Moins d’Etat or Mieux d’Etat: the French Response to the Neo-Liberal Challenge

Abstract

Despite ritual assertions by governments of their intentions to act in ways that demonstrate their wish to make policy rather than merely respond to external constraints, their will and capacity to do so has, for the last quarter of a century, appeared increasingly dubious. Although this has been a general phenomenon, its impact upon the conception of the function and scope of state intervention has been especially dramatic in those countries that have traditionally had an imperious, state-centred style of politics, in terms of the norms, institutions and practices of their political systems. If one excludes the states that have emerged from the collapse of Communism in the former Soviet Union and in Eastern Europe, as well as those such as Spain and Portugal which had experienced prolonged periods of dictatorship, France has probably faced the most searching self-doubt about its model of state-economy relations.