The crisis of the “French model”: importing the Danish model without the spirit of community?
Everyone agrees: the French model works poorly. Should we change it? How to make it evolve? Proposals emerge. We cannot say that sociologists lack imagination. It is difficult today to find, on the left or the right, a defender of the “French social model”. Whatever we put under this name, the observation of a failure of French society to ensure decent living conditions for everyone is widely shared. And even if a number of statistical, sociological and economic works on unemployment, precariousness, inequalities of all kinds support this observation, several publications have very recently insisted on the profound gap between the official vision of society and the reality of society. social situation. (…).
Poverty of solutions, perhaps, but the debate has in any case begun and, despite the “declinist” spirit of the times, there is no longer a shortage of serious proposals to change our social model. Around the employment contract for example, the rejection of the first employment contract (CPE) has given all its vigor to the current debates among economists to tackle the duality of CDI/precarious contracts, which tends to create a labor market with two speeds, the advantages of some being paid for at the price of the insecurity of others. (…) But in terms of foreign inspiration, it is of course the Danish (or Nordic) model and its miraculous “flexicurity” which holds the upper hand. (…) Denmark seems to have found a virtuous balance, which maintains high levels of social protection for all without undermining the competitiveness of the economy: the unemployment rate is low, precariousness is an unknown concept, with great freedom of layoffs meet generous unemployment insurance with effective employment services…(…).
The fact remains that the French debate repeatedly invokes flexicurity while forgetting the entire institutional architecture that underpins it. In particular, the State occupies an even more dominant place than in France, with a bloated public sector which employs 31% of the active population and very high compulsory contributions. Another crucial aspect: employer-union relations that are much more institutionalized than in France, with a unionization rate close to 80%. So many elements likely to cool the reforming ardor of those who would have happily been content to trade a relaxation of labor law for new rights for employees. The road to Denmark is still long… (Source: Xavier Molénat, Human Sciences, 01/2007)
These debates of intellectuals in need of ideas have the merit of existing. They are wrong in wanting to reinvent old recipes such as lifelong learning, outplacement… But their main fault is to swim in abstraction: we would like the Danish system without unionization rates, without participatory employers, without the collectivism of decisions, without institutionalized negotiation, in short without everything that results from the sense of community which underlies the practices of Northern Europe. We must start by thinking about the cultural foundations of these practices.
The road would indeed be long to adopt a northern European type system and make it work in a country such as France. However, to have the slightest chance of success, it would be necessary to start by reintroducing the spirit of community. This starts with simple actions and basic daily behaviors: reintroducing politeness, good manners, sharing, transparency, a sense of compromise, in an effective and real way and not verbally. In a country which, prey to the authoritarian and individualist patterns of Bonapartism, completely lacks conviviality, this is not the least of the challenges.
