Familiarity Breeds Contempt

"Our problem is that we are intimate with everyone" Wallace Stevens

In German, it's Du and Sie, in french, tu and vous, in Hungarian, te and , in Italian, tu and lei, in Spanish tu and usted, and in Swahili well, you get the point by now. And in English, the world's most treasured vernacular of familiars, it's simply: you and you. When I was a child growing up in a German-speaking household in a largely German-speaking neighborhood of New York, virtually everyone in my world everyone either related to me or already deeply familiar was a Du. I more or less came across my first Sie as an adult, when I started working as a producer for West German Television in Washington.

To most Americans, accustomed to spilling out their life story to the person seated beside them in row l8 of the New York-Washington, D.C. shuttle, these various permutations of you are a strange and Neanderthal institution. To the likes of television host Larry King, who talks to everyone from Hillary Clinton to the trainer of the latest talking chimp as if they had been twins separated at birth, they must seem like downright insults. But here in Europe, where familiarity is still thought of as something earned rather than assumed, this double form of personal address is considered perfectly natural.

Being an American and also a writer, who sometimes considers it a great inconvenience to have to juggle those discretionary yous, part of me has always felt it a burden to have to address, say, two people I am having a conversation with in two different ways. It taxes the brain sometimes, and the memory. What's more, being, as they say here where I live in Berlin, a locker (laid-back) kind of guy, all this Sie business as did the business while I was living in Hungary, and the vous business when I have visited France often seems unnecessarily formal, class-based, stiff-necked, uptight.

But now, after years of living and working in Europe, I have come to appreciate the fact that all this differentiated youing contains a shorthand of its own, a way of identifying and naming what the poet Yeats called the heart-revealing intimacy/That chooses right. Along the sometimes vague boundaries of human relations, the difference between a tu and a vous, a Du and a Sie, or a te and an can provide a subtle but accurate guide to when, and where, trespasses on fragile human privacies may be permitted, intimacies assumed, distances respected and maintained. These yous, in other words, are a kind of border guide to human relations, a barbed wire that doesn't wound, but merely reminds. And this system, I have come to realize, is not simply occasionally about class. It also, to an extent I have come increasingly to appreciate, has class.

Which is why, with each successive year away from the U.S. and even with each successive year I'm back there the voice, the face, the demeanor, the assumed familiarity of Larry King has seemed more and more offensive to this quasi-American expatriate. I have come, quite simply and directly, to abhor his ingratiating, I'm-your-best-friend-Larry smile. I have come to feel embarrassed by his buddy-buddy intrusions (repulsed, of course, by not one of his celebrity and intimacy-starved guests) on what, in Europe, would be matters too intimate, even, to discuss with many a Du. I have come to detest his assumptions of intimacy where distance should prevail, his questions about, say, a guest's weekly ejaculations where, in Europe, even a question about the person's table manners would be considered a bit too much.

There are, of course, benefits to our American laid-back-ness and ease of familiarity, as any European who's grown a bit tired of always differentiating between you and you, or of spending months knowing someone before they dare to ask whether they're left-or right-handed, will readily testify. Life's short, and so, sometimes, is the plane trip, so why if the bloke happens to be sitting next to you anyway not get to know him? But, on the cost side of the ledger, I hardly any longer know any Americans who've had even a few of the same friends for more than five years, though I know dozens who, having fallen wildly in love with some new you on the Boston-New York air shuttle, are busily filing for divorce just weeks later.

With all the quick-and-dirty, Larry King-style intimacies of the American way, I fear increasingly, love's labor almost by definition, long, difficult, gradual and slow can all too easily get lost in that rush to you-ness that this single syllable readily assumes. Which is why, were I ever invited to be on Mr. King's show (which, after having written this, you can be sure I will never be), I'd insist even before the first commercial imploration to "reach out and touch someone" that he refer to me as Sie.
By STANLEY HOFFMAN

At the end of his war memoirs, Charles de Gaulle invoked "old France, overburdened by History, bruised by wars and revolutions, moving endlessly from grandeur to decline and back, but regenerated, century after century, by the genius for renewal." This is still the best short description of France's historical fate.

The France of the year 2000 has many reasons to be satisfied. Although it reappears from time to time, the almost obsessive fear of decadence that gripped so many intellectuals at the end of the 19th century, and deepened after the ordeal of World War I, has receded.

The drama of adaptation to the post-1945 world, in which Europe was divided and dominated by two non-European giants, was particularly intense in France. The rise of the superpowers, and the revolt of the colonized peoples, struck at the power, the status, the prestige of the old European nations just at the moment when the French were trying to modernize their country and to recover their rank in world affairs. But France's postwar reconstruction and the efforts of a remarkable group of brilliant civil servants resulted in what many foreign observers, in the early 1950s, had deemed impossible: a genuine industrial revolution, accompanied by the modernization of France's agriculture, under the aegis of a state that knew how to marshal and to reward the energies of entrepreneurs and of young farmers.

This was no mean accomplishment. The "30 glorious" years (actually, 20) made France the fourth- largest industrial power in the world, and the main exporter of food in Europe. Only a few years later came another revolution: that of the information age, of globalization, of the world of services and instant communications. Again, there was no lack of doomsayers (in France and abroad) who explained that this was more than the French could handle, and that the same state that had engineered the economic transformation of the '50s and '60s was now the main obstacle to the liberation of individual initiative required by the new age. Again, they were wrong. They had not taken into account that "genius for renewal" De Gaulle mentioned, which is fed both by the human skills of people workers, engineers, entrepreneurs who are intelligent, ingenious and hardworking, and by a collective ambition not to fall behind in the global race.

Of course, this new, quite drastic, transformation of French society takes place la franaise. The state has loosened some of its grip on society the flexibility of labor has increased, the role and scope of voluntary associations have grown but it remains a stimulator, a crutch, a source of funding. State policy, under Gaullist as well as under Socialist rule, has freed France from chronic inflation, practiced monetary rigor and either privatized state enterprises or made them competitive.

Two other transformations have made this social renewal possible. One is institutional. The Fifth Republic was given, by De Gaulle, a constitution which has provided France with the kind of stability, and with the strong executive, that neither the Third nor the Fourth Republics had enjoyed. The election of the President by universal suffrage has, if not reduced the number of parties, at least led to the formation of two coalitions that need (as in the U.S.) to please both their own supporters and the electorate of the center. Moreover, the Constitution has been far more flexible than many had expected, successfully allowing for several periods of "cohabitation" between a President from one of the coalitions, and a Prime Minister from the other a situation De Gaulle had never anticipated.

The other great engineer of change has been the opening of France to the outside world. Here, the decisive move was taken 50 years ago by the French specifically, Jean Monnet and Robert Schuman: the launching of European integration. The gradual establishment of a single European market required the dismantling of traditional French protectionism (except in agriculture). This has made French business and finance ready to play their part in the worldwide whirlwind of mergers and alliances. European integration too has been handled la franaise. Attached to their nation and to their state, French public officials have put aside the dream of a Federal U.S. of Europe, in favor of a kind of halfway house, a "union of nations" in Prime Minister Jospin's recent formulation, with a common economy and currency, and institutions that oblige these nations to cooperate in all the areas including diplomacy and defense where the nation state can no longer be an effective actor alone. Intransigent defenders of absolute national sovereignty are more vocal than vigorous, more nostalgic than effective. The motor of the European enterprise remains the Franco-German alliance another achievement for which every French government since 1950 can claim credit.

Foreigners should not be surprised to find France both eager to benefit from globalization indeed, to figure among its leaders and ready to criticize practically every aspect of la mondialisation (increasing inequalities within and among countries, jobs lost to countries with cheap labor, "Americanization," etc.). France remains a nation that practices capitalism but harbors a solid anticapitalist tradition, based on the high value attached to equality, and linked to powerful socialist and Catholic schools of thought. But isn't the critique of the dominant ways of thinking and acting the proper function of intellectuals? Dissent is an old French habit.

There are, of course, huge problems still. There is nothing scandalous about the attachment of the French to the thick social safety net built after World War II by an extraordinary coalition of Gaullists, Socialists, Communists and Christian Democrats. But its financing, in a country whose population is aging, will require either higher taxes bad for business and unpopular with all or serious cuts opposed by almost everyone.

The biggest issue is the reform of the state. It remains a formidable bureaucratic tangle of regulations, led by a very narrow elite educated in a small number of monopolistic grandes ecoles. It is true that society has emancipated itself in considerable measure from that spider's web, that the state provides public services of great quality (such as a splendid public transportation system), and that the efforts of the European Commission in Brussels to introduce some competition into national public service are beginning to bear fruit. Nevertheless, the size and habits of the French bureaucracy pose two huge problems. The system of higher education is in many ways perverse (separation between the elitist grandes ecoles and overcrowded universities; separation of teaching and research). The other problem is what makes a drastic reform of this system almost impossible: the state is, in fact, colonized by its employees and their unions, who resist change fiercely. A government that confronts them head-on is sure to fail, a government that tries to co-opt them will not get far. Change, here, will come but slowly.

Americans have shown remarkably little interest in the changes that have occurred in France, and little understanding of France's claim to a right to be (or at least to sound) "different" in world affairs. One lesson the French have learned from the inter-war period and from De Gaulle is the need not to be the dependent client of any one power. They know that France is a middle-size nation, but they believe, first, that even middle-size powers need not be satellites of the world's only superpower (whose self-proclaimed ability to "see farther" they question) and, secondly, that a unipolar world is badly in need of counterweights. If America was in France's position, and vice versa, Americans would sound like the French do today. They too would want to protect their distinctiveness, and their language. The rhetoric of independence does not prevent cooperation in Bosnia, in Kosovo, during the Gulf war just as the new push for a European common diplomacy and defense is both a kind of insurance policy against American withdrawal symptoms, and a way of reinforcing nato. It is not in America's own interest to have allies who unquestioningly carry out designs made in Washington. America needs candid friends and frank allies. And it needs to understand that the France of 2000 is still moving ahead on the rails that De Gaulle laid down: a strong executive, a modernizing society, a leader in European integration and a proud actor in world affairs.

Stanley Hoffmann is the Buttenwieser University Professor at Harvard University