[FISKING] Greeley, step up to the plate
May. 9th, 2003 08:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonaldFrom the Chicago Sun-Times:
I admit, here, a bias: I'm biased against Andrew Greeley. It all has to do with my immediate stunned reaction post-5 February 2002, when I was desperately looking for some precedents for a happy bisexual adult male, I came upon his book Fall from Grace, which was cited in the library database as a book on bisexuals in fiction. The book began with said bisexual man raping his wife after she learned that he had a secret male lover; fortunately, however, he was killed by his daughter later in the book before he could finish beating his wife to death and sacrificing one of his children to Satan (he belonged to a black coven, you know.) So, I'm inclined to tell him to fuck off and die anyway.
But then, back to the article.
This begins well. But.
I take it that he's never actually talked to someone in French; I've never gotten that feeling from speakers of Canadian French.
And, as expected ...
Now, we must define "inferiority."
The French are aware that their nation-state is less powerful than the American nation-state; France has only a fifth of the population of the United States, has a GNP per capita smaller than the American, and no longer enjoys the cultural dominance that it enjoyed even in the first half of the 20th century. No one denies this.
I do think, however, it's highly contestable that the French think of themselves as less worthy than the Americans, that--as Greeley seems to imply--they are self-hating and self-doubting; at least, any more than Americans are.
So. If France--the second-largest country in the European Union by population and GNP, the fourth-largest industrial economy in the world, a technologically sophisticated country (one that pioneered electronic communicates networks a decade befiore the Internet and has a highly successful space program), the centre of a large if somewhat thinly-spread francophonie, and the second conventional and nuclear military power in Europe behind Britain--is a "fourth-rate nation that has no power," is there any nation that rates? Has the United States decided that in light of the immense gaps between the United States and any contenders, it needn't pretend to respect the capabilities of any state?
More disputes below, but Greeley forgets the critical role played by France in defeating Austria in Italy in 1859. Italian unification began as a French project, remember.
Hmm. Is Greeley upset that France is no longer interested in being the "eldest daughter" of the Church? Inarguably, this is a good thing; it's interesting to note how the theocrats tended to be, well, less than committed to democracy, or civil rights for Jews.
Two points:
How was France different from the rest of western Europe? Would a hypothetical German-occupied Britain behave any differently? What about the United States in the era of Strange Fruit?
Jews in France fared much better that elsewhere in western Europe. The French Jewish community is the only one that has grown significantly since the Second World War, and in fact the French segment of the diaspora is the third- or fourth-largest in the world behind the Israeli, the American, and perhaps the Russian.
Perhaps because they don't, you silly git.
Let's go through the list of republics:
Some notes on the French experience:
Hmm. So, Greeley likes a charismatic authoritarian democracy, eh? Why am I not surprised?
And sad to say, most everyone in politics is corrupt to varying degrees; if not themselves, then their close allies. (In the US, Cheney and Rumsfeld come to mind.)
Um, OK. Why?
In Canada, the Liberal Party continually forms federal governments because all of the other parties are too divided or linked to regional interests. Does this mean Canadian democracy doesn't work?
Define "great leaders." Myself, I've not been impressed with anyone since Kennedy being "great," or of world-historical importance.
So doesn't this mean French democracy works better than American, if you are going for clear majorities?
It's the standard set of immigrant-related troubles, I fear, given exceptional strength in the French case by the relatively large number of Muslim immigrants and (misplaced) fears that the immigrants aren't assimilating.
Wow, those last three words are big.
"Routinely"?
There's 1945, of course; then again, the United States dawdled for almost two years before bothering to get involved in the Second World War.
There's the Cold War; then again, was it really in the American interest to let France and western Europe get absorbed one way or another into the Soviet sphere?
The United States has done good things for France, that is true, but it cheapens those things to make them not gifts but rather, what, payments?
And this brings me to a point about American foreign policy.
Greeley has demonstrated fairly conclusively that he thinks that the power gap between the United States and the rest of the world means that said rest of the world should be held in contempt whenever it or a fraction thereof dissents from the official American line, even when the gap isn't that large. Is this really a good way for a country to behave in terms of foreign policy? After all, the United States' allies in Iraq supported the intervention mainly on the grounds of short-term monetary gains acting against public opinion, the famed contracts for reconstruction and all that (Poland and Australia are cases in point); if that's all that the United States can offer its allies, then really, what's the point?
And Greeley can tell us that first-hand, can't he?
Not only the administration, I fear.
I wonder if
"Downward path"?
Over the second half of the 20th century, France's star has been in the ascendancy. The French population has grown quite vigorously, for instance; instead of declining (as was predicted in the 1920s) from 40 million to under 30 million by 1980, the French population instead boomed to reach more than 50 million people by that date. Now at 59.8 million, the French population is the second-largest national population in Europe west of Russia, instead of fourth-largest as it was in the 1920s; more, unlike almost all other European populations, the French population continues to grow vigorously. So, no decline there.
Similarly, over the second half of the 20th century France modernized its economy superbly, finishing the transition to urban industrialism and post-industrialism that Britain and Germany had completed a generation before by the 1960s and moving definitively into the front rank of world economies. The average French lives as well as the average Briton or (West German) or Scandinavian, more or less, and French levels of human development are some of the highest in the world.
Admittedly, in terms of the territory controlled by Paris France did contract hugely as it decolonized. Then again, colonial empires never were that much of an asset, opportunities for force projection aside; the fortunes that could be made by a lucky few in the colonies tended to be the exception in a balance table marked by losses. If France had retained its empire, then not only would it have been forced to choose between prosperous and promising Europe and a vast underdeveloped and restive colonial empire overseas, but its energies would have been dissipated in trying to build up a federal France that no one really wanted. Neocolonialism is much more productive that way.
The United States has grown much more rapidly than France--at the time of the Franco-Prussian War, for instance, France and the United States had roughly the same populations. That the United States has grown more rapidly than France isn't owing to some mythical American superiority; rather, American growth came out of the convergence of multiple factors, not least of which was the ability to start everything anew, efficient and modern. France in 1800 did not have a vast western frontier dozens of times its own size; France, like the rest of the Old World powers save Russia, lacked a frontier where it could rebuild itself. Not that the United States wasn't exceptional even among frontier societies, mind; Canada, for instance, regularly ranked in the last quarter of the 19th century as one of the most prosperous countries in the world, but the even greater prosperity to be found south of the 49th parallel sucked more than a million Canadian immigrants.
It all comes down to the question of whether American policymakers are interested in non-mercenary and relatively egalitarian relationships with the rest of the world. France is only the visible symptom of a much larger problem. Does the United States government want to run the world in cooperation with its allies? Or, does it want to run the risk of a counter-coalition organized around the European Union?
"Back off, France bashers"
May 9, 2003
BY Andrew Greeley
I admit, here, a bias: I'm biased against Andrew Greeley. It all has to do with my immediate stunned reaction post-5 February 2002, when I was desperately looking for some precedents for a happy bisexual adult male, I came upon his book Fall from Grace, which was cited in the library database as a book on bisexuals in fiction. The book began with said bisexual man raping his wife after she learned that he had a secret male lover; fortunately, however, he was killed by his daughter later in the book before he could finish beating his wife to death and sacrificing one of his children to Satan (he belonged to a black coven, you know.) So, I'm inclined to tell him to fuck off and die anyway.
But then, back to the article.
Despite the urging of the president and the secretary of state, we should leave the French alone.
This begins well. But.
I admit that their arrogant pretense of superiority is infuriating. The very tonalities of their language suggest that the speaker is looking down his nose in contempt.
I take it that he's never actually talked to someone in French; I've never gotten that feeling from speakers of Canadian French.
Yet the superior style is merely a cover-up for the deep-seated French feeling of inferiority.
And, as expected ...
Now, we must define "inferiority."
The French are aware that their nation-state is less powerful than the American nation-state; France has only a fifth of the population of the United States, has a GNP per capita smaller than the American, and no longer enjoys the cultural dominance that it enjoyed even in the first half of the 20th century. No one denies this.
I do think, however, it's highly contestable that the French think of themselves as less worthy than the Americans, that--as Greeley seems to imply--they are self-hating and self-doubting; at least, any more than Americans are.
France is a fourth-rate nation that has no power outside of its former African colonies into which it sends an occasional battalion of paratroopers to straighten out the mess France left, or to make it worse. If you have no power, then the next best thing is to pretend that you do.
So. If France--the second-largest country in the European Union by population and GNP, the fourth-largest industrial economy in the world, a technologically sophisticated country (one that pioneered electronic communicates networks a decade befiore the Internet and has a highly successful space program), the centre of a large if somewhat thinly-spread francophonie, and the second conventional and nuclear military power in Europe behind Britain--is a "fourth-rate nation that has no power," is there any nation that rates? Has the United States decided that in light of the immense gaps between the United States and any contenders, it needn't pretend to respect the capabilities of any state?
At the end of the 18th century France was arguably the most powerful nation in the world. It was able to impose on most of the world the metric system of measurement and driving on the right-hand side of the road. Since 1815 it has not won a single major military victory, except an occasional triumph over desert tribesmen.
More disputes below, but Greeley forgets the critical role played by France in defeating Austria in Italy in 1859. Italian unification began as a French project, remember.
France lost three major wars to the Germans (1815, 1870, 1939)
- Describing the Napoleonic Wars as a Franco-German contest is not just wrong, but stupid.
- As even a superficial reading of the Franco-Prussian War will reveal, France lost because it failed to implement the reforms implanted by Bismarck's Prussia. That said, the war was a close-run thing; as it was, the Third Republic kept fighting five months after the fall of the Second Empire.
- Yes, France was defeated in 1939. Name one other European country invaded by Germany that avoided utter defeat apart from the Soviet Union. Tell me that you seriously believe that, had the Germans naval superiority in 1940, Britain would not also have fallen. Et cetera.
and would have lost a fourth (1914) if it hadn't been for American intervention. Their generals are great at analyzing a situation but not very good at doing anything about it. Similarly, their bishops and theologians can tell you precisely (the French are always good at precision) what's wrong with the Church, but not able to do anything about reform.
Hmm. Is Greeley upset that France is no longer interested in being the "eldest daughter" of the Church? Inarguably, this is a good thing; it's interesting to note how the theocrats tended to be, well, less than committed to democracy, or civil rights for Jews.
During the German occupation in the early 1940s, most French people collaborated in one way or another despite the hindsight pretense of a vast underground. Very few of them protested the deportation of the Jews.
Two points:
How was France different from the rest of western Europe? Would a hypothetical German-occupied Britain behave any differently? What about the United States in the era of Strange Fruit?
Jews in France fared much better that elsewhere in western Europe. The French Jewish community is the only one that has grown significantly since the Second World War, and in fact the French segment of the diaspora is the third- or fourth-largest in the world behind the Israeli, the American, and perhaps the Russian.
How can they help feeling inferior?
Perhaps because they don't, you silly git.
Since 1789 they have tried five different republics, none of which worked very well.
Let's go through the list of republics:
- The First Republic (1792-1804) was the republic of the Revolution, of the Terror and of a decade of a sustained world war fought by France with its revolutionized satellite states. Is anyone surprised that this republic ended with Napoleon's self-proclamation as Emperor?
- The Second Republic (1848-1851) was the republic of the Revolution of 1848. The French, however, were not interested as they were in 1789 or even 1830 in radical social change. The republic quickly elected the nephew of the first Napoleon president by a huge margin, based on his mildly Saint-Simonian and liberal rhetoric and the dynastic factor; the proclamation of the Second Empire in 1851 occasioned some disturbances in the provinces, but not much.
- The Third Republic (1870-1947) emerged almost by default; its founders had seen the Third Republic as an interim measure until a monarchy was installed, but the refusal of the comte de Chambord to accept the French flag destroyed the plans for an orderly succession of power from the marginalized legitimists to the Orleanists in the person of the pleasant enough comte de Paris. The Third Republic should, perhaps, have been the Second Orleanist Kingdom. Despite this confused beginning, the Third Republic survived its initial birth pangs to do quite well: after General Boulanger disappeared in 1889, French democracy was secure despite the turmoil in its perhaps over-strong national legislature, and France did quite well. French democracy was only destroyed by the Nazi conquest of France in 1940; had it been French troops which conquered Germany in that year, I suspect that the Third Republic would have lasted to present.
- The Fourth Republic (1947-1959) represented, in many ways, a continuation of the Thrid Republic with some modifications. It fell only because France found itself incapable of cutting the Gordian knot of colonialism in Algeria; given the circumstances of Algeria, it's doubtful that any regime could have done so without committing genocide.
- The Fifth Republic (1959 to present) was founded by de Gaulle as part of his efforts to extricate France from Algeria. It has lasted securely to the present.
Some notes on the French experience:
- France has remained a democratic republic since 1871, the only exception being the interregnum of 1940-1945 when France was occupied by Nazi Germany.
- French democracy was unstable immediately after the Third Republic's foundation, but the nature of French political life was never questioned.
- The terms "Third Republic," "Fourth Republic," and "Fifth Republic" hide more similarities than differences in French political life post-Second Empire.
Most recently they re-elected Jacques Chirac, who was clearly corrupt (as are most French politicians save for the incomparable Gen. Charles de Gaulle).
Hmm. So, Greeley likes a charismatic authoritarian democracy, eh? Why am I not surprised?
And sad to say, most everyone in politics is corrupt to varying degrees; if not themselves, then their close allies. (In the US, Cheney and Rumsfeld come to mind.)
The French Left characteristically divided its vote so badly that the only candidate to gain enough votes to oppose Chirac was a quasi-Fascist reactionary. The country is split down the middle politically between those who support the French Revolution and those who oppose it--more than two centuries after the fact. Our electoral system creaks--as we demonstrated in 2000--but it usually works pretty well. Theirs almost never works.
Um, OK. Why?
In Canada, the Liberal Party continually forms federal governments because all of the other parties are too divided or linked to regional interests. Does this mean Canadian democracy doesn't work?
Le General, both a Catholic and a Republican, papered over the differences between the two sides, but France generally produces even fewer great leaders than our system does,
Define "great leaders." Myself, I've not been impressed with anyone since Kennedy being "great," or of world-historical importance.
though Chirac, who once sold a nuclear reactor to Iraq, at least won a majority of votes in his election, which is more than our man did.
So doesn't this mean French democracy works better than American, if you are going for clear majorities?
France has a large Muslim population, which it treats with absolute contempt and of which it lives in great fear.
It's the standard set of immigrant-related troubles, I fear, given exceptional strength in the French case by the relatively large number of Muslim immigrants and (misplaced) fears that the immigrants aren't assimilating.
In culture, since Impressionism, France hasn't produced much except morbidly pessimistic philosophers and some great filmmakers. If you were French, wouldn't you fear that your once-great nation had slipped into paradigms of incompetence, lethargy and corruption?
Wow, those last three words are big.
So why wouldn't you enjoy hating Americans, who have routinely pulled your chestnuts out of the fire?
"Routinely"?
There's 1945, of course; then again, the United States dawdled for almost two years before bothering to get involved in the Second World War.
There's the Cold War; then again, was it really in the American interest to let France and western Europe get absorbed one way or another into the Soviet sphere?
The United States has done good things for France, that is true, but it cheapens those things to make them not gifts but rather, what, payments?
The point in this grim portrait of France's fall from grace is that it is foolish for Americans to conspire to punish them. Not only are all Frenchmen no more responsible for Chirac than all of us are responsible for Bush. What is the point in punishing a country that has already so terribly punished itself? Is it not beneath our dignity to waste our time on petty vengeance against the French? Can we not show our contempt for the French more effectively by simply ignoring them? Why should we provide them with the satisfaction of rejoicing that they have pulled the eagle's tail?
And this brings me to a point about American foreign policy.
Greeley has demonstrated fairly conclusively that he thinks that the power gap between the United States and the rest of the world means that said rest of the world should be held in contempt whenever it or a fraction thereof dissents from the official American line, even when the gap isn't that large. Is this really a good way for a country to behave in terms of foreign policy? After all, the United States' allies in Iraq supported the intervention mainly on the grounds of short-term monetary gains acting against public opinion, the famed contracts for reconstruction and all that (Poland and Australia are cases in point); if that's all that the United States can offer its allies, then really, what's the point?
However, the country is in a petty mood today,
And Greeley can tell us that first-hand, can't he?
led as it is by a petty administration
Not only the administration, I fear.
that seems to enjoy insulting, for example, the presidents of Mexico, Canada and South Korea--and does its best to make the life of Tony Blair miserable. We are not able to act like real imperialists and pretend that other countries are so inferior that we need not notice them.
I wonder if
Rather we must get even. Could it be that our own personal and national immaturity traces a downward path for us, not dissimilar from that the French have followed?
"Downward path"?
Over the second half of the 20th century, France's star has been in the ascendancy. The French population has grown quite vigorously, for instance; instead of declining (as was predicted in the 1920s) from 40 million to under 30 million by 1980, the French population instead boomed to reach more than 50 million people by that date. Now at 59.8 million, the French population is the second-largest national population in Europe west of Russia, instead of fourth-largest as it was in the 1920s; more, unlike almost all other European populations, the French population continues to grow vigorously. So, no decline there.
Similarly, over the second half of the 20th century France modernized its economy superbly, finishing the transition to urban industrialism and post-industrialism that Britain and Germany had completed a generation before by the 1960s and moving definitively into the front rank of world economies. The average French lives as well as the average Briton or (West German) or Scandinavian, more or less, and French levels of human development are some of the highest in the world.
Admittedly, in terms of the territory controlled by Paris France did contract hugely as it decolonized. Then again, colonial empires never were that much of an asset, opportunities for force projection aside; the fortunes that could be made by a lucky few in the colonies tended to be the exception in a balance table marked by losses. If France had retained its empire, then not only would it have been forced to choose between prosperous and promising Europe and a vast underdeveloped and restive colonial empire overseas, but its energies would have been dissipated in trying to build up a federal France that no one really wanted. Neocolonialism is much more productive that way.
The United States has grown much more rapidly than France--at the time of the Franco-Prussian War, for instance, France and the United States had roughly the same populations. That the United States has grown more rapidly than France isn't owing to some mythical American superiority; rather, American growth came out of the convergence of multiple factors, not least of which was the ability to start everything anew, efficient and modern. France in 1800 did not have a vast western frontier dozens of times its own size; France, like the rest of the Old World powers save Russia, lacked a frontier where it could rebuild itself. Not that the United States wasn't exceptional even among frontier societies, mind; Canada, for instance, regularly ranked in the last quarter of the 19th century as one of the most prosperous countries in the world, but the even greater prosperity to be found south of the 49th parallel sucked more than a million Canadian immigrants.
It all comes down to the question of whether American policymakers are interested in non-mercenary and relatively egalitarian relationships with the rest of the world. France is only the visible symptom of a much larger problem. Does the United States government want to run the world in cooperation with its allies? Or, does it want to run the risk of a counter-coalition organized around the European Union?
