France is in the process of opening its eyes to globalisation. Historically, as a prisoner of the ideological approach, France has delighted in absorbing itself in backward-looking mediation in quarrels dominated by minorities, far removed from the general interest. One extreme liberal minority describes the total opening of markets as the paradigm of wellbeing and progress, disregarding the resistance of nations to the worldwide disorder generated by, amongst other influences, the free circulation of people, capital, ideas and technologies. Another minority, widespread and cautious, is prone to withdraw into itself behind unaffordable and illusory social Maginot lines.

The origins of this national characteristic of backwardness are well known: historical tensions between the public and private spheres which some, always antagonistic to the commercial world, have ossified; the arrogance of the ‘French exception’ bruited by our elites, cast in a mould isolated from other cultures; the weight of history in our political thinking, swinging between nostalgia for the reign of Louis XIV, the Sun King, and an obsession with repentance.

When it has been necessary to think globally and act in solidarity as a community we have remained divided. When we have had to be present in international forums to take charge or to influence proceedings, we have been isolated. When we should have been attentive to changes in the world, we have fallen back on our national solutions, disjointed by inconsistency and doomed by a lack of continuity to successive failures.