Rbrutal awakening for French and European industry. For three years, she has been beaten, just to remind her of some fundamentals and the fragility of her situation. First there was the “Doliprane shock” in France. Thanks to the health crisis, we suddenly realized that the manufacture of most of the active ingredients of medicines had surreptitiously left for India and China. European pharmacy is no longer what it used to be. Then it was the “chip shock”. Suddenly, the European automobile industry, another supposed strong point of the continent, found itself paralyzed by a lack of electronic components, again mainly produced in Asia.
And now we are experiencing the “electron shock”. The explosion in the prices of gas and then of electricity seriously compromises the continuation of the activity of small and large companies. A way of making us understand that there is no industry or even society without energy. It’s not new. In the Middle Ages, the first industries, often in monasteries, prospered to the rhythm of watermills. Today, even the Internet is no exception to the rule. Without affordable energy, there is no economic development. The unbridled growth of post-war Europe – the famous “thirty glorious years” – ended in 1974 with the sudden rise in oil prices.
The current energy crisis therefore raises the question of the sustainability of a powerful European industry. Already, a good part of the chemical industry of the Old Continent flew away towards more clement skies, in Asia or America, and some threaten to accentuate the movement. Too bad, at a time when there are increasing calls for a reindustrialization of the continent to respond in particular to the shocks of chips and Doliprane.
Doubly abandoned SMEs
We can always take comfort in noting that, while energy is necessary, it is not the key to an industry’s competitiveness. That of Japan is infinitely superior to that of Saudi Arabia, despite the latter’s energy advantage. In this respect, the case of France is instructive. For decades, its nuclear fleet, erected following the first oil shock, gave it such an advantage that, like Switzerland or Norway, thanks to their dams, the country was seen as an “emirate electricity”, with prices among the cheapest on the continent.
This did not prevent her from seeing her industry disintegrate considerably. In his book The Deindustrialization of France 1995-2015 (editions Odile Jacob, 384 pages, 27.90 euros), Nicolas Dufourcq, the boss of Bpifrance, recounts this descent into hell, where economic decisions, strategic errors and societal choices are mixed together which have contributed to making France the country most deindustrialized in Europe, with Luxembourg.
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