Transcript
Hubert Védrine: I’d like to share with you a few thoughts on the relationship between France and globalization, a topic on which I recently wrote a report for the current President, Nicolas Sarkozy. He just made a high profile trip to the United States. President Sarkozy had asked me to join his administration, to head once again the Foreign Ministry. I was touched by this offer, but we are not from the same political side and for a number of reasons which I will not discuss now, I felt I did not belong in his administration. However, I do have a very good relationship with the President. That’s something that has emerged over the past 20 years; in France, there have been three “cohabitations” and the relations between the left and the right are very different from what they were in the past: they are much more normal, relaxed if you will, even when theoretical or political differences arise. So I did not accept the governmental offer. However, when President Sarkozy asked me if I would write a report on France and globalization –and this is a real issue, and not an easy one-, I was glad to accept. I believe it is very good that there should be in France a President of the Republic who will ask people for their opinions, even if they’re outside of his political family, a President who will appoint people, from the right and from the left, to head commissions and discussions, I think it’s great. (I supported this idea when Mitterrand did it in 1988 after his re-election, but he didn’t go quite as far, the scope was more limited; Consistent with my previous views, I believe this is a very good thing indeed.)
Then, there is the issue of France and globalization, France’s place, France’s perception of its role, its significance, its sovereignty, its ability to act. This is something that has preoccupied France for a long time, and particularly since the beginning of the recent deep phase of globalization. I was interested in thinking about this. In this field, there is a dominant discourse, it is a discourse about openness, a globalist and economic discourse, that basically considers that the French are a peculiar people, that they are too negative, too worried, too anxious about globalization, and that they are maybe a little backward on this topic compared to other countries, particularly the United States, Britain, and the Nordic countries. However, when I started focusing on this issue for my report, I noticed that in all big countries, in all rich countries, everywhere, public opinion is wary of globalization. I use the [French] words “mondialisation” and “globalization” interchangeably as, in French, they mean the same thing. I found that there is no peculiarly French reaction to globalization. When you take public opinion in the US, even in the UK, in Germany and countries of the sort, you find that the elites are in favor of openness and globalization and that the wider public is wary. It’s not that the French are idiots on a topic where others are not. There is mistrust in all populations, in all wealthy countries, where there is some kind of more or less developed safety net (there are differences of course between the United States and Europe, but even in the United States, the system is not like in China, you have social benefits everywhere.) The populationss, with their common sense, understand that having everybody compete with each other, having the people in rich countries compete with poor farmers in China, means that the current situations in Europe and other highly developed countries risk being undermined. Again, there is no unique French reaction here. And I was looking at surveys over the past 10 or 15 years, so it’s not just short-term trends.
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