For decades France has been the red cape to the bull of liberal Atlanticist orthodoxy. Lukewarm on a transatlantic alliance others treated as sacrosanct, wedded to Gaullist multipolarity in a seemingly unipolar age, enduringly statist in defiance of Hayekian economics, heavy-handedly dirigiste in an age of decentralisation and networked power, at points it has appeared like the village in the Astérix books; the stubborn Gallic holdout against the end of history.
“Buy Taiwan, hold Italy, sell France” advised Thomas Friedman in The Lexus and the Olive Tree, his 1999 paean to liberal globalisation. Around the time of the Iraq War, the French were dismissed as “Old Europe” by Donald Rumsfeld, then the US secretary of defence, and “cheese eating surrender monkeys” elsewhere. “If the French social model is so great, why is the country in flames?” sighed Peter Mandelson in 2005 as riots gripped Parisian suburbs.
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