Tant Pis

Via Krugman, this chart points out just how bad the UK has had it under Osborne's economic stewardship. Looking forward to May, I am reminded of the dictum that the perfect election strategy is to deliberately collapse the economy for four years so when growth comes in the fifth you can point to your resounding success. Never mind. It's how France has fared that really interests me here.

Yes, France seems have done surprisingly well from the 2007 basepoint, despite being shackled to a horrible currency and suffering the innumerable problems of high unemployment, stagnant labour market, low competitiveness and everything else traditional for France. That's sort of my point, really. Even under a very poor leader with a weak political system and terrible economic times, France seems congenitally incapable of actually going into decline. God knows it's been threatening to since at least the time of Louis XIV.

If you quickly skim over the history of France, it can at times seem to be the history of permanent crisis. Even the period from 1780-1815 on its own should have been capable of knocking the country out of the running for Great Power status. Bankruptcy, famine, revolution, civil war, political turmoil, fighting absolutely everyone else on the continent for twenty years and losing most of your money and manpower in the process should put paid to a country. Later years involve being devastated by Germany three times in a row, a political system that could very rarely be called stable, expensive colonial wars, and on and on. And yet after seemingly being on the edge of terminal decline for pretty much two centuries, here they still are. Never was Adam Smith's "much ruin in a nation" quip more apt than for France.

How has France managed to be simultaneously the butt of jokes about efficiency and ability and more resilient than any other country? There are plenty of economic arguments to be made about what underpins the endless resurgence, I'm sure, although I have a strong feeling that the economic shackling to Germany postwar has had a curious effect of downplaying French success: that French corporations tend to be well-run and have high productivity rates, for example, is overshadowed by the more cliché-friendly if no less accurate similar observation about German ones.

As 2015 begins I am strangely sanguine about the future of Europe if only because the French experience proves that morale very rarely has an impact on the long-term prospects anyway. France, despite pessimism, sclerotic institutions, incompetence and instability has continued to win at history in the long term. I would be quite happy if the future of a united Europe was merely a rolling barrage of disaster, since that seems to have served one of its largest countries pretty well.