European leaders should stop scapegoating EU.

• Author: Chevalier, Alexandra
• Position: Book review

L'Europe n'est pas ce que vous Croyez ["Europe Is Not What You Think It Is"] Talks with Baudouin Bollaert By Jacques Barrot Foundation Robert Schuman, Albin Michel Press, 2007, 240 pages

Jacques Barrot, a veteran center-right French politician who is vice-president of the European Commission and Commissioner of Transport, sets out in his new book to tackle criticisms and misconceptions about the "European project" that have spread among his fellow French citizens. These grass-roots uncertainties surfaced brutally in the French "no" to the draft European Constitution in 2005, the year after he took up his post in Brussels. Barrot, who had been Minister for Employment and Social Affairs and then parliamentary leader of the Union for a Popular Movement, the majority party supporting the presidential aspirations of Nicolas Sarkozy, clearly feels a didactic mission to clear up the often wrong picture of the EU among its citizens, starting in his own country. His concern about the gap with the facts is evident in his blunt title: "Europe is Not What You Think It Is."

What French people do think, Barrot explains, is that "Europe" is a distant entity disconnected from people's daily lives. That is why in France, people like to refer to the entire European enterprise as "Brussels." Dissecting these suspicions as they erupted in the constitutional debate, he takes up the controversy about the so-called "services directive"--usually dubbed "the Bolkestein" directive after Felix Bolkestein, a free-market Dutch politician-turned-commissioner in Brussels. It was aimed at opening up the service-sector market to cross-border competition--a change equated by many French voters with outsourcing and resulting job losses at home for the benefit of companies getting cheaper labor in some new EU member-states. Addressing the bogeyman of "outsourcing" in France, Barrot points out that only three percent of jobs lost in France are due to outsourcing. In fact, France as a country stands to gain. Like all Europeans, customers in France have benefited from price drops (and greater choice) brought about by the single market. More such advantages could be expected from a services-liberalizing directive and France, as the fourth-largest worldwide...