Questions Of Identity

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Questions Of Identity


Editorial
The Guardian
May 25, 2005

France's debate on the European Union constitutional treaty, now in its final days, is full of anxiety about the country's own identity and future. Many have compared this referendum campaign, with only a little exaggeration, to the Dreyfus affair, which tore France apart in the late 1890s. Now, too, families, friends and generations are bitterly divided over whether to say yes or no on Sunday.

The good news for France is that fundamental issues are being put on the table: thousands turn out at rallies; newspapers print commentaries on the text's 448 articles; politicians debate passionately on primetime TV. The bad news is that polling over the past week has consistently pointed to a no vote of 53%, though one in five voters is still undecided. Few, though, seem indifferent.

In France, as elsewhere in the union, domestic and European politics are difficult to separate. The yes campaign is dominated by the governing UMP and other parties on the centre-right. Yet the key is the no campaign alliance between those on the left who insist they are pro-European but dislike the treaty's social and economic provisions (which are not remotely as significant as those in the Maastricht treaty in 1992) and the souverainiste far right, including Jean-Marie Le Pen's National Front, which backs withdrawal from the EU.

The biggest problem next Monday morning will be for François Hollande's opposition Socialist party, formally backing a yes, but so deeply divided that over half its supporters, many of them public-sector employees, are following the party's deputy leader, Laurent Fabius, who is widely seen as an opportunist.

France's agonising reflects its failure to come to terms with globalisation and with the enlarged EU's role in a globalised economy. Thus both yes and no sides claim to be protecting the country's social model and advantages such as the 35-hour week, generous welfare benefits and the CAP subsidies that have spoiled its farmers and distorted world trade. Both lambast the Anglo-Saxon liberalism embodied by a pro-American Tony Blair and the UK's flexible but enviably successful labour market. Alone among senior politicians, Nicolas Sarkozy, the ambitious president of the UMP, argues that France needs the constitution to allow it to modernise, so that alongside a highly productive private sector it no longer has 10% unemployment (double that among the under-35s) and sluggish growth, just as the EU needs the treaty's streamlining effect to face the challenges posed by the US, China and India.

Gripped by a sense of malaise and decline, France has been taken aback by how little it has changed as the EU has adapted, partly because the government failed to sell the benefits of last year's enlargement. The ubiquitous Polish plumber - symbol of cheap labour from the eastern accession countries - is the squeegee merchant of this debate. And the prospect of Turkish membership of the union is a reminder that there is more disorienting expansion to come.

President Jacques Chirac's own fate is bound up intimately with the outcome. A no will end any chance of a third term in 2007 - no bad thing for a 72-year-old who has sounded badly out of touch. The president's worst moment came in a TV debate about the constitution with young people, who bombarded him with anxious bread-and-butter questions about jobs and schools, not glory, destiny and other elements of the Gaullist rhetoric he likes to deploy. Plans for a final, solemn (and non-interactive) presidential appeal to the nation, to be broadcast from the Elysée Palace tomorrow night, smack
of desperation rather than confidence that it is still possible to avert disaster. For let there be no mistake: a French no will trigger a profound double crisis, first for France itself - and then for Europe as a whole.

© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004