[nq:2]Pour commencer, click cette direction, [nq:2]Merci. J'espere que l'information est, [nq:2]Click dans

1 2 3 4 5 6

GREGG . <-->:

[nq:2]Pour commencer, click cette direction d'internet http://europa.eu.int/comm/agriculture/survey/index en.htm Quand la ... ou, tu trouverais la section du document que j'ai mentionne.[/nq]
[nq:1]Merci. Il y a encore du travail à faire avec ton français mais bravo pour l'effort.[/nq]
Merci. J'espere que l'information est d'utilite pour vous.

Cheers,
Gregg

"This is an age of exhausted whoredom groping for its God." (James Joyce, Ulisses p.280)
http://www.geocities.com/airborne col/America.html

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John of Aix:

[nq:2]Merci. Il y a encore du travail à faire avec ton français mais bravo pour l'effort.[/nq]
[nq:1]Merci. J'espere que l'information est d'utilite pour vous.[/nq]
Tout à fait et je te remercie à nouveau.
J'ai lu sur le BBC News website, dans la partie Magazine, des commentaires sur le fameux 'rebate' du Royaume Uni et sa mise en question. Beaucoup des messages se plaignait de la Politique Agricole Commune, le CAP, ou plutôt sur les sommes qu'elle apportait à la France. On va en discuter beaucoup dans un proche avenir sans doute, donc je me renseigne.

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Bulba!:

[nq:1]So, it seems that the intellectuall lower end of the social spectrum, did not handled a vote of confidence to ... CAP will in fact "reduce de gaps between regions", therefore, choking up the countryside development possibilities at Higher Production Economies.[/nq]
The tripe about lies, damn lies and stats is worn out, but the specific problems I find with this approach is that what particular objectives mean to particular people are not to be taken in the same way:
"Those with the lowest level of education (31%) have a stronger belief than those with the highest level of education (21%) that the CAPs priority should be to favour and improve the life in the countryside."
I think farmer without high school will take the phrase "favor and improve the life in the countryside" to a different meaning than "inteligentsia" will take the phrase "priority of the CAP should be to reduce development gaps between regions".

For a farmer in the countryside will always favor improvement of life in the countryside for him. Why should that matter to an intellectual living in the city?! An intellectual (in Europe especially, but elsewhere as well) typically favors equality uber alles. So yes, he will like "reducing gaps" between the regions.
But a farmer in the countryside? What does the development of another farming region far away from him matter to him, whether it is higher development or lower than that of his region?
He just wants 'improvement of life in the countryside'. And we know what that means: for him.
Another problem here is that you don't notice certain correlations: "inteligentsia" in cities may favor "organic" production because it sounds romantic to them, while farmers, while uneducated, know that for them it means dealing with more ***. Literally.

So they may be somewhat less enthusiastic about such prospect.

"The French always place a school of thought, a formula, convention, a priori arguments, abstraction, and artificiality above reality; they prefer clarity to truth, words to things, rhetoric to science. ... They emerge from description only to hurl themselves into precipitate generalizations. They imagine they understand man in his entirety, whereas they cannot break the hard shell of their personalities, and they do not understand a single nation apart from themselves." - H. F. Amiel

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usenet:

[nq:2]Click dans le cadre (pdf), et baisserais ce document pour ... ou, tu trouverais la section du document que j'ai mentionne.[/nq]
[nq:1]Merci. Il y a encore du travail à faire avec ton français[/nq]
Plutôt "des travaux"... je suggère une démolition totale au lance-flammes puis une reconstruction.
Salut
Mario "le français"

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GREGG . <-->:

[nq:2]Merci. J'espere que l'information est d'utilite pour vous.[/nq]
[nq:1]Tout à fait et je te remercie à nouveau. J'ai lu sur le BBC News website, dans la partie Magazine, ... qu'elle apportait à la France. On va en discuter beaucoup dans un proche avenir sans doute, donc je me renseigne.[/nq]
Sa va, John. Je dois lire ceci que vous commentez de la BBC..., Il cherche de ceci dans la partie Magazine. En temps, tous ces sujets relatifs le CAP sont d'interet economique et politique, non seulement pour la France ou aux Europeens, mais aussi est d'importance nationale pour les Etats Unis et leurs strategies de court et long temps des secteurs l'agriculture et le betail.
Cheers,
Gregg

"This is an age of exhausted whoredom groping for its God." (James Joyce, Ulisses p.280)
http://www.geocities.com/airborne col/America.html

This thread originates from within 'usenet', and as such the content and users are not guaranteed to have been moderated by our community.

Bulba!:

This guy must have inherited some genes after Frederic Bastiat: sharp, insightful and articulate.

Anti-Globalism = Anti-Americanism
By Jean-Francois Revel
How to understand this war against globalization, which has grown in scope and virulence over the past five years? First, we must realize that it is a war in the real, not the figurative, sense of the word. It is a physical struggle being fought in the streets, not just theoretically. The demonstrators who are its shock troops are organized by activist organizations, many of them subsidized by governments, and they sack cities and lay siege to international meetings during their battles.
What motivates this extraordinary resistance? Globalization simply means freedom of movement for goods and people, and it is hard to be violently hostile to that. But behind this fight lies an older and more fundamental struggle?against economic liberalization, and against the chief representative thereof, which is the United States. Anti-globalism carnivals often feature an Uncle Sam in a Stars-and-Stripes costume as their supreme scapegoat. In this way, the new movement taps into an old socialist tradition, where opposition to economic freedom and opposition to America are impossible to separate.
The simplistic article of Marxist faith that capitalism is absolute evil, and that it is incarnated in and directed by the United States, may be the most important principle shared by the current crop of anti-globalizers. America is the object of their loathing because for a half century or more it has been the most prosperous and creative capitalist society on earth. But ultimately it is something even bigger that the anti-globalizers want to destroy: liberal democracy and free-market economics. Or quite simply liberty itself.
According to the anti-globalists, the global marketplace will breed ever-increasing poverty for the profit of an ever-richer minority. This is of course the outcome Karl Marx predicted in the middle of the nineteenth century for the industrialized nations of Western Europe and North America. But we all know how history has confirmed that brilliant prophecy. So the old prediction has been transferred to a new locale, new time, and new active agency. Ah, the genius of ?scientific socialism.?
But today?s anti-globalists are much more than false prophets. Their violence has gone far beyond legitimate protest into real savagery. They have killed people through charming acts like bombing McDonald?s restaurants. In Seattle, Nice, Genoa, and other cities, rioters destroyed millions of dollars worth of property and attacked officials and police.
Anti-globalists have tried to replace democracy with a despotism of the mob, advancing the brutal proposition that street demonstrators are more legitimate than elected governments. Wherever they have been active, their goal has been to prevent elected heads of state or appointed officials of international organizations from meeting. Like other totalitarians, they treat the mere expression of ideas contrary to their slogans as a crime.
Anti-globalizers have no ambition to advance a program by democratic means, for the simple reason that they don?t have a program, or coherent ideas, or facts on their side. So instead they beat relentlessly on the archaic anti-capitalist and anti-American drum. In Genoa we saw red flags adorned with hammer and sickle, effigies of Che Guevara, and the acronym for the Red Brigades.
The anti-globalists are often incoherent. They brought mayhem to Seattle in the name of combating a ?savage? globalism that ?profits only the rich.? Yet which groups met in Seattle? The World Trade Organization (WTO), whose role is precisely to monitor international economic transactions so as to prevent them from being ?savage.? There has not been a country in the world that hasn?t been eager to be admitted into the WTO, and the poorest are the most eager.
At Genoa, the hooligans who smashed the facades of banks before the conference even began said they objected to rich countries that didn?t care about the poor countries of the world. Actually, the goal of the international summit they were warring against was specifically to help poor countries. The eight leading industrial countries present were meeting to target aid for economic development in the Southern Hemisphere, and for creation of a global fund to finance the medical campaigns against AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis, especially in sub-Saharan Africa.
If you ask the developing countries what they want, they will tell you they want more globalization, not less. What they desire most of all is freer access to the world?s best markets for their products. So when well-heeled young radical protestors try to subvert meetings whose goal is to extend free trade and strengthen poor countries? ability to export goods, they actually act as enemies of the world?s poor. The 2001 conference meeting in Quebec City that was invaded and wrecked by protestors, for example, had been organized to lay out the basis for a single American market that would open the rich northern countries of U.S. and Canada to the products of the poorer South American countries.
So it is astonishing when European leaders declare themselves ?impressed? by the rioters, and convinced of the necessity to ?dialogue? with them. It is grotesque to see the leftist press and political stratum, seemingly having learned nothing from the socialist catastrophes and absurdities of the last generation, now greet this new crusade against capitalism with open arms. The president of the French republic, Jacques Chirac, paid tribute to a ?global social consciousness? and pleaded before his peers in favor of ?normal and permanent dialogue? with the demonstrators.
Governments discredit themselves when they give in to violent demonstrators, because violence paralyzes democracy itself. Democrats worthy of the name should not forget that power is conferred by ballots, not by bricks hurled through windows. It is disturbing that the Left too often ignores this principle.
It?s important to recall that it is only market globalization that the Left rejects. In fact, the Left has always hoped for globalization without the market?an ideologically correct world government. Soviet and Maoist communists always felt the vocational urge to impose their models on the whole of humanity, if need be by armed subversion, which they did not hesitate to use on five continents. Although they lack the means to undertake bellicose operations on such a scale, today?s anti-globalizers are no less internationalist in their ambitions.
But history shows that only capitalism can deliver a form of globalism whose balance sheet, while not without liabilities, is on the whole positive. The beneficial effects of widening commerce were evident as far back as the Middle Ages and ancient Rome. But it was not until after the great explorations of the late fifteenth century and the growth of transatlantic trade that globalization in the modern sense of the term began. Merchant capitalism developed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; the industrial revolution spread throughout Europe and North America from about 1840 to 1914.
It was Europe that created the first world markets, as her capital, technologies, languages, and people spread over every continent. She was the driving force of an international circulation of commodities, scientific knowledge, ideas, and techniques. After the catastrophe of World War I, Europe drew back and turned in on herself. Her supremacy became a thing of the past. She even became divided within as her countries erected barriers against each other.
On the other side of the Atlantic, the United States, Argentina, and Brazil, whose immense territories were traditionally open to immigrants and foreign products, barricaded themselves in turn. International trade plummeted, capital could no longer circulate, exchange controls were instituted and there were efforts to fix currencies by decree. All over the world, economic life stagnated and came to resemble what today?s enemies of globalism desire for us. The result was not long in coming: the stock market crash of 1929, followed by the Great Depression, with tens of millions unemployed. (France would not return to her 1914 per capita income level until the beginning of the 1950s.)
After World War II, the United States became a powerful advocate in favor of free world commerce. If world economic activity at the turn of the millennium is now thoroughly global, capitalist, and U.S.-led, this has nothing to do with ?arrogance.? The enfeebling of the Europeans? position in the world is self-caused: They alone are responsible for their own heaped-up aberrations and follies over the first half of the past century. This weakening entailed the corresponding and virtually automatic rise of the United States.
Strikingly, Americans continue to increase their lead, even since the consolidation of the European Union. That a united Europe hasn?t yet risen to the challenge is obviously not for lack of material and human resources, but rather for lack of understanding of how to use them. Inhibited by ideological prejudices, Europe, despite her successes, continues to live overshadowed by America. Witness the fact that the health of her economy is dependent on the state of America?s economy: Whenever the latter goes into recession, as in the beginning of 2001, Europe falters.
Elsewhere, American-style market capitalism is equally successful and dominant. Third World countries have developed at sharply different rates basically according to the degree to which they have respected free markets, and left economic activity to private enterprise rather than to undertakings of the state. Even in nations like China where political communism has artificially prolonged its existence, it has done so only by thoroughly expunging economic socialism through privatization, appeals to foreign investors, deregulation of commerce, and establishment of cross-border trade agreements. Only Cuba and North Korea have clung to economic collectivism, with utterly disastrous results.
Will jealous activists from Europe and some other nations treat globalism as poisonous merely by virtue of its association with America? In July 2001, when the ?Network of French Cultural Cooperation? gathered at France?s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, French foreign minister Lionel Jospin called upon the participants to fight liberalizing, American-style globalization with their brand of globalization, which Jospin said would be based on the ?affirmation of states against the unbridled laws of the market.? In the process, France would replace America as the global leader.
This crusade has deep roots. Back in May 1944, Hubert Beuve-Méry, the future founder and editor of Le Monde, the most influential journal in France today, was able to write that ?The Americans constitute a real danger for France?. They cling to a veritable cult of the idea of liberty (and) don?t feel the need to liberate themselves from the servitudes that their capitalism entails.? The fact that an important Frenchman was able to argue this even while France was occupied by the Nazis, with the possibility of American liberation being their only hope for a different future, indicates the depth of both the hatred for economic liberty and the anti-American obsession in France.
Resentments that lead to the rejection of every idea that comes from America simply because it is American can only weaken countries. To follow such a course is to let phobias become guiding principles. Does anyone really believe today that nations which substitute government edicts for economic markets are likelier to prosper? Must we close our eyes to the achievements of the last 50 years of increasing economic liberty, when worldwide production grew by a factor of six and the volume of exports by a factor of 17? Must investment capitalism abroad, the engine of extraordinary, racing progress for many previously poor countries, be banned just because it often brings links to America?
We French have had little to say against Saddam Hussein, Muammar Qaddafi, Kim Jong Il, Fidel Castro, Robert Mugabe, the imams of the Islamic Republic of Iran, or the bosses of China and Vietnam. We reserve our admonitions and our contempt and our attacks for the U.S., for Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, and for Europeans like Margaret Thatcher, Silvio Berlusconi, and Tony Blair, because they are insufficiently hostile to capitalism. Our enemy is not the dictator but the free market economy.
Anti-globalizers make the same mistake. What?s important to them is not the eradication of poverty. Rather, it is the propaganda value they gain from linking poverty to the spreading market economy. But this puts them on the wrong side of all evidence, of reality, of history.
Life expectancy in Third World countries has more than doubled during the free-market dominated second half of the twentieth century. In India, food production has grown by a factor of ten, leading to the elimination of massive famines. In Latin America, per capita income doubled between 1950 and 1985. Over the past 50 years, Latin America on the whole has experienced an annual growth of 5 percent. No European country can boast an equivalent rate. These figures show to what an extent the mantras about ever-increasing poverty spring from ignorance or simple dishonesty. Where poverty continues to exist today it is almost wholly due to ruinously inefficient public sectors.
This is most obvious in Africa, the only Third World continent to have actually declined. Impoverishment there has political, not economic, causes. It is statism, not the market, and socialism, not capitalism, that has destroyed the African economies. After independence, the African elites who formed the political leadership generally adopted the Soviet and Chinese systems. Thus they were able to assume absolute power with access to the levers of personal enrichment. And from communism they borrowed an infallible recipe for agricultural ruin: collectivizing the land, from Algeria to Tanzania, setting up ?cooperatives? that quickly became unproductive.
In these fatal mistakes the Third World has had false friends. In particular, the privileged pseudo-revolutionaries of Seattle and Göteborg have encouraged them down the primrose path of anti-capitalism. Lacking any real knowledge about the African cataclysm, and careless about finding remedies, the anti-globalist agitators prefer hurling brickbats at their perennial hobgoblin to the moral imperative of saving and improving lives.This just licenses Africa?s socialist dictators to commit their robberies. In Madagascar, the anti-American radical Didier Ratsiraka received a fortune in francs, but the starving Madagascan people never had the slightest whiff of it. An investigative journalist could do well to search for traces in Switzerland or elsewhere of the billions of dollars stolen by the late Nigerian dictator Sani Abacha. And what?s the point (other than irritating America) of defending Robert Mugabe, a typical dictator who has rigged every election in Zimbabwe and managed in 20 years to transform one of the most fertile lands of Africa into one of the most desolate? Between 1960 and 2000, Africa received four times as much funding and aid per capita as Latin America or Asia.

How was it that these last two continents took off, and not Africa? By practicing capitalism and establishing world trade.
But it is pointless to set forth facts like these to anti-globalizers; they simply howl in indignation. In spreading the lie that globalization impoverishes the most needy, the protestors simply act upon their twin enthusiasms: anti-American and anti-capitalism. Their floating mass of some hundreds of thousands of demonstrators is their compensation for the frustration of having seen all the socialisms and all the revolutions fail. At a time when they have no positive alternative, yelling slogans and trashing cities and blocking international gatherings provide them with the illusion of moral action

"The French always place a school of thought, a formula, convention, a priori arguments, abstraction, and artificiality above reality; they prefer clarity to truth, words to things, rhetoric to science. ... They emerge from description only to hurl themselves into precipitate generalizations. They imagine they understand man in his entirety, whereas they cannot break the hard shell of their personalities, and they do not understand a single nation apart from themselves." - H. F. Amiel

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Viejo Vizcacha:

[nq:1]This guy must have inherited some genes after Frederic Bastiat: sharp, insightful and articulate. Anti-Globalism = Anti-Americanism By Jean-Francois ... organizations, many of them subsidized by governments, and they sack cities and lay siege to international meetings during their battles.[/nq]
Wow! If I had been without news, and living in another planet for the last five years, and were to try to know what is going on by reading articles liek this, I would think that every freaking month (what month? week!!) there is a gathering of tens of thousands of people in some world capital destroying private property, and killing police officers.

So, for starters, we can say that the author is a bit on the exagerting side when trying to build his case. As far as I can remember, the anti-globalization demonstrations are far and between, and though there have been a few incidents, there have been none killed, or seriously injured, and no more than a dozen shops attacked in couple of times.
[nq:1]What motivates this extraordinary resistance? Globalization simply means freedom of movement for goods and people, and it is hard to ... lies an older and more fundamental struggle?against economic liberalization, and against the chief representative thereof, which is the United States.[/nq]
Here is another struggling bachelor in political science trying to get by on scraps from the US State Department. Is he suggesting that "globalization" means freedom of movement for people, and the US is behind it? So, what the heck is that wall along the border with Mexico doing?
[nq:1]Anti-globalism carnivals often feature an Uncle Sam in a Stars-and-Stripes costume as their supreme scapegoat. In this way, the new movement taps into an old socialist tradition, where opposition to economic freedom and opposition to America are impossible to separate.[/nq]
And pro-globalization articles often feature communists, marxists, hippies, drug addicts, confused lieerals, wel meaning but misguided religious people, and immature youth as their scapegoat. In this way the old movement taps into the old maccarthyist tradition, where opposition to imperialism si equated to anti-Americanism.
[nq:1]The simplistic article of Marxist faith that capitalism is absolute evil, and that it is incarnated in and directed by ... is something even bigger that the anti-globalizers want to destroy: liberal democracy and free-market economics. Or quite simply liberty itself.[/nq]
The simplistic article of capitalist faith is that Capitalism is the absolute good, and that it is incarnated in and directed by the United States, may be the most important principle shared by the current crop of globalizers, from Christian fundamentalists, to neo-cons, through objectivists.
[nq:1]According to the anti-globalists, the global marketplace will breed ever-increasing poverty for the profit of an ever-richer minority.[/nq]
According to the globalists, teh global marketplace will breed everincreasing prosperity for the profit of an ever-richer majority.
[nq:1]This is of course the outcome Karl Marx predicted in the middle of the nineteenth century for the industrialized nations ... In Seattle, Nice, Genoa, and other cities, rioters destroyed millions of dollars worth of property and attacked officials and police.[/nq]
Really? Could you please give us the number of people killed in Seattle, Nice, Genoa, and other cities, other than one fellow killed BY THE POLICE?
From time to time someone writing stupid things gets them published in the newsgroups. The rest of us have the right to call it what it is: garbage!
Regards,
VV

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Viejo Vizcacha:

[nq:2]Pour commencer, click cette direction d'internet http://europa.eu.int/comm/agriculture/survey/index en.htm Quand la ... ou, tu trouverais la section du document que j'ai mentionne.[/nq]
[nq:1]Merci. Il y a encore du travail à faire avec ton français mais bravo pour l'effort.[/nq]
Todo el esfuerzo que lleva usar un traductor de web. Con razón el jefe le dijo a Mario que el que llamaba usaba un francés malísimo.

Saludos,
VV

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GREGG . <-->:

[nq:1]This guy must have inherited some genes after Frederic Bastiat: sharp, insightful and articulate. Anti-Globalism = Anti-Americanism By Jean-Francois Revel[/nq]
OUTSTANDING !!!
Cheers,
Gregg
PS: my share follows...

The anti-American obsession
by Jean-Francois Revel

=
This essay is adapted from the book Anti-Americanism, a translation of Jean-Francois Revels Lobsession anti-americaine: Son fonctionnement, ses causes, ses inconsequences published in September

=
"Cultural diversity" has replaced "cultural exceptionalism" in the French-inspired, European rhetoric. But in actuality, the two terms cover the same kind of cultural protectionism. The idea that a culture can preserve its originality by barricading itself against foreign influences is an old illusion that has always produced the opposite of the desired result. Isolation breeds sterility. It is the free circulation of cultural products and talents that allows each society to perpetuate and renew itself.
The proof of this goes back to the old comparison between Athens and Sparta. It was Athens, the open city, that was the prolific fount of creation in letters and arts, philosophy and mathematics, political science, and history. Sparta, jealously guarding its exceptionalism, pulled off the tour de force of being the only Greek city not to have produced a single notable poet, ora- tor, thinker, or architect; their achievement was diversity of a sort, but at the price of emptiness. Parallel phenomena of cultural vacuity are found again in contemporary totalitarian states. Fear of ideological contamination induced the Nazis, the Soviets, and the Maoists to take refuge in an official art and a pompously dogmatic literature, sheer insults to the heritage of the peoples on whom they were inflicted.When, in December 2001, Jean-Marie Messier said that French-style cultural exceptionalism is dead, he aroused horrified protests, but he was not going nearly far enough. He could have added: in fact, French cultural exceptionalism has never existed, thank goodness. If it had, it would be French culture itself that would be extinct. Lets suppose that the sixteenth-century kings of France, instead of inviting Italian artists to their courts, had said to themselves: This predominance of Italian painting is insufferable.

Well keep those painters and their pictures out of the country. The result of this castrating démarche would have been to thwart a renewal of French art. Again: between 1880 and 1914 there were many more French Impressionist paintings in American museums and the homes of private collectors than there were in France, despite whichor because of whichAmerican art was subsequently able to find its own wellsprings, and then influence French art in turn.
These cross-fertilizations are indifferent to political antagonisms. It was during the first half of the seventeenth century, when France and Spain were frequently at war, that the creative influence of Spanish literature on the French was particularly marked. The eighteenth century, which saw repeated conflict between France and England, was also the period when the most active and productive intellectual exchanges between the two countries occurred. And between
1870 and 1945, diplomatic relations between France and Germany werehardly idyllic, yet those were the years when German philosophers and historians had the most to teach the French. And wasnt Nietzsche steeped in the ideas of the French moralists? It would be possible to extend indefinitely the list of examples illustrating this truth: cultural diversity arises from manifold exchanges. This applies just as well to gastronomy: only McDonalds-hating lunatics are unaware of the obvious fact that there have never been so many restaurants offering foreign cuisines, in practically every country, as in our day. Far from imposing standardiza- tion, international exchange diversifies. Withdrawing behind a wall can only dry up inspiration.

In practice, Europeansand chiefly the Frenchuse the jargon phrases cultural exceptionalism and cultural diversity as code words for state aid and quotas. We keep hearing that, after all, Cultural goods are not simple commodities. But that is merely a platitude. Whoever pretended that they were? Still, neither are they purely the products of state financing; otherwise, Soviet painting would have been the finest in the world.
Look at the Italian cinema industry, people say. Without government support, it has practically disappeared. Yet in the years after the war, the brilliance of Italian film came not from subsidies, but from Rossellini and De Sica, Blasetti and Castellani, Visconti, and Fellini. Similarly, Spanish cinema owed its blossoming in the 1980s to the imagination of its creators and not to ministerial grants. And if the French film industry in 2001 has recaptured market leadership at home and found successes abroad, this is not because it is more subsidized than formerly, but because it has managed to produce a handful of films whose quality was appreciated not only by their auteurs, but by the public. A commercially successful French cinema, with international appeal, evidences a more authentic diversity than the kind preached by tedious diversity-mongers.
This revival must be placed in perspective, however. As Dominique Moïsi dared to write, The irony of this debate is increased by the fact that last year, the symbol of Frances successful resistance to Hollywoods hegemony was a pleasant but very superficial comedy, Le Fabuleux Destin dAmélie Poulain (Amélie), a string of trendy clips in advertising style without any social or intellectual content whatsoever. By comparison, Ken Loachs penetrating films, which owe nothing to cultural exceptionalism, reflect a stimulating, refreshing cultural diversity.(1)You dont have to be an Aristotle or a Leibniz to grasp that universal exceptionalism is a contradiction in terms on the most elementary level of logic. And it is not the only such contradiction in a confused quarrel that has more to do with strong emotions than rational analysis. So Denis Olivennes, who heads Canal +, a television network that plays a big role in the French film industrys financing, argues that a linchpin of this financial support is a tax on all new releases.

In this way, he writes, American films, which represent about half of new releases, contribute half of the funding. Here is impressive sleight of hand. For its obvious that American films would not provide the funds, but rather the French filmgoer. More generally, the opposition between the state and the market in relation to the arts, between public moneys and the money of the public, is a misleading one. Public funds have but one source: the public, which is taxed by one means or another, directly or indirectly.

The question is what proportion of the publics contribution is freely offered and what proportion is milked from it by government fiat, then spent according to the whims of a minority of political and administrative decision-makers and commissions whose members are appointed, not elected.
A culture becomes decadent when it takes to running down other cultures while heaping praises on itself. Thus the professionals of radio and television keep harping on the notionwhich they end up seeming to believe and making their audiences believethat American television movies, produced with the sole aim of making a profit, avoid all controversial social and political issues. But French series, we are told over and over again, draw from a tradition of publicly funded state television; even productions from our privatized networks follow the aesthetic canons of this tradition. So they escape the tyranny of profit and can risk upsetting some of their viewers by courageously airing serious, painful controversies.

French television series are not designed to make you think. The three main networks have one and the same policy when it comes to TV drama: catering to conformism. The viewers are treated like sheep. Conversely, in the United States television, with its social critiques, has taken over from the cinema of the years between 1930 and 1950. Conventional French productions hold the public all the more captive in that only 15 percent of French people have access to cable or satellite television, compared with 80 percent in America.Bringing grist to the mill, let me cite the episodic television drama about the Watergate affair that was filmed and broadcast in the United States very soon after Richard Nixons resignation in the mid-seventies. The actor who played the president was virtually his double, and all the others were easily identifiable as real characters. And of course this was not the only national scandal that furnished the plot for an American TV production or movie, or a scenario close to actual events.

But Im still waiting for French equivalents: exposés, perhaps, of the insider trading that led to Pechineys buy- out of Triangleinsiders, it seems, at the highest levels of governmentand of the Crédit Lyonnais and Elf scandals. If they were to be comparable to American productions, they would have to be accurate renditions of these episodes, highly unflattering to France, with a cast closely modeled on the original. Its likely that well have to wait a long time for these programs.

Rehashing one of the stalest Marxist clichés, Catherine Tasca, the French minister of culture, confided to the Figaro magazine that market laws are the totems of American power. In fact, market laws are not so much totems as the explanation.
In the cultural as in other domains, the quarrel with globalization that flared up during the 1990s actually represents a resistance to Americanization. Here again, in our perception of Americas influence as a threat and a disease, we should distinguish between what is fantastical and what is justified. And we should ask ourselves if American culture might include achievements and ways of doing things that others would do well to look at and emulate.The fear of seeing cultural identities drowned in a kind of planetary standardization, which today is thought to be overwhelmingly American in coloration but in former times showed other hues, has no basis in historical fact or impartial observation of todays reality. The commingling of cultures, with predominance going first to one and then to another, has always ledin antiquity, in the medieval period, and in the modern worldnot to uniformity, but to diversity.

This is what is happening to- day, as the Swedish essayist Johan Norberg (among many others) has pointed out: Many people are afraid that the world will become McDonaldized and homogenized: we will all end up wearing the same clothes, seeing the same films. But this is not a good description of the globalization process. Take a walk in Stockholm and look for yourself. Of course youll find burgers and Coca Cola, but you can also pick and choose from shish kebab, sushi, Tex-Mex, Peking duck, French cheeses, Thai soup. And the author recalls what is frequently forgotten: that American culture is not just songs by Madonna and action films starring Arnold Schwarzenegger; it includes 1,700 symphony orchestras, opera attended by 7.5 million people every year, and museums that are visited by 500 million annually.

Almost all American museums, where entrance is quite often free, owe their existence and funding to private sponsors.
It is surprising that artists should have so little esteem for their art that they see its international dissemination as strictly dependent on the power of money and ad- vertising. Bertrand Tavernier, for example, whom I nevertheless knew to be a connoisseur of American cinema before he himself became a filmmaker, explained its success in these terms: With the complicity of certain politicians and even newspapers rely- ing on a bomb-proof distribution system, Americans impose their films on us.(2) Yet Tavernier ought to know that a work of literature or art, still less a work of entertainment, can never be imposed on the public by force or cajoling. All the coercive power of the Soviet Union never succeeded, however much the commissars might have wanted to, in imposing official literature on readers, who preferred the clandestinely circulated, mimeographed material famously known as samizdat (literally, self-published). When the authors or distributors of this literature were caught by the police, they were charged with cosmopolitanismanother name for globalismand sent to prison camps or special psychiatric hospitals.
In January 2002, when Yves Saint Laurent unexpectedly announced his decision to retire, suddenly bringing his career as couturier to an end, reaction to the news was worldwide. And it was not only Saint Laurents talent that was influential everywhere, but also that of his predecessors, who for over a century had created and sustained French leadership in haute couture (which is not to diminish the excellence of other schools, notably the Italian). There was no suggestion in the foreign press that this traditional preeminence of French haute couture and Saint Laurents influence was attributable to a bomb-proof distribution system that, with the shady complicity of politicians and newspapers, had succeeded in imposing French styles on others. Anyone who said as much would have been ridiculed.

But the French make themselves liable to such ridicule when they assess the achievements of others. For instance, between 1948 and 1962, most of the of top prizes at the Venice Biennales were conferred on artists of the Paris school. But in 1964, when the first prize was awarded to Robert Rauschenberg, the newest leading light of a New York school that had been showing great vitality for twenty years, the French cried scandal, imperialism, and collusion with dealers.
I have finally understood what pluralism is; its when lots of people share my point of view. In that spirit, governments and elites almost everywhere have signed on to cultural globalism provided that their own countries are its source and model. In 1984, presenting a Projet culturel extérieur de la France, the French government said, with signal modesty, that this manifesto had no parallel in other countries. All cultures are of equal value, conceded the authors of this official document (a statement erring on the side of simplistic political correctness), but our culture is predestined to be a universal mediator, for it is shared by people of every continent. Touching optimism indeed, which naturally led up to the conclusion that the future of the French language in the world can only be as a promoter of cultural progress and is closely linked to the future of people everywhere. Global homogenization of culture, in the illusions of these authors, is fineprovided that it emanates from France.

And the homogenization in question, which today is perceived most often as Americanization, is (insofar as it exists) American only in its most superficial and least durable aspects. It is above all the vehicle for popular culturethe entertainment, clothing styles, and fast foods favored by the young, and popular music (but not all of it, by any means). Here the word culture is being used in the rather loose sense that has prevailed because it is the entertainment industry that leads the choir in lamenting American influence. This influence may present a problem, but to identify the whole of cultural life with entertainment is a travesty.
Contrary to what Jacques Chirac maintained, globalization is not a cultural steamroller. It is and always has been an engine of enrichment. Think, for example, how the French artistic sensibility was revitalized by the discoveryor rather fuller knowledgeof Japanese painting afforded at the end of the nineteenth century, or by the arrival in France of African art ten or twenty years later. There are plenty of similar cases. Unless one has been brainwashed by the brawlers of Seattle and Porto Alegre, the age-old lesson of the history of civilizations cannot be erased: barriers are what diminish and sterilize cultures; commingling is what fructifies and inspires them.Science is a different matter. Research depends much more on financial support than other pursuits. This fact partly explains the current American dominance, but only partly. It stems also from the way that American universities manage to combine teaching and research much more closely than their European counterparts, excepting German and British institutions. This is one of the reasons why American universities attract so many foreign students and professors.

In its report for 2002, the French revenue court criticizedyet againthe CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique) for its sclerosis, aging researchers, and absence of peer review. This pessimistic diagnosis is a refrain that has been periodically repeated over the last few decades, but, as is common in France in every domain, it has never led to the slightest reform. Despite these drawbacks, some Nobel Prizes have gone to French scientists in recent decades, as well as to scientists of other countries, although the United States has of course won by far the largest number.

So geographical diversity still prevails in the sciences, even though the notion of diversity in science itself is relatively meaningless: scientific knowledge, in contrast to understanding of sculpture or music, is no different in Tokyo, Rome, or Bombay than it is in Massachusetts or California.

The equal-opportunity nature of scientific knowledge means that internationalism is a necessary condition for its most rapid progress. If Descartes, through philosophical dogmatism, had not rejected Galileos physics, perhaps it might have fallen to a French scientist to make the discoveries that Newton eventually made in England, where speculation was much less constrained by metaphysical presuppositions than it was in France. And if Islam had not rejected modern science, perhaps Islamic countries would not have suffered from the cultural exceptionalism that has been theirs, and not always helpful, for the last three centuries.
For a culture to be strong and internationally prominent depends on the scope and quality of education at home and within its domain of influence, and how it adapts to evolving knowledge. The deterioration of elementary and secondary teaching in France since about 1970 is an acknowledged catastrophe, abundantly doc- umented and discussed. But there is less agreement about the deficiencies of French higher education. At a time when a grow- ing portion of the population has access to higher education, the quality of university instruction is crucial for the health of a culture and its appeal to outside observers.Why do students, teachers, and researchers from every country in the world swarm to American schools and not to ours? In an important study, LUniversité française du XIXe au XXIe siècle, Jean-Claude Casa- nova ruthlessly exposes how French higher education has failed in comparison with what is available in the United States. One reason is simply lack of money. The author notes that the endowment of Harvard, certainly not the largest university in America, is close to $20 billionmore than twice the annual expenditure of France on its entire university system.

A second cause of our weakness, since the beginning of the nineteenth century, has been the promotion of administrative centralization. For a long time we have spoken of the French university rather than French universities. By the late nineteenth century, in his book Les Origines de la France contemporaine, Hippolyte Taine was convincingly describing the cultural sclerosis engendered by this academic authoritarianism.

To this lack of autonomy in our universities was added the mistake of separating teaching from research. For fifty years the harmful consequences have been regularly denounced by prominent French scientists, above all those who have had experience with German, English, and American universities. In this area as elsewhere, French reluctance to take account of the most incontrovertible studies and to make reforms (except in rhetorical fashion) has perpetuated this absurd divorce. Finally, a third weakness, according to Casanova, is that the French university system was slow to extend education to the masses, by contrast with American universities, the first in the world to get serious about this task from the middle of the twentieth century onwards.
True culture always transcends national frontiers. Among all the contradictions of anti-Americanism, one of the oddest is that one finds condemnation of cultural internationalism even when roles are reversedthat is, when it is American culture or popular culture that is subject to foreign influence. Thus, a Québecois journalist blathers against the cultural fast food of the hour The Phantom of the Opera, a cultural equivalent of the Big Mac. As it happens, the show that Mme. Vaillancourt is talking about was originally not an American but a British production, and journalists should know that it was developed from the renowned French novel that came out in 1910, Le Fantôme de lOpéra, which we owe to Gaston Leroux. We ought to be happy that a popular French book finds itself, by means of an American adaptation, also translated onto movie screens throughout the world. But in Mario Roys pertinent comment, Facts have never been the point, of course.
Hatred for America is sometimes pushed to the point where it transmutes into hatred for ourselves in France. This is what we saw when the Disneyland near Paris was opened in 1992. This event was denounced by our intellectuals as a cultural Chernobyl. But you will notice that a large part of Walt Disneys themes, especially in his feature movies, are drawn from European sources. Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, Sleeping Beauty, Carlo Collodis Pinocchio, the musical scores in Fantasia, the reconstruction of the pirates ship from Robert Louis Stevensons Treasure Islandall are borrowings from, and homages to, European creativity. And Disney pays deference to other traditional masterpieces from various culturesfor example, The Thousand and One Nights.
That these popular stories, the fruit of the imagination of so many different peoples over so many centuries, orally transmitted from generation to generation, then fixed in written form by authors who collected them, should finally appear in a completely new medium thanks to the unique talent of a Californian artistisnt this an example of the unforeseeable paths and crossroads of cultures? Their dynamic motifs travel by varied transmission routes, ancient and modern, scornful of the prudish chauvinism of the narrow-minded protectionists.(3)
These last will surely raise the objection that exploitation of these ancient Western and oriental legends by American show business can only betray their special qual- ities by deforming and commercializing them. Hollywood, as everyone knows, or ought to know, has never been anything but the capital of bad taste, vulgarity, and banality. American show business destroys other cultures more than it honors them. But at this point, we have left the sphere of reason to enclose ourselves in our own self-contradictory fantasies.
Shame at seeing the variety of cultures allegedly being effaced for the profit of America alone is reinforced by another factor, this one very real: the international spread of the English language. English is the mother tongue of approximately 380 million human beings. Almost an equal number use it as a second language, not counting the legions who know a few words and phrases, an indispensable minimum of the lingua franca for travel abroad, even in non-Anglophone countries.

If this internationalization of English is largely the consequence of American superpower, does that mean it must lead to the cultural Americanization of the planet? Not at all. Obviously, to learn elementary English, enough for everyday needsfor commercial exchanges, financial transactions, even political and diplomatic businessdoesnt require even a superficial familiarity with Anglo-American culture and thought, much less the abandonment of ones own culture.

The utilitarian use of English by hundreds of millions of our contemporaries is clearly not incompatible with an abysmal ignorance of the great writers and thinkers as well as the historical, political, and religious events that have forged the British and American civilizations. Conversely, someone who knows scarcely a word of the Russian language can be imbued with the Russian sensibility thanks to assiduous reading of Russian classics in the often fine translations that have been made in so many languages.

And then, globalization is equally a factor in the learning of foreign languages other than English. As Mario Vargas Llosa writes, How many millions of young people of both sexes, throughout the world, have undertaken, thanks to globalization, to learn Japanese, German, Mandarin and Cantonese Chinese, Arabic, Russian or French? Undoubtedly the number is very large, and this is a sign of our times; the trend, fortunately, will continue to grow in years to come. So lets not forget: globalization is really the facilitation of travel, both mentally and physically. The furthest destinations, once accessible only to the wealthy, are now within reach of a vast crowd of cosmopolitans, for a relatively modest sum.One may justifiably object that the omnipresence of English could lead to the adulteration of other languages, not so much by borrowings that they make from Englishthis is a normal and universal linguistic phenomenonas by the distortions in syntax and vocabulary that Anglicisms may impose. In France, Étiemble listed, from 1964, an inventory of such contaminations of the French language in its famous Parlez-vous franglais? If abusive or superfluous Americanisms do have a tendency to invade other languages, it should nevertheless be stressed that the decay of some high culture languages has mostly autonomous causes.

There are two principal ones: the decline in educational levels in nations where they were previously high, and a spurious modernism that regards any concern to protect and develop the specific virtues of a language as backward-looking academic purism. The majority of semantic confusions, improprieties, and syntactical inconsistencies that pepper, for example, the French media language are of purely domestic origin. They owe nothing to contamination by English.

Yet, it is true that the impoverishment of a language makes it more and more vulnerable to invasion by alien terms and structuresas happens today, in the majority of cases, from a bastardized English. Of course, every language must evolve, but its a mistake to forget that the evolution can be to good or ill effect. The bombing of a cathedral is certainly one form of architectural innovation, but does that make it desirable?
It remains a fact that in the domain of languages too, globalization leads to variety, not uniformity. The spread of English facilitates communication and mutual influence between cultures; it is hardly a trivial matter when, thanks to the lingua franca, Japan- ese, Germans, Filipinos, Italians, Russians, French, Brazilians, etc., can participate in the same colloquium, sharing information and ideas. Meanwhile, many more people than in the past speak or understand, in addition to their native language, one or two foreign languages other than English.The real dangerconceivably a mortal onefor European culture is that anti-American and antiglobalist phobias might derail progress. Guy Sorman has shown the scientific and technological retreats this obscurantism has led to in his book Le Progrès et ses ennemis. And this isnt some right-wing or left-wing thesis; it is a rational one. It is defended alike by the liberal-democrat Sorman and by the socialist Claude Allègre. The latter wages war against the idea that Europe should abandon nuclear energy, genetic engineering and research using embryonic cells.

Should the pressure groups that agitate against progress win the day, in twenty years the European states will regress, he writes, to the level of the underdeveloped countries, in a world that will be dominated by the United States and China (LExpress, February 7, 2002.) The anti-American fanatics will then have succeeded in making Europe even more dependant on the United States than it is today.

"This is an age of exhausted whoredom groping for its God." (James Joyce, Ulisses p.280)
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