The French Left has much to learn from the English

Bernard-Henri Lévy

19 April 2008

Blairism may have had its day on this side of the Channel, but Bernard-Henri Lévy says that the English Third Way should be a model to his Gallic comrades

And then, for his own reasons and yet without disavowing himself or forgetting to recall that if he were French he would (and I quote) be ‘in the Socialist party’, standing alongside ‘those who are committed to transforming it,’ Tony Blair accepted French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s invitation to address the leaders of his conservative party. They gave him an ovation, which elicited new shrieks of alarm from the Left, mutterings of major excommunication and sweeping accusations of betrayal.

So my friends, we have two choices. Either Tony Blair is indeed a sellout, this bearer of ill and shame you have denounced for ten years. (In which case, why are you complaining?) Or he is one of our own, who has his rightful place in the family. Haven’t you said it already? Why this embarrassment? This squirming? Why the profusion of linguistically inventive slogans like Lionel Jospin’s ‘modern socialism’ or François Hollande’s ‘reformism of the Left’ — phrases that function as euphemisms for ‘social liberalism’ or just plain ‘liberalism’, the central tenets of Blairism?

How, in that case, do you dare complain that a president of the Republic leaps into the opening that you yourselves have created, taking for himself the heritage that is yours, and which you want only as long as you don’t have to say it aloud? The problem has been highlighted with renewed sharpness by Sarkozy’s adroit manoeuvre of ‘opening’ his administration to leading figures from the opposition.

It is time for the Left, our Left, to emerge once and for all from its ambiguities. It must give up its outdated Jacobinism, the Robespierrist inclination that forms its ideological identity. Hollande recently said in a memorable debate with French minister of the interior Michèle Alliot-Marie, ‘Yes, it’s true: I do not like rich people.’

The Left must — and this is key — break the spell the extreme Left holds over it. But the far Left is unfortunately in the process of resurrecting itself — while evoking Trotsky, Pierre Bourdieu or José Bové — and acting as a superego.

In other words, the Left must finally undergo, openly and transparently, a conversion to the market economy, liberalism, Europe, globalisation and human rights, which it has until now done only on the sly, clandestinely, condemning itself to hypocrisy and schizophrenia. Conversion or death. Either clarity or the chronicle, defeat after defeat, of a disappearance foretold.

Whatever you call it, Blairism is, more than ever, the only possible choice for a Left that has truly learned all the lessons it can from the totalitarian temptation.

Translated From The French By Sara Sugihara And Distributed By The New York Times Syndicate. © Bernard-Henri Lévy.