Free The New Old World by Perry Anderson

reverted frantically to financial orthodoxy again. The Juppé government is now administering even tougher doses of retrenchment to force the deficit down to Maastricht levels.
    Yet even the tightest budgetary rectitude is no guarantee of a
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. The ‘convergence criteria’, as Connolly rightly insists, are completely unrealistic in their exclusion of growth and employment from the indices of a sound economy. Designed to reassure financial markets, they satisfy only central bankers. The markets themselves are not mocked, and will sooner or later mark down any currency where there is widespread unemployment and social tension, no matter how stable are prices or balanced are public accounts—as the French Treasury discovered in the summer of 1993. The current domestic course of the Chirac regime can only tighten already explosive pressures in the big cities at the cost of its electoral credibility, on which that of its exchange rate also depends. The massive street protests of late November could be a harbinger of worse trouble to come. The regime’s slump in the opinion polls is without precedent in the Fifth Republic. An image of zealous compliance with directives from the Bundesbank involves high political risks.
    Chirac’s resumption of nuclear tests can be seen as a clumsy attempt to compensate for economic weakness by military display—demonstratively flexing the one strategic asset the French still possess that the Germans do not. The result has been merely to focus international opprobrium on France. Partial or hypocritical though much of this reaction has been (how many pasquinades have been written against the Israeli bomb?), Chirac’s experiments remain pointless. Forcible-feeble in the style of the man, they can scarcely affect the political balance of Europe, where nuclear weapons are no longer of the same importance. At a moment when French diplomacy ought to have been engaged in winning allies to resist German attempts to harden the Treaty of Maastricht, for which France’s immediate neighbours Italy, Belgium and Spain were more than ready, it was gratuitously incurring a hostile isolation. On present performance, Chirac could prove the most erratic and futile French politician since Boulanger.
    Nevertheless, contrary to received opinion, in the end it will be France rather than Germany that decides the fate of monetary union. The self-confidence of the political class in the Federal Republic, although swelling, is still quite brittle. A cooler andtougher French regime, capable of public historical reminders, could prick its bluster without difficulty. Germany cannot back out of Maastricht, only try to bend it. France can. There will be no EMU if Paris does not exert itself to cut its deficit. The commitment to monetary union comes from the political calculations of the elite, and the world of classical state-craft—a foreign policy determined to check German and uphold French national power. The socio-economic costs of the
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have been borne by the population at large. Here, absolutely clear-cut, there is a conflict between external objectives and domestic aspirations of the kind Alan Milward would banish from the record of earlier integration. How much does it matter to ordinary French voters whether or not Germany is diplomatically master of the continent again—are not the creation of jobs and growth of incomes issues closer to home? In France the next years are likely to offer an interesting test of the relative weights of consumption and strategy in the process of European integration.
    Meanwhile the pressures from below, already welling up in strikes and demonstrations, can only increase the quandaries above. On the surface, the French elite is now less divided over Maastricht than at the time of the referendum. But it is no surer that the single currency will deliver what it was intended to. Germany bound—or unbound? In the space of the new