Limits of France and Europe in the Third Industrial Revolution

Attali ¢ France is the leading nation in the world in tourism. It is difficult to be the first nation of the world in everything. France will not be first in technology, because networking is essential to success. France is a nation of centralization; it is an old nation. So, it will be difficult for France to lead.

There are two reasons for a nation to be linked to new technologies:

• To be decentralized

• To have a nomadic culture or nomadic mentality ; flexible mobility

The U.S. is a nation of nomads because of its origin; people are coming from everywhere. The culture of America is a culture of movement as well as a culture of decentralization.

France is a nation of peasants, sedentary ” and our culture is far from being linked to the new technologies. The only way for France to lead is to go through another route. To use the nation and the state as a door- opener for new technologies. For instance, if we could lead a large international program for e-government. The future of France in new technologies is linked to its capacity to develop e-government (Internet-based, online access and interaction with government for all its functions with business and individual citizens ), but we are not there yet.

The future of France in new technologies is linked to its capacity to develope-government.

But France must be considered within the context of the European Union. Europe has a tremendous potential for jointly developing leadership in specific areas such as telecommunications and mobile phones. We have a huge potential if we can create what has been missing in Europe, which is the relationship between university research and industry.

Thurow ¢ The United States had an advantage in the 1990s relative to Europe because we had a greater flexibility to fire people. In the prosperous years , when the economy was booming, big profitable American companies were still laying off between 600 “800,000 employees a year. If you develop a new, efficient technology breakthrough then you have to be able to reduce the number of people working, otherwise why invent the technology? Closing down the old is even more important than opening up the new. If you cannot close down the old, then the new won't emerge.

Attali ¢ These are two different problems. We are not too slow to close down. Unfortunately, we have been able to close down enough so that we have a large unemployment problem. It is true that we are very slow in creating new companies and people are not receiving enough incentives to create new companies, to do their own business. It is important to create a climate that encourages the creation of new start-ups; we have to do more than we are doing now.