The French Exception

Sophie Meunier

From Foreign Affairs, July/August 2000

Summary:  Anti-Americanism and a stubborn Gaullist independence in foreign policy have often marked French political discourse. These traits are coming to the fore once again in France's wildly popular antiglobalization movement. Today, a complex mix of political, economic, and cultural reasons explains the French resistance to "Anglo-Saxon global capitalism." If sustained, France's stand could become a model for other countries seeking an alternative to the new, American-style world economy.

Sophie Meunier is Research Associate at the Center of International Studies and Lecturer at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University.

Above all, globalization has been vilified because it threatens the very foundation of French greatness: France's unique culture. But the clash between French and American cultures was probably inevitable given the universalist vocation that both nations claim. This tension reemerged at the end of the Uruguay Round in 1993, when the United States and the European Union (EU) debated the issue of "cultural exception." At the time, the debate focused only on cultural goods such as movies, music, and television programming. But in recent years France's fear has grown that trade in general -- not just trade in cultural goods -- might threaten French culture. The WTO has been portrayed in France as a Trojan horse that forces on others the low-brow uniformity of the American lifestyle -- fast food, bad clothing, and even worse sitcoms. In contrast, the French cultural model is portrayed as a "high" culture of philosophers, fine dining, and intellectual films. Indeed, one of Bové's public-relations victories was to fuse the issues of agriculture and culture. In an editorial titled "Vive le Roquefort libre!" the respectable newspaper Le Monde intoned that "resistance to the hegemonic pretenses of hamburgers is, above all, a cultural imperative." According to this reasoning, a Truffaut film is as much a defining component of French cultural identity as fois gras or Parisian cafes. Hence, France must protect all of its cultural treasures or none.

Focusing the cultural arguments on food has proven a particularly fruitful strategy for globalization's adversaries. Food is one of the most universally recognized components of French culture -- and remains one of the greatest sources of domestic pride. As Le Monde noted, "McDonald's red and yellow ensign is the new version of America's star-spangled banner, whose commercial hegemony threatens agriculture and whose cultural hegemony insidiously ruins alimentary behavior -- sacred reflections of French identity." By painting globalization as a direct attack on French food, its opponents received national approbation for a collective struggle against la mal-bouffe, or "lousy food." Bové and his followers threw into the same bag the issues of American trade imperialism, genetically modified food, and the fatty American nutritional model. Since nothing that French politicians say on behalf of French culinary traditions can backfire, they have now entered a free-for-all battle of wits in which they try to outdo each other with catch phrases and solemn declarations on hamburgers. The winner in this category may be France's agriculture minister, who recently declared that the United States "has the worst food in the world" and publicly announced last August that he had never eaten at McDonald's and disliked hamburgers.

Critics also fear that globalization threatens the French language -- another prominent and unifying component of French identity. In recent decades, France has tried to stop the decline of French usage in the world by promoting an aggressive policy known as "francophonie." Abroad, it meant teaching the French language, developing cultural exchange programs, and fostering Francophone cultural traditions. It also meant defending French in one of its traditional bastions: international diplomacy. At home, French language policy has sometimes gone so far as to ban certain foreign words while developing an alternative vocabulary in French. In March, for instance, the French government prohibited civil servants from using the words "e-mail" and "start-up." Instead, they must refer to "un message electronique" and "une jeune pousse" -- results of months of brainstorming by specially appointed committees. This effort has also meant downplaying local dialects and regional languages. But France is losing this particular battle: spoken by 1.6 billion people on the planet, English dominates as the language of business and the Internet.

NO SURRENDER

Much of French resistance to globalization stems from culture, but politics and economics also count. In fact, the recent debate really emerged in spring 1999 as a result of two WTO rulings against Europe. In one, the WTO concluded that EU preferences under the Lome Convention for bananas from former African and Caribbean colonies were discriminatory; it let the United States impose retaliatory sanctions against certain European goods until the EU banana regime complied with world trade rules. In the other, the WTO ruled that the EU ban on U.S. hormone-treated beef was indeed protectionist as long as scientific evidence could not attest to any danger, so it allowed Washington to retaliate against European products such as Dijon mustard and Roquefort cheese until the ban was lifted.

Both rulings infuriated the French. Who were WTO judges to rule that Europeans could not help their former colonies, whose economies would otherwise be destroyed if opened to international market forces? Who were WTO judges to rule that the American cattle lobby could force potentially harmful hormone-treated beef down the throats of European children? The rulings were presented in France as clear evidence that globalization puts business interests above consumer safety, international political stability, and humanitarian concerns.

But trade is only part of the story. For many French, national sovereignty is also at stake. As the anti-WTO backlash revealed, globalization is charged with producing a democratic deficit, a "rape of popular will" (in the words of Le Monde Diplomatique). The 1992 Maastricht referendum on the EU had already demonstrated the appeal of the sovereignty theme in French public opinion. More recently, the failure of the Multilateral Agreement on Investment in 1998 and the aborted 1999 WTO meeting in Seattle gave France further opportunities to reassert what it saw as its basic democratic and sovereign principles -- and teach the world a lesson.

Along with its obsession with sovereignty, French political culture has always looked to a highly centralized state for governance. The French people rely on the state for entrepreneurship, political leadership, and economic support. Globalization threatens this bulwark of French politics because it weakens the state by giving more responsibilities to private actors. Indeed, globalization consecrates American individualism and the victory of American-style democracy over French-style republicanism and dirigisme. In reacting against globalization, the French are reacting to the surrender of their state traditions to a foreign system of political values.

CORDON SANITAIRE

France has also embraced the international crusade against globalization for domestic political reasons. The argument here began in the 1980s, when the far-right National Front's Jean-Marie Le Pen fretted about France's "borders." Le Pen won support by linking domestic economic insecurities to threats from abroad -- arguing, for example, that the "invasion" of France by immigrants caused high unemployment and threatened French national identity. When the debate turned to European integration and later to globalization, the fear of immigrants easily translated into a fear of foreign goods, labor, and capital. Indeed, Le Pen himself switched his target from immigration to trade globalization in 1999 as he campaigned for the European Parliament.