Allow me to introduce you . . .

By Jean-Benoit Nadeau and Julie Barlow

Imagine a country where people work thirty-five hour weeks, take seven weeks of paid holidays per year, take an hour and a half for lunch, have the longest life expectancy in the world, and eat the richest food on the planet. A people who keep alive their mom-and-pop merchant class, who love nothing better than going to the public market on Sundays, and who finance the best health-care system in the world. A people whose companies are the least unionized and most productive among modern countries, and whose post-industrialized consumer society ranks among the most prosperous in the world.

You are now in France.

Now imagine a country whose citizens have so little civic sense that it never crosses their minds to pick up after their dogs or give to charity. Where people expect the State to do everything because they pay so much in taxes. Where service is rude, where the State is among the most centralized and pervasive in the world, and where the civil-servant class amounts to no less than a quarter of the working population. Where citizens tolerate no form of initiative or self-rule; where unions are so pervasive that they virtually dictate the course of government and even run French ministries.

You are still in France.

Dieticians have never understood how the French smoke, drink, and eat more fat than anyone in the world, yet live longer, and have almost no obesity and fewer heart problems than Americans. In spite of high taxes, a bloated civil service, a huge national debt, an over-regulated economy, over-the-top red tape, double-digit unemployment, and low incentives for entrepreneurs, France at the turn of the third millenium had the world's highest productivity index per hours worked, ranked as the number three exporter, was the world's fourth-biggest economic power, and had become Europe's powerhouse. How could this be? The New York Times journalist Thomas Friedman published The Lexus and the Olive Tree, his bestseller on how globalization was changing the world (and how the world would have to change for globalization). His verdict on France was damning: "If France was a stock, I'd sell it," he wrote.

Globalization is certainly on everyone's minds in France. But it isn't the only issue the French are grappling with. It doesn't take long to see that France is a society in flux. It also doesn't take long to see that Thomas Friedman was wrong; his predictions hadn't come true, anyway. Many things he said about France in The Lexus and the Olive Tree were true. Yet one has the impression of observing two countries in one. France is both rigidly authoritarian and incredibly inventive. It is a country that had barely any clout left on the international stage, but was still incredibly influential - a country at once traditional, if not archaic, and modern to the extreme.

All these contradictions, or paradoxes point to one conclusion: France is "something else" that could not be understood in terms used in The New York Times or Fortune Magazine. Why the French resist globalization is the wrong question about the right topic. The French are globalizing in their own way. But France needs to be understood in its own terms . . .