Last Saturday afternoon at the Palais des Sports in Paris, a dapper aristocrat called Philippe de Villiers assembled about 5 000 people who presumably had other things to do. His posters, plastered everywhere, were eloquent: ”We all,” they said, ”have a good reason to vote no.”
For one pundit, it is about ”the last kick of the dying French exception”. Another cites ”the bankruptcy of the political class”. For a third, the explanation lies in ”our essential ungovernability”; a fourth believes France is ”in the grip of a profound identity crisis”.
France’s referendum on the European constitution on Sunday has plunged the nation into a bout of tortured introspection. And at present — as a seventh successive poll confirmed at the weekend — what has emerged is a clear temptation to say non.
”It’s intriguing,” said Pascal Perrineau, director of the Centre for the Study of French Political Life, ”because there is a historical, if passive, consensus in France in favour of Europe. But as soon as you ask a concrete question, pro-European Union sentiment melts.”
The concrete question is simply: Do you approve the treaty establishing a European constitution? But what it has triggered is not so much a melting of pro-EU sentiment as a meltdown of French certainties and confidence — of France’s view of itself and its place in the world.
Besides the clear-cut anti-Europeanism of the far right and the far left, and the deep unpopularity of the present centre-right government, a mass of less precise complaints and concerns are fuelling France’s no vote.
Some are permanent features: a perennial spirit of revolt, and the French tendency to favour ideals, principles and ideologies over facts, reality and pragmatism. The ill-concealed presidential ambitions of some campaign leaders is also a factor.
But for the writer Denis Tillinac the root problem is one of identity. ”Today one is European, and only residually French. That was fine in a Europe with six or 12 members: we know the Italians, the Germans. But a Europe of 25? We don’t know who or where we are.”
Eric Zemmour, a commentator on Le Figaro, defines the problem as a loss of French influence: ”We exported democracy across a continent; we defined the notion of universal human rights. And now we learn it’s all worthless, that Europe’s going to decide?”
For analyst Alain Duhamel, France is suffering from ”a generalised economic malaise, inspired by rising unemployment, stagnant salaries, falling spending power, pension worries, the fear of jobs being lost abroad … It’s a no to today’s world; a no to a frightening world.”
That, perhaps more than anything else, is what has prompted the most frequently heard argument against the treaty: that it enshrines a vision of an over-competitive, free-market, ”Anglo-Saxon” Europe that will kill French jobs and destroy France’s social and public services.
The ”Anglo-Saxon model” is cited repeatedly as the example to be avoided — even by the constitution’s defenders, who say it will protect France against economic liberalism. ”It’s extraordinary,” said Eric Morgan de Rivery, an EU specialist. ”It’s as if people are just discovering the market, when it’s been part of Europe since 1957.”
Only one politician has so far dared suggest the country should vote yes because it needs to change. ”The best social model is no longer our social model,” French politician Nicolas Sarkozy said last week. ”The question is this: can France escape the effort, the work, the questioning, the reforms that some of our European neighbours have put in before us? My answer is no. Europe demands that we change.”
”We’re witnessing one of the last remnants of the French exception,” said De Rivery. ”The constitution has confronted France with a debate it should have been having for a decade or more. And now we risk blaming Europe for our own immobilism.” — Â