Who's Right in France?
What is happening in the streets of French cities is in one sense deeply absurd. The object of the protests is withdrawal by the government of a modest law intended to improve employment chances for poorly qualified young people.

The measure is being attacked by its opponents as reinforcing the precariousness of the lives of those same young people. This is a dramatization in the great tradition of French political psychodrama. What is most interesting, however, has been the revelation of the economic and social anxiety of the French middle classes.

The usual foreign description of the French problem is that the nation and its political and economic elites are failing to confront the demands of the globalized economy, taking refuge in the unrealistic notion of defending a French "social model" that has no place in the modern world. Hence any effort to make the employment market more flexible is rejected, with consequent high French unemployment.

Actually, French youth unemployment is not what it is usually made out to be, since free baccalaureate- and university-level education keeps young people out of the job market much longer than in most countries. As a result, as The Financial Times reported last weekend, the official figures are misleading. The newspaper calculates that 7.8 percent of French under-25s are actually out of work, as compared with 7.4 percent in Britain and 6.5 percent in Germany.

Similarly, it seems to me that the current unrest in France signals wider popular resistance in Europe to the most important element in the new model of market economics, its undermining of the place of the employee in the corporate order, deliberately rendering the life of the employee precarious.

The model's principal characteristic in the United States has been the transfer of wealth to stockholders and managers, and away from public interests (by tax cuts) and employees (through wage-depression and elimination of employee benefits).

In this perspective, what in France seems to be a sterile defense of an obsolete social and economic order might be interpreted as a premonitory appeal for a new but humane model to replace it. It could be Europe's opportunity.