France is going through a deep-seated crisis of identity about its role in the enlarged European Union as it prepares to vote on the EU's constitutional treaty on May 29th. Opinion polls register a sharp swing against the treaty at this stage of the campaigning, albeit with a large body of uncommitted voters. The issue has become bound up with domestic politics, social and economic reforms, and with the latest draft directive on services from the European Commission.
The French can no longer see themselves readily reflected in the enlarged EU (especially if the logic of that process continues with eventual Turkish membership), despite the clarity the constitution is intended to bring to it and successful interventions by French leaders during the negotiations. No compelling alternative vision of the country's role has been put forward by France's political elites, with the result that debate has become hijacked by the government's unpopularity and made hostage to passing issues on the EU agenda. President Jacques Chirac is going to have to heed the growing calls that he intervene directly in the debate to halt such a slide into contingent arguments.
Already Mr Chirac has told president of the European Commission José Manuel Barroso that the services directive must be drastically changed because of the threat to French jobs. This plays into the fraught domestic debate on the subject at a time when trade unions are campaigning against changes in the 35-hour week. There is a growing fear that security of employment will be undermined by competition from central and eastern Europe and little realisation that structural reforms in the services sector are essential if the European economy as a whole is to be revived. It should be possible to protect working conditions without resorting to protectionist measures against newer member-states. Labour mobility is strongly impaired for the next five years in most of them, while this week an EU summit will consider plans to amend the Stability and Growth Pact governing the euro.
A French defeat for the treaty would be a mortal blow, a "political cataclysm" for Europe and for France, as Jacques Delors has put it. In a dress rehearsal of this campaign in the French Socialist Party late last year, opponents of the treaty were defeated by those who favour it.
Now opinion in that party is running strongly against, especially in response to ill-founded arguments that the treaty endorses a crude neo-liberal economic agenda. In fact market opening is balanced in its text by commitments to social solidarity. In the same way the services directive must not undermine established working conditions and social models.
It is a good thing to debate these issues sharply and in a cross-national fashion. But if the argument for the EU constitution is not to go by default the French political class will need to engage with it much more vigorously than it has done so far.