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centrally managed. Many of those voters on the Left have been reassured that their
representatives have been engaged with their concerns about the consequences of
marketization and globalization by “harnessing,” “mastering,” and “managing”
globalization. That is, the doctrine is often invoked as the French way of tempering,
moderating, or even undermining globalization.
85
Yet these stories of liberalization and
bureaucratization in trade and finance reveal that the doctrine and its derived policy
stances have done very little to undermine globalization. Rather, France and Europe
have been responsible for a great deal of liberalization and globalization.
Despite the early efforts of Delors and Lamy, the French Left has undertaken two
inconsistent approaches to globalization over the past decade. On the one hand, some
policy makers of the Left have employed the rhetoric of “managed globalization” to
imply their distrust of the phenomenon, when in fact its practice has been the embrace
of more global markets subject to a collection of new rules. As Lionel Jospin explained in
2001: “Political globalization remains to be built: it is regulation. Everywhere where the
law of the strongest might apply, where private interests may be damaging to the
general interest, where the quest for short‐term profit weakens social justice and
damages the environment, states have to define the “rules of the game”. Through
cooperation and in a multilateral framework, states must build an international
regulation architecture.”
86
Yet the process of managing globalization has hardly been
illiberal. Although socialists have been left with the impression that France is leading
the charge against globalization, liberalization, and marketization, in fact France has,
with the exception perhaps of the United States and Germany, done more than any other
country to make our current era of globalization possible.
These socialist policy‐makers also used the rhetoric of managed globalization as
a way of masking the real adaptation of France to the global economy. The French
double‐talk on managed globalization started in the late 1990s, while the Socialist
government accelerated the privatization of state enterprises, significantly cut France’s
historically high rate of taxation, and made France home to the world’s second highest
volume of executive stock options. At the same time, the Jospin government covered its
tracks with such apparently managed globalization measures as the 35‐hour workweek
and the en‐masse trek of government ministers to the successive Social Forum in Porto
Alegre, widely applauded by the French public.
87
On the other hand, other French Leftists have adopted a more nostalgic, and
increasingly anachronistic, approach to the problem of globalization. “Managing
globalization” could also, in some cases, mean rejecting globalization. Between 1998 and
85
See Gordon and Meunier, The French Challenge, chap. 6.
86
Lionel Jospin “Maitriser la mondialisation”, speech of April 6, 2001 in a symposium
organized by the Candido Mendes Center and the Brazilian Center of International Relations
87
Meunier, “France’s Double‐Talk on Globalization.”
Convention