The New Old World

by Perry Anderson

  The combination of appeals to security and identity on one side, and to mobility and opportunity on the other, which gave him his convincing victory, made Sarkozy an object of acute detestation and alarm in the opposite camp. There, lurid depictions of him as the offspring of a wedding between Le Pen and Thatcher, if not actually a crypto-fascist, circulated freely. Such images were not without effect, rallying not only the youngest cohort of voters to Royal, but the constituencies of the far Left, many of whose electors plumped for her ab initio, and all of whose candidates clung to her skirts in the second. One phalanx of intellectuals declared that ‘never had a candidate of the right so symbolized social regression’, while another warned that Royal’s defeat would mean nothing less than ‘grave dangers to fundamental liberties’.51 Such overwrought lamentations, not unlike the hysterics of 2002 at the imaginary threat of Le Pen capturing the presidency, served only to disarm the opposition before the actual character of the regime with which it was confronted, once this was in place.

  For Sarkozy’s first move, far from speeding to the right, was to welcome as many lights of the Centre–Left into his administration as he could find, starting with the Socialist paladin of human rights, Bernard Kouchner, promptly appointed foreign minister; Jospin’s deputy chief of staff Jean-Pierre Jouyet, given the portfolio on Europe; Royal’s one-time chief economic adviser, Éric Besson, installed as secretary of state in the Matignon. This should scarcely have come as a surprise: during the campaign itself, Sarkozy had not hesitated to invoke Jaurès and Blum as inspirations for the country, not to speak of the young Communist resistance hero Guy Môquet, soon afterwards, as a model for its youth. Such ecumenical overtures were not confined to matters of ideology. Gender and race were no less liberally accommodated. Half of the new cabinet was composed of women, and three members of the full government were of Maghrebin or African origin, one a stalwart of SOS Racisme itself.

  If the instrumental character of such appointments, designed both to demoralize the PS and to provide the administration with cover for the sharper end of its policies, was plain enough, their condition of possibility lay in the actual programme on which the government was embarked. For, as it soon proved, both hopes—in the euphoric visions of the business press—and fears—in the agitated imagination of the left—of the new presidency were exaggerated. Sarkozy did not retreat from his campaign commitments, but these were never as radical as his more ardent admirers supposed, or his own rhetoric implied. The most divisive of them, a handsome present to the rich of tax cuts and abolition of inheritance tax, was prudently slipped through before the immediate glow of his victory had faded. Thereafter, taking care to avoid any set-piece confrontations, the government’s measures were generally introduced after at least an appearance, and often substance, of negotiation. Unions, weak enough in France anyway, were cajoled with talks into acceptance of limitation of strikes in public services, abolition of special pensions on the railways in exchange for higher final wages, and voluntary circumvention of the thirty-five-hour week. Universities have been granted autonomy, allowing them to raise money from private sources and compete in attracting talent, but selection of students has not been introduced, and an increase in public funding of higher education has been promised. The retail sector has been liberalized, without greatly threatening small shopkeepers. Immigration laws have been stiffened, but as elsewhere in Europe, mostly to symbolic effect.

  As a prescription for the reinvigoration of French society, the dose of neo-liberalism has so far been quite modest. Apart from anything else, the state itself has not been put on much of a diet. Having promised voters he would increase their purchasing power, Sarkozy was in no position to tighten fiscal discipline. Within a year of his coming to power, growth had slowed, the budget had sunk deeper into the red, and inflation had doubled. Failure to raise taxes or cut public spending was, in the eyes of Anglo-Saxon commentators otherwise well disposed towards him, bad enough. Worse was Sarkozy’s lack of respect for the principles of a free market, where politically inconvenient. Not scrupling to denounce firms for outsourcing jobs, he has promoted national champions in industry, brokering state-led mergers in energy and armaments in defiance of admonitions from Brussels, and repeatedly attacked the European Central Bank for undermining growth by restricting the supply of money. Soon after his inauguration, indeed, he could be heard—to the dismay of Le Monde, which had hoped this odious expression was a thing of the past—criticizing la pensée unique itself.

  To date, in short, Sarkozy’s approach to the task of bringing France up to scratch, as understood by a modern liberalism, has—not in style, but substance—been closer to that of a Raffarin than a Thatcher, even though as a ruler he enjoys far more power than the first, or even the second. Reforms, though relatively consistent, have not been radical.52 What explains the apparent paradox? In part, the very personalization of power that his presidency has introduced. For the first time in the history of the Fifth Republic, the executive is concentrated entirely in one omnipresent ruler—Sarkozy acting not just as the head of state, at a certain distance from day-to-day administration, as envisaged by the Constitution and respected by his predecessors, but as the visible manager of every detail of government. Jospin’s ill-starred tampering with electoral tenures and calendars had made this collapse of any separation between presidential authority and partisan responsibility possible. But it required the full blast of Sarkozy’s temperament to make it a daily reality. From the start, the hazards of such activism were clear: the Elysée would no longer be a shelter if anything went wrong.

  To this political change was now added a cultural turn. By the new century, traditional barriers between public and private life in France were breaking down, with the spread of pulp journalism along Anglo-Saxon lines. Revelling in the new celebrity culture, Sarkozy went out of his way, both before and after his election, to play the super-star of a Vanity Fair world—blazoning a glamorous marriage and sporting every modish accessory for the attention of photographers and reporters. When, after well-advertised affairs, his wife finally abandoned him amid media pandemonium, he wasted no time acquiring a successor of even more doubtful taste: nude modelling, husky singing, kitsch romancing. This was overstepping the mark. Much of Sarkozy’s own conservative base was affronted by such ‘pipolisation’, and his ratings fell like lead, from close to 70 to 37 per cent, faster than those of any ruler since the late fifties. The speed of this fall in public esteem could not but cool any too hasty reformist zeal.

  Beyond such circumstantial setbacks, however, there are more structural reasons why Sarkozy’s sweeping powers have not led to any comparable transformation of the social landscape. While real enough measured by the Gaullist past, French decline was not, economically speaking, of the same order as the British when Thatcher came to power—productivity was higher, profitability greater, the currency more stable, public services superior. At elite level, lesser ills called for milder remedies. At popular level, more drastic solutions ran the risk of explosive reactions. If more limited in scale than the strikes of 1995, the turbulence of 2006–7 remained a warning. Manchestertum pure and simple was never an option. No regime in France could abandon all pretence of paternalism. The hallmark of Sarkozy’s rule has rather been an ideological and practical eclecticism, veering rapidly in whichever direction the preservation of its project of semi-liberalization has pointed. Where, sociologically speaking, opposition lacks critical mass, attack on it can be truculent, as in the case of the country’s research establishment. Where resistance threatens to become contagious—national demonstrations over falling household incomes—there is a switch to placation. The edginess of every government in recent memory has not disappeared. Contemplating the Greek riots of late 2008, Sarkozy told a deputy from his party: ‘The French adore me with Carla in a carriage, but at the same time they guillotined a king. It is a land of regicides. Over a symbolic measure, they can turn the country upside down. Look at what happened in Greece’.53 I
n the glare of Athenian fires, impending reform of lycées was quickly put on hold.

  In foreign affairs, on the other hand, such domestic constraints cease to hold. The politics of the Fourth Republic were marked by deep conflicts over the external policies of the governments of the day, as the Cold War descended, colonial insurgencies multiplied, and European integration began. This was the epoch of Indochina, the Ridgeway riots, the European Defence Community, Algeria—issues capable of dividing voters, splitting parliaments, toppling governments. With the Fifth Republic, that came to an end. The change was due to the success of De Gaulle in disengaging France from North Africa, dominating the direction of the European Community, and where necessary defying the will of the United States. These were achievements that united virtually the whole nation, from Right to Left, behind them. What is striking since, however, is the ease with which his successors have gradually abandoned his legacy, without significant electoral incidence or popular reaction. Pompidou promptly admitted Britain to the Community; Giscard pushed for monetary union; Mitterrand signed up for the American war in the Gulf; Chirac for the war in the Balkans. At no point was Gaullism ever openly repudiated, and each presidency could claim its share of continuity with the first: maintenance of the Franco-German axis, not unfriendly relations with the Soviet Union, advancement of Romania, opposition to the attack on Iraq. The drift, away from a classically independent foreign policy as De Gaulle had conceived it, was always incremental, leaving margins for local reinflection or reversal.

  Sarkozy has broken more cleanly with the diplomatic traditions once upheld by Couve or Jobert. Proclaiming unrestricted admiration for the United States from the start, and promising a full return of France to military integration in NATO, under American command, he has aligned Paris with Washington on every major political issue of the War on Terror. Alone among European nations, France has increased its contingent in Afghanistan. Where his predecessor accepted the prospect of an Iranian nuclear capability without undue alarm, Sarkozy has not hesitated to threaten Iran with an aerial attack from the West if it should show any such temerity. Within a few days of a meeting between Bush and Sarkozy at Camp David, the French foreign minister was speeding to Baghdad with warm wishes for the work of liberation in Iraq. A fulsome state visit to Israel, replete with reference to biblical entitlements, passed without a word on the fate of the Palestinians, and the EU has for the first time been pushed into a formal embrace of Tel Aviv as a privileged partner for mutual consultations with Brussels.

  The new French Atlanticism does not spell mere passive submission to the will of the United States. Within the European Union, on the contrary, Sarkozy has been active in pursuit of a clear-cut goal: to strengthen it as a more compact and powerful ally of America. Naturally, this implies no federalism. The aim is tighter inter-governmental direction of the EU, by a select company of its major states, optimally at French initiative. To this end, Sarkozy worked with Merkel to design a way of circumventing the defeat of the European Constitution by French voters. Reproducing every key feature of the original, the Lisbon Treaty was duly passed through parliament without the inconvenience of a popular vote. Although the Treaty was signed during a German presidency, the driving force behind it was France, as the leading country where the Constitution had stumbled. So too, when Irish voters rejected the Treaty, the Aussenamt was furious, but it was Sarkozy who led the campaign to pressure Dublin to hold a second vote on it before New Labour might be turned out of office, and the project risk a final quietus from a Conservative government in London.

  If successful, as must be probable, the skills in political sleight-of-hand displayed in this institutional engineering are likely to leave a more durable mark on Europe than the merely theatrical gestures of the French presidency of the Union in 2008—creation of yet another symbolic pan-Mediterranean organization; mediation in a conflict over South Ossetia, more or less bound to end in much the same way without it; pledges of less pollution, and more coordination in handling immigrants. Behind such image-building, however, lies a coherent purpose: not simply shepherding the disparate states of the EU into the habit of common ventures, verbal or material as the occasion may be, but convincing them these require firm leadership by the big-hitters of the Union. The potential tensions in this conception of Europe lie, obviously enough, in future relations with Berlin. Sarkozy’s repeated attacks on the restrictive monetary regime of the European Central Bank have faded as the ECB has been forced by events to loosen it, moderating what might otherwise have become an acute source of friction between the two countries. But in wooing Britain—treated as France’s natural military partner—so persistently, Sarkozy has inevitably weakened the Franco-German axis of old. Whether common economic pressures of recession bring the three countries closer together, or fault-lines between them more into the open, remains to be seen. Viewed structurally, problems of coordination are inherently greater between three parties than two. But for the moment, the complement of Sarkozy’s sharp swerve towards America has been his energetic act as pace-setter for a Europe projected as second-in-command on the global stage. Here too, as domestically, French sensibilities that might be ruffled by one side of his rule are salved by another, as the stock of the nation appears to rise, along with that of its leader, in the Union.

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  The new political dispensation, even if it lasts only five years, rather than—more than possible, as things stand—ten, cannot but reconfigure the intellectual field in France, though in just what ways it is too early to say. The connexions between power and thought, traditionally closer than in any other Western country, are likely, however, to remain so.54 They form, indeed, the guiding theme of the most substantial current consideration of the ‘future of French intellectuals’, the subtitle of Les fils maudits de la République by Gérard Noiriel, not only France’s leading authority on immigration, but a social historian of wide-ranging horizon. Since the era of the Dreyfus Affair, his argument runs, the country’s intellectuals can be divided into three types, defined by the relation between knowledge and politics each represents. ‘Revolutionary’ intellectuals, from Péguy to Nizan or Sartre, sought to reincarnate the figure of the Enlightenment philosophe, ‘complete’ thinkers, uniting political, scholarly and publicistic roles, long after the modern division of social and intellectual labour had barred this fusion. With the collapse of Marxism and the absence of any prospect of revolution after 1968, this non-university species became effectively extinct, leaving only a scattering of ‘radical’ intellectuals—philosophers, like their predecessors, but now ensconced in the academy—of more modest ambitions, and marginal standing.

  The ‘governmental’ intellectual, by contrast, was typically a historian, in command of key academic positions and intimate connexions with officialdom. In a line from Seignobos to Furet, such figures were counsellors to power, of moderate reformist or conservative persuasion. They had excelled at the weaving of networks of influence, aiming at—and not infrequently achieving—a general hegemony of a conformist stripe. The ‘specific’ intellectual, on the other hand, was to be found above all in sociology, from Durkheim or Simiand to Bourdieu. This type had learnt the lesson that science means specialization, and renounced pretensions to either political subversion, or moral magistracy, of the state. Commitment to the more sober duties of empirical research and accurate scholarship did not, however, mean seclusion in an ivory tower. Specific intellectuals sought, on the contrary, to put their knowledge at the service of their fellow citizens, sharing in a democratic spirit the fruits of their labours with society at large, as Durkheim had enjoined them to do.55

  The core of Noiriel’s book, which appeared in 2005, is made up of a detailed dissection of the anti-totalitarian nexus around Le Débat, as the great contemporary example of moderate historians in hegemonic action. Treatment of the governmental intellectual, in fact, is twice as long as that of the other two, which flank this centrepiece. Noiriel’s portrait of this type, highly critical,
ends with its discredit in 1995. Since the revolutionary intellectual is now a bygone figure, the specific intellectual is left as the single commendable ideal today. The taxonomy, with its many local demonstrations of interest, is delivered with clarity and dignity. But it is a straitjacket into which much untidy reality cannot be fitted. The counter-revolutionary intellectual, no mean figure in the past, disappears from sight; even latter-day epigones, rarely attached to universities yet scarcely without influence in the public sphere, have no place in Noiriel’s schema. Nor is governmental always a literal description of the posture of all those so classified; pertinent enough for Lavisse or Seignobos, it is perhaps less so for Furet, who was often more scornful than respectful of successive rulers of the country, his hegemonic capacity depending as much on a position to the side, or above, as within the councils of the day.

  The principal weakness of Noiriel’s inventory lies, however, in its idealization of the figure it recommends. It was Foucault, as he notes, who invented the slogan of the ‘specific intellectual’, promoting it as a salutary alternative to the part played in the past by Sartre, with whom Foucault sought to settle accounts. But anything less like examples of sober empirical scholarship than the Nietzschean sightings of Les mots et les choses, or its author’s fulsome endorsement of the Nouveaux Philosophes, let alone panurgic metaphysics of power, could hardly be imagined. Foucault’s own career, indeed, crested on the very wave of mediadriven publicity—the emergent universe of journalistic fashions and corruptions that became so powerful in the course of the seventies—that is a particular target of Noiriel’s dislike, and cause for his insistence on its contrast with that of scientific research.56 If the coiner of the term himself so often embodied its negation as a generic publicist, there is good reason to doubt its cogency.