The journal review. What is the particularity of the French social model? Five months before the presidential election, the review Future, through his collaborator Arnaud Teyssier, had the excellent idea of interviewing one of the masters of the subject, Alain Supiot, founder of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Nantes. The jurist observes that the neoliberal turn of the 1980s had a lasting influence on the direction of public policies. Taking the examples of Germany, the United Kingdom and France, he shows that each country has drawn on its fundamentals to respond to the crisis. “The English model addresses the social issue in terms of the labor market, which must be allowed to self-regulate through collective bargaining; the German model in terms of professional communities whose order and coordination must be guaranteed; the French model addresses it in terms of political equality, which it is up to the State to promote in labor relations. “
The reaction of French society is on the political ground and has given rise to a confrontation, where the communities social in Germany and the UK market serve as a remedy. In France, the role of the State is to arbitrate, when the promise of freedom and equality is contradicted by wage subordination. “The French social model has developed in close connection with the construction of the political and administrative model”, summarizes M. Supiot, even if there is also a mutualist tradition inspired by Proudhon, which is as wary of the power of the State as of the owners.
Still, the basis of the French democratic pact rests on the articulation between political and social democracy. But this one is seized. This question is today reinforced by the fact that the popular classes are almost absent from parliamentary representation.
Warning signs of de-globalization
In this same issue of Future, the geographer Antoine Frémont deals with the zone of turbulence into which globalization has entered through the prism of maritime transport. This provides 80% of world trade, but while it has been one of the powerful vectors of globalization, the decline that is beginning could bear the forerunner signs of de-globalization. Nothing is played and the author describes three scenarios. The darkest is that of repeated crises marked by a reinforced antagonism between China and the United States, a second envisages a surge in multilateralism, while the last is part of the two previous ones.
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