The riots may be just what the French economy needs

Ask any former drug addict. You’ve got to hit rock bottom before you are ready for cold turkey. What France is facing now is the equivalent of waking up on a soiled mattress in a crack-house you cannot remember entering. It may be what France needs. It may be what Germany needs too.

Until the peoples of France and Germany are confronted by a palpable sense of national failure, they will never embrace the Anglo-Saxon model of market reform, and our continent’s economic logjam will never shift. For all its horror, and although no feeling person can welcome death and destruction, France’s convulsions this week could be for the French people and for the European ‘social market’ the beginning of a coming to terms with reality.

I do not, of course, mean the supposed reality of ‘terror’. It is simply facile — it flies in the face of observation over not years but decades — to try to link this month’s disorder with international terrorism. The awful drama now being played out across France has less to do with race than with despair, little to do with Islam or al-Qa’eda, and everything to do with national economic failure. Immigrant ghettos are always the places where national economic failure hits first and hardest, lingers longest, and exacts the cruellest toll. If the flames and the screams can now be seen and heard beyond these ghettos’ confines, then in this (and only this) respect, good may come of it. The French may be learning that their beautiful and precious country cannot go on as it has gone on before.

The Germans have yet to confront such truths. Angela Merkel’s election (if she finally does become Chancellor) comes too soon. But perhaps another weak German administration may lead to the real national collapse which Germany needs in order to break from her self-imposed business and economic straitjacket.