With an eye to next year's presidential elections, France's political parties are mulling their stances on the anti-globalization movement which is meeting with growing popular support nationwide.
Prime Minister Lionel Jospin highlighted his Socialist Party's efforts to be associated with what many see here as a battle against Americanization in the aftermath of the G8 summit in Genoa last month.
While denouncing the violent street protests that marred the summit, Jospin rejoiced "in the worldwide emergence of a citizens movement in as much as it expresses the wish of the majority of mankind better to share the potential fruits of globalization".
Socialist Party spokesman Vincent Peillon for his part lamented the fact that no party members had joined the Genoa demonstrators with whom, he said, "we share the same values".
The comments contrasted starkly with those of British Prime Minister Tony Blair and other Western leaders baffled by the violence that marked the conference and other international summits of recent years.
But observers say the French position is understandable considering the country's innate mistrust of globalization, which is equated by many with American hegemonism and a whittling down of French sovereignty.
"This is the French challenge today: to embrace those aspects of globalization that are indispensable for thriving in the 21st century without abandoning the practices and traditions on which France built its prosperity and identity in the 20th century", Philip Gordon, director of the Center on the United States and France at the Brookings Institution in Washington, said in a recent newspaper article.
While there is clear French resistance to globalization, he noted, there is also awareness in the French business world of the need to be totally integrated into the world economy.
Political parties, both on the right and left, realize that globalization is sure to become a campaign issue ahead of presidential elections set to take place in April or May and are intent on exploiting it.
A precise date has not yet been set for the vote, in which Jospin is expected to challenge the conservative President Jacques Chirac.
"Globalization will certainly be a major political issue during the 2002 elections," said Eddy Fougier, a researcher at the French Institute for International Relations.
The French business daily La Tribune said the anti-globalization movement, despite some excesses, had succeeded in "raising the awareness of political parties, both on the right and left, on the need to regulate global capitalism."
A series of job cuts in France earlier this year at the food group Danone and the British retailer Marks and Spencer has meanwhile helped fuel anger at the impact of globalization on employment.
According to recent polls, two thirds of the French are "hostile to or concerned about" globalization, and 85 percent called lay-offs by profitable companies unjustifiable.
As Jospin put it earlier this year, "We want a market economy, not a market society."
Commentators warned, however, that politicians had to walk a fine line in their bid to please the electorate while not seeming to be influenced by the demands of militant anti-globalization movements such as Attac or the Peasant Confederation headed by sheep farmer turned activist Jose Bove.
"The situation is not easy for them, particularly for the Socialists who want to regulate globalization -- if only to please their constituents," La Tribune said. "But at the same time many Socialists refuse to have the party appear as though it has ceded to the demands of anti-globazation groups."
Fougier Bove and his allies in turn were running the risk of seeing the ideals they defend hijacked by politicians.
"The question is: Will these organizations maintain the distance with the political world that contributed to their success?" he said. |
