The French Left has much to learn from the English
Blairism may have had its day on this side of the Channel, but Bernard-Henri Lévy says that the English Third Way should be a model to his Gallic comrades French Socialists are extraordinary. For the past ten years, they have made ‘Blairism’ their foil, even declaring that it embodies exactly what the Left — and in particular, their Left — must not be.
They see in Blairism the quasi-diabolical incarnation of the betrayal of the very ideals they claim to embody. They disavow former English Prime Minister Tony Blair and call his domestic policies ‘Thatcherism with a human face’. They insult his foreign policy, which they believe was driven by a servility to US President George W. Bush and, they assert, should disqualify him from presiding over the European Union once the Lisbon Treaty is ratified.
In 1997, in Malmo, Sweden, during the Congress of the Party of European Socialists, the French delegation was preoccupied with the question of who would be the best substitute for Blair and his horrendous ‘Third Way’ policy.
When Blair and German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, a Social Democrat, signed a manifesto for a Third Way and a ‘new centre’ in June 1999, in preparation for the European elections, the French Socialists rushed to be the first to repudiate it.
When Ségolène Royal was interviewed by the Financial Times during her campaign for the French presidency, and tried to say that perhaps not all of Blair’s ideas should be rejected out of hand — for example, his policies on public service, youth employment and security — she was immediately chastened by the volley of sarcastic comments she received from her Socialist party colleagues and backed away from her comments.
And even in 1995, when Jacques Delors considered running as the Socialist candidate to replace François Mitterrand as president of France, he withdrew because he was a ‘Blairist’ and he knew ‘Blairism’ was a bad word, virtually an insult to the party whose support he would have had to seek.
In short, Blairism is the enemy. It is the ‘anti-model’ for most of the French Socialist leaders. It is castigated as the ‘right-wing’ Left — in contrast to a Left that turns its back not only on modernity but also on reality.
And then, for his own reasons and yet without disavowing himself or forgetting to recall that if he were French he would (and I quote) be ‘in the Socialist party’, standing alongside ‘those who are committed to transforming it,’ Tony Blair accepted French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s invitation to address the leaders of his conservative party. They gave him an ovation, which elicited new shrieks of alarm from the Left, mutterings of major excommunication and sweeping accusations of betrayal.
So my friends, we have two choices. Either Tony Blair is indeed a sellout, this bearer of ill and shame you have denounced for ten years. (In which case, why are you complaining?) Or he is one of our own, who has his rightful place in the family. Haven’t you said it already? Why this embarrassment? This squirming? Why the profusion of linguistically inventive slogans like Lionel Jospin’s ‘modern socialism’ or François Hollande’s ‘reformism of the Left’ — phrases that function as euphemisms for ‘social liberalism’ or just plain ‘liberalism’, the central tenets of Blairism?
How, in that case, do you dare complain that a president of the Republic leaps into the opening that you yourselves have created, taking for himself the heritage that is yours, and which you want only as long as you don’t have to say it aloud? The problem has been highlighted with renewed sharpness by Sarkozy’s adroit manoeuvre of ‘opening’ his administration to leading figures from the opposition.
It is time for the Left, our Left, to emerge once and for all from its ambiguities. It must give up its outdated Jacobinism, the Robespierrist inclination that forms its ideological identity. Hollande recently said in a memorable debate with French minister of the interior Michèle Alliot-Marie, ‘Yes, it’s true: I do not like rich people.’ The Left must — and this is key — break the spell the extreme Left holds over it. But the far Left is unfortunately in the process of resurrecting itself — while evoking Trotsky, Pierre Bourdieu or José Bové — and acting as a superego.
In other words, the Left must finally undergo, openly and transparently, a conversion to the market economy, liberalism, Europe, globalisation and human rights, which it has until now done only on the sly, clandestinely, condemning itself to hypocrisy and schizophrenia. Conversion or death. Either clarity or the chronicle, defeat after defeat, of a disappearance foretold.
Whatever you call it, Blairism is, more than ever, the only possible choice for a Left that has truly learned all the lessons it can from the totalitarian temptation.
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