Democracy and Prosperity: Reinventing Capitalism Through a Turbulent Century by Torben Iversen & David Soskice

Author:Torben Iversen & David Soskice
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Business & Economics, Economic History, Political Science, Political Ideologies, Democracy, Political Economy, Public Policy, Economic Policy, Globalization
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2019-02-05T01:25:52+00:00

4.4.4. FRANCE

The deterioration of growth across the industrialized economies which gathered pace in the second half of the 1970s led to intense debates about the role of government, involving political leaders, and generally played out in the electoral arena. This period corresponded to the slow beginning of the collapse of Fordism and the OPEC oil price shocks. In France the debate and the policy changes were sharp. Zysman’s seminal Governments, Growth, and Markets (1983) covers several countries—most notably, France—and sets the stage for understanding these changes.14 The French political economy since the 1950s had attached high importance to the role of the state; this both reflected the weakness of the French economy in the immediate postwar years, and the exceptional ability of top civil servants and politicians (typically from the same top educational background) who played a major role in detailed decisions on major investments through state control of key banks. On this, both leading socialist and Gaullist politicians shared a similar belief that the private sector required considerable state supervision (and vision) to achieve major innovations.

Thus French strategies to react to the slow collapse of Fordism involved increased involvement by the French state in reconfiguring large companies to make them more competitive. Just as British business and financial leaders saw Thatcher’s reforms as against their interests, so, not surprisingly, did the French private sector. Anglo-Saxon readers may raise eyebrows at the widespread nationalizations of leading manufacturing companies by Mitterrand when he became president in 1981 in a socialist-communist alliance. While ambiguity doubtless colors many of Mitterrand’s strategic moves, this major maneuver conformed to the Gaullist idea of the grande politique industrielle of creating great industrial clusters, including the supply chains (filières) which had come apart during the Giscard-Barre period of liberal economic policy in the turbulent second half of the 1970s; nor was it a million miles from the idea of the Japanese vertical Keiretsu. It is true that it did not represent a direct policy of radical liberalization, but it was exactly intended to arm national champions with the competitiveness and innovative capacities needed to succeed in increasingly competitive world markets.

In any case, it took place within an electoral debate of deep concern over French industrial policy; it was part of the Socialist program during the presidential election; it was large-scale and serious political experimentation in a very unclear climate; and its goal was to create innovative and competitive national champions.

The whole development fits well in our basic argument. The government was deeply concerned with restructuring large companies to face increased world market competition as the ICT revolution gradually got underway, which went directly against the perceived interests of French advanced capitalism. And it was very clear to Mitterrand that he needed, electorally, the reputation of being capable of responding to the needs of the advanced sectors in France.

As we know, the experiment failed; and from the mid-1980s the French government moved to give their leading corporations much more freedom to work out their trajectories, and by the late 1980s to denationalize them.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.