Friday, March 14, 2014
Blue Room (Omni Shoreham)
This paper analyzes the evolving politics of France's European commitments with a particular emphasis on the contradictions and inconsistencies within France's position as a European leader and anchor of EMU. It argues that the competing allures of statism and liberalism, France's vacillating commitments to Keynesianism and austerity, and France's core partnership with Germany have generated a deeply fraught and inconsistent set of trajectories in financial and economic policy both domestically and at the European level. It supports this central claim through an empirical study of the political debates surrounding the incipient European and Economic and Monetary Union in the late 1990s and the European financial and ensuing Eurozone debt crisis after 2007. In both of these instances (but most powerfully and obviously in the latter), French policy was guided by powerful but often contradictory political-economic imperatives: French economic autonomy and political leadership within Europe, the preservation of its historic partnership with Germany as an avenue of influence in the EU, and protecting and preserving its relatively nationalistic and statist model of its domestic political economy. It concludes with a series of claims about France's shifting role in Europe and its evolving partnership with Germany and evaluates the significance of these changes for the future viability of EMU and France’s role within it, suggesting that France's effectiveness at articulating an alternative vision of European economic policy will depend upon both more propitious economic circumstances and a nuanced strategy for negotiating differences between French and German priorities.
