Peter Gumbel on French Elitism

Énarques and Les X have come up before in posts here relating to France’s elite. So as soon as it became available last month I bought Peter Gumbel’s France’s Got Talent: The Woeful Consequences of French Elitism to read on Kindle. It had appeared in France in print as Élite Academy: Enquête sur la France malade de ses grandes écoles. Gumbel arrived in Paris in 2002 as a correspondent for TIME and began teaching at Sciences Po in 2005. Eventually he was appointed Director of Communications by the Director, Richard Descoings, who died suddenly in New York in 2012 at the age of 53. To describe Descoings’ regime at Sciences Po as controversial would probably be an understatement and for many French readers part of the interest of Gumbel’s book will be its outsider-on-the-inside’s view of Descoings and his wife Nadia Marik and the way things were run.  

Gumbel could have arranged his material more carefully to help readers unfamiliar with the anatomy of France’s elite and the grandes écoles where they are trained. The latter are introduced as:

… the most prestigious grandes écoles, especially the École Polytechnique, for science, or the École Normale Supérieure, for humanities …(location 84)

And then Sciences Po appears without description at the funeral of:

… the director of Sciences Po, who had been found dead …(location 102)

We learn a little later about ENA because Descoing:

… sat the competitive entrance exam for the École nationale d’administration (ENA) not once but three time before he succeeded. (location 129)

But it's more complicated::

… the typical French system of grandes écoles to which just 5% of young people are admitted. Even in this highly selective universe there is a strict hierarchy. Two institutions dominate: the École Polytechnique, known to insiders by the initial X, which was founded in 1794, and ENA, founded in 1945. Together the graduates of these two schools – 400 from X and 80 from ENA every year – represent just 0.057% of their age group, a proportion so miniscule it could be a statistical error. Yet they dominate the top echelons of French business and politics to an astonishing degree. (location 271)

Shortly afterwards we learn that the graduates of ENA are known as énarques (location 296). But what has happened to the École Normale Supérieure, and where does Sciences Po fit in? Gumbel makes a good case that the French system of selecting and training a small elite who then run everything is becoming increasingly dysfunctional. Partly because its entry is more about exclusivity than merit:

Just as most énarques went through Sciences Po, …

Ah!

… so it is that the overwhelming majority of students at École Polytechnique went to just five classes préparatoires – two-year cram schools that prepare for the grandes écoles and are an ultra-selective alternative to a regular university. Three of them are in the 5th and 6th arrondissements of Paris, the lycées Henri-IV, Louis-le-Grand and Saint-Louis, and the other two, the lycées Hoche and Saint-Genevieve (better known as “Ginette”), are in Versailles. Every year, Ginette alone sends more than 80 students to Polytechnique, out of the 400 who are accepted. By comparison in Britain, students from the top 100 schools only make up one third of those who get into Oxbridge. (location 365)

So whose children get access to these exclusive prépas?

… children from well-off families still account for almost 70% of registered students at Sciences Po, and the proportion of students whose parents are managers or work in an “intellectually superior” profession actually increased between 2005 and 2011. (location 1883)

Their choice of bac subjects, by the way, will be influenced by the coefs (coefficients, weightings in the overall score) which they carry. Difficult subjects like maths and the dreaded philo have the highest. The only UK equivalent I’m aware of is Cambridge University’s list of “suitable” A levels. The dominance and self-perpetuation of this Parisian elite would be no surprise to Charles Murray whose analysis of diminishing social mobility in the USA, I posted about last year.

In due course, for some lucky énarques and Les X (as polytechniciens are known but Gumbel omits to say), glittering prizes await:

… the VIP treatment accorded to the alumni of these two schools after they have graduated. For the 15 ENA graduates and the 60 or so polytechniciens who come top of their year, the reward is membership of the grands corps d’État (grand state corps) – the Conseil d’État, the Cour des comptes and the Inspection générale des finances (the General Inspectorate of Finance – or of the exclusive technical corps, especially the Corps des mines, the mining corps. Those who join these corps are given entry-level jobs that are already very lofty, and their careers thereafter are fast-tracked. This world of the professional corps, with its entrenched system of privilege, simply doesn’t exist in other countries. (location 402)

Things are changing:

… thirty years ago, about 200 of the 320 graduates joined one of the prestigious state technical corps, in the first place the Corps des mines or the Corps des Ponts et Chausées. Today the total number of French students is up to 400 while those joining a corps has dropped to about 60-70. (location 1843)

Largely because they go on to private sector jobs instead. By the way, as explained here last August, the corps des ingénieurs des ponts et chaussées has become the corps des ingénieurs des ponts, des eaux et des forêts, and also the corps des mines covers a much wider range of technology than mining nowadays.

The main thrust of Gumbel’s book, to which he devotes a whole Chapter (6 – The Small World Phenomenon) is that, however well this institutionalised elitism may have served France in the past, it is increasingly inappropriate and he cites various analyses and numerous statistics to support his view. He goes on to describe some of the changes that are needed, particularly in the grandes écoles and some of the reforms that are already in place. His final warning is:

That the most powerful elites can be brought down if they fail to adjust to a changing world. That arrogance and defiance won’t guarantee longevity, or even courage. That even the cream can turn rancid. (location 2227)

I’m not sure that Gumbel, who taught journalism at Sciences Po is as au fait with the École Polytechnique, the technical corps and ParisTech as he is with the world of the social sciences. About 15 years ago I got to know some young French corps members who had spent time at MIT and Caltech on Master’s degrees, a recent development in Sciences Po apparently. As to whether the following is a bad thing:

The election of President Hollande in May 2012 sparked days of scrambling as the ministerial cabinets started to be constituted. One friend was in the thick of it, juggling calls from hundreds of people who were pitching their candidacy. The most striking, he recalls, was the call that came from the Corps des Mines. The message was “this is the name of the technical adviser for your cabinet”. There was no discussion of who this person was and whether he would be suitable for the post. (location 429)

Well, the iron grip of the technical corps would never allow France to get into the situation of the USA with its 70,000 structurally deficient bridges. Again, it is EDF Energy, majority-owned by the French government, that the UK is having to negotiate with for the construction of new nuclear power stations. According to the Financial Times (£):

… [HM] Treasury offered EDF a strike price of £80 per megawatt hour, while EDF had been holding out for a price of just below £100/MWh, about twice the current wholesale price of power. People close to the negotiations say a potential compromise would lie somewhere in the middle. It is understood that EDF could be encouraged to settle for a lower strike price if the government underwrote some elements of the project. This would reduce the amount of capital invested on which EDF earned a 10 per cent return, but would remove some risk from its balance sheet.

which doesn’t make the UK position sound too clever. (A MWh is 1000 kilowatt/hours which cost you and me about £130 at present).

Anyone who is at all interested in understanding the way France is run (or is negotiating MWh with EDF) should download a copy of France’s Got Talent. Peter Gumbel has done a great service in making his insider’s view available to other English-speakers – the French version will hopefully be a timely contribution to debate among les citoyennes as well.

NOTES: As usual I have put French words in italics in my text; Gumbel doesn’t, so not in the quotations from his (but elite and corps are no longer French words, I think). A Kindle download is an awkward thing to use for any serious purpose, it seems to me, by comparison with hard copy. The locations are as a consequence approximate, but should take readers to the relevant passage.

Clay Shirky, Social Media and the Arab Spring

I can remember when the highly-respected journal Foreign Affairs, published six times a year by the US Council on Foreign Relations, came with uncut pages as did American hardbacks. It is still handsomely produced, but being the size of a large paperback and costing £8.95 a copy (or $67 annual subscription), is not easily found these days in UK newsagents. Now, thanks to Amazon Kindle, it appears in seconds by Wi-Fi at a subscription price of £2.98, the penalty being that only the last six issues remain available to the subscriber.

The content of Foreign Affairs is heavyweight but accessible to non-specialists who, after all, get two months to absorb it. The March/April 2011 edition has just arrived and is leading with “The Tea Party and American Foreign Policy” and “Will China’s Rise Lead to War?” (I sneaked a quick look at the latter – Charles Glaser’s view seems to be that “realism offers grounds for optimism in this case, so long as ...”). But this post is about an article in the January/February edition (left).

The Political Power of Social Media was written by Clay Shirky, Professor of New Media at New York University and the author of Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age. The journal summarises his article:

Discussion of the political impact of social media has focused on the power of mass protests to topple governments. In fact, social media's real potential lies in supporting civil society and the public sphere -- which will produce change over years and decades, not weeks or months.

My attempt at a fuller summary follows. Shirky contrasts the successes of social media (texts, Facebook, Twitter) in securing regime change as in Moldova in 2009, with their failures like Belarus in 2006, Iran in 2009 and Thailand in 2010. He believes that, in reality, mass protests topple governments through the pressure of civil society, as in Eastern Europe in the 1980s. This process can be developed by internet freedom, but he regards emphasis on advocacy and enablement of the latter as “instrumental” and misplaced. He regards the key element as being the shift in the balance of power between the state and civil society: “Communications tools during the Cold War did not cause governments to collapse, but they helped the people take power from the state when it was weak.”

However, Shirky does see social media as a powerful mechanism for developing ”shared awareness” – the ability of each member of a group not only to understand a situation, but also to understand that others do as well. The new media-enabled shared awareness leads to “the conservative dilemma” – the state's having to account for the discrepancies between its view of events and the public’s. An authoritarian state can use censorship and propaganda to counter dissent, but the alternative of attempting to shut down the internet or mobile phone networks runs the risk of alienating its own supporters and harming the economy. The Chinese government has spent considerable effort on developing systems to control the new media – [“the Great Firewall of China”]. But such efforts can bring problems – the Bahrain government’s banning of Google Earth helped alert its citizens to the extent of the monarch’s land holdings.

Shirky concludes that the US State Department should reorder its Internet freedom goals towards securing freedom of personal and social communication – freedom of assembly rather than access to Google or YouTube, and accept that progress will be slow.

It can’t be very often that a thesis advanced in Foreign Affairs is put to the test so quickly. Since Shirky’s article went to press there has been turmoil across North Africa and, to a lesser extent so far, the Gulf. It will be some time before we can be certain of the outcomes of the ‘Arab Spring’ or ‘Jasmine Revolution’ in the countries concerned. But there seem to be two key issues worth examining in the context of the article – that of timescale, and also the significance of the new media.

My feeling is that in concluding that progress will be slow, Shirky did not consider the pressure of demographics in the Arab world, (along with other relevant data on Scribd - remember that the median is the halfway point, so in the UK half the population is under 40, half over, as opposed to 25 in the countries where it’s all happening). For people in their 20's, waiting years and decades for reforms which they see as urgently needed to improve their lot, wouldn’t be tolerable.

As to the new media, there seems to be some disagreement as to how significant it has actually been. Certainly the young middle-class intelligentsia seem to have made full use of Facebook, etc as enablers for sharing their discontent about the democratic shortfall, but for the mass of people on very small incomes and with limited if any internet access, the shared awareness may be of more basic concerns like the sharply rising price of food.

Shirky seems to have been right about the problems governments face if they attempt to shut down the new media which seem to be more resilient than might have been expected. Alexander Klimburg, a fellow at the Austrian Institute for International Affairs, points out that achieving influence over social networks involves:

“highly complex operations that take a lot of resources to accomplish, and also have a small danger. There is a possibility of a 'reverse infection', that the security services themselves are undermined in the process and [come to] support the revolution - something we have seen as well."

In his view:

"What is being witnessed, especially in Egypt, is the perfect storm of social media revolution. Facebook, YouTube and Twitter have combined together with standard media [such as TV network Al Jazeera] and cross-border crowd dynamics to create a perfect feedback loop.”
"The Arab revolutions have much in common with the 1848 European revolutions, and shared three important pillars: the importance of an educated and disaffected demographic youth bulge, the impact of new media [in 1848, newspapers, the telegraph and pamphleteering], and the cross-border dynamics," with each revolt triggering and inspiring others.

It is also interesting to note, given Shirky’s policy recommendation that the US should redirect its efforts away from securing internet access, a recent blogpost in Wired: U.S. Has Secret Tools to Force Internet on Dictators. But after examining various hardware options that could impose connectivity, it concludes “This is far less an engineering problem and far more a political one.”

The comingweeks will shed more light on all this, particularly after what may, or may not, occur in Saudi Arabia.