Yesterday's European rail strike may have given a new word to the lexicon of integration - "eurogreve" - but as angry travellers waited in freezing stations across France for fewer than one in three scheduled trains, it felt very much like business as usual. In recent months, the government of the French Prime Minister, Mr Lionel Jospin, has been plagued by strikes, to such a point that industrial action is now known as "the French disease".
Some of the French strikers revelled in the irony: the Europeanisation of transport policy has led to Europe-wide strikes against that policy. The EU Commissioner for Transport, Mr Neil Kinnock, says he wants to revive railway traffic by introducing competition. The six EU countries that held strikes yesterday, including France, oppose Mr Kinnock's directives on the grounds that they threaten jobs. Not so, says Mr Kinnock. He claims the decrease in railway traffic has destroyed half-a-million European jobs in the past 15 years.
Who are the British to tell them about running railways, French labour unionists and media asked yesterday. They spoke of chaos on Britain's 25 passenger rail carriers and six freight companies, of cancelled trains, dirty carriages and overcrowding.
Yesterday's strike in France was more severe than action in Germany, where trains slowed but did not stop, or Luxembourg, where traffic was disrupted for only two hours, or Spain, where a minimal service was ensured.
Despite promises that the Paris-London Eurostar would operate normally, passengers were delayed by up to two hours. Travellers complained that they were misinformed by hotlines intended to lessen the inconvenience of the strike.
Worse still, the strike was merely a rehearsal for the November 27th until 29th railway strike which will be national, not European.
Although French ticket collectors work only 28 hours per week, and train drivers work 30 hours, of which 18 is at the controls, French railway unions are demanding that up to 30,000 new workers be hired, in addition to the 174,000 employed by the SNCF. The railway company has offered to hire 5,000. Relations between management and the unions are at their lowest since the month-long transport strike in December 1995, from which the Juppe government never recovered. The rail strikes come at a bad time for the Prime Minister, Mr Jospin. As his opinion poll ratings fall, he faces a revolt by his communist and ecologist allies over immigration policy, as well as an attack on the dishonest practices of the Mitterrand era from a former Prime Minister, Mr Michel Rocard.
Smaller strikes have proliferated this autumn, when stoppages closed tourist attractions including the Eiffel Tower, the Palace of Versailles and the Musee d'Orsay, in the midst of a popular Van Gogh exhibition. Last week, Air France flight attendants, school prefects and policemen went on strike while 17,000 clerks at the ANPE employment agency went on strike yesterday. Doctors, dentists, gas, electricity, telephone and post office workers are also grumbling.
French fears of being forced to sacrifice job security and generous benefits to the "liberalism with a human face" advocated by Mr Tony Blair and Mr Gerhard Schroder seem to underlie the outbreak of industrial action. During the October strike by French lycee students, one of the protesters invented the slogan "dans greves il y a reves" ("in strikes there are dreams) - which seems to sum up the national attitude towards a ritual that other Europeans regard as a huge inconvenience.