Letters from Europe:

France and the EU - more notes from a stranger in the strange land

You can find my first post on the upcoming referendum in France on the EU constitution at The Moderate Voice.

GRENOBLE, France - Although I am a part of a three-company alliance in the semiconductor industry, the primary aim of that alliance is more on the development and manufacturing side rather than on the research side where I work. Hence, primarily people from the French component of the alliance surround me.

Today, I was able to spend some time discussing the referendum on the EU constitution that will be held here in France next month with a young man (he is 24) in the office who works as a contractor, writing software to model the results of the research. It was a conversation held in both French and English. We regularly talk to each other using the two languages, he helps me with my French and I help him with his English.

He is probably about as politically aware as the average French citizen, and he is remarkably humble and gentil (how the French say "kind," but more accurately if not the French-English dictionary definition, gentlemanly), especially for a 24-year-old.

He plans to vote "oui" on the EU constitution, but he fears that the referendum will result in a defeat for acceptance. He feels it is important that France is a part of the larger European community and culture.

Repeatedly shaking his head as he spoke, he described what he felt was a common sentiment, best vote "non!" out of fear of losing control over the social benefits provided by the French government for unemployment, health care, retirement, and all the other "social" programs as he described them.

As we talked, he revealed his annoyance that there are people in France who abuse the system of social benefits, never having to work yet receiving money from the government, sounding remarkably like what is described in the US as "right-wing", although I continually have to remember that in politics here the words liberal, left, conservative, and right ALL have different meanings than I am accustomed to.

When I asked him about the appearance of French President Jacques Chirac on television last week, he again shook his head and said that he felt Chirac did not make a good showing and had made several poor responses to the "young people" who questioned him and, remarkably in my friend's eyes, interrupted the President.

My friend discussed the larger implications of how if one of the "big two" in Europe, France and Germany, rejected the EU constitution, it could be a fatal blow to the continuance of the EU. What was interesting to me while we talked was the impression I received that he had arrived at this conclusion on his own; he was not parroting something he had read or heard.

He also said that despite his view that France needed to be a part of a larger Europe, many of his fellows felt that France had to pay too much in supporting less wealthy nations in the EU such as Spain, Portugal, and the recently joined nations of Eastern Europe. Describing a zero-sum game, he said that the wealthy nations had to be pulled down in order to raise up the poor nations. When I said it was better to pull the poor nations up to the level the wealthy now had, he agreed that was a better solution, but extremely difficult to achieve.

Then we began to talk about the differences between Europe and the US. I brought up the point that in Europe, within the individual nations, there was in general an agreement upon the role of government. For example, in France, there is no discussion about the propriety of government being involved in providing health care or retirement benefits to the population, the main debate is on how to raise the money to pay for these government provided services.

Despite the language barriers (he and I both speak the other's language equally well, or rather, equally poorly) needed to be overcome to describe complex issues and ideas, I explained to him how the debate in the US tends to be over the more fundamental question of how much government involvement should exist in these areas, he seemed taken aback. Once I explained the historical basis for the suspicion towards government in the Founding Fathers who wrote our Constitution, he said that their reaction at the time made sense, but he said that he still felt that acting as a larger society was better than the focus on the individual as promoted by certain groups in the US.

Even after discussing the history of the referendum in France for acceptance of the common European currency held over a decade ago, a vote that appeared to be against the government of the time and the common currency until the last votes were counted, he was still pessimistic regarding the possibility of an assenting outcome in France for the EU constitution.

I told him of a statement by a famous American wise fool, Yogi Berra, "It ain't over 'till it's over," and we were both able to return to our work with smiles, if not an excess of hope.