The French Connection

"The American model" plays a big role in European domestic economic debates, with business school types convinced that the streets really are paved with gold in the land of Ronald Reagan, and the left certain that modern America is a kind of Dickensian inferno. The leading candidates in France's presidential election (held, in two rounds, on April 22 and May 6) have followed this pattern in their rhetoric, with conservative Nicolas Sarkozy and Socialist Ségolène Royal respectively praising and criticizing the US economy.

At other times in history, however, these roles were reversed. During the American Civil War, French liberals supported the Union, while monarchists around Europe were drooling at the possible demise of the American experiment. Civil War historian James McPherson, in an essay on European responses to the conflict, quotes French reformer Edgar Quinet's 1862 statement that Napoleon III wanted to "destroy democracy in the United States...because in order for Napoleonic ideas to succeed, it is absolutely indispensable that this vast republic disappear from the face of the earth."

Today, the transatlantic discussion is not about "Napoleonic ideas" but rather about the viability of the welfare state in an era of globalization. And just as European republicans of the nineteenth century depended on the success of the American experiment in democracy, so today American progressives would be enormously helped if Europe can get social justice and globalization right. Thus, while the French are debating the American model, Americans should be taking a look at what's happening to the French one.

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