France has arrested a researcher at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (Cern) for suspected links with al-Qaeda, officials have said. [...] “He was not a Cern employee and performed his research under a contract with an outside institute. His work did not bring him into contact with anything that could be used for terrorism,” it said. [...] The physicist had exchanged messages over the internet with people known to be close to the organisation al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb and expressed a desire to carry out attacks, but had “not got to the stage of carrying out material acts of preparation”, one said.

When we’re debating Afghanistan, I think it’s important to keep in mind that to undertake a terrorist attack in France you have to be in France. To undertake a terrorist attack in the United States, you have to be in the United States. Anyone in a “safe haven” in Central Asia is, by definition, not nearly as dangerous as someone working at CERN. So in terms of short-term terrorism prevention, domestic law enforcement is always going to be the most important priority. And in the long term, the key issues relate to motivation and recruitment; decreasing the number of people who feel that it makes sense to engage in violent attacks against western targets to advance a political agenda. What happens in the “AfPak” area is important, but not really the most important thing.

US Embassy, Paris, France (official photo)

Brian Knowlton for the New York Times takes a look at the practice of appointing political favorites, typically donors, to ambassador posts in fun countries. His specific focus is our new ambassador to France, Charles H. Rivkin, a major Obama fundraiser:

Mr. Rivkin can certainly find France. A graduate of Yale (international relations) and Harvard (M.B.A.), he spent years as a youth studying, traveling and working in France — he did an internship at Renault — and is fluent in French. Business interests have taken him to Paris or Cannes every year for the past 20 years, he said.

One measure of an ambassador’s effectiveness can be how well-connected he is in Washington. Here, a political appointee like Mr. Rivkin can enjoy a significant advantage.

One thing to note here is that as a general matter this is a much bigger deal for US foreign service officers than it is for foreign governments as such. Because the United States is such a large and influential country, it’s simply in the nature of things that Spain’s ambassador in Washington will be a more senior figure in Spanish policy circles than America’s ambassador in Spain is in American policy circles. Which is to say that whether or not we appoint career professionals, government-to-government contacts that need to be run through an embassy will almost certainly be run through embassies located in Washington, where most countries are represented by very senior officials. And as the article notes, in terms of access and influence you may be better off with a political appointee. A major fundraiser and longtime personal friend like Rivkin will have an easier time getting a message to Obama than would any career person who might possibly get the job.

At the same time, for American foreign service officers heavy reliance on political appointees is extremely demoralizing. Foreign service professionals do extremely important, often overlooked work and it’s not as if they’re getting rich doing it. Declining to use career FSOs for the top diplomatic positions devalues the work of the entire foreign service. The Obama administration is nominally committed to the view that the United States needs to rebalance its international agenda toward less reliance on the military and more reliance on our civilian capabilities. The foreign service is integral to that idea, and moving to curb the use of ambassadorships as patronage positions would have been an excellent signal of seriousness about elevating the status of the foreign service.

Ezra Klein got the following question doing some live-chatting:

Lexington, Va.: Hey Ezra – I really enjoyed your article, but I’m wondering, with all the references to European-style health care, what role homogeneity plays in the success of these systems? Many European countries are far less diverse (economically, ethnically, etc.) than the US, and going beyond Europe, Japan’s population is almost entirely homogeneous. Don’t these systems that you have mentioned depend largely on the ease of applying universal care to a population that doesn’t vary from person to person like the US does?

Ezra Klein: Not really. Some of those countries are more and less diverse than others, for one thing. And it’s not as if Montana, which isn’t very diverse, has an awesome health-care system. It’s arguably the case that there are fewer political obstacles in a more homogenous system because it’s easier for voters to feel connected to one another. But there’s no real reason national health insurance should work with 20 percent diversity but not 35 percent diversity.

To back this up with a bit more in the way of demographic information, there’s no objective measure of which society is “most diverse” but I think in a commonsense way the most ethnically and religiously diverse European country is probably France, which is also the country with what’s probably the best health care system. In a different sense of diversity, Belgium is strongly binational, which creates a lot of problems, but hasn’t prevented them (or Canada for that matter) from constructing a reasonable health care system. Meanwhile, citizens of super-homogenous Japan are extremely healthy but my understanding is that their health care system actually delivers a pretty low standard of care.

I think what you can say about America’s diversity and health care is that segregationist sentiment was a major impediment to creating a universal health care system back in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s as there was fear that a national health care system would come under pressure, like the military, to be desegregated

Patrice Higonnet’s book Sister Republics: The Origin of French and American Republicanism is recommended for a smart take on the Franco-American relationship.

Eiffel Tower, Paris, France (wikimedia)

As every good conservative knows, France is bad and universal health care is bad. This the sneering condescension in this Dennis Boyles post at the Corner must secretly make sense:

A couple of things you can learn if you’re in France:

First, the meaning of “universal.” It doesn’t mean what you think if you’re a poor person in France, where “universal” health care is arguably better than elsewhere in the EU. It means about 75 percent. Le Parisien reports this morning that, as in the U.S., the more money you have the better care you get. Shocking. The paper backed up a recent study with a small-scale sting of their own and discovered that if you rely on France’s medical insurance alone, 25 percent of French doctors will refuse to treat you. That’s how you say ObamaCare in French.

For one thing, Obama’s proposed reforms—unfortunately—wouldn’t actually make American health care much like French health care. That said, the moral of the story is that in France no matter how poor you are, or what pre-existing conditions you have, or what happened to your job amidst the latest recession, or whatever else if you get sick 75 percent of doctors will treat you and the government will pick up the tab. In the conservative free market utopia, as I understand it, what would happen to you is that you would just die.*

The reality is that France provides a very high standard of health care to its citizens:

Some researchers, however, said that study [from the WHO, proclaiming French health care the best in the world] was flawed, arguing that there might be things other than a country’s health care system that determined factors like longevity. So this year, two researchers at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine measured something called the “amenable mortality.” Basically, it’s a measure of deaths that could have been prevented with good health care. The researchers looked at health care in 19 industrialized nations. Again, France came in first. The United States was last. [...]

“There are no uninsured in France,” says Victor Rodwin, a professor of health policy at New York University, who is affiliated with the International Longevity Center. “That’s completely unheard of. There is no case of anybody going broke over their health costs. In fact, the system is so designed that for the 3 or 4 or 5 percent of the patients who are the very sickest, those patients are exempt from their co-payments to begin with. There are no deductibles.”

There’s a lot that could be said about the relevance of France’s success in health care policy to the American debate. But to argue that the French system is unsuccessful is totally untenable. And to argue that it’s somehow worse for the poor than America’s “good luck with that!” approach is ridiculous.

* Now in the current American status quo you might be able to sign up for Medicaid (socialism!) or else go to the ER and get some unpaid-for health care once your condition deteriorates enough. But it is worth being clear that the free market solution to someone being poor and sick is for them to die. If you’re too poor for HBO, you go without watching True Blood. If you’re too poor for a MacBook Pro, you make due without one. And if you’re too poor for statins you get a heart attack. And if you’re too poor to get your heart attack treated you die. Whether or not anyone in the United States actually wants to implement such a system isn’t clear to me, but that would be what a free market health care system looked like—like free markets in other things.

Besides Fontainebleau, about 50 French chateaus are to receive a facelift, including the palace of Versailles. Also receiving funds are some 75 cathedrals like Notre Dame in Paris. A museum devoted to Lalique glass is being created in Strasbourg, while Marseilles is to be the home of a new 10 million euro center for Mediterranean culture.

Basically, if you had tried to do this in the United States it would have been derided as pork. Or else you would have needed to set up a centrally administered slush fund that wouldn’t have played well in the press. It seems to me, though, that the larger issue simply relates to the much larger state sector in the French economy which is naturally going to be more insulated from a sharp downturn. The argument against it would be that this recession is forcing us into some kind of awesome structural adjustments that will pay off in the form of post-crash growth, while France’s insulation from the current “destruction” will hurt them during the “creative” upswing.

Now I think that’s a pretty striking chart. Politics is politics, and that means change that’s fairly incremental. But looking at that chart, and abstracting away from the practicalities of it, you’ll need to show me overwhelming evidence that the United States is getting better health outcomes than these other countries are before I stop thinking that a hefty dose of socialism is what the health care sector needs.

Arc de Triomphe, Paris (wikimedia)

Kevin Drum thinks someone should tell Max Baucus the truth about foreign health care:

Now, the fact that the French spend about half what we do doesn’t mean that we’d cut our costs in half if we adopted a French-style system. We wouldn’t. There’s too much path dependence and too many cultural differences for that. But what it does mean is that if we adopted something close to their system, we could certainly achieve high-quality 100% basic coverage — with the ability to purchase extra coverage for anyone who wants it — for no more than we spend now and possibly a bit less.

We won’t, of course, because too many people are still convinced that healthcare in the United States is better than it is in France — or anywhere else. It’s not. It’s worse and more expensive. Somebody tell Max Baucus.

The trouble is that as I’ve had occasion to note before the evidence suggests that Baucus already knows this:

Afterward, Sen. Ken Salazar, D-Colo., who has since become interior secretary, noted that other countries saw a conflict between profits and health. How could the United States possibly persuade insurance companies to give up profits? [Author T.R.] Reid answered that Switzerland, home to many powerful insurance companies, had done it in 1994 when it adopted the Bismarck model. The insurers fought it tooth and nail, of course, but now they compete energetically to sign up people for basic care on a nonprofit basis because they constitute a customer base for supplemental insurance that they’re allowed to sell on a for-profit basis. This answer didn’t satisfy Baucus. “Perhaps you don’t know how much money [U.S. insurers] have,” he told Reid.

As I’ve said before, it’s as if Baucus doesn’t realize that he’s the single most important person in Congress on this issue. He could just decide not to listen to the insurers no matter how much money they have. Instead we get things like Rahm Emannuel floating compromises about introducing a public insurance option only after a “trigger” test has been passed. This really only makes sense if you think protecting the profits of insurance firms is an independently desirable policy goal. You’re open to the possibility of a public plan, but you want to err on the side of avoiding its introduction because . . . well . . . because . . . it’s not really clear.

Number 2 tram in Amsterdam (my photo)

Mitch McConnell was on the floor of the Senate the other day droning on about the nightmare of rationing and Soviet-style bread lines that are sure to result from the government guaranteeing affordable health care for everyone. Meanwhile, Jonathan Cohn actually traveled to foreign countries—specifically France and the Netherlands—to check out their health care systems. He reports that things are pretty awesome:

But in the course of a few dozen lengthy interviews, not once did I encounter an interview subject who wanted to trade places with an American. And it was easy enough to see why. People in these countries were getting precisely what most Americans say they want: Timely, quality care. Physicians felt free to practice medicine the way they wanted; companies got to concentrate on their lines of business, rather than develop expertise in managing health benefits. But, in contrast with the US, everybody had insurance. The papers weren’t filled with stories of people going bankrupt or skipping medical care because they couldn’t afford to pay their bills. And they did all this while paying substantially less, overall, than we do.

It’s also really important to just make a simple conceptual point. Right now health care is rationed by your ability to pay. And under any even remotely plausible vision of health care reform for the United States it would continue to be the case that people with the means and desire would be able to pay doctors to do pretty much whatever. Insofar as any “rationing” would take place at all it would be in terms of what the government is prepared to pay for.

Michelle Goldberg had a very good column in TAP Online the other day about the debate in France over banning burqas:

Ultimately, though, there’s no evidence that most burqa-clad French women regard themselves as oppressed. “There are women who wear burqas who are not being forced by anyone, who think that form of modesty is appropriate for who they want to be in the world,” says Scott. “It’s hard to distinguish between them and those who are being forced.” And so in the end, a ban putatively passed to further women’s rights could instead impinge on their freedom, and take from them something they value. Even worse, it could lead to those in the most fundamentalist of households being trapped inside their homes altogether. It would be cruel to limit these women’s options in the name of liberation, even if their clothes are a rebuke to the secularism that the French rightly hold sacred.

Putting her points on this together in a slightly different way, this sort of ban seems extremely unlikely to actually help anyone who’s genuinely in need of help. A woman whose husband and/or other male relations have enough power over her to force her into a burqa against her will is only going to be forced by those same men further underground by this sort of rule. The only kind of person who would be genuinely unveiled by this kind of legal measure would be someone with enough autonomy to be in a position to choose compliance with the law over compliance with tradition. The French have a strong tradition not just of secularism, but of a kind of illiberal egalitarianism that holds that everyone should really be the same, and I think it tends to push them toward measures like this that don’t ultimately help anyone.

— Does objectivity in history presuppose the impartiality of the historian?

— Does language betray though?

— Explicate an excerpt from Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation

And from the science series:

— Are there questions that are un-answerable by science?

The correct answers are no, no, I don’t know anything about Schopenhauer, and yes. Apparently there’s also a question asking if it’s absurd to desire the impossible. I think it is.

Either way, I think it’s safe to say that Barack Obama’s nowhere near turning us into France.

Geoffrey Lean has an interesting piece in Grist about Nicholas Sarkozy’s green agenda in France. He makes the point that this isn’t all about the nukes:

At least one new solar power station is to be built in each region by 2011; by contrast, only two new nuclear power plants will be completed by 2017, despite France’s history as the world’s chief champion of the atom. By 2020 national capacities for geothermal energy will have been increased sixfold, for wind energy ten fold, and for solar photovoltaic energy 400 times over.

Still, the fact that France already gets such a large proportion of its electricity from nuclear power means that carbon pricing will have less impact on France than on many other developed countries. And it would be hard for me to imagine a robust, worldwide effort at reducing carbon emissions not being good for the French nuclear power industry. I’m not, personally, a huge proponent of nuclear electricity but I think at least a few countries will probably wind up following France in going big-time nuclear. Meanwhile, another large French company, Alstom, is a leading provider of rolling stock for high-speed rail and mass transit projects. So on this front, too, you would expect the French business community to be relatively enthusiastic about a low carbon agenda.

I know people on the right who are aware that climate change is real and problematic, but who somehow don’t really feel that engaging with the denialists on their side and trying to educate people is an important thing to do. It seems like an odd point of view to me. Meanwhile, in the alps:

Melting glaciers in the Alps may prompt Italy and Switzerland to redraw their borders near the Matterhorn, according to parliamentary draft legislation being readied in Rome [...] “This draft law is born out the necessity to revise and verify the frontiers given the changes in climate and atmosphere,” Narducci said. “The 1941 convention between Italy and Switzerland established as criteria [for border revisions] the ridge [crest] of the glaciers. Following the withdrawal of the glaciers in the Alps, a new criterion has been proposed so that the new border coincides with the rock.” [...] Narducci said the same negotiation will be proposed to France and Austria.

Fortunately, boundary adjustments between Western European countries are almost certain to be handled in an amicably bureaucratic manner rather than a violent one thanks to the success in turning international relations within Europe into a rule-governed enterprise. The rest of the world, however, doesn’t have these kind of luxuries and as de-glaciation unsettles established patterns of land- and water-use we’re going to see some very serious political problems.

Henry Farrell has a good post taking on some odd recent punditocratic assertions that the United States is in danger of imminent Frenchification. To take this idea a bit more seriously than it merits, it’s worth observing that if you take ideas about path dependence and institutional structure seriously—and you should!—you’ll see right away that the United States couldn’t possibly become France, whether or not Barack Obama or I or anyone else wants it to.

Nothing can happen in U.S. federal politics that’s the equivalent to the scenario that arises in the Fifth Republic when the President commands a majority in the parliament. Barack Obama’s relationship with the congressional Democrats is just nothing like what Nicholas Sarkozy is, in practice, empowered to do with a parliamentary majority. Similarly, the powers of the national government are completely different in the two countries—the subordinate levels of government in France, for example, have no authority to set tax rates. But the United States has its own currency and its own monetary policy which France doesn’t. There’s no metropolitan area in the United States that plays a role even remotely resembling the centrality of Paris in French life, and given the size of the United States there’s nothing you could possibly do to give any metropolitan area that kind of centrality. For all these reasons, to try to do something like adopt the French approach to education would be completely impossible in the United States. But the French education system is integral to the entire operation of the French political and economic system.

Meanwhile, the general habit of looking at departures from the status quo in the United States and immediately comparing them to France is incredibly lazy and inappropriate. Total taxation (including state and local government) in the United States amounts to 28.3 percent of GDP. In France, it’s 43.6 percent of GDP. We’d have to go past such more-generous-than-the-US Anglophone welfare states as Australia, Ireland, Canada, and New Zealand before arriving at the legendary statist nightmare of Germany at 36.2 percent and then plow through the U.K., Spain, the Netherlands, and even such Nordic all-stars as Iceland, Finland, and Norway before you got a French level of taxation. Under the circumstances, it would make a lot more sense to ask if Barack Obama is trying to turn the United States into Ireland—universal health care, slightly higher taxes, somewhat more unions, different St Patrick’s Day celebration—than France. France is just a weird bugaboo for Americans, but it’s just about the least-enlightening comparison you could ask for.

I’ve been glad to see Obama getting dinged around a little for the line in his speech about how the United States invented the automobile. What I wish more people appreciated was that he’s been using this line on and off for a while now. Way back during ThinkProgress’ October 15 debate live-blog I noted:

Obama said America invented the automobile industry. In fact, the first market-viable car was developed by Germany’s Karl Benz. The first automobile was invented in 18th century France and the first internal combustion engine was invented in 1806 by a French-speaking Swiss man (this is why we use the French word “automobile”).

Obviously, this isn’t a really big deal in the scheme of things. But I do think that one thing this country needs is to become a little bit more mature about our place in the world. We’re the richest, mightiest nation on earth and we’re close to the top in land area and population size. A ton of stuff was invented here, a ton of first breakthroughs were made here, Henry Ford is a very important figure in the history of the car industry. But this can be taken too far. I recall that back during his 2000 convention speech, Joe Lieberman suggested that “only in America” could a Jewish person get nominated for Vice President even though France had a Jewish Prime Minister back in the 1930s. The kind of solipsism and hubris of that statement, or of made-up tales of automobile invention, ill-befits a country that wants and needs to play a role of genuine leadership on the world stage.

Yesterday I got a chance to read an English translation of French President Nicholas Sarkozy’s speech from at the Munich security conference over the weekend. I thought this part was interesting:

What has history taught us? That no empire, even the largest, can defeat the longing for freedom. All of us, in the course of our history, have found ourselves confronted with this painful reality. All of us, not just in the twentieth century, with the dissillusionment of the USSR, but when we look back at our history, at some point have thought we were an empire able to treat others’ longing for freedom with disdain.

It isn’t just in Europe that there’s a longing for freedom; it’s all over the world. We have all — and, in her history, like others, France has — had to deal with great disillusionment when we forgot that freedom was for everyone.

Not so long ago this kind of anti-imperialist sentiment would have been commonplace in the United States. Certainly FDR and Harry Truman took the view that part of forging the alliance with England and France to fight Nazism and Communism required the U.S. to pressure those countries to disband their empires. More recently, we’ve lost sight of these issues, and under the administration of George W. Bush it became commonplace to argue that to support an international agenda aimed at “freedom” actually required the United States to espouse the coercive military domination of foreign countries. Sarkozy has found a way to push back on that attitude that, both rightly and politely, puts the recent errors of American policy in a broader context not as some unique sin of ours but as a sin of hubris that’s been repeatedly engaged in by a variety of countries and that we all need to collectively overcome.

If you ask me, one of the most disturbing trends in American public discourse is the incredibly provincialism and solipsism of a lot of our policy debate. The idea that other countries are doing better than we are in various ways is totally off the radar. Instead, when foreign countries are mentioned at all you get stuff like this:

“We have fundamental philosophical differences. We’re in an era of unfunded liabilities,” said John Culberson , R-Texas. “This stimulus is really a Trojan horse. It’s part of a plan that would turn the United States into France.”

France! A country so impoverished that its citizens are fleeing in droves, washing up on our shores desperate to experience the good life as it’s lived in suburban Houston.

I was reminded of that by this post from Tim Lee pointing out that broadband internet access in the United States is a lot better and cheaper than it was nine years ago so he “can’t get too upset about the possibility that in 2018 Americans might be limping along with 2 gbps broadband connections while the average Japanese family has a 20 gbps connection.” I, for one, am pretty upset about that possibility. The United States isn’t a poor country dealing with some objective shortfall of national resources. And yet across a whole variety of dimensions—from broadband speed to train quality to the cleanliness of streets to life expectancy to the crime rate—we fall far short of standards that are reached elsewhere. What we do have, on the other hand, is the richest multi-millionaires in the world. And an awful lot of people’s first instinct is to try to explain these things away or explain why it would be impossible to bring some of these quality of life features to the United States.

It seems to me people would do better to get more upset.

I’m pretty young, but even I’m old enough to remember when this sort of industrial policy was badly out of vogue. But now France is getting in the auto bailout game:

French carmakers will receive a government bailout of up to €6 billion (£5.5 billion) in return for pledging to keep factories in France open, Francois Fillon, the Prime Minister, said today. [...] “There is no question of the State helping a manufacturer which would purely and simply decide to close one or more plants in France. [...] [Carlos Ghosn] urged lower taxes for French-made cars and a tax hike on imported cars, claiming that French vehicles cost on average Euro1000 more than foreign rivals because of French fiscal rules.

For well-known reasons, free trade deals between the U.S. and the developing world have come under a lot of criticism for undermining U.S. environmental and labor standings and undermining American wages. But whatever you think of that debate, those kind of considerations don’t really apply when you’re talking about this kind of thing which has to do with producers in one rich country wanting protection from competition from companies based in other rich countries. Moving back to a sharply segmented market will be bad for consumers and over the longer-run it’s still going to leave us with a situation where either car firms need to shrink or else car firms will need to keep on being propped up by governments.

But of course that’s not how things work at all. The whole business of electioneering is full of irrationality and tradition all the way from top to bottom. The notion that all members of the Kennedy family are ex officio considered plausible candidates for public office is weird, but it’s a particular oddity that exists against background conditions that are also odd. And in fact when Americans hear about French politics where politicians are expected to attend the ENA and then go work in the bureaucracy before getting into politics, that seems incredibly odd. But politicians write rules for bureaucrats to follow and supervise bureaucrats, so why shouldn’t experience in the bureaucracy be considered essential?

Alex Massie notes that they handle their pregnancy politics a whole different way in France:

Rachida Dati, the 42 year old French Justice Minister, is, like Bristol Palin, pregnant. As Art Goldhammer says, however, they do things differently in France. Dati says she has no intention of revealing the father’s identity and offers this marvellous comment: “I have a very complicated private life, and that’s where I draw the line with the press. I won’t have anything to say on that subject.”

Meanwhile, Byron York offers this provocative thought: “If the Obamas had a 17 year-old daughter who was unmarried and pregnant by a tough-talking black kid, my guess is if that they all appeared onstage at a Democratic convention and the delegates were cheering wildly, a number of conservatives might be discussing the issue of dysfunctional black families.”