Will you please mind your own business?

 

Three years ago, the presidential elections in France have been a renewed opportunity for most of the American MSM to display a permanent feature that is to be found in many articles reporting on our country: an obsession which translates into an incessant set of criticisms about how France is run, particularly its economy. Above all, the 35-hour workweek, the 5-week paid vacation and the free and high-quality healthcare and educational systems seem to be particularly unbearable to those many journalists, columnists and reporters who also seem to have trouble understanding why the labor market is regulated, why workers are entitled to social rights and protections, and even sometimes are allowed to go on strike.

After having been fed so much bias and disinformation, so many clichés and stereotypes for years, it’s no wonder that a great number of Americans may sincerely believe that France is a socialist (communist?) country on the verge of collapse, nearing bankruptcy with next to no hope of ever being salvaged. Unless… unless it adopts the American way. It doesn’t matter that similar social structures can be found in Germany, Italy or Spain and for that matter across most of Europe, save for Great Britain. For some reason, France is their bête noire…

After having diagnosed the ills, here comes the medicine: liberalism, globalization, free markets, more competition, less government intervention, no paralyzing trade unions, fewer taxes, more flexibility, etc… As if the French had never heard of those things…

Now, the point of this post isn’t to discuss the pros and cons of their “analysis,” but to try to understand what the process at work here is. 

Does anyone really think their first and foremost concern is the well-being of the French? Does anyone really believe they care and even wish for France to be a major actor on the world scene? Particularly in economic term, when the same people are all too ready to criticize and mock France for her pretension on the diplomatic stage? Or rather, isn’t this a pretty good illustration of a mindset posing as a universal standard-bearer as well as an indisputable benchmark that is beyond any questioning? Wouldn’t the world just be better if it were organized along the tenets of the American structures?

May I suggest that what we’re witnessing here is a perfect demonstration of the basic nature of imperialism: the refusal to accept the otherness of the one you want to subjugate, the impossibility of accepting the differences, the wish to have the other conform to one’s own model as well as the continual refusal of the other’s identity and integrity? Imperialism is also the belief that one is invested the responsibility - the duty, even - to teach the world how it should behave and the unassailable right to project and impose one’s own criteria upon everybody else. Isn’t it a commandment of God to lead the unfortunate to the right path and away from evil and make them to my own image while erasing any and all significant differences in the end?

The funny part is that when the French dare object to their well-meant counsellors, said counsellors can read no other “explanation” but sheer anti-Americanism. These people portray themselves as peaceful and benevolent missionaries who eventually fall victims of the violence and ungratefulness of the people they want to help. Ain’t life unkind? What they fail to understand is that the intolerance they claim the French to possess is none other than their own intolerance regarding the way other peoples want to live their lives. When they receive the reaction of those they want to oppress as an echo of their own meddling in others’ business, they regard it as incomprehensible aggression without apparently having the slightest idea that their numerous bits of advice are evidence of their massive intrusion into the vital space of the other, their denial of its specificity and their disrespect and blindness to other forms of social lives.

One English author had perfectly summed it up more than 250 years ago:

“Now, brother, to prescribe rules of happiness to others hath always appeared to me very absurd, and to insist on doing this, very tyrannical.”

- Henry Fielding - “History of Tom Jones, a Foundling” (Book XIV, chap. 8.)

On the other hand, is it so far-fetched to imagine that these same American reporters would be very pleased to benefit from these very rights the French have acquired and which eventually characterize the difference which makes life in France so attractive to many visitors from across the pond? What better way to keep the forbidden fruit at bay than to profess complete disdain for it?

 Talk about ambivalence!

Note: The illustration is "Allées et venues" by Jean Dubuffet.