Wall Street Journal

Burning Down
The House
In FranceLand
November 11, 2005; Page A10

I am prepared to entertain the notion that France's second-generation Muslims are burning down those lovely French towns because Muslims can't or won't integrate into European societies. I'm also inclined to believe that if you are 18, male, live in a scuzzy neighborhood and have not much better to do from 9 to 5 than hang with the boys, nothing good can come of it. The solution to the first theory of France's riots is to round up all the young Muslims, put them on trains and ship them "home." Plan B would be for France to output a better 9-to-5 culture than it's got. My guess is the Chirac government would prefer the first solution.

Rewind. Let's try to come at this burn-down France problem from a different perspective.

Amid the flaming fortnight in France, two other notable events occurred. A stadium in Argentina filled with people waving Che Guevara flags who screamed obscenities at President George W. Bush's free trade proposals. The U.S. press reported that Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez's crypto-socialist theories pose a major challenge in Latin America to Mr. Bush's ideas.

The second, more important story, to anyone whose income depends on knowing where the world will be a decade hence, was the email traffic between Microsoft founder Bill Gates and his top techie, Ray Ozzie. "It's clear that if we fail to do so," wrote Mr. Ozzie -- that is, fail to figure out the ultimate meaning of the Internet -- "our business as we know it is at risk. We must respond quickly and decisively."

As so often the past 125 years, the wolf at the door -- in France, Argentina and at Microsoft -- is modernity. The forcing mechanism was once the steam engine, then the telegraph, then linked electronic financial markets, and now economic "globalization" and the World Wide Web. Each new transition makes people crazy. There are several ways to respond.

The Gates-Ozzie Method, whose upside is survival, is: Get a grip on the change. The Young Muslim Method is: Burn down the house and rule the embers. Both methods warrant further thought. But as the political leadership of France is the big news this week, one's energies are drawn to examining the method the French elites have shaped as their response to globalized modernity: Do nothing.

To be sure, they would put it differently. French elites -- like their counterparts in Germany and the rest of Western Europe -- would say their response to such modernizing forces as the Doha trade round, agro-bioengineering and fast food is "Resist!" But the endpoint logic of resistance is the status quo, or do nothing.

Anecdotes don't carry much statistical strength, but for some time I've been carrying around three about Western Europe because they illuminate the continent's perplexity about the future.

A Frenchman who lives in New York described how he has been remodeling a large estate home in central France. He flies back constantly to supervise the never-ending project because he can't find local French willing to work on it, and because those who work do so poorly. Why bother? "It's an investment," he says. Come again? "This house is going to make a lot of money for me," the Frenchman says, "when France arrives at its inevitable destination as mainly a vacation land for Chinese tourists."

In January I spent most of a week walking around Rome. Talking to a lifelong resident, I remarked that while it was a wonderful place for strolling, one couldn't help but notice there weren't many young adults. I asked: Is there much opportunity for a young person in Rome? Came back the instant answer: "Zero." Most of the young, she said, certainly those with ambition, move "north." The jobs available in Rome are with the government "or maybe a bank."

But let's take on the idea that France's rioters have little to do with economic enervation, that this is really about France's failed attempts to "assimilate" Muslims who in any event don't want to assimilate. But what if they did? Or what if, instead of Arabs, they were Rome-fleeing Italians or even workaholic Slovakians? About three weeks before these riots, a German-born businessman in New York, who is now a successful developer of American real estate, tried to explain why he was here and not there:

"I could not do in Europe what I did here. A European at the age of 25, with little money but a lot of ambition and ideas, could not expect to move outside his own country -- move to say the center of France, or the center of Italy, Belgium or any other country -- and have much prospect of succeeding. He would remain an outsider."

This is the roots argument. In America, the Jamestown settlers hit the ground running in 1607, and their descendants have kept moving for nearly 400 years, high on change. Lucky us. In Europe, every village and town has roots that run 1,000 or more years deep. Past some point, maybe World War I, pulling up one's roots became unthinkable. Tough luck for the young Ray Ozzies in the historic towns of Europe, yearning to be "quick" and "decisive."

European monetary union was supposed to loosen history's stranglehold on economic rationality. Europe's monetary authorities delivered a low inflation rate. But labor across most of Euroland has remained immobile. For German workers, north and south of their own country are the far sides of the moon. So Germany's auto-parts companies moved to Slovakia, which enacted a flat tax of 19% on both personal and corporate income. Most of eastern Europe also has adopted low, flat taxes.

Outside of "Peter Pan," I'm not aware of any society, suburb or neighborhood that functions without jobs. So in a sense there is not really a France for its Muslims to assimilate into.

I don't much like economic and cultural determinism -- for Europeans or Muslims. I do believe lower taxes, as in eastern Europe, would kick-start the land of Montesquieu, Voltaire, Balzac, Hugo, Manet, Rodin, Berlioz, Bastiat, Pasteur and Chateau Margaux. But France's political class seems incapable of moving. When he imports enough Poles to finish the job, I look forward to visiting my friend's historic theme house in the center of FranceLand