“You have to travel to rub and grind your brains against those of others”
This article is adapted from an article originally published by Thomas Eymond-Laritaz in French in the March 2022 edition of the Association des Anciens Elèves de l'ENA’s magazine L’Ena Hors les Mur.
As the French senior civil service has embarked on a new cycle of reflection and reform, it is more important than ever to look at what our neighbours are doing and to draw inspiration from their successes.
The real shock of the year 2000, for a young engineer from the corps des mines as I was then, was not the famous long-awaited computer bug, but the discovery of the incredible diversity of the functioning of the administrations of the countries of the European Union. When invited on a study trip to Finland with representatives of the Ministries of the Environment of the EU countries, I was flabbergasted to see how neighbouring countries had a fundamentally different way of implementing identical European directives.
In a wooden sauna on the edge of an arctic lake, the realization of Blaise Pascal's adage “truth on this side of the Pyrenees, error on the other” led me to heretical thoughts. Could it be possible that the holy French administration is not organised in an optimal way and that we have lessons to learn from our European neighbours? Back in France, I kept these blasphemous reflections to myself for fear of being confronted with the incomprehension of my peers, or even with an excommunication.
Twenty years later, having lived and worked in six different countries and having advised more than a dozen Presidents and Prime Ministers in Europe, Africa, the Middle East and Asia, I see the relevance of this Pascalian thought every day. The divergence of public policies in the face of the Covid-19 crisis is just one illustration among many others.
Around the world, public administrations face a common challenge: that of efficiency. In other words, how to implement as best as possible and at a lower cost the public policies decided by the people's elected representatives. The lack of efficiency leads not only to waste but also to collective suffering, economic hardship, loss of human life and the disintegration of the social contract.
In small and medium-sized enterprises, which represent the vast majority of economic actors and job creation, the issue of efficiency is settled in a Darwinian way. Only those who survive competition strike down those who are efficient and manage to adapt. Public administrations, on the other hand, can certainly live with inefficiency: they always survive political failures, popular discontent and competition from other countries.
Because of this absence of external structural forces, it is essential for the senior civil service to show extreme vigilance and constant mobilization to improve the efficiency of the State administration. The question of seeming to improve administrative efficiency should therefore become a public policy priority and a criterior for evaluating French senior civil servants. My experiences in France and abroad have enabled me to identify five major scourges to be avoided in order to ensure efficient public administration: corruption, incompetence, corporatism, statism and nationalism. The French civil service is unfortunately not immune to any of these evils. Corruption undermines many countries, mostly outside the European Union, but incompetence is more worrying as it is widespread and rarely has legal consequences.
The French civil service unfortunately does not have all the skills necessary to carry out its missions. The fact that very few experienced senior executives from civil society, the academic world, NGOs and companies join the senior civil service in France, even for short-term assignments, leads to a structural lack of young skills. For example, national education still operates on the basis of education principles from the 19th century, and the civil servants who impose taxes and regulate economic activity unfortunately often do not know much about the business world.
Corporatism encourages the protection and defence of the interests of the personnel in the administration, even if this goes against the general interest. SNCF strikes on the day of holiday departures or the absurd opening hours to the public of certain administrative offices are probably the best-known examples.
The risk of corporatism is increased by the sometimes very endogamous functioning of the French senior civil service. At the Quai d'Orsay, for example, as in certain other administrations governed mainly by specific state bodies, few senior officials seem ready to carry out painful reforms because everyone needs the support of their peers to obtain a prestigious post. Here again, bringing in executives from outside (from the private sector but also from other ministries) whose career does not depend on an assessment by their peers could play a significant role in improving the functioning of the administration. Statism, on the other hand, is a very French danger. In our national political tradition, born in reaction to the detestable excesses of the old regime and industrial capitalism of the 19th century, the enemy is the rich (the aristocrat or the bourgeois), and the role of the state is to protect the people against exploitation and oppression by the economic elites. In this context, the State has all the rights because it is by definition the saviour and protector of the people, and its functioning cannot be controlled or called into question by anyone.
In the Anglo-Saxon tradition, on the other hand, the State is traditionally considered the oppressor, because it has the power to limit individual freedoms and impose its beliefs and rules on minorities and individuals in a coercive way. The many experiential waves of immigration of economic and political refugees and oppressed religious minorities seeking freedom (notably the French Huguenots in England and the Jews of Eastern Europe in the United States) have only reinforced this public philosophy across the Channel and across the Atlantic. Free contracting and strict control of the administration and activities of other sovereign authorities are therefore considered to be essential conditions for the protection of individual freedoms.
Without falling into certain Anglo-Saxon excesses and while remaining faithful to our history, the French administration would have much to gain if it were more controlled by Parliament. A profound cultural change must also take place: the senior civil service must see itself as at the service of its fellow citizens, rather than as a meritocratic aristocracy in charge of regulating citizens whom it treats in a way sometimes perceived as infantilising, even contemptuous. The bureaucratic difficulties faced by companies investing in France are the direct result of this pernicious state philosophy.
Unlike political nationalism, administrative nationalism remains the norm in the French senior civil service. Exchange missions and benchmarking studies to learn and be inspired by innovative solutions developed by other countries are rare. However, the French senior civil service would have much to learn from countries like Singapore, Estonia, Sweden, Germany or England, to name but a few. But French senior civil servants, who came out in the boot of the ENA and I'X, sometimes find it difficult not to consider themselves the best and to learn from others.
Our meritocratic elitism and the excessively strong oppressive monopolisation of senior civil service positions and the French public by executives selected from minorities and on purely academic criteria, without any sufficient experience internationally or in the business world, leads to perverse effects. While rejection of the elites is in full swing and the French people have less and less confidence in public institutions, the aristocracy of the French public philosophy service must imperatively carry out "aggiornamento" contracts by drawing inspiration from the lessons from other countries.
I therefore invite all those who remain convinced of the exceptionality and superiority of French way of thought to reread the Pensées of Blaise Pascal, the Persian Letters of Montesquieu, or even the Essays of Montaigne who declared so nicely that “you have to travel to rub and grind your brains against those of others".
Thomas Eymond-Laritaz is the founder and CEO of Highgate