Francis Fukuyama in “Trust” highlights the difference in various societies expectations of their government. He points out how France is largely incapable of creating independent-of-the-state civil society solutions. IMO, their press is but one example.

In France, there is near-incestuous entanglement of state-and-corporate management and finances. The French see no difference between espionage undertaken to ensure their own national security and espionage in pursuit of their own business’ success (in (most of) their minds, as Fukuyama explains, there is no distance between the two). It is amusing to consider that the great capitalist hyperpower is incapable of this behavior (irrespective of conventional wisdom). This is why the French seldom have minor corporate scandals, only those-too-monumentally-embarrassing to be ignored.

My sense is the Europeans and especially the French are just governmentally and culturally delayed (relative to the U.S.). They’ve yet to experience the 1960s in U.S. terms (e.g. eventually their underclass in the northern Paris ghettos will riot and demand equality). They haven’t had the 70s (vietnam-ish) experience with their old colonies, or the shame of their head-of-government stepping down. And they certainly haven’t seen the corporate re-engineering of the 80s and 90s where time-in-job (i.e. relevance of existing skills, prior to new learning or retraining) moves from decades to years. And the discipline and responsibility-for-self this drives throughout a society

/Ari