France in Crisis. Welfare, Inequality and Globalization since 1980 (review)

The thesis of France in Crisis is simultaneously revisionist and conventional. The revisionist position is that France's governing elites – notably socialist leaders and left-wing thinkers – misrepresent the French welfare state as redistributive, egalitarian, and solidarist, when it is a corporatist welfare state composed of highly organized public-sector unions protected by excessive labour regulation and separate and unequal social insurance funds. Instead of redistributing income in an egalitarian and socially cohesive way, the state maintains the incomes of public-sector employees and professionals and their retirees with pensions sustained by state subsidies, to the detriment of private-sector employees, women, the young, immigrants, and children of immigrants. Timothy B. Smith blames both socialist and republican politicians for failing to alter the system, and especially the pension system, which is fiscally unsustainable because it relies on a pay-as-you-go system that is overstretched owing to the high ratio of retirees to employed members of the pension plans.

Instead of critiquing and reforming the existing state, Smith contends that most governments and public intellectuals – including the internationally renowned Pierre Bourdieu – have blamed globalization or neo-Liberalism, also known as 'jungle capitalism' in French socialist discourse, and thereby diverted attention from internal problems such as the high percentage of workers and the level of redundancy in the public sector. Smith categorically rejects popular critics like Naomi Klein in Canada and Viviane Forrester in France who contend that globalization has restrained states' capacity to promote social redistribution and limited pension and health care funding. His blunt rejection of this position resembles the increasingly conventional, neo-conservative position on welfare state reform.

Although the revisionist portion of Smith's thesis is the salutary and stinging critique of socialist and left-wing thinkers and socialist government policies of early retirement, stringent rules about firing personnel, and the like, Smith also blames republican governments for failing to contest the French consensus about social policy; he attributes their failures, in large part, to their fear of taking on powerful public unions and pension funds and more generally, their aversion to social conflict, given memories of May 1968. When, as in 1995–96, the Juppé government proposed reforms to the special pension regimes and civil servants' pensions – changes that would have treated people more equitably and contained costs through universalism – millions of older, largely male workers and elite cadres took to the streets, paralysing France for six weeks. If these stakeholders are primarily to blame for the fall of the Juppé government, the book also finds fault with Juppé for his efforts to link reforms to the Maastricht treaty.

Smith supplies masses of statistics to support his position, though he often follows paragraphs of statistical generalization with a paragraph of qualifications. The sheer number of economic statistics tends to overshadow the qualifications and blunt criticism, unless the reader would like some flesh on the statistical profiles. For instance, the aging, white, largely male public union members and retirees remain faceless and silent. With one exception, France in Crisis does not offer vignettes or profiles on individuals other than leaders. This reader had some difficulty reconciling the demonized representation of union members with her personal experiences with public transit workers. One does not have to be a dupe of French socialist and left-wing thinkers – or so this historian of French labour and Frenchwomen believes – to wonder if the situation of all public workers is quite so cushy and comfortable as Smith suggests. Some, like myself, may not be overly concerned about workers and unions daring to be 'arrogant.'

To offset criticisms about the conservative thrust of his book, Smith insists that the alternative to French dirigisme is not American neo-Liberalism. His alternative models of welfare state reform is the Netherlands – a corporatist welfare state that managed, during the 'Dutch miracle' of the 1980s, to reorient social policy towards job creation and integration of citizens into the workforce – and the inevitable one, Sweden. The other comparison...