[Timesink]

Happy Monday!

[Mr. Silverback]

It's gotten so bad that there's heavy fighting going on in downtown Paris as we speak. Go here and vote USA.

[Billthedrill]

I honestly do not believe that bilateral relationships with the United States are the critical challenge to French foreign policy - that challenge is France's place in the nascent European Union and the effect membership will have on policies that heretofore have been regarded as purely internal. The budget deficit, for example, is outside EU stated parameters for a third straight year - what happens when that is no longer cheerily disregarded? Many Americans consider the French difficult to get along with, (is that an understatement or what?) but then we don't really have to get along with them at all. The other EU members do. If there is an undercurrent of assumption in the French media that the EU is simply going to be France writ large, I think they are in for a surprise.

From where I sit (half a globe away) it would appear that the first big issue is shaping up to be agricultural policy - this promises to be knotty because the current strongly protectionist policy is held in place by a coalition of conservative (in the original sense of the word) farmers' union planks and a liberal Green plank that is on a crusade against genetically modified crops. It is a rather difficult combination for any government to buck.

[malakhi]

France is not in decline!

[Pagey]

France, for all its undoubted glories, was suffering from a general “irritation, frustration and demoralisation”

For all of it's undoubted glories? I'm still LOL about that line.

Socialism = Irritation, Frustration and Demoralisation. Just Think about it, Hellary Clintoon is a U.S Senator now and no one seems to care about that horrible fact.

[GOPJ]

Bump