The Spread of Neoliberalism in French Public Policies: Is There a French Exception?

Abstract

This chapter gives an account of the spread of neoliberalism in French public policies between 1974 and 2012 based on a diachronic and comparative analysis. Changes undertaken in economic policies in France between have been quite immense throughout this period: France gave up indicative planning, abolished price controls, largely abandoned its industrial policies and major projects, given up its sovereignty to pursue monetarist macroeconomic policies, opened up French companies to foreign capital and carried out numerous privatisations. However alongside these policies designed to shrink the State’s role in economic matters, others, such as employment policies, have been pursued to strengthen its role, and interventionist practices such as corporate subsidies have persisted. Despite some attempts in the mid-1980s of political actors to question the system’s foundations, no structural reforms of the welfare state were adopted, while other reforms creating new aid were created. Another salient fact is that the partisan identity of governments is essentially uncorrelated with the implementation of reforms. Comparatively speaking, we cannot assert French exceptionalism insofar as France follows the same trends as its European neighbours for almost all the data we have analysed. However, two characteristics do distinguish the case of France: its absolute level of interventionism in economics, and the low level of change of its social policies towards a neoliberal model. In 2008, France had public expenditures, public employment, government revenues, regulations, social spending and welfare state generosity among the highest in Europe. For each of these dimensions, changes have been very gradual, without major shake-ups, and slower than elsewhere. The absence of coherence in developments, and of the “turning points” observed in many countries (Switzerland, the Netherlands, Ireland and the United Kingdom in particular), leads us to conclude that there has been no “neo-liberal shift” in France, but rather, economic liberalisation has taken place, quietly (with no specific political force enforcing it) in parallel with a powerful resilience of the welfare state and an increase in the size of the State as a whole.