report…
Wealth hierarchies and holy bullshit have been natural population and resource control tools for ages.
Sounds like the response of the Easter Island loggers to anyone that suggested resource management. Did they gather and pray to the gods as they chopped down the last tree?
Planet earth is the reason. We already know that it would require the resources of several worlds to raise the global standard of living to that in the US. And for many in the US that standard isn’t all that high.
Of course they have to be finite and dwindling under the current conditions.
They have to be finite because there is only so much matter-energy on Earth and in the Solar System.
Of course it has to be dwindling under the conditions expressed. You have more people competing over the same finite amount of resources.
Not even close, I certainly don’t know where your allusion to one another is based upon! Solely on their preferred policy of globalisation? The Third Way has ended and Macron certainly will not be on that path! The economy of France is on life support dependent on EU subsidies. Corbyn in the UK is beyond reality, backtracking in support of nationalisation of industry.
Neither Macron nor Merkel will become friends with president Trump, thank goodness. PM Theresa May will by necessity be quite supportive. A UK split from the EU was inevitable.
○ Managing Democracy, Managing Dissent [pdf]
○ The populist deficiency of European social democracy | Policy Network, London – 2003 | :: [cached webpage]
You know better than I. But Macron is for “reform” is he not. He was a member of Hollande’s cabinet.
Merkel imposes neo-liberal policy everywhere she can.
Except, of course, in Germany.
After 8 [!] weeks of negotiations for a Dutch coalition, the Green party had to bow out because of the conservative policy on immigration issues.
Such a nonsense from Rutte’s conservative VVD and the right-wing CDA – Christian Democrats [leader Buma].
So sad and once again a missed chance to honor the young electorate who voted for young leader Klaver of the Green party.
The establishment must have felt empowered after Macron and Merkel’s surprise win last Sunday in North Rhine-Westphalia.
No it hasn’t and Macron is in lockstep with it. As is Trudeau. Your praise of these two suggests that you place too much value on their rejection of racism and nativism language as if they are leading that parade of the young (and all long time equal rights advocates) instead jumping on the preexisting bandwagon. And too little weight on who they take their economic orientation from.
No individual has the power to change culture overnight — it evolves and does so over a very long period of time. Elites in the private and public sector can nudge it in a progressive, status quo, or regressive direction. Their real power lies in shifting public and economic power and that interacts with the culture. When those policies are negative for the vast majority, people will also reject the cultural stuff espoused by the “leaders” because it was sold to them as a package deal.
Economist Richard Wolffe has explained this. It was the end of a 300 year labor shortage in the US.
In 1970, immigrants were 5 % of the population.
Today, they are 13.5% or so. Today, we have a huge problem with employment of our children in good jobs. When you increase the competition, especially of the illegals who represent UNPLANNED competition, you have a huge problem.
We have at this time too many immigrants. We have an obligation to our own citizens, and NO obligation to others.
http://www.migrationpolicy.org/programs/data-hub/charts/immigrant-population-over-time?width=1000&am
p;height=850&iframe=true
For a “dataguy” you sure do ignore a lot of data. In your obsession, you posted a chart in response to my comment that doesn’t support your claim. Immigration was historically low from an early point in the 1920s through 1990. So, it sure wasn’t immigration that flipped the historical labor shortage to a labor surplus by the early 1970s. The explanation is multifactorial, but the two biggies were increased paid labor participation by half the population (women) and two decades (194x-196x) of white people breeding like rabbits (at the same time as child and infant mortality were significantly declining).
How many generations or years are you removed from an immigrant ancestor? Unless ALL your ancestors are native North Americans, like most USians you’re an immigrant mutt.
The point, which you seem to have difficulty comprehending, is that there is now a huge competition inside the US for jobs inside the US. This means that OUR CHILDREN in OUR COUNTRY cannot get jobs that are like those which we were able to get.
I’m just unclear why it is so difficult for purportedly intelligent people to understand labor competition. When there is a huge over-supply of labor, the value drops. That is what we have now. We have an over-supply of labor. We have an over-supply of Ph.D.s because foreign Ph.D.s, who cannot speak English, are allowed to stay here. We have an over-supply of cheap labor. We have an over-supply of middle-income labor.
This is the point. Is it possible for you to understand it? I wonder.
“Goldman Sachs estimates that almost one million foreign H-1B contract workers are now employed in college-level jobs throughout the United States, even though many media outlets routinely say the federal government approves only 85,000 H-1B visas per year.”
In other words, for those who have trouble walking and breathing at the same time, millions of jobs which used to be done by Americans, or which would have gone to Americans, went to foreign workers, who are generally less qualified, but are cheap and stupid.
Yes.
If by repeat you mean the window-dressing feints to the left, no. Being twenty years late, he appears ready to push the pedal to the metal to catch up: Emmanuel Macron picks centre-right Édouard Philippe as PM . The one thing neoliberals have learned is there is no going back once their crap (anti-social) policies are implemented.
En Marche and back to the 19th century when peasants knew their place.
The French president gets to appoint the PM, but the composition of the Cabinet is more complicated. Per WIkipedia:
“All members of the French government are nominated by the President of the Republic on the advice of the Prime Minister. Members of the government are ranked in a precise order, which is established at the time of government formation. In this hierarchy, the Prime Minister is the head of government. He is nominated by the President of the Republic. Whilst the President is constitutionally free to nominate whomever he likes, in practice he must nominate a candidate that reflects the will of the majority of the National Assembly, as the government is responsible to parliament. [my emphasis] After being nominated to lead a government, the Prime Minister nominee must propose a list of ministers to the President. The President can either accept or reject these proposed ministers. Ministers are ranked by importance:
“Ministers of State (French: Ministres d’État) are senior ministers, and are members of the Council of Ministers. It is an honorary rank, granted to some Ministers as a sign of prestige.
“Ministers (French: Ministres) are senior ministers, and are members of the Council of Ministers. They lead government ministries.
“Secretaries of State (French: Secrétaires d’État) are junior ministers. This is the lowest rank in the French ministerial hierarchy. Secretaries work directly under a Minister, or sometimes directly under the Prime Minister. While the Council of Ministers does not include Secretaries of State as members, Secretaries may attend meetings of the Council if their portfolio is up for discussion.”
Sorry, the point is that unless Macron is extraordinarily successful in creating a new political party from scratch and then winning a majority in the National Assembly, he’ll be in the position of “co-habiting” with a possibly hostile National Assembly majority, and will have to adjust his cabinet accordingly.