[A-List] France: strategic reorientation

["Michael Keaney" <michael.keaney@xxxxxx>]

It is clear that, just as Bush and co. have derailed the British drive
towards Europe, so too has it clarified the importance for Europe to the
French ruling class. Thus Chirac, having been a staunch opponent of
Schröder, going so far as to openly back Edmund Stoiber in last year's
election, is now parading his new love affair with Gerhard, who went so far
as to ask France to represent Germany at the recent UN vote on Bush's
pathetic Iraq resolution. Meanwhile the French state is restructuring
itself. Dressed up in populist garb it's apparently all about the
decentralisation of previously remote institutions. But the relocation of
ENA to Strasbourg, home of the European parliament, suggests something else
at work here -- a clear indication of just how important Europe has become
in French strategic thinking.

----

Raffarin seeks to shift elite school out of Paris
By Jo Johnson in Paris
Financial Times; Oct 23, 2003

The Ecole Nationale d'Administration, the training ground of the French
elite since the liberation, is to be moved out of Paris as part of the
centre-right government's drive to decentralise France and overhaul the
civil service.

Under the proposed reform, the school, which has two of its three facilities
close to government ministries in Paris, will move all operations to its
base in Strasbourg. It will also make an internship with a company
compulsory and open up its competitive entrance exam to foreign students.

The emblematic reform, which will be presented today to parliament by
Jean-Paul Delevoye, the public service minister, is characteristic of the
efforts of Jean-Pierre Raffarin, the prime minister, to bring government in
touch with the concerns of la France d'en bas -his term for "the little
guy".

ENA's dominance of French public life - President Jacques Chirac is an
énarque ,agraduate of the school, as were three of the last four prime
ministers - has made it a perennial target for populist politicians.

The emphatically non-énarque Mr Raffarin, a provincial senator from
Poitou-Charentes in the west of France, has made decentralisation and
bridging the gap between the voters and the elites one of the few clearly
identifiable ideological themes of his premiership.

In recent years, even as the public sector has lost some of its dominance in
the French political economy, énarques have shown themselves to be natural
survivors, moving silkily into top positions in the private sector - a
process known as pantouflage, or "putting on slippers".

They run a quarter of France's 40 largest quoted companies. However, the
failures of high-profile énarque businessmen such as Jean-Marie Messier of
Vivendi Universal and Michel Bon of France Telecom have damaged the school's
reputation as a training ground for the private sector.

Although ENA accepts just 100-120 of France's most academically gifted
university graduates each year, its alumni, who are guaranteed civil service
jobs for life, have a stranglehold on French public life. Given its size,
this makes it the most ruthlessly successful old boy's network in Europe.

ENA addresses the criticism on its website. "Our school is a victim of its
success. Because some of our students have left the civil service, to work
in public or private businesses, or have successfully entered politics,
énarques are identified with politicians, bankers and those who 'run France'
in the collective imagination."