Quote:
Originally Posted by alum
My H had to deal with French nationals as fellow students at KSG and on a State level at NATO, at the UN, etc. He felt they were the most difficult people and government with whom to negotiate.
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Yeah... I'm a Francophile for sure. I love French history and culture and food and pop music and so many things. I love being in France. But they have a bureaucracy that is out of control... It's really inhibiting their economy at the moment. It's difficult to impossible for young people (even with college degrees in many cases) to find employment, and getting anything done that requires the government is nearly impossible. One example would be on the French historians listserv I'm on, there was a recent discussion of an elevator in one of the Parisian archives, can't remember which one, and how the elevator had broken and there was apparently no effort and a total level of disconcern from all sources about getting it fixed... It was supposed to be weeks rather than hours... wow. Also when I was in Lyon last summer if there was a computer problem at the municipal archives they'd just shut down immediately in the AM and go home claiming it couldn't be fixed until the next day (the computer network is used to recall the documents). Uh... OK. It's a different mentality. In one way the laid-back thing is beneficial and fun--eg cafe culture. In other ways it really inhibits getting things accomplished efficiently... There was a New Yorker article about this last May during the election season. I'll see if I can dredge it up...
Not to mention the MASSIVE racial and ethnic prejudice and disenfranchisement of North Africans and others (sans-papiers from former French colonies, for example)... they just haven't dealt with a lot of their societal problems. Modern French society has a multitude of problems to confront. I guess this goes along with my basic political position, which is anti-authoritarianism/anti-government power.