Whenever I hear U.S. academics and journalists blather on about the "inevitable" linkage between globalization, free trade and overall social progress, I'm tempted to take up a collection to buy them round-trip plane tickets to Paris for a week of R & R. It's not just that their long-dormant palates, numbed by years of cafeteria food and frozen home cooking, would find themselves enlivened by what is still an unrivalled national cuisine. It's also that a few days in the "hexagon" might convince them that a heavily regulated, highly protectionist society has something more to offer than anti-American slogans, native arrogance and contemptuous intellectuals preaching the latest philosophical fashion.
But instead of enjoying France, America's pundit class persists in being annoyed, even angry, with its sister republic across the sea. Thomas Friedman, booster-in-chief of an unregulated world economy at The New York Times, has famously recommended to his readers, "Buy Taiwan, Hold Italy, Sell France," because of the French habit of taking umbrage at, among other things, genetically altered seeds from Monsanto Corp., hormone-treated American beef and British beef thought to be infected with mad cow disease. Recently, Washington Post columnist Geneva Overholzer returned from a two-week visit to pronounce the French hypocrites in regard to the new world economic order. "For all their sneering about malbouffe [junk food], the French and their fellow Europeans are wolfing the stuff down," she wrote, citing McDonald's reported sales of $9.6-billion (U.S.) in Europe last year.
Of course, the French didn't invent hypocrisy -- they merely refined it to the level of art. It was a Frenchman, François, Duc de la Rochefoucauld, who insightfully said that "hypocrisy is the homage that vice pays to virtue," and it was the great French novelist Honoré de Balzac who brilliantly illuminated the poisonous two-facedness of Gallic high society during the Second Empire.
Today's French intelligentsia remains very much aware of the contradictions in the French national character. On a recent visit to my maternal homeland, I came across a newspaper column by Bernard Pivot, host of France's most important cultural TV show, in which he mused on the paradox of French nationalism. He noted that while the anti-globalist "peasant" celebrity José Bové was on trial in Millau (accompanied by 20,000 supporters) for last summer's "dismantling" of a McDonald's construction site, France was convulsed with admiration for its European champion national soccer team, whose star players readily sell their skills and renown to the highest foreign bidder. Two of the most popular, Laurent Blanc and Fabien Barthez, even appear in ads for McDonald's.
Obviously, however, hypocrisy isn't what annoys Ms. Overholzer; for hypocrisy on a grand scale, one needn't look further than the confines of her home base of Washington. What angers America's pundit class, as well as the State Department, is France's pretensions to compete ideologically and commercially with the United States.
It wasn't always this way. When the French saved George Washington's bacon at Yorktown, no one knew that the l3 colonies would expand to global dominance and the pecking order of power be reversed. In the l8th century, it was France and England that promoted globalization; in fact, the world then was in many respects more "globalized" than now, so extensively was it colonized by the European powers. The German invasion in l940 and the Suez debacle in l956 effectively ended French aspirations to genuine global influence; these days, despite its independent nuclear arsenal, France must fall back on its natural and man-made advantages over the Ricains.
Which are considerable. Despite the increasing number of hideous, American-style supermarkets and shopping centres, most tomatoes grown in France -- indeed, most fruits and vegetables -- retain a flavour so superior to their factory-farm U.S. equivalents as to smother the ravings of the most earnest free-trade propagandist. Overdevelopment and suburban sprawl, so ubiquitous in the States, is relatively well-controlled in France. Around St. Tropez, for instance, the vineyards stretch as far as the eye can see and are protected, not xenophobically from foreign ownership but simply from the ravages of housing speculators. José Bové's "artisanal" Roquefort cheese goes rather well with Provençal red wine that remains (I hope) permanently out of reach of French-style Donald Trumps.
All this must be terribly unnerving to a Washington establishment that decries France's insistence on being French before it is capitalist. In the United States, capitalism has become the raison d'être of the elites; in France, it seems to be only a means to an end -- living better than the competition and maybe converting a few foreigners to their way of life. The French continue to smoke and drink with reckless abandon while spending heavily on public health (more hypocrisy). But, with all that, their average life expectancy of 73 places them third in the world, well ahead of 24th-place America at 70. Little wonder that in a just-released World Health Organization survey, France ranked first in "overall health system performance," compared with anti-socialist America at 37th. In France, one tends to leave the table satisfied and disinclined to seek supplements at the local Krispy Kreme doughnut franchise. In health-fascist America, obesity is epidemic.
I wish I could report that the French are united against the forces of American-style commerce, but Ms. Overholzer is right about the hypocrisy. Evidently hoping no one would notice, the faintly socialist government of Lionel Jospin announced on Bastille Day that it would not order thousands of acres of corn destroyed because of an accidental infestation of genetically modified seeds. A lot of people did notice, however, and the government's assurance that the mutant seeds appeared in harmless quantities of less than one part per thousand has failed to placate environmentalists and their farmer allies.
Nevertheless, one senses a political awareness of multinational depredations up and down French society, from the ordinary wine grower to the intellectual and governing elite. And the French people are learning that anti-globalism (that is, anti-Americanism) can be fun. In the downmarket magazine l'Echo des Savanes, the editors recently devoted the cover and several pages to the topic of "Moronic America," a place where "everything is large, excessive, at once ridiculous and immoderate," and gave particular attention to the "nightmare" of gated communities and the enormous intake of fat by supposedly diet-obsessed Yankees.
At the higher end of the media spectrum, Bernard Pivot remarked that the greatest French soccer star, Zinedine Zidane, despite his American-style international wealth and fame, seemed much less happy than José Bové: "Curiously, the one who protests, who denounces, who threatens, breathes good humour and joy; and the one to whom the heavens have granted so much talent and fortune displays a discreet smile, a little melancholic, occasionally sad." I'm sorry to find my fellow Americans so much more similar in temperament to Mr. Zidane than to Mr. Bové.
John R. MacArthur is the publisher of Harper's Magazine and author of The Selling of "Free Trade": NAFTA, Washington, and the Subversion of American Democracy.
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