13 December 2018
A French Lesson For Us
“No man is an island”.
By John Watson
There is a moment in the film Johnny English when Rowan Atkinson shrugs his shoulders in mock bafflement when referring to the French. It was inevitably part of a joke but nonetheless it strikes something of a chord. Near neighbours we may be, but we approach things differently from each other and, to English eyes, the recent rioting in Paris looks very foreign.
This makes it easy to smile and turn away, becoming absorbed again on our own divisions over Brexit, but it is not particularly wise to do so. Political dissent has always flowed across borders: although we did not have a revolution in the 1790s, it got close in the navy; there were wars of religion in both countries over much the same period; and the 14th century French Jacquerie was followed, some twenty years later, by our own Peasants’revolt. There is nothing accidental about this. Religious wars flowed from the same basic teaching. The rebellions of the peasantry were in each case a reaction toward heavy war taxation, the Black Death and the hard lot of the common man. A similarity of grievance drives unrest across national boundaries and that is why we should be looking at the Gilets Jaunes and asking ourselves whether their issues have any traction here.
It isn’t all about fuel tax, of course. Nor are the demonstrators all people with cars, or students, or anarchists. The driver is a general loss of confidence in politicians and the feeling that ordinary people are not as prosperous as they should be. As Bruno Le Maire, the French finance minister put it:
“Our country is deeply divided between those who see that globalisation has benefited them and others who can’t make ends meet and who see globalisation not as an opportunity but as a threat.”
If that doesn’t sound familiar, it should, although the detailed problems are different from those we face. France is more concerned about inflation and unemployment. Here the focus is on slow wages growth and the cutbacks in public services. In the end, though, there is a common theme which runs through all of it. The prosperity which should be generated by the advance of technology is simply not getting to a lot of people. It is not just that, either. The environmental agencies are producing ever more alarming figures and there is little sign that the international community is going to achieve very much. Yes, countries are trying. Our own carbon footprint has dropped considerably, but still, any savings we make are likely to look small when compared with the increasing pollution elsewhere.
These are the real problems of the 21st century. How are we going to keep people employed as the robots move in? Can we devise new ways of making wealth trickle down? How are we going to restrict global warming? It will be no good our sitting behind our sea defences and sipping Kentish wine when large parts of Asia and Africa become uninhabitable, producing a refugee problem beyond anything we can imagine.
The approach taken to global problems has been through a number of iterations. Once empires and education were seen as the answer. Then it was the turn of increased freedom and economic liberalisation. There have been lots of other formulae too, some collective, some dictatorial, others based on private capital. Some have turned out to be intrinsically defective; others have run into political problems; but there is one thing that is common to them all. They may work for a time but they can easily become out of date, even the best needing to be continually refined to keep pace with the march of technology. How is that process to work as the changes in the way we live accelerate? What system can we use to keep our species fast on its feet and to avoid a road crash?
Certain things are obvious. Environmental issues need to be dealt with internationally and the big common questions of how we should live also need to be addressed in concert. Does that mean supra national authorities like the EU being given extensive powers to impose solutions? That is a possible way of dealing with it, but imposing from above will lead to an orthodoxy of thinking which may not be fleet-footed enough to meet the various challenges. Is fragmentation a better answer with different ideas working in competition? That would certainly be more responsive but could be chaotic. Is there a middle way where public opinion drives the politicians to work in concert without imposing rigidity of method? Perhaps that is where we will get to, in which case the political correctness of the snowflake generation is a hopeful sign that they will impose moral suasion on those in power.
So let’s start with us. As we look across the Channel to see how our neighbours grapple with their current problems, we should be looking for solutions which have a wider application, for the issues are not restricted to their shores but affect all of us. It is not quite what Donne meant but his words are still apt:
“send not to know for whom the bell tolls, It tolls for thee”
