France's resistance to globalization and cultural imperialism

Globalization (Negative viewpoint)

Globalization/Negative Viewpoint

In the issue of globalization, since the start of the modern round of political moves geared toward increasing it, France has seemingly been the 'mine canary,' reacting first and somewhat explosively against the progress of globalization. It has been followed by Canada (particularly French Canada) and feminists; in short, there is a certain Gallic cultural 'softness' encapsulated in the drive against the 'challenges' of globalization; there is arguably also a logic predicated on the female principle, which is to say, one thing leading to another, rather than a masculine principle, one characterized by might making right.

This may seem like an extreme view, linking globalization with the gods -- arguably of war, although in politicians' clothing -- and anti-globalization with the goddess principle. But it is borne out in even a short assessment of salient facts and events beginning as long ago as the Disney implantation in France (Krishnan 1996, 1)

The beginnings of revolution: France

It seems many of the world's politicians have forgotten the French Revolution, taking place shortly after the American one, with peasants on battlements and a hue and cry for the nobles to get out of the way and allow some goods to trickle down to the poor. Feminism came to the fore as well. In 1791, a Frenchwoman named Olympe de Gouge wrote a Declaration of the Rights of Women. The butcher's daughter is regarded as "one of the most outspoken and articulate women revolutionaires" although the result of her efforts was, in 1973, execution by guillotine for treason.

De Gouges wrote, "Oh, women, women! When will you cease to be blind? What advantage have you received from the Revolution? A more pronounced scorn, a more marked disdain" (Halsall 1997). Further, she exhorted women to "...unite yourselves beneath the standards of philosophy; deploy all the energy of your character, and you will soon see these haughty men, not groveling at your feet as servile adorers, but proud to share with you the treasures of the Supreme Being. Regardless of what barriers confront you, it is in your power to free yourselves; you have only to want to...." (Halsall 1997).

For all her fervor, de Gouge was naive, not unlike modern women who had arguably thought feminism would finally see them included as equal partners in the commerce of the world, sharing equally in the benefits of that commerce. Globalization has, however, pointed out the fallacy of that belief in distressing ways.

In the late 1700s, as for most of its history (Charlemagne, the Louis dynasty), France has been ruled by authoritarian men. Krishnan (1996) contends that was no less true in 1995, when globalization and French dissent ran headfirst into each other, with intellectuals -- who might and usually are linked with the feminine principle -- supporting the peasants in their protest against a complex of changes designed to make their lives 'better' and more global, which they saw as shorthand for robbing the poor to pay the rich. Krishnan writes, of the standoff between French railway workers and the state, "An explosive French political and social life in turn is linked to the authoritarian nature of the political system. The president is all-powerful for seven years, and with the current huge majority held by the president's allies in parliament there is little space or motivation for compromise." Compromise is often seen as a feminine principle.

Krishnan believed the events clearly had "global implications" at a time when nations were "experiencing a social and economic crisis and a breakneck transition from one form of social organization to another," that other being the global economy (1996). Krishnan compared the events of December 1995 to those of May 1968 when thousands of students manned the ramparts in Paris and protested government excesses in a movement that paralyzed the country for a month and left a deep imprint on the political, cultural, and social life of an entire generation, both inside and outside of France" (1996).

Reagonomics and its fellow travelers

The student strike, arguably liberal in its underpinnings as are most student uprisings, students being the educated version of the penniless peasant, did not have a lasting effect. By December of 1995, the true peasants, the railway workers, carried out a strike that "opened up some breathing space in the suffocating right-wing ideological climate that has characterized France and most of the world since the early 1980s" when globalization, although possibly not noted in the press, was well underway. It was linked to President Nixon's rapprochement with China; it was linked with Reaganomics; it was linked with Bush I's armed excursions in the Caribbean. In France, "The overriding message of the strike and social movement is that the right-wing offensive of cutbacks and layoffs is not the 'only possible economic policy' as the French and most everyone else have been told ad nauseam in recent times" (Krishnan 1996, 1).

Over the next several years, however, nothing changed. As globalization expanded, cutbacks and layoffs did also, at least in the developed countries, where the jobs of the peasants, and even some of the educated peasants such as it workers, were 'offshored' to the nations that had been opened up by Nixon-style junketing, Reaganomics and Bush's military thuggery. It is unfortunate that the French strike (following vociferous French dissent several years earlier at the implantation of a sterile Disney theme park where luscious French onions once grew) did not, in fact, operate as more than a "stiff rebuke" -- unheeded -- to the "richest, most productive, and developed countries in the world" that were subjecting their citizens to "mass unemployment, growing homelessness, declining quality of and access to basic utilities, inequality between regions, environmental degradation, and xenophobia" (Krishnan 1996, 1). At the moment, with the American invasion of Iraq and assorted other sorties, it is not necessary even to support Krishnan's claim about xenophobia further.

In any case, Krishnan compared the revolt to the Zapatista uprising in Mexico in January 1994, coinciding with the North American Free Trade Agreement. "In both cases, it wasn't so much a revolt against the idea of globalization as against the steamroller character of the 'globalization' currently underway: a 'globalization' characterized primarily by the thirst for markets and profit of a small number of multinational corporations and financial institutions based overwhelmingly in the rich Western countries and Japan" (Krishnan 1996, 1). In short, it was a completely masculine, completely bellicose maneuver of the same sort de Gouge lamented more than 200 years earlier.

Modern icons of imperialism

Doubtless, too, Martha Stewart and all the other 'guys' have some redeeming human foibles once in a while. But it is characteristic of militarism to cover those foibles under a uniform and distance them through discipline; arguably, Stewart was simply being disciplined for an infraction of the rules. She can lie to the public (in what universe could women possibly content with covering books in hand-made paper when there are children to raise and valuable work to do for those who have no work?), but she can't lie to the other officers in the global financial army. As in the military, once a soldier has been sanctioned and borne the sentence, all is forgotten because there are still battles to wage and win.

McLaren and Farahmandpur take the discussion out of the military realm and into lifestyles, and still make the case that globalization is a war waged by greedy lunatics whose divorce from their own humanity is almost total. "How the dynamics and crises of capitalism are handled, and how the state is organized, are core questions for political struggle. They also are inescapably class questions" (2001. 136).

They note that class interests are inherent in the writing of laws, the way politicians pursue issues, the ways the sciences and social science are funded, the ways work is done, the ways universities are governed, the ways news is reported, the ways mass culture is created and manipulated, how careers are propelled or hampered, how racism and sexism are defined and reinforced.

On each one of these subjects, a treatise could be written vis-a-vis its relationship to globalization. But perhaps a few recent top-of-mind incidents will serve at least to point toward the negative impact of globalization in some of these areas.

Recently, a law was written in haste to deal with the treatment of a brain-dead women. The woman has been brain dead for a decade, and yet, suddenly, a patriarchal government rushes to judgment where seasoned medical and ethical workers feared to tread. How does this speak to globalization? It speaks to the ownership of bodies. In this case, it is clear the state is claiming that it 'owns' Terri Schiavo, more than the man to whom she was legally wed. Whether one thinks 'he done her in' and profited, the fact of government stepping into a private and medical affair at all puts things into bold perspective; the government is busy claiming all the world's citizens as its own. Globalization, Krishnan argued, was fostered primarily by the United States. Linking the Schiavo case and Iraq leaves one with an interesting picture of globalization, one that lead directly toe the McLaren/Farahmandpur conclusion that "globalization" is simply an acceptable euphemism for U.S. imperialism.

An issue concerning the governance of universities also puts globalization into perspective. Recently, a university professor made a perfectly reasonable assertion, from his own observation of the situation, about the lack of women in pure science. The media covered it as if he were the devil incarnate; in the end, he was censured by his peers, with his pension threatened. All this for speaking his mind. But worse, he spoke his mind about one of the globally taboo issues, class, in this case represented by gender, although the gender issue stands on its own as a reason for the attack on him by his peers. It won't do -- back to George Orwell -- for people to go about pointing out actual facts, especially when those facts are inconsistent with the somatic picture the power structure is attempting to paint for the gullible populace. and, like the Martha Steward case, the case of the outspoken professor suggests that a 'soldier' in the campaign for global values (lip-service to false feminism) had gotten out of line and had to be sent to the brig for a couple of days, metaphorically.

In the United States, mass culture is manipulated by the government, arguably every bit as much as it was in the U.S.S.R. In the bad old days. However, the United States does not employ a central agency for censorship duties; rather, there are a large number of watchdog groups concerned with public decency and voluntary compliance with a bunch of standards developed by an amorphous group of 'experts'. This makes it easier to export those standards; were the government to attempt it, it would seem to be imperialism, a fact the power structure would like to keep hidden. It is difficult to imagine a suggestion by President Bush, with his sly grin and hollow laugh, telling the aristocratic Jacques Chirac that France really needs to stop having a nude competition in its Miss France contest and especially, it needs to stop showing it on public TV. But if a group of Mothers Against Nude Competition takes its message to France...well, that's just people to people, right? Never mind that the Mothers are supported sub-rosa by a fundamentalist juggernaut of grand proportions, fueled by money from the Religious Right, which, by virtue of the non-profit status of its leading organizations, is basically carrying out its campaign with government funds. The idea of Mothers Against Nude Competition is fiction, one hopes. The fact of the competition itself is (or at least was) fact as late as 1987, according to personal reports.

Saying the right thing

There is an adage that in Ireland, one must do the right thing, but one can say anything. In Britain, it is the opposite: one can do anything, but one must say the right thing. In terms of globalization, Britannia still rules, if filtered through the militarism of its first great breakaway colony, the United States.

The revolution that created the United States, it might be argued, was the first step toward globalization. It is easy to understand many nations being involved in the European wars of the modern era, that is, after the Age of Enlightenment began. They are so close together, it would be difficult to invade one without another. But in the American Revolution, Ben Franklin went to France to gain their aid. Hessians and Prussians from the are now called Germany and Poland also showed up to help. This began long allegiances between two very distinctive parts of the globe, and it also paved the way for U.S. imperialism in the current era. While the assistance of the French and Germans was helpful, it is probable that England would have been vanquished, if less rapidly. The fledgling United States was born in a surge of militarism and imperialism unbroken until the contiguous United States had been secured, as well as Alaska and Hawaii. That those two territories became states only in the mid-19th century is instructive; that Puerto Rico has resisted statehood is also instructive in terms of globalization. It would see that if we cannot completely gain an island over which we have had dominion for eons, we will simply co-opt other parts of the Caribbean to U.S. needs, while retaining Puerto Rico as the poster-child for U.S. laissez faire policies, as inaccurate as that might be.

Besides that, Latin America has had identity problems from the outset, making them much more exploitable in terms of globalization (by which, at this point, read U.S. imperialism) than, for example, France. Feminism re-enters the picture as well.

Miles (2000, 6), in writing against globalization, now that feminist activists are convinced of the truth of the statement, "No woman is free until all women are free." "To win our full freedom, and not merely ameliorate women's conditions, we will have to transform global as well as national and local structures of power. Feminism is necessarily an internationalist politics, for the systems of exploitation and control we resist are global" (Miles 2000, 6). France, in many of its heroines but notably for this discussion, de Gouge, has long understood that freedom had to include women; globalization advocates understand it, too, and are busy making the most visible of women into camp followers (such as Martha Stewart, for example).

Identity, which is weak in Latin America because of historic imperialism by Spain, Portugal, and the United States (in addition to the influence of still extant native peoples), is strong in France, uninterrupted in its male power line for centuries. In addition, and with more than passing reference to the fact of the American Revolution and its military alliance with Franc, France feels its culture -- to which is it attached -- is threatened by globalization, which "they equate with Americanization" (Miles 2000, 6). Indeed, while in the rest of Europe only ten percent of citizens are worried about globalization, in France, the figure is 63%.

Conclusion

Several authors equate globalization with anti-feminism. Two, McLaren and Farahmandpur, equate it with imperialism. Inherent within both those discussions is the issue of class warfare. One cannot have a need for feminism without first having a hierarchical division predicated on gender. One cannot have globalization without first having the concept that what one nations has is better than what another has; implicit in this concept is, however, the idea that the subordinate nation will be dragged kicking and screaming into parity with the superior nation or nation, if need be.

But this is the modern world, and we no longer have the divine right of kings with which to justify imperialism. Thus, globalism had to be created, justifying instead, the divine right of corporations.