Reason Magazine - Topics > France

Violating Human Rights to Defend Them

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 13:23:00 EDT

At a time when the U.S. government is often (and often justly) criticized for compromising civil liberties in pursuit of terrorists, New York Times legal writer Adam Liptak reminds us of one respect in which Americans are indisputably freer than other Westerners: They can speak their minds without fear of being prosecuted for offending people. In countries such as Canada, France, England, Germany, and the Netherlands, by contrast, freedom of speech can be overriden in the name of equality and multiculturalism. Mark Steyn, the Canadian writer accused of violating British Columbia's hate speech law by saying unnice things about Islam in Maclean's, tells Liptak:

What we're learning here is really the bedrock difference between the United States and the countries that are in a broad sense its legal cousins. Western governments are becoming increasingly comfortable with the regulation of opinion. The First Amendment really does distinguish the U.S., not just from Canada but from the rest of the Western world.

In hearings before the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal, the lawyer representing Maclean's noted that the province's law gives writers accused of hurting people's feelings little recourse:

Innocent intent is not a defense. Nor is truth. Nor is fair comment on true facts. Publication in the public interest and for the public benefit is not a defense. Opinion expressed in good faith is not a defense. Responsible journalism is not a defense.

An attorney with the British Columbia Civil Liberties Union (which is siding with Maclean's) explains the Canadian attitude this way:

Canadians do not have a cast-iron stomach for offensive speech. We don't subscribe to a marketplace of ideas. Americans as a whole are more tough-minded and more prepared for verbal combat.

In the face of Canada's enforced niceness, it is refreshing to hear someone defend the principle that people should not have to justify their opinions to the government, period. Ezra Levant, another Canadian journalist who faced a human rights complaint (since retracted) for offending Muslims, put it this way during an encounter with an inquisitor from the Alberta Human Rights and Citizenship Commission:

I reserve maximum freedom to be maximally offensive, to hurt feelings as I like....The only thing I have to say to the government about why I published [the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons] is because it's my bloody right to do so.

That's from my February column about Canada's human rights tribunals. Last week I noted that the French government, which is so keen to defend the country's secular and feminist values that it's prepared to violate Muslims' rights to freedom of religion and freedom of contract, nevertheless defends their "right" not to be offended. I should have mentioned a recent example cited by Liptak (and noted by our own Michael Moynihan): "Earlier this month, the actress Brigitte Bardot, an animal rights activist, was fined $23,000 in France for provoking racial hatred by criticizing a Muslim ceremony involving the slaughter of sheep."

Addendum: As Robert notes in the comments, the Alberta Human Rights and Citizenship Commission continues to investigate Levant for reprinting the Muhammad cartoons in The Western Standard. Although Syed Soharwardy, president of the Islamic Supreme Council of Canada, withdrew his complaint last winter, Levant reports that the commission is still considering a similar complaint from Yasmeen Nizam of of the Edmonton Council of Muslim Communities. You can keep up with the case at Levant's blog. Information about Mark Steyn's speech-related legal troubles is available here.

What's the Matter With France?

jsullum@reason.com (Jacob Sullum) — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 15:44:00 EDT

A.P. reports that French politicians across the political spectrum are outraged by a judge's decision (noted this morning by Katherine Mangu-Ward) to grant a recently married Muslim couple an annulment because the bride misrepresented herself as a virgin. "The ruling ending the Muslim couple's union," A.P. says, "has stunned France and raised concerns that the country's much-cherished secular values are losing ground to cultural traditions from its fast-growing immigrant communities." I don't get it, just as I did not understand why so many Frenchmen thought it was imperative to ban headscarves from schools. This case seems like a straightforward application of a contract, albeit one constrained by laws regulating marriage:

In its ruling, the court concluded the woman had misrepresented herself as a virgin and that, in this particular marriage, virginity was a prerequisite.
But in treating the case as a breach of contract, the ruling was decried by critics who said it undermined decades of progress in women's rights. Marriage, they said, was reduced to the status of a commercial transaction in which women could be discarded by husbands claiming to have discovered hidden defects in them.

The court decision "is a real fatwa against the emancipation and liberty of women. We are returning to the past," said Urban Affairs Minister Fadela Amara, the daughter of immigrants from Muslim North Africa.

Notably, the wife, presumably suffering from false consciousness, joined the husband in seeking the annulment and has no desire to challenge the outcome or to publicize the case:

The hitch is that both the young woman and the man at the center of the drama are opposed to an appeal, according to their lawyers. The names of the woman, a student in her 20s, and the man, an engineer in his 30s, have not been disclosed.

The young woman's lawyer, Charles-Edouard Mauger, said she was distraught by the dragging out of the humiliating case. In an interview on Europe 1 radio, he quoted her as saying: "I don't know who's trying to think in my place. I didn't ask for anything....I wasn't the one who asked for the media attention, for people to talk about it, and for this to last so long."

Yet critics of the ruling, including the justice minister and the prime minister, insist it must be challenged because it represents a defeat for feminism and secularism. Evidently women's freedom must be restricted to protect their freedom: They cannot be allowed to enter into whatever contracts they choose or make their own legal decisions because they might misuse those rights. Just to be clear, that is the feminist position. As for the secularist imperative, which in France is strong enough to override the free exercise of religion, I do not understand how it can co-exist with legal principles that empower aggrieved religious groups to punish people for speech that offends them. How can the same country that fears Muslims are taking over when they insist on wearing headscarves or marrying virgins prosecute a novelist for contempt of Islam?

[Thanks to Mark Tarnowski for the tip.]

Obsolete Communism

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Mon, 05 May 2008 11:30:00 EDT

City Journal has published a collection of reflections on the revolutionary month of May 1968. The views on display are more varied than you might expect, given the magazine's neoconservative slant. I particularly enjoyed Guy Sorman's memories of the uprising in France:

Slogans painted on walls and an onslaught of posters with surrealist messages captured widespread attention. The most memorable posters were those asserting that it was FORBIDDEN TO FORBID. Others offered more cryptic slogans like SOUS LES PAVÉS, LA PLAGE ("Under the paving stones, the beach") and COURS CAMARADE, LE VIEUX MONDE EST DERRIÈRE TOI! ("Run, comrade, the old world is behind you!"), an ironic paraphrase of Marxist ideology. Slogans were the only program, and they called for individual freedom, anarchy, nonviolence, and enjoyment of the here and now.

The longterm effect of '68, Sorman argues, was that "an individualistic society replaced the hierarchical one." The results could be seen everywhere from sexuality ("May '68 was the moment when sexual liberation coincided with the availability of the birth-control pill") to business ("Many '68 leaders became entrepreneurs and contributed to the new managerial style") to the left:

In the ideological world, Marxism was the most obvious victim. The May '68 leaders were anti-Communist. Those who claimed to be Maoist, as some did (without any understanding of Maoism's true nature), were, above all, anti-Stalinist. The revolts in Eastern Europe rendered Marxism comatose, both as an ideology and as a mode of governance. While another 20 years would pass before the Communist Party gave up power in Eastern Europe, the seeds of its demise were sown in '68. True, there were a few deviations: the Red Brigade in Italy, the Baader-Meinhof Gang in Germany, and the guerrillas in Latin America. But these were ideological last gasps.

That isn't, of course, the only political legacy of '68. Sol Stern's contribution to the forum describes Tom Hayden's naive support for the Viet Cong, and Christopher Hitchens' essay reveals the many ideological paths a soixante-huitard could take. But Sorman is right: A revolt against Communism was brewing, sometimes even among people who considered themselves Marxists. What looked like a month of triumph for the left wound up advancing something that is beyond left and right.

Footnote: How did free-market libertarians react to the rebellion in France? Many wrote it off as another spasm of collectivism, but not everyone. Here is Murray Rothbard's brief review of Daniel and Gabriel Cohn-Bendit's book about the uprising:

The story of the almost-victorious French revolution of May, 1968 by its heroic young anarchist leader. The case for an anarchist rather than a Bolshevik revolution.

By the way: This is also the anniversary of May 1958, another month of turmoil in France. Where are the cinquante-huitards?

Lando Calrissian's Cloud City for Fat People

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 15:07:00 EDT

David Small writes in with news that, as an AP headline puts it, "France may make it illegal to promote extreme thinness":

The French parliament's lower house adopted a groundbreaking bill Tuesday that would make it illegal for anyone—including fashion magazines, advertisers and Web sites—to publicly incite extreme thinness.
The National Assembly approved the bill in a series of votes Tuesday, after the legislation won unanimous support from the ruling conservative UMP party. It goes to the Senate in the coming weeks.
Fashion industry experts said that, if passed, the law would be the strongest of its kind anywhere. Leaders in French couture are opposed to the idea of legal boundaries on beauty standards.

More here.

reason on chubsy-ubsyism here.

Lando Calrissian: "Cloud City Entrepaneur (sic) or Everyday Cock-Blocker" here.

Wait, I Thought Norman Lear Liked the French!

matt.welch@reason.com (Matt Welch) — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 15:50:00 EDT

Well, if the Democrats win the White House back in November, at least we'll know for sure that the days of infantile French-bashing are over! Oh wait.

The ad's progenitor, the lefty-Dem Campaign for America's Future, accuses McCain of costing the U.S. and A. "40,000 jobs," because Airbus beat Boeing on that one contract. As Isaiah J. Poole explains, in a piece entitled "Merci, John McCain, for French-Frying American Jobs,"

McCain has repeatedly voted against bills that encourage defense contracts to be awarded to American companies. In 1996, McCain voted to table an amendment that required defense contractors to indicate on contracts what percentage of the contract would be manufactured in the United States. The amendment would have also required the Department of Defense to treat this as an important factor when awarding contracts.
Moreover, in 2004, McCain proposed and voted for an amendment to allow the Defense Department to waive "Buy American" requirements, opening defense contracts to firms in seven countries that have a "declaration of principles" with the United States.

I swear to Dieu, these people are trying to make me vote for John McCain.

Market Fears, Loathing in Europe

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 10:02:00 EST

While on a fellowship in Europe, Newsweek editor Stefan Thiel reviewed and compared economics textbooks for college and high school students in France, Germany, and the United States. He writes about what he found in the current issue of Foreign Policy.

“Economic growth imposes a hectic form of life, producing overwork, stress, nervous depression, cardiovascular disease and, according to some, even the development of cancer,” asserts the three-volume Histoire du XXe siècle, a set of texts memorized by countless French high school students as they prepare for entrance exams to Sciences Po and other prestigious French universities. The past 20 years have “doubled wealth, doubled unemployment, poverty, and exclusion, whose ill effects constitute the background for a profound social malaise,” the text continues . . . Capitalism itself is described at various points in the text as “brutal,” “savage,” “neoliberal,” and “American.” This agitprop was published in 2005, not in 1972.
[...]
Equally popular in Germany today are student workbooks on globalization. One such workbook includes sections headed “The Revival of Manchester Capitalism,” “The Brazilianization of Europe,” and “The Return of the Dark Ages.” India and China are successful, the book explains, because they have large, state-owned sectors and practice protectionism, while the societies with the freest markets lie in impoverished sub-Saharan Africa. Like many French and German books, this text suggests students learn more by contacting the antiglobalization group Attac, best known for organizing messy protests at the annual G-8 summits.

One might expect Europeans to view the world through a slightly left-of-center, social-democratic lens. The surprise is the intensity and depth of the anti-market bias being taught in Europe’s schools. Students learn that private companies destroy jobs while government policy creates them. Employers exploit while the state protects. Free markets offer chaos while government regulation brings order. Globalization is destructive, if not catastrophic. Business is a zero-sum game, the source of a litany of modern social problems.

Dubai Weirdness Watch

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 13:54:00 EST

The Sunday Times describes plans for yet another bizarre proprietary community in Dubai -- a reproduction of Lyons:

Inspiration struck [Dubai businessman Saeed] al-Gandhi while he was drawing up plans to build a French-language university in Dubai in partnership with the University of Lyons. Not wanting to be outdone by Abu Dhabi, another Arab emirate, which has announced it will build its own version of the Louvre, al-Gandhi hit upon the idea of "Lyons-Dubai City", as the new metropolis will be known, or "Lyons's oriental little sister", as they call it in the French town hall.

Lyons and Dubai had already signed a "pact of cooperation and friendship" but al-Gandhi's idea adds a new twist to twinning: the new Lyons will cover an area of about 700 acres, roughly the size of the Latin Quarter of Paris, and will contain squares, restaurants, cafes and museums.

Al-Gandhi could have picked a worse place. Famed as the home of gastronomy and the birthplace of cinema, Lyons sits between two of France's best-known wine-growing regions. Even so, Dubai is unlikely to want to copy the decrepit tower blocks that ring the real city, symbols of the urban violence that periodically plagues France.

For more from reason on Dubai's building boom, go here and here.

[Via bOING bOING.]

Pop Goes the President

myoung@reason.com (Michael Young) — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 08:56:00 EST

History, even trivial history, does indeed repeat itself as farce. In December 1995, Francois Mitterrand traveled to Aswan in southern Egypt to spend his Christmas holidays. It was a fittingly Wagnerian ending for the dying former French president—a last communion with timelessness through contact with a timeless culture, before Mitterrand met the real thing in Paris a week later.

Cut to last Christmas. French President Nicolas Sarkozy also decides to holiday in Egypt. He stays at Luxor—not Aswan but close enough. Descending from a private jet, Sarkozy, his Ray Bans tilted forward, his shirt opened an extra button, looks more like a Corsican hoodlum than the president of a venerable nation. At his arm is new girlfriend Carla Bruni, whom no one seems quite sure what to describe as. Model? Singer? Next First Lady? This is their first overseas expedition together, after the media discovered they were an item during an outing to EuroDisney.

"Vulgar!" was how many Frenchmen described their president after witnessing all this. And vulgar Sarkozy surely is. There is little gravitas to a hyperactive man present everywhere and nowhere, with a strong opinion on just about everything; someone evidently enjoying his recent divorce, who seems as bored with high culture as he delights in the favors and company of the affluent, of pop singers and actors.

But that's missing the significant point that Sarkozy has skillfully used his relentless presence in the media as a source of political advantage, while redefining what the presidency can be all about. By being a pop figure himself, ever-present in the minds of his countrymen, publicly and personally, Sarkozy has managed to retain the initiative. With much in the media about Sarkozy, his leadership has turned into a reality show and the president is writing the script. So ubiquitous is Sarkozy that he is the state and the state is he. How better to define political power?

Those now moving through the U.S. primaries might want to investigate. Sarkozy, often referred to as the most "American" of French politicians, has until now juggled paradoxes. He was elected as the candidate of a conservative party, peddling a message that France needed to return to traditional values. Yet he is anything but conservative in his avidness for luxury and attention; and anything but an agent of traditional morality in his private life. However, that doesn't much differentiate him from, let's say, the former Italian prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, still Europe's archetype of schlock. What does is that Sarkozy is who he is in France, where presidents invariably act like republican monarchs

There is more to that kind of presidential behavior than old Europe stuffiness. To act like a monarch without being one, to play the members of their court off against each other, is a way French presidents have had of maintaining control over an unruly political class and society. Mitterrand was an expert at dividing his supporters to boost his authority; Charles de Gaulle so naturally behaved like a man of destiny that the French created a new republic to accommodate him. Even Jacques Chirac, who earlier in his career had also sold himself as an "American" politician because of his fondness for pressing the flesh and his informality, by the end had morphed into a detached royal in the public consciousness—stuck in a gloomy palace with a wife he could neither stomach nor divorce, whom he was said to address with the formal "vous."

Sarkozy has taken a different tack. He's still all-dominating and has demoted his prime minister to little more than an assistant's role. But that domination comes not from pulling the strings from a high perch, but from the president's getting personally involved in the muck of politicking. So, for example, although he named Bernard Kouchner as his foreign minister, Sarkozy has blocked him out of his highest-profile overseas undertakings—whether relations with the United States, or Libya, the fate of French aid workers detained until recently in Chad, and contacts with the Syrian regime over the presidential election in Lebanon.

There is risk here, because the president himself might rise or fall with the outcome of his actions. In Lebanon, Sarkozy was so keen to arrive at a deal with Syria to enhance his personal prestige, that he completely ignored a United Nations resolution co-sponsored by France in 2005 that sought to prevent involving Damascus in Lebanon's presidency. It didn't matter: Syria humiliated the French anyway by undermining their scheme to resolve the Lebanese crisis. The recent visit to Paris of Libya's leader Moammar al-Qaddafi turned into a public relations disaster for Sarkozy when even government ministers expressed their distaste. And Sarkozy's involvement of his wife in negotiations with Libya over the release of Bulgarian nurses last summer looked disturbingly like an effort to save his failing marriage by handing her a sensitive mission.

Yet Sarkozy's breaking of taboos, his imposition of a public and personal narrative to keep his political adversaries off balance, makes you wonder whether his strategy can be applied by politicians elsewhere who want to remain on top. France is very different than other countries, particularly the United States. But maybe not as much as we think. Americans may not soon take to a president gallivanting with his latest girlfriend, whose nude photos circulate freely on the Internet. However, they were surprisingly tolerant when a president of theirs lied by suggesting that the blowjob he had been provided did not really qualify as sex. Americans are also more likely than the French to appreciate a celebrity-president who likes popular culture—indeed who is popular culture--because that's far closer to the nature of their society than it is of French society.

As for the pull of traditional "values," so central to political life in America, Sarkozy has shown that politicians can maneuver in the gap between rhetoric and behavior, and still remain credible. The continued devotion to the Kennedy fable is as good an American illustration of this proposition. John F. Kennedy paid any price and bore any burden to get laid, but still remains among the most respected of U.S. presidents. As Gore Vidal has written, describing JFK's reaction after being elected: "'Mass every Sunday,' Jack would moan, 'for four years.'" The lesson is that if you play to the gallery on values, you can do what you want in private. At least Sarkozy's conduct is offered up minus the hypocrisy.

In his way, Sarkozy is quite invigorating: a post-modern president in what is sometimes, oddly, a pre-modern society—all baroque rules, obstinate certitudes, veiled prejudices, and a surprising affection for hierarchy. In an American campaign where some candidates have latched onto the catchword of "change", without daring to change much, Sarkozy's dissidence is instructive. Times are changing, thank heavens for that.

Reason contributing editor Michael Young is opinion editor of the Daily Star newspaper in Lebanon.

France's Clandestine Culture War

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 11:33:00 EST

Secret societies in the news:

Mr Kunstmann belongs to les UX, a clandestine network that is on a mission to discover and exploit the city's neglected underworld. The urban explorers put on film shows in underground galleries, restore medieval crypts and break into monuments after dark to organise plays and readings. In the eyes of their supporters, they are the white knights of modern culture, renovating forgotten buildings and staging artistic events beyond the reach of a stifling civil service.

The authorities view them differently: as the dark side of the City of Light -- irresponsible, paranoid subversives whose actions could serve as a model for terrorists. A police unit has been trained to track les UX through the sewers, catacombs and old quarries that are their pathways under Paris. Prosecutors have been instructed to file charges whenever feasible.

The stand-off is symbolic of French society: a rigorous bureaucracy on the surface with a bizarre subculture below.

The following passage needs to be read with skepticism, but also with an appreciation for Kunstmann's Feuillade-worthy vision, whether or not it's entirely true:

Mr Kunstmann said that les UX had 150 or so members divided into about ten branches. One group, which is all-female, specialises in "infiltration" -- getting into museums after hours, finding a way through underground electric or gas networks and shutting down alarms. Another runs an internal message system and a coded, digital radio network accessible only to members.

A third group provides a database, a fourth organises subterranean shows and a fifth takes photographs of them. Mr Kunstmann refused to talk about the other groups.

Before you assume that all of that is romantic mythmaking, consider this:

Last year the Untergunther [one of those branches] spent months hidden in the Panthéon, the Parisian mausoleum that holds France's greatest citizens, where they repaired a clock that had been left to rust. Slipping in at closing time every evening -- French television said that they had their own set of keys -- they set up a workshop hidden behind mock wooden crates at the top of the monument. The security guards never found it. The Untergunther used a professional clockmaker, Jean-Baptiste Viot, to mend the 150-year-old mechanism.

When the clock began working again, officials were horrified. The Centre for National Monuments confirmed that the clock had been repaired but said that the authority had begun legal action against the Untergunther. Under official investigation for breaking and entry, its members face a maximum sentence of one year in prison and a €15,000 (£10,500) fine.

"We could go down in legal history as the first people ever to be prosecuted for repairing a clock," said Mr Kunstmann.

Fortunately for the subterranean people of Paris, the prosecution failed.

[Via Infocult.]

French Wine and the Fable of Free-Trade Britain

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 13:30:00 EDT

If economics is often a dry and dusty affair, the new book War, Wine, and Taxes: The Political Economy of Anglo-French Trade, 1689-1900, is a wet and wild ride—and not simply because it's about alcohol.

John V.C. Nye debunks the conventional wisdom that Britain was a free-trade nation during the 19th century. If you look at actual trade policy rather than the self-aggrandizing pronouncements of politicians and ideologues, argues Nye, Britain remained a bastion of protectionism and mercantilism throughout the century. In comparison, France, often derided by contemporary free-marketers, was wide open to trade. In concise and eminently readable prose, he tells a story in which well-connected special interests and government officials joined forces to line their own pockets while reducing the choices available to consumers.

In answering the question, "Why do the British drink beer and not wine?," Nye not only advances our understanding of the past, he shows how economic policy can often have a major effect not just on trade but on national identity.

The 48-year-old Nye was born and raised in the Philippines and educated at Caltech and Northwestern. The married father of two sons, he and his family recently relocated to Northern Virginia, where he teaches at George Mason University and holds the Frederic Bastiat chair in Political Economy at the Mercatus Center.

In late September, he spoke with reason Editor-in-Chief Nick Gillespie via AOL Instant Messenger. What follows is an edited transcript of their interview. Comments can be sent to gillespie@reason.com.

reason: You open your book with this line: "The idea that Britain was the leading free trader of the nineteenth century is one of those rare stylized facts in economic history...." Your book is dedicated to proving this wrong. How is that conventional view wrong?

John V.C. Nye: No one had ever bothered to examine in detail what the overall tariff burden of British policy was in the 19th century. When you used standard measures to compare average tariffs in Britain with those of France—supposedly Britain's opposite number in trade—what you find is that the French were clearly much closer to being free traders than were the British for most of the 19th century. Most of the different ways we can slice the data make clear that the British had higher average tariffs than the French even after their supposed move to abolish all protection from the 1840s on. Britain had tariffs on fewer items than did France, but British tariffs were on items that were such a substantial part of British trade that the impact was more serious.

reason: Speaking of specific tariffs, explain the significance of the one part of your title everyone can get behind: Wine. You ask the question, "Why do the British drink beer and not wine?" Give the short version of your answer (hiccup) with regard to tariffs.

Nye: The core of British tariffs was directed against the French and specifically against French wine. This policy dated back to the late 1600s, when the two countries were at war for a quarter century. Tariffs designed to exclude all but the best French wine—and to a large extent depress imports from most other wine-exporting nations—were matched with policies targeted to assist brewers and domestic producers of spirits. Over time, the exclusion of cheaper French wine—especially during the Industrial Revolution—meant that lower- and middle-class drinkers had to settle almost exclusively for beer, gin, whiskey, and rum.

reason: My god! The horror!

Nye: We probably have no idea how bad some of that stuff actually was!

reason: That's speaking as someone who has obviously never drank anti-freeze. Your book is in many ways a primer on public choice economics and how officials respond to the demands of the very people they are supposed to be regulating in the name of the public good. Talk about the brewers in England as a special interest group and their relationship to the state.

Nye: During the quarter century (from 1689 to 1715) when French wine was excluded from the British market, the beer industry experienced what historian Peter Mathias refers to as the Brewing Industrial Revolution. Technology made it possible to produce beer (initially porter) in quantity. At the same time, protection meant these guys were earning money hand over fist.

When war ended, domestic beverage interests successfully lobbied to have very high tariffs placed on wine, and extra high tariffs on French wine. But a cynical public choice scholar would argue that the government would not be content with handing out goodies to the brewers. Now the state had the brewers over a barrel (so to speak). They were able to impose excise taxes on the industry and expect to collect them. The latter point is very important. In previous times, high excise taxes were not always accompanied by high revenues because of evasion.

Now the government had both a carrot and a stick...

reason: ...and access to beer! A dangerous combination, as the senators from Massachusetts and Connecticut could tell you. Or more precisely, as waitresses who have served them could tell you.

Nye: If the brewers didn't make sure that the government got their taxes, tariffs on competing drinks could be lowered. At the same time, the government wanted the brewers to be highly concentrated, because it made regulation and bargaining easier, so they worked to destroy competition in brewing.

reason: You posit that this, in some ways, is the beginning of big government. Or if not the beginning, a clear example of how big government and big business (for lack of better terms) conjure one another into existence, right?

Nye: It was the beginning of the growth spurt in the British state. Throughout the 18th century, British revenues grew four to five times faster than the growth of Gross Domestic Product. This was simply unprecedented in Europe and comes as a surprise to those who think of 18th-century Britain solely in terms of Adam Smith and David Hume.

reason: What was happening across the Channel in terms of government growth?

Nye: French officials were trying their best to grow revenues but their hands were mostly tied. Constraints on the way that the drown could raise revenue in France were part of the reason that Louis foolishly called the Estates General at the beginning of the French Revolution.

Studies of French taxation show that average taxes as a share of GDP were roughly constant or even declining prior to the Revolution. In contrast, they were rising steadily in Great Britain.

reason: The conventional story goes something like this: Adam Smith and others argued for free markets in the 18th century and then in 19th century, with the repeal of the Corn Laws especially, England became this free-market Mecca (or something). Your book demonstrates—concisely, though with too much math for this English major—just how wrong that story is. Why did it take your colleagues in economics so long to look at the data?

Nye: That's a difficult question. For one thing, I think that economists don't look at history very much. Economic history is a lively but very small subfield and digging through archives for statistics is not usually rewarded. There is a tendency to confuse the problem of intent with outcomes. Why were the British free traders? Because they told us so. I would also add that Britain did move to liberalize trade quite dramatically; it's just that they didn't do it as smoothly as the conventional wisdom claims.

reason: Politicians espousing free-market ideals while being protectionist? Zut! I've never heard of such a thing!

Nye: Finally, I would note that some people get hung up on the question as to whether British tariffs were "efficient" from the standpoint of fiscal policy. And that is a separate question altogether. It is possible that a [classically] liberal Britain might have had to impose some sorts of taxes, and the ones they chose were probably not too awful. However, this is entirely separate from the question of who was a free trader.

reason: Is part of the slowness in accepting Britain as protectionist that it messes up a very happy ideological picture of England=Good/France=Bad in many free-market circles?

Nye: Maybe. I've thought about this a lot but I don't have good answers. When I completed the first article on this stuff (the basis for the opening chapter in the book) almost two decades ago, I was taken aback by the response I got. Some people just said, "This result is preposterous, case closed." Others said, "Oh, this proves that free trade is a bad thing!" While still others said, "Who cares about wine? What matters are manufactures."

Most simply didn't want to engage me on the central point itself. From a factual/descriptive perspective, was Britain really a free trader, especially in comparison to France? If not, why? If so, what does this tell us about economics, history, politics, and the way in which countries successfully transition to liberal market economies in the real world?

reason: How had things changed by the end of the 19th century?

Nye: By the end of the 19th century, Britain was the most genuinely free trade nation in Europe and France had begun to revert to some protectionist policies. But all told, France's policies were still quite liberal and a fair reading would say that most of Europe was extremely open to trade and commerce of all sorts. If one takes labor and capital mobility into account, Europe was more liberal around 1900 than at any point since then.

Tariffs were low. Capital moved freely and labor moved much more easily than today. Moreover, it was much harder to enforce restrictions on commerce and on the free movement of goods and labor than today as well. While no one has done a rigorous study of this, I am pretty certain that Europe today is far less open than it was from about 1870 to 1910.

reason: What's the relevance of your book to contemporary politics and economics?

Nye: The first and most obvious point is: Don't rely on what is politically significant to gauge what is economically significant. The debates on the front pages of newspapers are not reliable evidence of the thrust of policy or the relative importance of issues.

Second, small policy changes can have large unanticipated consequences. The British-French trade war began in the late 17th century out of very local conflicts. No one had any clue that it would have such far-reaching repercussions.

Third, I think it's very interesting how much of what we think of as tastes or culture are really manifestations of the prices and constraints that we and our parents have faced for awhile. I certainly think that economists have paid insufficient attention to culture, but those studying culture have paid insufficient attention to how relative prices shape what we think of as luxurious or beautiful or normal.

reason: I should ask, do you prefer wine or beer?

Nye: I guess I'm mostly a wine drinker, but I like beer on hot days and I like beer in preference to very low quality wine. I remember that the first time I traveled to France in the early 1980s, almost everyone seemed to drink wine all the time. By the 1990s, that seemed to have changed. Beer was much more common in the summer than the winter. On more than a few occasions, all the visiting American academics would drinking wine and all the French guys would be drinking beer.

reason: Where did your interest in this project come from? Who are your intellectual heroes in economics?

Nye: The project arose out of my research on the economic history of France in the mid-19th century. In the course of studying French trade I put out this graph of British and French average tariffs and was stunned to see the difference, a difference that no one had ever talked about. Fortunately for me, one of my colleagues was [Nobel Prize winner] Douglass North and I turned to Doug and said "Have you ever seen this before?" We got into a long discussion about this, I contacted several more people and as they say, the rest is my peculiar history.

As for intellectual heroes, I was strongly influenced by my advisors at Northwestern, Joel Mokyr and Jonathan Hughes, and by Doug North. They made me feel that economic history was perhaps the most undervalued and intellectually exciting area of economics. Because the payoff in econ was to do very abstruse and advanced mathematical theory in the 1980s and 1990s, we were also aware that you paid a price in terms of career prospects by doing history. That gave it a certain unconventional, risk-taking flavor.

reason: You recently moved from Washington University to George Mason University and the Mercatus Center. What prompted the move and how is it working out so far?

Nye: Well, as you say, I've just gotten here. But GMU has been doing very exciting and different sorts of things for quite some time. They have put together a group of scholars with a strong interest in political economy and development, very broadly speaking. More important is they have done something extremely rare—perhaps unprecedented in economics. At one shot they hired three senior-level economic historians. Aside from me, there are Werner Troesken and Gary Richardson, and we have the potential to make GMU one of the best places in the world to do economic history. Moreover, there are plans afoot to expand further in related areas.

I also get a kick out of talking to the non-historians here, especially Tyler Cowen, Pete Boettke, Bryan Caplan, Robin Hanson, Russell Roberts, and Alex Tabarrok. Lunch can be more interesting than the best seminars in the world when we get going on the right topics.

reason: How did you come to be a professional economist?

Nye: I was born and raised in the Philippines. I was fortunate to get admitted with aid to study at Caltech as an undergrad where I majored in Physics. However, when I got to Caltech, I quickly found that I wasn't quite right for the most abstruse forms of theoretical physics. At the same time I admired the rigor and intensity of the Caltech way of looking at the world. There were some very exciting people at Caltech at that time doing work in areas of political economy and rational choice politics, including Bob Bates, Mo Fiorina, Bruce Cain, John Ferejohn, as well as Lance Davis, who was the main economic historian.

I had originally thought about doing a Ph.D. in political science, but all the Caltech guys thought I would be better off studying economics. This was complicated because I had basically studied no economics. But apparently a degree in physics and enough math will get you far, so I went to Northwestern University to do my Ph.D.

reason: Did growing up in the Philippines affect your take on economics?

Nye: Yes, I think it has. Corruption was/is much more common than the US and many things just don't work right. Also, despite growing up with a privileged middle class life, being constantly surrounded by poverty was a reminder of how important basic economic growth is. I'm always struck how fortunate we are in the West and how rare, historically speaking, prosperity is. Most of the people I meet here just have no conception of either bad government or poverty. I also grew up during the Marcos/martial law era and remember being worried on the one hand about the increase of authoritarianism and militarism versus the threat of a radical or communist takeover. Again, people I meet in rich countries seem to take stable, market-oriented democracies for granted.

reason: How do you define yourself politically or ideologically?

Nye: Hard to say. I am probably a conservative with very modest libertarian sensibilities especially on economic issues. But I doubt that I would be a good fit for reason magazine on foreign policy or social issues.

reason: We're not measuring you for a suit! So you're for the indiscriminate invasion and subjugation of foreign countries (and parts of the U.S.) and aren't going to be volunterring at Planned Parenthood anytime soon, right?

You do believe in equal rights for Baal worshippers, I hope, at least until they die and go to Hell. That's really the only litmus test we've got here. And the bit about "Free Minds and Free Markets."

Nye: FMAFM!!

reason: We're working on an emoticon for that. Is there anything else you'd like to add?

Nye: Thanks for the opportunity to chat. And thanks to the two or three readers who actually made it to the end of this chat.

reason: Thanks very much for your time.

Profit or Principle?

myoung@reason.com (Michael Young) — Thu, 16 Aug 2007 15:15:00 EDT

Nicolas Sarkozy is as pro-American a president as France will ever have. But when he was received last Saturday at the Bush compound in Kennebunkport, Maine, for an "informal" meeting with President George W. Bush, he was probably hoping this would not be interpreted gastronomically. The Bushes offered hamburgers and hot dogs rather than lobster or swordfish, leaving the slighted family fish supplier, Steve Kingston, to declare: "I hope it won't be taken badly in France."

In fact, detractors in France seemed far more disturbed by where Sarkozy was vacationing, namely the tony retreat of Wolfeboro, New Hampshire, than by what he was putting into his mouth. The high price tag of the president's holiday was a consistent object of derision, but the reality was that many Frenchmen seemed even more uncomfortable with Sarkozy's plain message that things were back to normal with the United States—meaning the United States of the reviled George W. Bush.

If so, the critics might want to look again. On the U.S.-French agenda were three Middle Eastern issues of common concern: Iran, Darfur, and Lebanon. But while Bush and Sarkozy are closer than Bush and Jacques Chirac ever were, when it comes to the Middle East, Sarkozy's France is going the way other European states are in detaching itself from Washington and from the implications of the Bush administration's war on terror. That's not to say there invariably is disagreement. Rather, the European-American relationship with regard to the Arab world and Iran is drifting back to what we had before 9/11, when the pursuit of national interests trumped any declared common effort to advance democracy and human rights while isolating repressive regimes and "rogue nations."

Take the recent release by Libya of six foreign medics, most of them Bulgarians. This opened a Pandora's Box of recrimination when it was suggested that France, which played a principal role in the liberation, had overseen a more sinister quid pro quo: the medics in exchange for Libya's being allowed to buy weapons and a nuclear reactor from France. The French government insisted there had been no tradeoffs. Sarkozy was even more affirmative in denying a nuclear deal. However, Paris was forced to concede that a weapons deal had been agreed after the son of Libya's dictator Moammar Qaddafi broke the story to the French daily Le Monde.

But what Seif al-Islam Qaddafi disclosed suggested more than just arms sales, which are allowed now that Libya is no longer under an international sanctions regime. He told Le Monde: "First, the agreement [with France] involves joint military exercises; we will be buying Milan anti-tank missiles from France to the order of 100 million euros, I think. Then there is a project for the manufacture of arms, and for the maintenance and production of military equipment. You know it's the first arms supply deal between a Western country and Libya [since the sanctions ended]."

At home Sarkozy was attacked by the Socialists for being willing to transact with an autocrat like Qaddafi. But the president is likely to weather that storm. His party agreed to a parliamentary inquiry scheduled to begin in autumn, and most probably this will serve to push the dispute to the backburner. After all, the Bulgarian medics deal involved many more states than France. According to the head of Bulgaria's intelligence service, Kirtcho Kirov, some 20 countries, including the United Kingdom, participated in what looked like a bazaar of liberation. Kirov recalled that the person who put him in touch with his Libyan counterpart was Marc Allan, the former head of global operations for MI6, the British foreign intelligence service.

Why the U.K.? Because the British authorities hold a vital card in the game of bringing oil-rich Libya back into the international fold. He is Abdul Basset Ali al-Megrahi, the Libyan former intelligence agent being held in Scotland for his alleged involvement in the Pan-Am bombing over the town of Lockerbie. In June, Britain's judiciary allowed him to appeal his sentence for a second time. For most observers Megrahi is a scapegoat; someone who went to prison so the international community would not have to go after the real culprit: Moammar Qaddafi. Megrahi's future release may be part of the tentacular medics deal, in exchange for which, presumably, the U.K. will also be invited into the lucrative Libyan market.

It hardly takes Libya to show that the U.K. is going its own way in the Middle East, or that the mood toward the United States is changing in London. Already, U.S. forces are preparing for a possible British withdrawal from the southern Iraqi city of Basra early next year, amid signs that British Prime Minister Gordon Brown wants out of the Iraq conflict.

The growing U.S.-U.K. disconnect was also evident in the conclusions of a report by a select committee of the House of Commons addressing Middle Eastern matters. Among other findings, the report criticized the British government's rejection of an early cease-fire during the summer war in Lebanon last year—a decision taken by then-Prime Minister Tony Blair in accordance with Washington. The MPs also called for an opening of dialogue with "moderates" in Hamas, cast doubt on the success of the U.S. "surge" in Iraq, and warned that the use of such terms as "war on terror" and "arc of extremism" provoked "resentment" and was "unhelpful and that such oversimplifications may lead to dangerous policy implications." The real target of these conclusions was, plainly, the Bush administration's post 9/11 terrorism policies.

An older nemesis of the administration, the Socialist government in Spain, is also taking a much freer line on Lebanese and Syrian affairs than the U.S. would like. The Spanish foreign minister, Miguel Angel Moratinos, has repeatedly sought to engage Syria's dictatorship, despite open U.S. skepticism. Moratinos' attitude has also disturbed the anti-Syrian parliamentary majority in Lebanon, with one parliamentarian describing his benign attitude toward Syria as "not reassuring." Recently, Moratinos traveled to Damascus to meet with Syria's leadership, even though there was a very high probability, confirmed by United Nations officials, that Syria played a role in the bomb attack that killed six Spanish peace-keepers of the U.N. Interim Force in South Lebanon on June 24.

Still, it's not all bad between Washington and Europe—nor is the U.S. itself particularly consistent when it comes to dealing with autocrats, as it continues to bolster the regimes in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan. Most European states are on the same page as the U.S. in opposing Iran's nuclear ambitions and its rising power in the Persian Gulf. On the Palestinian front, up to now European governments have sided with Washington on isolating Hamas (though that may be changing). In Lebanon, France may soon adopt measures similar to two White House Executive Orders denying travel to or blocking the property of individuals deemed to be undermining Lebanon's sovereignty and democracy.

However, the more uniform rhetoric heard in the aftermath of 9/11 is now a memory. The Europeans are doing their own thing, and so is the U.S. What that means in practical terms is that it is once again acceptable to cajole despots if national interests mandate it. So whether your name is Qaddafi, Assad, Mubarak, or Abdullah, the moral of the story is: Enjoy the greater breathing space you now have to asphyxiate your own people.

Reason contributing editor Michael Young is opinion editor of the Daily Star newspaper in Lebanon

A Glass By Any Other Name...

jsamuel@reason.com (Juliet Samuel) — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 16:34:00 EDT

Rising demand in India and China has sparked fears that the world could experience a drastic champagne shortage in the near future. Some say hoarding vineyard owners are to blame (the damn kulaks!)—they currently keep back about 100 million bottles for their retirement funds. But evidence points to a more likely culprit: the French government. In order to plant more champagne grapes, vineyards have to obtain authorization, which can take 10 years.

Global sales have risen from 287 million bottles in 2002 to 321 million in 2006. They are likely to reach 330 million this year, with exports to Russia growing by 39 percent, to China by 50 percent and to India by 125 percent. But only 32,600 hectares of vineyards are authorised to produce the black grapes for champagne.
Experts say that the maximum number of bottles to be wrung out of the land is 350 million – and many even doubt whether this can be attained. They say that the region’s grapes are already being pushed to the limit as owners await official approval to plant more vines in 2017.

Of course, one solution is to just buy the same product with a different name. Since 1990, an E.U. law has forbidden any wine producer not from the Champagne region in France from using the name for their goods (and it tries hard to insist its trading partners abide by the rule). After all, if consumers can’t be trusted to tell French champagne from trashy foreign stuff, they obviously need the government to help them. Perhaps what we’re really facing is a semantics shortage.

New Markets in Speed

jsamuel@reason.com (Juliet Samuel) — Fri, 13 Jul 2007 12:39:00 EDT

Sarko might not yet have transformed the French economy, but in one area at least, he has created a market where there was none before: driver’s license points.

As in many European countries, French drivers start with a total of 12 license points, which they lose for various driving offenses. Getting to zero means an automatic six-month driving ban. During Sarko’s reign as Minister of the Interior, he introduced 1,000 more speed cameras across France in a frenzied law and order “crackdown." There are particularly harsh punishments even for mild speeding (under 20kph over the limit)-- two points a pop.

But the crackdown has rather misfired: Drivers now see the penalties as universally unfair, and have started a market in license points. Those still with relatively clean records (close to 12 points) sell their points online for 300-1500 euros each to drivers in danger of a suspension. The seller then sends in her license number and name in place of the guilty party, and takes the rap. And the sheer number of cases makes it impossible to check who’s who:

Officials acknowledge that the state is swamped with the administration of automatic fines. The Interior Ministry said that it carries out spot checks. “For example, suspicion will be raised if an 84-year-old grandmother is snapped at 200 kph (160mph) at five on a Sunday morning near a nightclub,” he told le Parisien newspaper.
Jean-Baptise Iosca, a lawyer who specialises in motoring cases, said that the borrowing and buying of license points now touched every social class. “I have clients coming to see me after losing not only all their own points but also 12 from their grandmother and all their grandfather’s,” he said.

The solution? Another crackdown. Ex-PM de Villepin began a 20 million Euro investigation to stamp out fraudulent point-claiming, but it has yet to release any findings or suggest any action.

(Thanks to Sahil Mahtani for the tip.)

Sarkozy the Gaul

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 11:51:00 EDT

Rumors that France's new president Nicolas Sarkozy is a militant free-marketeer may have been greatly exaggerated:

For all his pro-European symbolism, Sarkozy has shown little willingness to abandon certain nationalist instincts of past French leaders. He has defended EU agricultural subsidies against demands for greater trade liberalization. He has shown little inclination to withdraw from France's aim of creating national champions, particularly in the energy sector. On Thursday, he debated the future of the state-controlled gas company Gaz de France with his prime minister and finance minister. And rather than encouraging globalization, he has appeared to reinforce French fears of unfettered capitalism -- for example, by fighting to remove a largely symbolic affirmation of EU competition policy from the revamped treaty agreed last month in Brussels.

On the bright side, Sarkozy is also clashing with the EU over his push for tax cuts. "Pro-European" does not always mean "pro-market," even in France.

[Via Daniel Mitchell.]

Why Chirac Sucked

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Wed, 09 May 2007 13:49:00 EDT

Over at Slate, Anne Applebaum lays into outgoing French President Jacques Chirac:

Ponder closely, for example, what Chirac has had to say about Africa, where his country has enormous influence, in many places far outweighing ours. During a visit to the Ivory Coast, Chirac once called "multi-partyism" a "kind of luxury," which his host, president-for-life Félix Houphouet-Boigny, could clearly not afford. During a visit to Tunisia, he proclaimed that, since "the most important human rights are the rights to be fed, to have health, to be educated, and to be housed," Tunisia's human rights record is "very advanced"-never mind the police who beat up dissidents. "Africa is not ready for democracy," he told a group of African leaders in the early 1990s.

On the up side, Chirac also quipped:

On Britain: "The only thing they have ever done for European agriculture is mad cow disease. ... You can't trust people who cook as badly as that."

More here. Coming soon by most accounts (including Applebaum's): Chirac in the dock for various corruption scandals.

Is it too late for Chirac--who served as president for a dozen years, mayor of Paris for 18 years, and prime minister for four years--to have his political hymen stitched back together?

French Mull On-the-Job Napping

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Thu, 01 Feb 2007 10:16:00 EST

One more sign the French century has been over for a very long time:

The French already enjoy a 35-hour workweek and generous vacation. Now the health minister wants to look into whether workers should be allowed to sleep on the job.
France introduced plans this week to spend $9 million this year to improve public awareness about sleeping troubles. About one in three French people suffer from them, the ministry says.
"Why not a nap at work? It can't be a taboo subject," Health Minister Xavier Bertrand said Monday. He called for further studies and said he would promote on-the-job naps if they prove useful.

More here.

Question: Would no-show employees get officially sanctioned nap time?

America's Oldest Enemy Now Bestest Friend!

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Tue, 30 Jan 2007 12:06:00 EST

Zut! The Wash Times reports that relations between the U.S. and France are tighter than, er Diane Lane and Christopher Lambert in years gone by:

Jean-David Levitte, who took over the French Embassy in December 2002 at a time of strained ties just before the Iraq war began, said he is a "happy ambassador" these days because the two countries have similar positions on most key issues.

"Today, our relationship is back on the right track," Mr. Levitte told editors and reporters at The Washington Times. "These are not only words; these are deeds."
His comments on Lebanon's political crisis, Syria's behavior, Iran's nuclear program and its larger role in the Middle East were almost identical to the Bush administration's positions.
"We share the frustration of the United States, and for the time being, we have decided not to maintain a high-level dialogue with Syria," he said, citing Damascus' continued interference in Lebanon.
"There is not much difference between Washington and Paris," he said.

More here.

But is Lebanon and/or the Middle East simply playing the role of Catherine in this high-stakes, geopolitical version of Jules et Jim? If that's the case, don't get in the car, man, whatever you do!

In Sunday's NY Post, I reviewed The Story of French and predicted a long slow death to the language of Rabelais, Moliere, Balzac, etc.

Back in 2003, Matt Welch banged the gong for France's new "Liberty Belle," libertarian youth leader Sabine Herrold.

And in 1998, Tyler Cowen explained "how protectionism has hurt French films."

Japanese Invasion of France Repelled...

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Thu, 21 Dec 2006 14:02:00 EST

...by the shocking rudeness of French waiters and taxi drivers. Apparently a large enough number of innocent Japanese tourists, heads filled with romantic visions, find the grim realities of Paris so devastating to their fragile, polite psyches that a name has been given to the condition--"Paris Syndrome."

The Japanese embassy, a handful of times a year, apparently has to send their mentally strained citizens back to the homeland with doctors and nurses aboard to mind them. As with any "syndrome" that is in fact an understandable, if eccentric, reaction to circumstances, the "cure" is--to get out of Paris and don't come back.

The far more interesting "Jerusalem Syndrome"--religious delusions suddenly overtaking travelers to the Holy Land--discussed here.

French vs. American Culture

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Wed, 22 Nov 2006 19:33:00 EST

From the always wonderful The Week magazine, a heartening summary of an argument made by French columnist Eric Le Boucher in Le Monde. (In The Week style, the internal quotes are from the original article that they are summarizing):

[The French] system, "which rests largely on public subsidizing of the arts and on massive unemployment insurance for artists," seemed intrinsically superior—even morally superior. Yet a new French study of the American culture industry says this caricature of the U.S. as McHollywood is way off the mark. The U.S. has 2 million people professionally employed as artists. Not only is that figure nearly three times the number employed as police in the U.S., but it’s also proportionately much larger than the artist population in France. Even more surprising, to French sensibilities, is "the diversity of the American art scene." Spurred by competition and lacking the complacency that government funding imparts, American artists have created independent theaters, studios, writing workshops, and alternative dance groups, even in small towns. The result is not a cultural scene ruled by money but one that is "profoundly democratic."

For the full summary, see here and scroll down to the bottom. America's varied and vital art scene, both high and popular--one of many things to be thankful for this holiday weekend.

Au Revoir, Frenchies!

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Wed, 01 Nov 2006 07:23:00 EST

The Washington Times weighs in on the fate of the French Foreign Legion, the ultimate casualty of France's diminished status as a world power and unwillingness to jump into the next Algerian war:

The Foreign Legion isn't what it used to be. Killers on the lam are no longer welcome, and unhappy recruits have a year to back out without being branded deserters.

These days a bigger issue faces the 175-year-old force that made its name fighting France's overseas battles in jungle and desert. Its primary mission -- to be a crack professional force of non-French volunteers available for instant, no-questions-asked deployment in far-flung conflicts -- has all but evaporated....

"They are an anachronism, the last remnants of a medieval mercenary tradition," said Dominique Moisi, a political analyst. "While they were the only professionals in a conscript army, they made sense, but not now that everybody else is professional, too."

More here.

The Legion's demise as a militar force may or may not be a trenchant commentary on contemporary soldiering. Certainly the Legion's demise as a cultural signifier helps explain the decline into outright suckitude of Crock, the long-running, long-tedious comic strip about a Legionnaire. Well, that and the absolute lack of humor in the writing of the strip.

Frogs in a Pot

myoung@reason.com (Michael Young) — Thu, 25 May 2006 14:18:00 EDT

If the French needed more proof that their political system was in urgent need of repair, a new scandal is providing it. The so-called Clearstream affair has sucked in President Jacques Chirac, Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin, Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, and a cast of others, including businessmen, spooks, and high-profile magistrates.

The scandal, named after a Luxembourg-based international clearing and settlement house, is turning into a byzantine beast, even by exacting Gallic standards for convolution. However, its political implications are easy to summarize, because they illustrate the rivalry within France's main right-wing party between Chirac and de Villepin on the one side, and the ambitious Sarkozy on the other. The question that has yet to be answered is whether the president and prime minister sought to use accusations of corruption against the interior minister--accusations that later proved to be false--to demolish his bid to become the right's candidate in the April 2007 presidential election--whether in favor of Chirac if he chooses to stand for a third term, or of de Villepin, as the president's most probable anointed successor.

Much remains unclear, but in May and June 2004, French magistrate Renaud Van Ruymbeke received anonymous letters and a CD-Rom disclosing the names of individuals who had allegedly been paid kickbacks through Clearstream from the sale of French frigates to Taiwan. Subsequently, the source was shown to be Jean-Louis Gergorin, a senior official at the European defense firm EADS. While it's not certain whether Sarkozy's name was on the initial copy of the CD-Rom (Gergorin has stated it was not), Chirac and de Villepin may have initiated an investigation of him (even that's not proven yet) presumably to get dirt on their foe, who by then was preparing to take over leadership of the Union pour un Mouvement Populaire (UMP), the former Gaullist parliamentary majority party to whom all three men belong. Particularly embarrassing is that de Villepin may have ordered the inquiry to continue, and perhaps expanded it, even after being told by a senior intelligence officer that Sarkozy was innocent.

The affair was given new life last January, when Sarkozy went to court to gain access to the case files. But this caused controversy as well, because the intelligence officer who declared Sarkozy blameless claims he tipped the minister off long before January about what was going on. This implied that Sarkozy, far from being a victim, used his legal request for information as a means of weakening Chirac and de Villepin.

In the past two weeks, Sarkozy showed once more that he could sniff the public's mood. As details of the scandal emerged, he made it known that he would not resign from the government, even if many observers, and reportedly several of his advisors, wondered how he could coexist with a prime minister who had purportedly tried to destroy him. Sarkozy made it appear that his decision was motivated by a sense of duty, but he really grasped that the public was so disgusted with and bewildered by Clearstream, that his making a fuss might threaten his own political career, alongside de Villepin's and Chirac's. The prime minister survived a no-confidence motion in the National Assembly (though many UMP deputies stayed away, in a strong rebuttal of de Villepin), but he's very likely terminally damaged as a serious presidential contender for the right.

It was the third misstep by de Villepin in seven months, following on from rioting by immigrants in France's suburbs last October, and the fiasco early this year after the prime minister's vain effort to implement the so-called Contrat de Premiere Embauche (CPE), or the First Hire Contract. The rioting underscored how elusive was the problem of Muslim immigration to France, and how paltry were the ideas from mainstream political parties for advancing integration. The CPE, in turn, was a ham-fisted, flawed, but also understandable stab at trying to introduce flexibility into the rigid French labor market. It was a modest endeavor (so much so that the body representing French employers refused to endorse it) that would have permitted employers to terminate the employment of workers under the age of 26, without any reason, or notice, within their first two years of being hired.

De Villepin's first mistake was to sneakily approve the CPE by tagging it on to other legislation, without clearing the way through a national dialogue necessary for so predictably contentious a measure. His second was to misread how deeply young people viewed it as a lethal threat to job security in a country where the state is considered a giant safety net. Facing weeks of massive demonstrations, the prime minister's steadfastness was ultimately undermined by an anxious Chirac, who proposed changes to the CPE that effectively neutralized its effectiveness.

With a political class eyed suspiciously by the public (even if Sarkozy and his main Socialist rival Segolene Royal have better managed to remain above the fray), no answers to the pressing problem of immigration, and governments unable to break free from stifling state regulation of an increasingly outdated economy, France looks poorly prepared to face a future that necessarily requires more social and economic suppleness. For a long time it kept alive the illusion of renewal thanks to the ongoing project of European unity, which was to culminate in the approval by European Union member states of a single constitution. But French voters put that effort to the sword last year, when a de facto alliance of right-wing voters wary of eroding national sovereignty and left-wing voters who found the European constitution too economically liberal sank the draft document.

Now France is listless. Charles de Gaulle and his successors, particularly Francois Mitterrand and Chirac, understood that only an anchor in Europe could salvage a declining France. Only in the context of a unified continent would the country be able to punch above its weight. But the EU's rapid expansion, growing fears that the European leviathan would be unable to successfully manage immigration, visceral distrust of social and economic change, and much else, coalesced to give the French cold feet. In such confusing times, the country has tended to simply change its constitution. For France to untie its myriad knots, the solution may require replacing the Fifth Republic with a Sixth.

Orange Méchanique

tcavanaugh@reason.com (Tim Cavanaugh) — Mon, 14 Nov 2005 00:00:00 EST

Here's a good rule of thumb: If you come across the phrase "Islamo-fascist" unironically deployed in an article, there's a 99-percent chance the author doesn't know what he or she is talking about. The rule has been in full effect over the past few weeks, as rioting in France's banlieus has allowed the usual gang of idiots to do what they do best: take a kernel of truth (in this case, that the rioters are Muslims and either immigrants or first-generation French citizens) and build it into an apocalyptic, hysterical tirade (in this case, predictions of a Euro-jihad and none-dare-call-it-Islamo-treason castigations of the politically correct mainstream media). That's easy to do in America, where the national media have never ignored a riot, but the true international template of the French riots has been missed by both the assimilationists and the clash-of-civilizationists. Instead, the model was described more than 40 years ago, in a popular book that has never been fully appreciated as a political prophecy. What are the distinguishing features of these riots? They are, as Olivier Roy notes in his recent New York Times argument for assimilation, overwhelmingly the work of young, male layabouts who are poor but not particularly uncomfortable. The rioters may be attracted to an extreme version of their parents' religion (although there's been precious little evidence of that), but the central characteristic so far has been a marked disintegration of parental influence. Most intriguingly, the rioters and their online supporters are employing something more than merely the hip slang of those crazy kids. A fairly new combination of bad French, borrowed English and Arabic words, verlan, (hiphop slang in which syllables in existing French words are reversed to produce a completely new word), and (in written language) nearly phonetic spelling, the argot is a key to understanding the society of the riots. Some examples: Cops are referred to as Schmits (supposedly a reference to the Nazi occupation of France), and a brouhaha in the Ile de France is called a hagra party, with "hagra" meaning "contempt" or "humiliation." So you've got underemployed but well fed kids with plenty of time on their hands, the depraved indifference of a welfare state that usurps the role of parents but provides no useful structure for the youth, a housing-project culture that sees itself (not without reason) as a defenseless ward of the state, politicians who veer between mealy-mouthed coddling of sociopaths and vicious denunciation of people with legitimate grievances, and kids who react to it all with theatrical violence. Clearly, the last century's great prophetic novel was not George Orwell's 1984 but Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange. The two books have plenty in common. Both enjoy an enduring popularity even while they're only partially understood (A Clockwork Orange is known primarily through Stanley Kubrick's remarkably faithful film adaptation, 1984 primarily through the many buzzwords and catchphrases it has contributed to the language). Both are generally classed as speculative science fiction, though hardly any of their "predictions" have come true and their real value is as cultural and political analysis. Both are by far the most popular works their authors produced, overshadowing much broader literary careers: Orwell's nonfiction offers an almost complete socialist history of the first half of the twentieth century, while Burgess continued the modernist language experiment through an astounding number of works in various media. Specifically, A Clockwork Orange was born of Burgess' lifelong efforts to popularize the works of James Joyce, and specifically to demonstrate that there was any point to Joyce's catastrophically polyglot last novel Finnegans Wake. A Clockwork Orange is probably the most fully realized (and certainly the most successful) attempt to put Finnegans Wake-type language into a more or less conventional tale. This doesn't tell the full story: The book's harrowing rape and beating scene, for example, was drawn from an experience in Burgess' own life—the rape of his first wife by American deserters during World War II. But the key element is that the book's invented language precedes the book itself. The language is called "nadsat," a mix of English, Russian, and invented words. It's the argot of Alex, the book's juvenile-delinquent hero and his gang of murderous hoodlums. Nobody who has read the book will forget the bravura performance in which Burgess tells the whole story, with notable clarity, from Alex's point of view, with virtually every fifth or sixth word being a Russian borrowing, a piece of street slang, or a whole-cloth invention. (The Kubrick film retains large, entertaining chunks of Alex's narration, but the book is worth reading for the unsettling experience of being locked into nadsat for nearly 200 pages.) While Burgess' Soviet-era model didn't prove out, his insight that the future would bring a new mongrel tongue to the streets hit the bull's eye. What makes Alex an engaging narrator, though, is not just his linguistic invention or the mordant wit of his observations, but that he harbors no illusions about the world he lives in—an overwhelmed, politically calcified welfare state where teenagers menace the streets when they're not being shuffled between public schools and juvenile detention centers. From page one, Alex recognizes a central fact about the state that provides his food, shelter, schooling, and jail time: The people in charge don't give a crap whether he lives or dies. They don't even care, really, whether he commits crimes. They just want to make sure he doesn't cause them trouble. Of course, the state has to be seen taking care of business, and Alex regularly bumps up against authority figures whom he views with wry bemusement. He is officially in the charge of a probation officer (or, in one of the book's brilliantly anodyne euphemisms, "Post-Corrective Adviser") named Mr. P.R. Deltoid—"an overworked veck with hundreds on his books." In an unnecessary gloss, the film makes it clear that Mr. Deltoid is sexually interested in Alex, but the character functions better as merely a self-interested, self-pitying public servant. As he puts it: "Just watch it, that's all, yes. We know more than you think, little Alex." Then he said, in a goloss of great suffering, but still rocking away: "What gets into you all? We study the problem and we've been studying it for damn well near a century, yes, but we get no farther with our studies. You've got a good home here, good loving parents, you've got not too bad a brain. Is it some devil that crawls into you?" You could hear echoes of that despair in recent weeks, as liberals expressed surprise at the burning of public schools and civic centers. After all, why would these crazy kids destroy the very bounty that the state has provided for them? Burgess' supreme insight was that, despite the popularity of the phrase "grinding poverty," poverty in a modern state is almost never grinding. One of my first reactions, when watching the Kubrick movie in high school, was to envy Alex the vast amount of leisure time his truant lifestyle seemed to afford him. What drives the rioters in France may be Islam, it may be a lack of opportunity, or the disrespect of the wider culture, or alienation from the keepers of "Gallic pride" (whatever that is). It's probably some combination of all those things, and a few others. The one thing that definitely isn't driving any of the rioters is an empty stomach. The clash-of-civilizationists have one important point: The London bombers, the murderers of Theo van Gogh, and the banlieu rioters are all Muslims, and it's vain to deny this connection. (Then again, it's not clear that anybody is denying it: After about the fiftieth media story berating the media for ignoring the story, I'm starting to smell a rat.) But there is an even clearer pattern of a welfare structure that sings the praises of the nation while discouraging recipients from feeling any connection to the nation—a one-size-fits-all style of governance that cultivates, if it doesn't actually breed, anti-social behavior. The French government makes a particularly choice target for schadenfreude: With one hand it fails to make cité residents to feel like full citizens (by, for example, ensuring an Arabic-sounding name is not a barrier to a good job), and on the other it enforces fake national unity on pointless matters (by banning headscarves in public schools). But the pattern repeats itself everywhere the state provides for the basic needs of its outsider groups while standing in the way of their pursuit of happiness. Proposals to change direction in France have so far not been promising: claims that France needs "a common dream;" calls for "collective responsibility" by "political and economic decision-makers;" an idea to translate the Marseillaise into Arabic. Denunciations of Europe's "unassimilable" hordes are suspiciously similar to the language of 19th-century anti-Catholicism in the United States. The difference may not be the presence of the stick but the lack of a carrot. American Catholics, though picked on, were left to fend for themselves. Is Europe ready for such a radical shift in attitudes toward individual rights and responsibilities? One hopeful story turned up in Grigny, where local residents took the defense of their neighborhood into their own hands. That approach is unlikely to get much of a national hearing. In A Clockwork Orange, the same politician who subjected Alex to "Ludovico" behavior modification—a slick minister of "interior or inferior"—ends up publicly embarrassed by the treatment's results, and has to buy Alex off with a cushy patronage job and friendly photo opps. Don't be surprised to see Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, after a few months of stewing in opprobrium over his promises to "clean out" the "scum," shaking hands with a celebrity rioter. What's it going to be Nic, eh?

Reason Express

info@reason.com (Jeff Taylor) — Tue, 08 Nov 2005 00:00:00 EST

In this issue:

1. The Latest French Fashion
2. Two Days and Three Sleepless Nights in Baghdad!
3. Libby's Fibby: A Motive?
4. Quick Hits
5. New at Reason Online - Casey at the Bench
6. News and Events

1. The Latest French Fashion

One tiny positive to flow from almost two weeks of rioting in Paris and across France is that maybe, just maybe, would-be city planners from America will pause for a second before simply assuming that Euro-style living is the best thing ever. Or to put it bluntly, would some front-load garages come in handy when the New Urbanist, pedestrian-friendly on-street parking is just a bull's-eye for a firebomb?

The occasional three-day trip to the French countryside is probably responsible for more bad ideas about zoning and land-use than all advanced degrees put together. The ugly images of the past few days should not be more persuasive than common sense, but they might puncture Euro trendiness among America's planner set all the same.

That might at least balance out the truly senseless violence that was met by an almost Katrina-esque response from French officials. Presumably Jacques Chirac had a reason for waiting 11 days to comment on the riots, but needing time to come up with great oratory surely was not among them. The situation seems ripe for some real leadership to bubble up from below the ossified political structure and point France back toward sanity.

http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/world/sns-ap-france-rioting,0,2062000.story?coll=ny-top-headlines

Reason Express is made possible by a grant from GlobalDrive, the world leader in globally-accessible data storage. Want to share files with co-workers or friends? Don't want to shlep your laptop to Europe? Worried about a safe place to store your computer's backups? Give GlobalDrive a try! Privacy. Protection. Security. Sharable. And from only $40/year.

2. Two Days and Three Sleepless Nights in Baghdad!

Running a close second to events in France in the "most bizarre reaction to a crisis" category must be plans to turn Baghdad into a destination location, complete with a ritzy hotel and a theme park in Tikrit. In fact, the grab for tourist dollars suggests nothing so much as those same trendy land-use dreams of America's central planners run amok.

Ignoring basic needs like roads and police in favor of convention centers and sports arenas is the bread-and-butter of modern city planning in the U.S. Most every city of any size has an under-utilized, publicly funded convention center in its midst. Iraq is just applying this notion slightly more aggressively. Not only is the public infrastructure ignored, it is non-existent in places. Not only is public safety an afterthought, tourists are advised to travel with their own armed body guards.

Come to think of it, maybe American cities have a thing or two to learn from the Iraqi way of running municipal services. Build the attractions, and to hell with civil society.

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article325277.ece

3. Libby's Fibby: A Motive?

Watergate principal John Dean, a man who presumably knows his way around a White House cover-up, fisks the Scooter Libby indictment and advances the ball a little, but does not quite score. Call it a nice first-down pick up for Nixon's former lawyer.

Dean follows the "protect Cheney" meme popular among lefties searching for an explanation, but does so with a great deal more detail than most. Dean posits that Libby lied to Patrick Fitzgerald in order to obscure exactly how he came to have the knowledge that Val Plame worked for the CIA. The claim that journalists were in the loop along with the VP, although easy to disprove via the journo testimony that allowed for that perjury charge, nevertheless builds a "firewall" around Cheney as far as possible violations of the Espionage Act go. Or so Dean believes.

But to bring charges on Espionage Act grounds, Fitzgerald would have to show that not only did Cheney discuss Plame with Libby, he directed him to leak her name in a truly Tricky Dick move. It just can't be a violation of the law for two people with the proper clearances to discuss secret stuff without having a good reason to, or half of D.C. would be guilty of breaking the law. Dean doesn't seem to get that, and he thinks a Cheney indictment is in the cards.

http://writ.news.findlaw.com/dean/20051104.html

4. Quick Hits

Quote of the Week

"The grenade struck two decks above and about four rooms further forward. I could tell the guy firing the bazooka was smiling." —Charles Supple, one of the passengers aboard the cruise ship Seabourn Spirit that was attacked by RPG-toting pirates about 100 miles off of the Somali coast.

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/1105AP_Seychelles_Pirate_Cruise.html

The Supremes on Tribunals

The Supreme Court has agreed to hear a case brought by Osama bin Laden's supposed driver on the legality of the military tribunals set up by the Bush administration to try accused terrorists.

http://www.cnn.com/2005/LAW/11/07/scotus.gitmo/

Wi-Fi Police

Officials in Westchester County may ban operating a wi-fi network without securing it first with a firewall and encryption. Otherwise "somebody parked in the street or sitting in a neighboring building could hack into the network and steal your most confidential data," County Executive Andy Spano explains.

http://news.com.com/Unsecured+Wi-Fi+would+be+outlawed+by+N.Y.+county/2100-7351_3-5934194.html?part=rss&tag=5934194

Grokster, RIP

Killed dead by Hollywood and music industry, with a big assist from U.S. courts.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/netmusic/story/0,,1636939,00.html

5. New at Reason Online

Casey at the Bench
Samuel Alito's controversial abortion ruling. Cathy Young

Freedom Riders
How motorcyclists won the right to feel the wind in their hair. Jacob Sullum

Democrats--Not for Free Speech Anymore!
Once again, the party that thinks it's pro-expression demonstrates that it's not. Matt Welch

And much more!

6. News and Events

An Evening with Milton and Rose Friedman

Please join the The Milton and Rose D. Friedman Foundation in celebrating 50 Years of an Idea. This 50th Anniversary Gala Dinner on December 5, 2005 at the Regent Beverly Wilshire in Los Angeles, California will honor Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman, who first proposed the school voucher idea in 1955.

The Friedmans will participate in a Q&A session, answering questions submitted by the audience. The Friedman's will be joined by several honored guests, who will be announced in the coming weeks. For more information on the dinner and how to attend, visit here.

Get liberated with Ronald Bailey's brave new book for a brave new world!

In his new book, Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution, Reason's Ronald Bailey examines the scientific and ethical controversies surrounding everything from stem cell research to therapeutic cloning to longer life spans to genetically modified food.

Buy Liberation Biology in hardcover from Amazon for just $18.48!

Buy Reason T-shirts and coffee mugs!

Click here for the latest on media appearances by Reason writers.

Want even more Reason? Sign up for Reason Alert to get regular news from Reason Magazine and Reason Public Policy Instiute, as well as advance notice about media appearances and events.

We encourage you to forward Reason Express. If you received this issue from a forward, please subscribe. It's Free!

Back Issues
Subscribe
Send Feedback
Visit http://www.reason.com/re/rextext.txt for the plain text version of Reason Express.
Visit http://www.reason.com/re/current.shtml for the html version.

Now you can get the electronic edition of Reason magazine delivered to your PC the day the print edition mails! Reason's electronic edition is an exact digital reproduction of the print edition with all the benefits of interactivity and electronic navigation.

For more information and a FREE issue of the new Reason electronic edition go here.

ORIGINAL LOCATION LINK

The Root of the Problem

jsanchez@reason.com (Julian Sanchez) — Mon, 24 Oct 2005 00:00:00 EDT

The Internet, in John Perry Barlow's famously purple description, is a happy anarchy "naturally independent" of government; it is an "act of nature and it grows itself through our collective actions." That was always, alas, a slightly starry-eyed description of the Pentagon's most precocious baby, which is why a growing conflict over who will manage the Net's basic virtual infrastructure will take center stage next month in Tunis, Tunisia, at the second meeting of the World Summit on the Information Society, where some are proposing that the United Nations take the helm.

At the level of content—the myriad websites, audio streams, and e-mails produced by millions of individuals, companies, and virtual communities—Barlow's description is not far off. And though the Internet's physical infrastructure or "backbone" is owned by a far smaller number of commercial firms, they've largely treated the content level with a policy of benevolent neglect.

The Internet's basic virtual infrastructure, however, is in the hands of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, better known by the feel-good acronym ICANN. When you point your browser to "reason.com," the network knows that's just what friends call the site: In the more formal world of machines, it goes by 204.200.197.158. ICANN is in charge of allocating blocks of those numerical strings, Internet Protocol (IP) addresses, and maintaining the "root lists" that tell your computer where to start looking to link up names with numbers.

ICANN took over these tasks in 1998 when the U.S. government, in a shocking display of sensible self-restraint, recognized that it was in the best interests of cyberspace that they not be tied too tightly to any one government. But there's growing international dissatisfaction with that arrangement. The Department of Commerce can still, in principle, veto ICANN decisions. And even when it doesn't exercise that power formally, international observers can hardly be faulted for worrying that American politics is influencing Net policy.

For example, ICANN recently halted the rollout of a new .xxx domain for adult Web sites after the Bush administration, under pressure from socially conservative groups like Focus on the Family, objected.

Backlash against proposals to end ICANN's monopoly has been no less robust. It's met stiff opposition from legislators like Sen. Norm Coleman (R-Minn.).

It's not hard to see why the U.N.ternet lacks fans in the U.S. The organization has been doing what President Bush might call a "heck of a job" at such diverse tasks as peacekeeping and administering peacekeeping and administering oil for food aid programs. And an organization where Libya can be elected to chair a human rights commission may not seem the ideal oversight entity for what is probably the most free and open medium the world has ever seen.

Some concerns, admittedly, are overblown. The ability of a China or an Iran to exercise direct censorship through an ICANN-like entity would actually be fairly constrained. The authority of the root servers, after all, is a kind of moral authority—they work because people agree to use them as a common point of reference. In a worst-case scenario, truly onerous restrictions would probably prompt the reemergence of alternative root nameservers for politically disfavored sites and domains.

More realistic is the threat of the slow accretion of minor rules, restrictions, and taxes. A bureaucracy can strangle by accident as effectively as many despotisms manage to do on purpose.

Still, if the idea of an Internet managed by the U.N.—or (more likely) some other body controlled by world governments—is unappealing, this might be a good time to ask whether an ICANN under the watchful eye of the U.S. Department of Commerce is so much better. The U.N. shouldn't control the Net's virtual infrastructure—but then, why should the U.S.?

There's a certain appeal to the simple "it's our ball" argument. A global computer network certainly might have looked very different: The French Minitel rather than the Pentagon's ARPANET could have been the fountainhead from which the world's greatest porn repository sprang. In a parallel universe not too far away, we're probably sending our courriel électronique over x.25 instead of TCP/IP, and taking great care to include some minimum proportion of Gérard Depardieu flicks in our pirated BitTorrent movie downloads. But that didn't happen—and why (some ask) should the U.S. give up its stake in the Net any more readily than we might expect France would have?

But in many ways, that argument runs contrary to the spirit of the Net. The Internet grew out of ARPANET precisely because, at key points, the government opted for openness over control. As grumbles about the last vestiges of U.S. government involvement with the Internet's master address book grow louder, perhaps it's time to sever the last strands of digital umbilical cord.

As Syracuse University's Milton Mueller, a professor of information studies and author of Ruling the Root, noted in a post to the Politech mailing list, the real problem we face is that "the debate has devolved to a choice between 'US control' versus 'UN control.'" Yet, Mueller observes, there are other options:

What seems to have been lost in the shuffle is the idea of distributed, cooperative control that involves individuals, technical and academic groups, Internet businesses and limited, lawful interactions with governments. The idea that nation-states should not have the ability to arbitrarily intervene in the Internet's operation whenever they feel like it, but should be bound by clear, negotiated constitutional principles, has been crowded out of the debate.

The Internet may have grown out of a government project, but it has never really been a creature of government. Why, then, is the debate over the Net's future being framed as a contest between whether one government or a group of them will get to breathe down the neck of ICANN or its successor organization? We have an opportunity now to put the root in the hands of an organization that is not international—in the sense of being "between nations," though still defined by them—but truly global, responsible to the citizens and stakeholders of the world rather than its governments.

John Barlow's vision of the Internet came from a "Declaration of Independence" for cyberspace, in which he insisted to the world's governments: "We must declare our virtual selves immune to your sovereignty, even as we continue to consent to your rule over our bodies." Perhaps he was too sanguine. Or perhaps he was merely premature.