France

In this post I discussed a new French labor law. The law in question was supposed to reduce unemployment by allowing employers to fire anyone who was under 26 years of age, and as long as they had the job for less than two years.

(And in this post I wondered if all of the cars that protesters set ablaze affected the price of gas and automobiles in France. I didn’t get an answer, so I suppose that means we don’t have any French readers.)

This seemed to me to be the only sensible thing to do. While the new law couldn’t very well be seen as turning the French around so that they had a sound fiscal policy, at least it made the government’s stance a little less insane.

The news today is reporting that such a measure simply isn’t going to pass. Instead the government is going to offer incentives to companies if they will only hire more young people.

I seem to remember that they already tried to combat unemployment by passing a law which mandated a 35 hour work week. That was such a disaster that they had to rescind the legislation after only five years.

I’m certainly not an economist by any stretch of the imagination, but it seems to me that the French government is pretty much going to partially subsidize jobs offered to young people. This just boggles my mind. Where is all this money that the government is using to bolster the economy coming from? And how long can they keep this up before something snaps?

The French government recently passed a law which allows employers to fire their employees if they choose to do so.

Yes, I know. I, too, was shocked when I first heard about it. But then I discovered that the law only applied to workers who were 26 years old or younger, and only if they had been on the job for less than 2 years. Employers can give workers the boot without stating a reason as long as those conditions exist.

Young people aren’t taking this lying down, though. Hundreds of thousands of them have taken to the streets in protest, causing major disruption and even some property damage. So far we haven’t seen as much arson like we did last year in French cities, but it’s possible that it could happen. That would be somewhat ironic since I figure that the favorite target of the protesters (cars) are owned by people who need them to get to work.

Read more

France has had some troubles lately, mainly about 10,000 torched cars. The powers that be are trying to assimilate the disenfranchised and arson prone youth by getting them involved in the democratic process. This is something I heartily approve of in principle, but I think they’re going about it the wrong way.

According to this news story, a Get-Out-the-Vote rally in the same ghetto where the rioting started didn’t turn out too well. The crowd was made up of Muslims of African ancestry, but one canny heckler pointed out that not a single elected official in all of France’s National Assembly shares their heritage.

Yep, they’ve got a ways to go.

This news item is reporting that the damage caused by the French rioters is abating. The benchmark seems to be how many cars are being set ablaze each night.

What isn’t mentioned is how many inflammable cars are left. For the past two weeks, the numbers of autos which lit up the night was staggering. It wouldn’t surprise me in the least if more than 10,000 cars have gone to automobile heaven by now, and I bet that people who own secure garages are making a pretty penny by charging some hefty rent.

The news report attributes the decline in civil unrest to a curfew and, less significantly, to ad hoc neighborhood patrol groups. It seems to be more reasonable to assume that most of the low hanging fruit has been torched, and now there are less targets of opportunity to be found.

One of my coworkers compared the tally of newly burned cars to the body count of Viet Cong dead that was reported every night on American television during the Vietnam War. He then openly speculated what he would do if faced with a riotous situation like that faced by the French. By day two of the riots he would have used a vacant lot on his street as a vehicle park, and organized his neighbors to stand rotating watches over their property. He couldn’t understand why every car owning French citizen didn’t do something similar.

“You’re an American.” I explained.

Despite widespread violence including numerous shooting incidents it appears that no one has yet been killed. Why is this? The linked article and others suggest that the rioters are going for maximum damage short of the level that would provoke a decisive response from the French government. Wretchard comments:

Belmont Club commenter Red River makes the interesting conjecture that rioting “youths” in Paris have confined their primary mode of attack to car burning as part of a deliberate brinkmanship. Car burning is spectacular, serious enough to get attention yet — and this is the vital point — not serious enough to provoke lethal force. By staying just shy of the threshold, the rioters can maximize their rate of propagation at minimum danger to themselves.

(The link to Red River is worth following. Go to the linked thread and search on his name. He posted several insightful comments.)

The use of car burning and shotguns fired from a distance are reminiscent of the first Intifada against Israel. Then as now provocateurs used weapons that were extremely dangerous but not consistently lethal. In the Intifada Palestinians’ slings and fire bombs were effective because they did not kill enough Israeli troops for the Israeli leadership to be willing to bear the high domestic and international political cost of responding with overwhelming force. Yet the Israelis couldn’t do nothing in response to constant provocations, and the drumbeat of apparently pointless IDF and civilian casualties, and seemingly no-win nature of the “situation,” eventually demoralized Israeli society and made Palestinian victory possible (until the Israelis developed new tactics and the Palestinians overplayed their hand).

The French government isn’t as constrained as the Israelis were, since a lot of French citizens probably favor a harsh response to the rioters and other countries aren’t likely to interfere. Nonetheless the French rioters, like the Palestinians, appear to be getting the result they want. By keeping their violence to a level just below that which would provoke a real crackdown they have paralyzed the government and made their own victory — which appears to consist, initially, of the formal partition of metropolitan France into Muslim and non-Muslim areas — more likely.

UPDATE: Ralf notes that someone has been killed, but I don’t think that weakens my argument.

UPDATE 2: I hope we’re all wrong about the seriousness of these events, but I doubt it.

Even if the riots began opportunistically, the French govt’s reaction has provided fuel by making clear that substantial political gains for the Muslims are attainable by force. The sky’s the limit now. I didn’t see the WSJ article yet, but concession talk was foreordained by the leftist political culture which knows only to appease in response to attacks. God help them, and us, if they give in and grant the Muslims some kind of formal autonomy within France. It would be like the beach head of an invasion where the nation being invaded didn’t realize that it was at war.

Or maybe enough French realize what’s going on that they will eventually vote for leaders who will do something about it. But in the meantime, to paraphrase Red River, the Muslims are operating within French society’s OODA loop.