Never for GATT
Brooks, David
David Brooks Never for GATT Worried that free trade is making their indolent lifestyle less viable, the French are blaming sinister conspiracies and putting quotas on American movies. I t is...
...France now has massive unemployment, 12 percent and rising, because culture places less emphasis on service (even Disney has been unable to get its French employees to smile consistently...
...There is a full-page essay entitled "An Instrument of American Hegemony" which begins, "Led by unprecedented political and media pressure, orchestrated by the United States and its lackeys, the negotiators of GATT . . ." Another essay is entitled "GATT Against Culture: A Danger for Civilization," and yet another, "GATT Against Europe: The Ordeal of a Commercial War...
...The usually sober Le Monde calls GATT "the conspiracy of international finance," and runs such tabloid-style headlines as "GATT Must Die...
...Europeans are more likely than Americans to believe that work is there to Most Americans are only dimly aware of what GATT is, though according to the French government it is an American plot to dominate the globe...
...The French rock music industry, for example, is insipid 36 The American Spectator January 1994 and safe...
...All we can say for certain is that this argument does not pass the market test...
...Stores in Germany must close in the evening and during most of the weekend so that employees won't have to work at these times...
...The average American has twenty-three vacation days a year...
...France is only the extreme example...
...as a conventional military empire...
...And like some stereotypes, this one has a basis in truth...
...Nor have the massive subsidies to the arts produced an intellectual renaissance...
...The idea that American intellectuals have to follow the latest Parisian novels to be on the cutting edge is gone...
...Free trade enshrines the principle of competition...
...The movie industry has become the hottest topic in the GATT debate, because of the way American movies dominate the marketplace, even though the French government its labor market is rigid and the welfare cushion is comfy...
...he most striking aspect of the GATT frenzy is the T way French critics have linked GATT to the United States...
...And France is to be admired for at least trying to chart its own course, rather than taking things passively, like other continental countries...
...Having lived in Europe for nearly four years now, I have grown weary of the showers vs...
...For example, the allegedly free-market Nobel Prize–winning economist Maurice Allais has contributed several long tirades against GATT, calling it an "intolerable American diktat" designed to ensure America's "domination of the world economy by manipulating the dollar...
...Most Americans are only dimly aware of what GATT is, though according to the French government it is an American plot to dominate the globe...
...Price competition is further hampered across Europe by legal cartels (which cover over 70 percent of Swiss consumer goods, for example) and heavy regulations...
...congressional deadline) by December 15, 1993...
...The competitive, consumer-oriented culture emphasizes pleasing others...
...The influence of these things is all the more pervasive for being unguided and unintended...
...Books with titles such as The End of Democracy began appearing on the list with The Trap, James Goldsmith's meditation on the way American-style free trade will lead to a new era of barbarism...
...The average Frenchman has thirty-five and the average German forty...
...It was founded by first-generation immigrants who produced stories that were more quintessentially American than any America had been able to produce before...
...Immigrant groups in America have been characterized by their willingness to work hard, and by their unabashed ambition...
...the French line up to get into McDonald's just as quickly as anyone else...
...But many French leaders, as rationalists who believe in centrally orchestrated power, cannot accept at all that American dominance is inadvertent...
...bath argument...
...America is driving France crazy...
...the European version features people lying naked in a tub of mud...
...By the time you read this, France may have finally bowed to global pressure and accepted a GATT deal, but the French government will not have accepted the need to embrace competition and vulgar ambition, twin motors of the "creative destruction" that is the dynamic marketplace...
...The newspaper Liberation printed the entire legalistic text of the Blair House accord, the sub-agreement between the U.S...
...But they are right to link GATT to American economic culture and American popular culture...
...Francois Mitterrand recently encapsulated the French view on GATT in a speech to the francophone summit in Mauritius: "Who can be blind today to the threat of a world gradually invaded by an identical culture, Anglo-Saxon culture, under the cover of economic liberalism...
...The French have reached this point only because other alternatives to American-style flexibility have already failed...
...In a global free-trade regime, one must strive to be the best in the world...
...and the EC on agriculture, which France now wants to veto—and people read it...
...Rock music is about sexual repression and the poor boy's desire to become fabulously wealthy...
...In 1958 William Barrett wrote, "America, spiritually speaking, is still tied to European civilization, even though the political power lines now run the other way...
...One ran a cover with a grainy black-and-white photograph of a woman crying and the headline "Anguish...
...Here they mistook cause for effect: companies aren't successful because they are big...
...they become big because they are successful...
...and these European expressions simply point out the path that America itself will have eventually to tread...
...French actors appear at press conference after press conference, declaring, in their more mellow moments, that Hollywood is replacing French civilization with cultural poison...
...A job-sharing plan passed the French senate last October and as of this writing is under serious consideration in the assembly...
...It's all the more interesting to watch this breakdown because we are the cause...
...When the Maastricht treaty first ran into trouble, many French officials whispered darkly about a plot hatched in the U.S...
...The regulations are designed to provide security, but in addition, these policies mean that a bottle of Vidal Sassoon shampoo that costs $3.24 in New York costs about $5.00 in London, and a CD that costs $13 in New York costs upwards of $20...
...France's magazines were the first to pick up on their nation's ongoing crack-up...
...Then the best-seller list took on a depressive cast...
...If you ask a European to describe his stereotype of an American, the word "competitive" will be used early, whether the rest of the stereotype is positive or negative...
...And anybody who has tasted some of the beauties of French living can't immediately say they are wrong...
...Immigration in America has led to dynamism and social change, so that the children of immigrants are often ashamed of their parents' homely manners...
...T he French elites argue that their own style of capitalism makes for more humane and meaningful human relationships...
...It is not Paris-Match and the other popular press organs that have gone ballistic over GATT...
...But beyond its efficiencies as an economic tool, free trade carries cultural baggage, the content of which becomes more clear when seen from the vantage point of a society such as France, which doesn't necessarily accept it...
...It's fitting that movies should play this central role in the GATT debate, because Hollywood is the ultimate immigrant industry...
...It is American economic culture, rock music, evangelical Protestantism, radical feminism, political correctness, populism, and media dominance that now spread through Europe...
...anti-American saber-rattling is the province of the elite journals...
...When the European Monetary System broke down, French Prime Minister Edouard Balladur and EC President Jacques Delors openly blamed an "Anglo-Saxon plot...
...Open a November issue of Le Monde Diplomatique, an even more elite publication than the newspaper...
...0 f course there is much brilliant work being done in France, but it is nonetheless true to say that France, which used to be an idea-exporting country, is now an idea-importing country, and increasingly an intellectually protectionist country—although special mention should be made of the nation's young people, who are learning English in record numbers and who display much greater interest in the outside world...
...Though Americans may feel that their nation has grown soft and over-regulated, it doesn't look that way from the European vantage point...
...The French newspapers sometimes illustrate their anti-Hollywood articles with pictures from Terminator, without even noting that the man they are displaying is Austrian...
...Absenteeism in American companies averages 3 percent, while in France it is 8 percent, in Germany 9 percent, and in Sweden it was 12 percent until unemployment started rising...
...For M. Becker, children are like 'consumer durable goods,' is how Le Monde caricatures the distinguished work of Gary Becker...
...when it does it will know at last what the Europeans are talking about...
...In the same issue, another conspiracy is detected, that of the Nobel economics prize (funded by the Swedish Central Bank, Le Monde observes darkly), which keeps being awarded to economists from the University of Chicago...
...A third of a century later, no American could write that sentence...
...Currently, everyone is talking about Alain Mine's The New Middle Ages...
...For the past six months, France has been in a state of semi-hysteria over the latest GAIT round...
...F or France to hold off this restless, hardworking immigrant culture, it must try ever more extreme techniques, and so far, none have worked...
...If it is successful, trade barriers on everything ranging from services to corn will be reduced, and the resulting increase of trade will add $270 billion to world GDP, according to one study...
...Free trade is a fitting doctrine for a nation of immigrants, such as the United States...
...The American version of a health club features people sweating all over the StairMaster...
...The hottest reform idea at the moment is job-sharing...
...It's a matter of national identity...
...American movies now account for 81 percent of all EC screenings, because of viewer demand...
...Moreover, competition puts pressure on workers, because they are constantly challenged to work as well as the best person in their field...
...For forty years, the prevailing winds have favored free trade, and set the course for economic debates everywhere...
...Many Europeans believe that our unwillingness to soak in a bath for three hours in the evening is a sign of our inability to lie back and savor life...
...0 nly France is chauvinistic enough to see itself as a cultural rival to the United States...
...The nation's leading star, Johnny Hallyday, is a 50-year-old Elvis Presley ripoff who lives and records in the United States...
...Since World War II, the United States has been the prime sponsor of the peace and prosperity of the industrialized world...
...European economies are more likely to favor producers, who want stability and a buffer against competition...
...State Department to cripple Europe...
...Nor does the hysteria have much to do with economics...
...Minc predicts that a new dark age is descending on the globe, replete with tribalism, economic savagery and superstition...
...In reality, GATT—the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade—is a Geneva-based body that sponsors 34 The American Spectator January 1994 free-trade negotiations...
...But in a cultural and economic marketplace that is instantly global, all nations of the world must somehow adapt to America's cultural vibrations...
...It's impossible to turn on French TV without seeing some actor or politician declaring that civilization is on the verge of annihilation...
...Empire—the post-Cold War one—America's politicians no longer lead the way, and institutions such as NATO wither...
...But rather than solve the problem by moving toward American-style flexibility and competitiveness, the French have opted for economic alchemy...
...Throughout American history, immigrants have believed in movement, across the ocean in search of opportunity and then up the social ladder in search of respectability...
...Many Europeans believe that our unwillingness to soak in a bath for three hours in the evening is a sign of our inability to lie back and savor life...
...The current round of negotiations has been going on for seven years, and must culminate (according to a U.S...
...Through the past year, France has been the main obstacle to an agreement, because of its unwillingness to cut farm subsidies and because it does not want its citizens watching more American movies and TV shows than they already do...
...The reality is that the influence of American politicians is waning...
...Workers would work only four days a week (albeit with some loss of pay), and companies would have to hire extra workers to pick up the slack...
...Europe's producer-orientedpumps almost $400 million into its movie industry every year...
...These people suffer from what could be called paranoiaphilia—they love the idea that someone is out to get them...
...It has also led to vulgarity, and an emphasis on material success, as immigrants try to gauge their social progress through objective measures, namely money...
...Whatever resentment that may have caused during the Cold War, French elites could at least understand the U.S...
...At home, many Americans believe that American influence is waning...
...It fosters a social system that is fluid enough to allow winners to rise rapidly and losers to fall...
...Movies still have directors and stars from around the world, and yes, the French state-owned bank, Credit Lyonnais, owns MGM...
...The American Spectator January 1994 35 make leisure affordable...
...Anybody should be able to see that a nation doesn't solve its unemployment problem by having its most productive people work less, or by massively adding to every company's labor costs...
...In high-powered New York law firms, attorneys are expected to answer all mail within 24 hours...
...In Europe, they generally get a week...
...A nation of immigrants produces economic policies that tend to favor consumers, in which there is serious competition between companies to produce low prices...
...European politicians who tell their voters that they needn't have high growth rates because they 'will be compensated with more meaningful relationships do not win elections...
...I t is interesting to watch an entire nation have a nervous breakdown...
...If French conspiracies are being defeated, these people reason, then some greater conspiracy must be doing it...
...They are foolish when they use words such as "orchestrated" and "conspiracy" to suggest some planned effort to establish American hegemony...
...CI The American Spectator January 1994 37...
...But now, during the Second American David Brooks is deputy editorial-page editor at the Wall Street Journal–Europe...
...In Belgium, for example, stores can only have sales during two periods of the year, in January and then again in the summertime...
...And, of course, America isn't forcing its economic culture down French throats...
...It says that anybody from any background deserves to succeed if he can perform an economic task better than other people, regardless of whether he is virtuous or wise...
...They tried huge corporate subsidies, but the French computer firm Groupe Bull is a basket case...
...They also tried gigantism, throwing different companies together so that their weight would rival other global giants...
...In this, they are both wrong and right...
...Some people would argue that the world is worse off having America, not France, as its cultural dynamo...
...France has precious little sexual repression, and the hunger for wealth is considered vulgar...
...That's another topic...
...Hollywood is still hyper-competitive, money mad, and meritocratic to the extent of frenzy...
...It is viewer demand for American TV shows that forced the French government to impose a quota so that no more than 50 percent of programming could originate outside the EC...
...Anybody who thinks that the influence of America is waning should visit Paris...
...One day a BBC analyst counted twenty-seven editorials in the French national press about GATT, ,and the day after there were eighteen...
Vol. 27 • January 1994 • No. 1
