France's EU Rejection

The French rejection of the EU Constitution could be summed up best as a failure to provide much-needed leadership. Jacques Chirac’s penchant for pomp and bluster has been revealed as a bit of a smokescreen. Perhaps the same lack of leadership that resulted in the fissure regarding Iraq is responsible for the results of this referendum. As you recall, Chirac’s version of diplomacy within the EU has amounted to informing dissenting members of “New Europe” to shut up, or sniping at Tony Blair that he was brought up poorly. Granted, President Bush has certainly made his share of diplomatic blunders, but to my knowledge, he has not stooped to the level of name-calling.

David Ignatius writes in today’s Washington Post:

It was a no that resonated on many levels: a rejection of the document and the wider Europe it came to symbolize, a rejection of a market-driven way of life that's taken for granted in America, and above all a rejection of President Jacques Chirac, who tried to trick and cajole France into embracing the realities of the global economy, rather than forthrightly explaining them.

Of course, the ‘non’ camp has been described as a collection of Communists, Troskyites, Socialists, and Far Rightists. What does this say about the majority of the French electorate? Most Europeans seem to have a very academic view of Marxism. Americans choose a more pragmatic view of this system. A dreamer might look at a system that has generally failed in practice, and wonder how that same system would work in theory. Of course, Capitalism has its flaws as well, but we could always compare North Korea and South Korea to gain some perspective on this

Europeans must come to realize that a Global Economy is a fact. Ignatius writes:

Whatever their class, age or political orientation, French people want to conserve what they've got. They want to maintain inflexible management and labor unions, six-week vacations, a 35-hour workweek -- and also to be a growing, dynamic, entrepreneurial economy. Chirac never had the guts to tell the French they couldn't have it both ways. He never explained that rigid labor rules had led to a high unemployment rate, currently 10.2 percent.

Hopefully, Angela Merkel will have the courage to do what Mr. Chirac could not bring himself to do. She must be straight with the German electorate, and tell them that they must change their way of thinking, and she must have the courage to lead an unwilling population to go where they must go (even though they may not want this). Hopefully, Germany will have the courage to be “led” through this process.