Tag Archives: France

A modest proposal for CAP reform

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I’ve been in Canada for the last month, getting in my last family visit before settling in to the serious business of either going back to school or collecting unemployment checks. My family is large – Great-Grandpa had 25 children, and Grandpa had 9 – so it takes a while if you go to see my family. Ours is a large, disorganised, occasionally frightening clan who, depending on pure whim, identifies itself as either German-Canadian, Dutch-Canadian, Russian-Canadian or Ukrainian-Canadian. Our tribal language is an obscure dialect of Low Saxon (Platt for the actual Germans out there) spoken primarily in Paraguay, Mexico, Central America and Saskatchewan, and whose most famous speaker is, arguably, Homer Simpson. It’s a long story, don’t ask. It not being much of a literary language, we all just say our ancestors spoke German – the liturgical language of my clan’s particular sect.

In contrast to Europe and the US, Canadians are a lot less disturbed about asking people about their ethnic identities or expressing some loyalty to them. I guess the main reason is that Canada has never really pretended to be a nation built atop an identity, but rather a place where an identity of sorts has slowly built up from the existence of a nation. There is no Canadian myth of the melting pot, and as our soon-to-be new Governor General has demonstrated, no serious demand for nativism in public office. Michaëlle Jean, who is slated to be the powerless and unelected Canadian head-of-state when the Queen is out of the country – e.g., practically always – when she is sworn in on the 27th, is no doubt the most attractive candidate we’ve ever had for the office. And, like her predecessor, she is a former CBC/SRC reporter and talking head.

Ms Jean and I share an endemically Canadian charateristic: We both can and do identify ourselves shamelessly as several different kinds of hyphenated Canadians. She is French Canadian, but that’s hardly strange. She is also Franco-Canadian – Ms Jean has dual citizenship with France, making her the first EU citizen to be Governor General of Canada and the first French citizen to be acting head of state of Canada since 1763. But more unprecedentedly, she is Haitian-Canadian and – as logically follows – African-Canadian.

Yes, Ms Jean is black, and furthermore in an interracial marriage. Well, that’s Canada for you. America puts black folk in squalid emergency shelters, we put ours in Rideau Hall.
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Candle Makers Of The World Unite!

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While Peter Mandelson lectures the Chinese that they have a moral obligation to get the EU out of a mess that he got it into, and while clothing shortages and price-hikes apparently loom, I thought some soothing words from Fr?d?rik Bastiat might help calm our troubled nerves . (Hat-tip to Robert and Bob in comments). Back in 1845 Bastiat wrote a spoof petition on behalf of French candlemakers to the French Chamber of deputies:

We are suffering from the ruinous competition of a rival who apparently works under conditions so far superior to our own for the production of light that he is flooding the domestic market with it at an incredibly low price; for the moment he appears, our sales cease, all the consumers turn to him, and a branch of French industry whose ramifications are innumerable is all at once reduced to complete stagnation. This rival, which is none other than the sun, is waging war on us so mercilessly we suspect he is being stirred up against us by perfidious Albion (excellent diplomacy nowadays!), particularly because he has for that haughty island a respect that he does not show for us.

We ask you to be so good as to pass a law requiring the closing of all windows, dormers, skylights, inside and outside shutters, curtains, casements, bull’s-eyes, deadlights, and blinds — in short, all openings, holes, chinks, and fissures through which the light of the sun is wont to enter houses, to the detriment of the fair industries with which, we are proud to say, we have endowed the country, a country that cannot, without betraying ingratitude, abandon us today to so unequal a combat.

France’s Trade Deficit On The Rise

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France has just clocked up a record trade deficit for the first six months of this year: 11.193 billion euros. This now adds the French to the eurozone BoP sick room along with Italy, Spain, Greece and Portugal. Of course oil imports form an important part of the picture, but that doesn’t make the headache any less.

The shortfall in June widened to 1.194 billion euros from 1.148 billion in May. The deficit for the first half of 2004 had been limited to 581 million euros.

The finance ministry said that at prices prevailing at the beginning of August France could face an energy sector deficit of more than 40 billion euros this year after 29 billion in 2004.

“The increased impact of the energy component has accounted for nearly half the deterioration in the overall trade balance for France” in the past year, the ministry said, citing rising oil prices.

Alexandre Bourgeois, an economist at Natexis Banques Populaires, said the trade deficit of the last 12 months — 20.6 billion euros — was the highest in French history.

Yoghurt With Soda Anyone?

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Well, this about beats the lot of them. Yesterday the shares Groupe Danone SA went through the roof on rumours of a takeover by PepsiCo Inc. Dominique de Vil-pin also went through the roof:

“Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin said Danone was “among the jewels of our industry”…. “We plan to defend France’s interests,” Villepin said after a cabinet meeting at his official Matignon residence, although he insisted he was “not commenting on any rum“.

Jewels of French industry… defend France’s interests, well readers might be surprised to learn that Danone originated in Catalonia after local entrepreneur Isaac Carasso brought the formula for Bulgarian yoghurt back to Barcelona and set up shop in 1911. As the encyclopaedia entry notes:

“Ten years later, the first French factory was built, but during WWII, (Isaac’s son) Daniel moved the company to New York, where Dannon Milk Products Inc. was founded. In the United States, Daniel changed the brand name to Dannon to sound more American. Then in 1958, the company returned to Paris, where its headquarters are located today“.

My interpretation is that if Vil-pin is defending any French interests here, then they would be imperial ones. Possibly another example of how some still consider the Tractat dels Pirineus a licence to do and say what they want.

WaPo gets it wrong

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Sunday’s Washington Post had an article by one Anne Dumas that’s been blogged here and there, provocatively titled What’s American and Envied by France?. It starts with a rather shocking assertion that has, unsurprisingly, been quoted in a lot of the bloggage:

[N]ot a single enterprise founded here in the past 40 years has managed to break into the ranks of the 25 biggest French companies. By comparison, 19 of today’s 25 largest U.S. companies didn’t exist four decades ago. That’s why France is looking to the United States for lessons.

Alas, this quotable assertion is completely false.
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Lost In Translation?

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Interesting piece in the FT this morning about Jack Lang, French PS politician, and possible presidential hopeful in 2007. Before going further I should perhaps point out that the only thing I really know about Lang is that when he was the Culture Minister, back in the 80’s, he opened a small museum dedicated to my preferred contemporary French poet – Ren? Char – in Char’s home town of L’Isle sur la Sorge. This fact may cloud my vision somewhat.

Lang is, one would have thought, the most improbable of Presidential candidates. Nonetheless, as the FT points out, he is definitely out in front as the most electable PS politician in the recent Paris Match (ifop) poll, pinning Sarkozy down to a fairly assailable 52% of the voting intentions in a head to head with him.
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75m French People

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At 75 million, France is projected to have the largest population in the EU (of current members) by 2050, according to French government figures. France’s baby-friendly policies, plus reasonably large immigration seems behind the projected increase (the country’s population is now just over 60 million). By contrast Germany’s population is set to fall to 72m, around 8m less than at present.
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France’s Finances Under The Microscope

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The OECD has a new country report out on France:

“France’s rising government debt threatens the sustainability of public finances in the eurozone’s second biggest economy, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development has warned in its latest country report.

The Paris-based OECD said that a lack of control over public spending could leave France unprepared to deal with the financial consequences of an ageing society.”

I rest my case.
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Naive musings

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I have been trying to write something informative on the current budgetary crisis in the EU. After reading countless articles I have come to the conclusion that there is nothing worthwhile I could add to the discussion. Confusion reigns supreme in this little European?s head and economics have never been my forte – certainly not when mixed with politics. Just check out some of the comments made by readers of BBC News. Anyhow, I deleted everything I had written so far and decided to bring your attention to this (from New Europe):

Each year, more than a billon Euro worth of funds transferred by the European Union to its 25 member states are either misspent or lost, according to a European Parliament (EP) report cited by INEP last week. (?) Asked which countries are the most prone to fraud and irregularities, Buttice failed to give a clear-cut answer. But based on number of cases of fraud and irregularity reported by EU member states for 1999-2003, big EU countries such as Italy, Germany, Spain, France and the United Kingdom are the prominent ones.

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