Anche la Francia ha dei problemi, come riportato da Alain Duhamel su Le Point del 6 Dicembre 2007, tradotto da Jon Delogu

Spesso le problematiche italiane sono paragonabili a quelle evidenti in altri paesi europei come la Francia. Questo articolo apparso recentement su Le Point (e tradotto da Jon Delogu) lo illustra chiaramente. Interessanti sono anche i libri a cui si riferisce l'articolo, che pero' fondamentalmente parla del fatto che in Francia la realta' sia migliore dell'apparenza. In Italia, purtroppo, la realta' e' a volte anche peggiore della percezione.. Siete d'accordo?
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It is our national disease. The French distrust everything and everyone, including themselves. Although indispensable to the healthy functioning of democracy and irreplaceable within a market economy, confidence in France has become such a rare commodity that it seems sometimes not to exist at all. As we know, the French are more afraid of globalization than any other Western people, and are also the most allergic to liberal economic policies and the most traumatized by the new world of the twenty-first century. All studies prove it. The French confess a strange pessimism about the future of their country and their children, convinced that the best years are behind them, prosperity is a thing of the past, and decadence lies just ahead. They are mourning their lost hopes. All the same, they are not Europe’s most culturally impoverished nation nor are they the developed country with the fewest strengths. Nevertheless they have convinced themselves that a somber future is their fate. In France what weighs most heavily today is neither socialist ideology nor liberalism, but rather a “declinist” ideology that has managed to give shape to French fears and infest their collective spirit.

A very fashionable thin volume both explains and reflects this spiritual condition that constitutes a serious handicap for a nation that has not ceased to believe in its importance while also searching for a new equilibrium. Its title is “The Distrustful Society: How the French Social Model is Destroying Itself.” It is the work of two young and brilliant economists who, in plain language, go straight to the facts and rely on incontrovertible evidence. Their diagnosis (which aims, naturally, to give the patient a positive therapeutic shock) is that France is dominated by distrust and incivility, and that these attitudes derive from a mixture of corporatism and statism established after World War Two, even though some of its roots go back to the Vichy regime. The evidence they give is impressive. Only 21% of the French say they trust other people, as against 60% in Scandinavian countries, more than 50% in China, and more than 40% in Anglo-Saxon countries. This distrust applies not only to individuals but to institutions, whether parliament, courts, or unions. Worse still—the French are persuaded that it is impossible to rise to the top of society without being corrupt. In quasi-masochistic fashion, they even think it dangerous to trust people like them. In their answers to international comparative questionnaires, the French easily take first prize for incivility. When asked if it is immoral to try to obtain financial aid or indemnities for which one is not eligible, or it if is OK to offer bribes to win a particular client or market, the French prove to be the most cynical of all.

The two authors, Yann Algan and Pierre Cahuc, see this as the direct effect of a typically French blend of corporatism and statism: status, rank, and profession determine social advantages (the origin of a fragmentation of the society and the ostentatious display of competing desires, jealousies, and demands) and the State butts into everything, arbitrating on every issue and substituting itself for the natural social dialogue between unions and company directors. At the present time, one has to admit that the scandals at EADS or UIMM, the strikes against the reform of a group of special government pension plans, or the international contracts won by Nicolas Sarkozy; i.e., by the State, all offer ample proof of the authors’ thesis. Moreover, Algan and Cahuc’s extremely thorough investigation is only the most devastating example of a veritable flood of publications that all agree in their denunciation of the crumbling French social model. Other titles include “The Derailment of the Middle Classes” (Louis Chauvel, Seuil), “The Social Down Escalator” (Philippe Guibert and Alain Mergier, Plon), “The Capitalism of the Inheritors” (Thomas Philippon, Seuil), and “The Big Bad Market” (Augustin Landier and David Thesmar, Flammarion). The dissection of France’s social model has become today’s favorite intellectual exercise.

This demystifying balm of an unprecedented scientific violence recalls the rabid denunciations and the clairvoyant warnings of the non-conformists in the 1930s that heralded the terrible storms to come. While lacking the literary flair of that earlier group, the recent studies compensate with larger amounts of investigative rigor. They underestimate, however, the importance of metamorphoses within France over the past generation: the end of job indexing (?), successive waves of privatization, strong international performances by large French companies, the spectacular productivity of French workers (always ranked in the top three worldwide), the decrease in unemployment, and the recent rethinking of the archaic social practices inherited from the 1940s. Various corps, ranks, rites, and laws from a different world are finally on the point of disappearing. France carries the burden of a society of distrust but also the promises of a dynamic economy. In sum, the reality is more positive than France’s psychological profile would suggest.