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The French debate over the Bolkestein directive

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Comparative European Politics Aims and scope

Abstract

Why did the services directive proposed by Internal Market Commissioner Frits Bolkestein lead to such virulent reactions in France? This article examines several potential explanations focusing on political economy, public opinion and the timing of events. While all of these elements contribute to the difficult political context, they are insufficient to explain the importance of the backlash against the directive in France. We therefore focus on party politics and argue that political elites had an interest in exploiting the directive in the context of a leadership crisis within the French socialist party. The case study bears lessons about the domestic potency of European policy issues: they can pose a real challenge to centrist parties, which have insufficiently addressed them in their party platforms.

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Notes

  1. We define ‘politicization’ as the process by which an issue moves from technical or bureaucratic treatment to open and public debate, with an increasing number of people becoming active and expressing their views on the issue. Inversely, an issue becomes ‘depoliticized’ when it is moved out of the public sphere and into the realms of a technical authority, who consult with an increasingly restricted number of stakeholders.

  2. We thank one of our anonymous reviewers for pointing this out.

  3. The figure of the Polish plumber became subsequently known well beyond the borders of France, although Nicolaïdis and Schmidt (2007, p. 726) note that the Germans were more concerned about competition from Eastern European butchers rather than plumbers. The Polish government even launched a tourism ad campaign, displaying a good-looking Polish plumber and a Polish nurse to entice French travellers to visit their home country (Sciolino, 2005).

  4. Aboura (2005) analyses the time granted to the proponents and the opponents of the treaty during the 12 days leading up to the vote and shows that proponents benefited from 10 hours more airtime than opponents. In addition, only one out of nine French daily newspapers openly campaigned against the Treaty: Humanité, which is closely connected to the French Communist Party. All weekly news magazines, be they from the left or from the right, came out in favour of the Treaty.

  5. The importance of divisions within the PS have been highlighted by several analysts of the French campaign against the constitutional treaty, for example Crum (2007), Wagner (2008) and Crespy (2008b).

  6. Cf. Frieden (1991), Hiscox (2001) furthermore underlines the importance of factor mobility in predicting whether we should expect to see protest to liberalization according to class or industry fault lines.

  7. All references are based on OECD National Accounts and the OECD STAN Database for Structural Analysis (OECD, 2005; Vogt, 2005).

  8. A discussion of the motivations for the services directive is beyond the scope of this article. For a critical view, see Hay (2007).

  9. For political fears, the indicator contains the fear of the loss national sovereignty, national identity, the use of the national language, and the fear of increased drugs and organized crime. Economic fears contain a question concerning one's country having to pay more, the loss of social benefits, the fear of economic crisis and of job transfers to other countries.

  10. Avril (2005). In fact there were a series of clumsy declarations by new commissioners. Concerning regional policy, Commissioner Danita Hübner declared, for example, that she wanted to ‘encourage delocalisation’. This series led to hostile reactions among French political leaders. See « Le gouvernement « choqué » par les propos de Bruxelles » (2005).

  11. These stakes were probably reversed in 1992, when Socialist president François Mitterrand put up the Maastricht Treaty for popular vote.

  12. On this point, see a longer development by Sauger and colleagues (2007).

  13. Jean-Luc Mélenchon, nevertheless, experienced something of a political rebirth, recently, when he ran for European elections for the list ‘Front de gauche’, which combined the left-wing PS members and Communists. The list reached 6.3 per cent, well beyond initial expectations.

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Acknowledgements

This article has benefited from the discussion during a joint workshop between Sciences Po and the London School of Economics on Eastern and Western perspectives on enlargement in May 2008 and a panel at the PSA Annual Conference in Manchester in April 2009. We thank the participants, in particular Damian Chalmers, Ben Clift, Kevin Featherstone and Christian Lequesne, for their thoughtful comments, Vincent Tiberj for his advice on Eurobarometer data, and Amandine Crespy, Nicolas Sauger and the anonymous reviewers for their detailed feedback on the article.

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  1. Sciences Po/CEE, 28, rue des Saints-Pères, Paris, 75007, France

    Emiliano Grossman

  2. Sciences Po/CERI & Max-Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, 28, rue des Saints-Pères, Paris, 75007, France

    Cornelia Woll

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  1. Emiliano Grossman
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Grossman, E., Woll, C. The French debate over the Bolkestein directive. Comp Eur Polit 9, 344–366 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1057/cep.2010.19

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