Thursday, July 9, 2015
Caquot Amphitheater (28 rue des Saints-Pères)
France has long been viewed as the quintessentially statist political economy. Since the 1980s, however, such an image has comported poorly with reality. Even as French officials have rejected a Thatcherite program of neoliberalism, this paper argues that they have devised and implemented a strategy of “statist liberalism,” involving significant state efforts to bolster macroeconomic activity in some areas combined with initiatives designed to strengthen market dynamics in others. Such efforts have focused on macroeconomic guidance and an emphasis on individual welfare, informed by a Republican ethos of equality before the law, combined with continued initiatives of constrained liberalization. The advent of the Eurozone crisis in 2009 confronted this statist liberal model with an acute challenge, as French authorities found themselves caught between a domestic economic model sharply at odds with the emerging orthodoxy of austerity advanced by Germany and the ECB, and an enduring desire to retain their traditional influence at the European level in the face of growing German dominance. This paper contends that the inconsistencies between France’s neo-Keynesian rhetoric and repeated statements in opposition to austerity, on the one hand, and its reluctant but consistent following of the policy line advanced by Germany and the ECB, on the other, stem from tensions within the ideas at the heart of the statist liberal model itself. These tensions have ultimately undermined France’s possibilities for leading an alternative ideational coalition in opposition to Eurozone austerity.
