The end of the industrial age in France and Europe at large as portrayed by a novelist. As we know, economists don't read much in the way of fiction, and literary critics read even fewer of the financial pages. This means that crucial aspects of the novel by the best-known modern French author, Michel Houellebecq, have been ignored by the critics, namely what the author himself describes as a nostalgic meditation on the emend of the industrial age in France and Europe. He believes that money-market and services capitalism is dismembering industrial capitalism.
This is not a realistic novel set in modern-day France but a novel that describes France in the future in a neutral, objective way without anathema or condemnation. 'We lived through a strange ideological period in which everyone in Western Europe seemed certain that capitalism was condemned to die in a few years time and was living its last breath, without the far-left parties being able to attract anyone other than their usual snarling, masochist customers.' Financial crises mushroomed and became ever more vicious: 'financial convulsions that suddenly plunged hundreds of millions into opulence followed by famine'. Economic theories that explain crises after the event are described as 'nothing but charlatanism'. The de-industrialisation of France is viewed with a calm eye by Houellebecq, 'immigration having dwindled to almost zero when the last industrial jobs disappeared and with the drastic cut in social welfare in the early 2020's'. He sees welfare protection lasting for little more than a decade. France will then be 'a country based on farming and tourism' with its art de vivre attracting throngs of Chinese, Indian and Russian tourists to the French countryside.
This novel is enlightening because, the way I see it, it justifies the building of the European Union and its attempts to establish (even intellectually) a civilisation that is both inventive and productive, rejecting the idea that Europe should restrict itself to safeguarding the noble aspects of protection (technology, management and trade) by relocating manufacturing to another part of the world, not just industry but also, under some theories, farming. The EU is fortunately trying to correct the direction things are going, that would lead us to the situation described by Michel Houellebecq.
Recognising our role. In a recent resolution, the European Parliament rejected the idea of lack of information about EU affairs, criticising instead a surplus of information (see issue 10211). The resolution by Danish MEP Morten Løkkegaard believes that too much information kills information and states that it is not lack of information that is the problem, but an avalanche of information without any true hierarchy of priorities. This is just one aspect of the resolution, which I will be returning to in detail as it sets out what needs to be done to improve information about Europe and explains frequent abuses (misuse of European information) and whether a code of conduct is needed.
I have highlighted the surfeit of information because it seems to me to justify the existence and the nature of this daily newsletter, whose aim is precisely to give an overview of what is important in European events and reporting on all the trends. MEPs should take this requirement into consideration, even when there is a news item they do not care for…
Media vanishing act. Awaiting improvements in information about Europe, Alain Lamassoure has explained with dismay that since he left French politics to become an MEP, he has vanished from the media. As French budget minister and government spokesman, he used to appear on television three times a week; in his new job as MEP, he had to cancel a Paris press conference because not a single journalist promised to turn up. He explains that 'none of the big French media players are present in Brussels'. He quotes a very well-known newspaper, 'whose editor thinks that Europe is boring and the less said, the better'. In his view, 'everything important is decided in Brussels,' but 'we only talk about Europe in connection with French politics and to highlight the good and bad things that are done in Paris'. Connections are being built between the EP and national parliaments, and when the French National Assembly or Senate start looking at Europe, then the media will talk about it; but when decisions are taken by the European Parliament, nobody takes any notice.
It would be interesting to know whether MEPs have the same impression.
(F.R. trans fl)