Poor King Charles III. In the face of widening, deepening and increasingly violent public protests and strikes over the government of President Emmanuel Macron’s plan to raise France’s full retirement age, the new British king’s planned state visit to France was postponed. He went to Germany instead.
Here in our nation, a similar increase from an already-higher age requirement may be in the political works, but there is little public indignation.
Here, an earlier, little noticed phased-in increase from age 65 to 67, stemming from the 1983 Greenspan Commission recommendations, was carried out with no demonstrations, no garbage in the streets, no tear gas or bonfires.
But a 1995 effort in France by then-president Jacques Chirac collapsed ignominiously after months of protests eerily similar to current ones.
Why the striking differences between our nation’s reaction and theirs?
That question is the subject of “comparative economic systems,” a discipline effectively killed in U.S. economic academia by the assumption that the U.S. market system is the only viable one.
Yet comparisons, as between French and U.S. retirement systems, remain enlightening. As does an evaluation of the stark differences in public reaction.
First, there are more similarities than one might think.
Both the U.S. and France have mind-numbingly complex retirement systems that mix public and private sectors and that grew up higgledy-piggledy over decades. The French have something similar to our Old Age, Survivors and Disability Income, better known as Social Security. Both countries’ systems are funded by a specific tax. The French also have something akin to our Supplemental Security Income. Like ours, that is funded from general tax revenues and is means-tested. They have special pensions for military and for civil service employees just as we do. And there are analogies to our 401(k)s, IRAs and so on.
Moreover, both nations’ systems have roots in periods of economic and demographic growth dominated by public optimism. Here, it was the period of unquestioned U.S. economic and political hegemony from 1945 to our 1972 repudiation of the Bretton Woods system of international payments anchored on the U.S. dollar. For the French, it was “les trente glorieuses,” the 30 glorious years from 1945 to 1975 during which the French economy grew as never before and enormous social change took place. Note that both nations were on the winning side of World War II.
Yet there also are fundamental differences — and these go much further back in our cultural, religious and political histories. We don’t have a reactionary “old right” incorporating a hierarchy of nobility, other large landowners, monarchists and an established Roman Catholic Church. The “American Revolution” attained independence from England with minimal economic or social change and remarkably little bloodshed. The French Revolution during the same period involved deep, painful, bloody political and social change and a quarter century of demographically and economically exhausting war.
The U.S. government has had continuity since 1789. France is in its “Fifth Republic,” although key elements thread throughout.
We had slavery, which shaped our constitution, resulted in a bloody protracted Civil War and propagated racial oppression and hatreds that still haunt our culture and public life. But, with the exception of the British burning Washington two centuries ago, we have never had foreign forces on our land and have never been in a war that threatened our existence or killed many of our people.
France was humiliated in the 1871 Franco-Prussian war and forced to pay devastating reparations — only to be brought into World War I’s existential struggle 40 years later. Then it was subjected to a brutal and humiliating German occupation less than two decades after that.
Our nation suffered nothing comparable. We vaunt our role in both world wars, but French military deaths relative to population were 43 times higher in WWI and 60% higher in WWII. Both world wars devastated France economically. Both pole-vaulted our nation’s output, income and self-confidence ahead.
With fewer social divisions, a two-party political system has always predominated here. No Marxist party, communist or socialist, ever has been a major force in U.S. politics. Socialist candidate Eugene V. Debs’ 6% of the four-way 1912 presidential election was a high water mark. France historically has had multiple parties, many organized around charismatic individuals. There, over the years, both socialist and communist parties have been important forces.
All this presents a sharp difference in labor organizations and how labor is viewed and valued.
Historically, Marxism has been central in European unions. In many countries, including France, there were and are competing unions with respective communist and socialist affiliations. Class conflict, as the core of history, was a fundamental assumption of this crowd, and a centrally-planned economy, with little private property, being many union member’s primary goal.
In the United States, when Samuel Gompers, long head of the American Federation of Labor, was asked what his unions wanted, he simply answered, “More.” There was no challenge to a market-based economy or existing government, no talk of revolution. U.S. unions just wanted a larger share of output and better treatment of their members.
As for religious differences, the idea of free markets as an optimal base for economies originated with Scotland’s Adam Smith, Presbyterian in his upbringing if not in practice. Continental Europe saw free markets as an Anglo-Saxon ideology. The Roman Catholic church saw a threat to its patriarchy, and set up its own paternalistic social system.
However, they also saw “godless Marxism” as a worse threat. Marxists themselves usually were strongly anti-clerical. So Catholics wrestled with a “third way” between that ideology and ruthless capitalism. The result was a long tradition of serious theological scholarship now known as “Catholic social thought” that is unrivaled within Protestantism. Under various names, there were Christian Democratic parties all over continental Europe, including France.
An important result is that even among non-religious people, the concept of “solidarity” on social issues is important across Europe and in France. It means little to most in our country. The pain, humiliation, loss and shame accumulated over 31 years from the outbreak of World War I in August 1914 to the end of World War II in May 1945, contribute to this.
Surveys show that Americans and Europeans view the causes of wealth and poverty, success and failure, very differently. Americans ascribe most responsibility to individual character, personal responsibility and hard work. Europeans see circumstances beyond an individual’s control as important. Hence there is a difference in how the appropriate role for government is viewed.
Yet the United States, France and many other industrialized nations now face the same problem. We constructed government social programs at a time of rising incomes and labor forces with young populations. Life expectancies, even at adulthood rather than birth, were lower. “Pay-as-you-go” seemed an easy way to finance these.
Now the number of children per woman is below replacement rates nearly everywhere, numbers of retirees relative to workers are burgeoning and growth of output seems harder. Both societies are taking it out on younger people, but something has to give, and Macron realizes this, even if the protestors do not — or refuse to see it.
France’s history and political culture mean the issue involves confrontation. Here we will grumble and mutter, but probably do little else.
St. Paul economist and writer Edward Lotterman can be reached at [email protected].
