COUNTRY CORNER

Strange politics in Europe might be a lesson to consider for home
By Steve Fairchild

A look at the papers in Europe provides perspective—and sometimes a lesson on what to avoid. Yet many of our political class and commentariat think that our cousins who didn’t make that Atlantic trip are more enlightened. We seem forever keen to do things the European way.

“How’s that?” you say. What has Europe got to do with a Midwestern farmer?

Maybe nothing. But here are a few things to watch.

Consider that the European Union with an annual budget of $131 billion devotes $10 billion of it to French farmers through the Common Agriculture Policy. Hard-nosed dealing has left France to extract this disproportionate amount to protect agriculture. So, it’s not a bad gig if you can get it. Yet France is discovering that protection cuts both ways. The CAP is teetering from the same weight as other protection schemes and straining the European Union project.

Likewise, when the French enacted a 35-hour work week in 1998, it was seen as a triumph for the socialists and protectionists in the republic. Juxtapose that triumph with the scene a few months ago. The poor and immigrant class burned thousands of cars in mass protests. One root cause offered was unemployment in the largely immigrant slums is an extraordinary 40 percent—there’s no integration in immigration, in other words. This spring it was France’s educated youth protesting. They worry that a proposed change in work laws will deprive them of short work weeks and long vacations. More tellingly, it might liberalize the employee termination rules, which make it quite hard to fire an employee. Keeping these rigid employment rules would continue to damper the French economy. Turns out that things like the WTO and a globalized work force have a enlightening effect of their own. Witness the U.S. immigration demonstrations as Congress debates our illegal-alien policy.

Across the English Channel, after the French student strike had cancelled or delayed flights, Philip Meeson, chief executive of Jet2.com, a low-cost airline, said it was time for the “lazy frogs to get back to work.” That’s hardly an elegant statement, but it might just be a call to reality in an economic world with Chinese labor and Indian high tech, not to mention Brazilian, Argentinean and ascending-EU-nation agriculture. Budgets in all of the EU will face similar enlightenment from world agriculture under WTO—if they follow the rules.

Which brings it back to the Midwest. We’ll find we aren’t immune to this reality in farm bill debates. And if you live near labor-intensive agriculture, labor policy and the situation for non-residents has much to do with your own.

Meanwhile, the English government doesn’t seem to hold its rural cultural collateral so sacred. Last year parliament banned fox hunting. It was a move pushed into hearts and minds by animal rights groups and enacted by urban members of parliament. There may be more compelling reasons in debating lease versus free hunting on your place, but keep in mind that certain rights are made more indelible by strong constituencies.

Moreover, I remember a few years back when a columnist in the UK suggested that the whole idea of farm subsidies should go the way of the British mines—unfettered into the free market, left to sink or swim (the mines sank).

Reading the foreign press is a lesson in strange politics. For even in their bureaucratic sclerosis, these nations are among the higher functioning democracies in the world. And sometimes in a democracy, regardless the consequence, you get what you ask for.