It continued last fall with the wave of violence in the suburbs. Now, France has again brought itself to the world's attention with weeks of street demonstrations against the Contract of First Employment (CFE) proposed by Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin to address high youth unemployment.

These three sets of events, different as they are, together illustrate several deep-seated characteristics of social life in France.

First, France has found it difficult to adjust to the demands of globalisation. Beyond ordinary dissatisfaction with economic problems, the failed referendum last May expressed the rejection by an important part of the French electorate of the discipline imposed by EU policies ensuring free movement of people, goods and capital - and thus of the primacy of economic competition. In a similar vein, last fall's explosion of violence in the suburbs reflected the frustrations of disoriented young people facing the grim prospects that a modern economy offers to those who lack proper training and education.

The young are also at the centre of the most recent protests, but this time those disaffected include all strata of French youth, including university graduates. In combating the CFE, they express their refusal to accept a precarious life outside the French model of job security that their parents enjoyed in the context of a profoundly different economy.

There is something very French about all of this, because while the economic rules of the game have changed throughout Europe in the last couple of decades, the need for greater labour-market flexibility seems to have been accepted more easily in most other countries.

In Spain, under a socialist government, roughly one-third of wage earners are working on temporary contracts; the percentage is even higher for the young. In Italy, greater employment flexibility was introduced by the Romano Prodi government in 1997 and further strengthened under the so-called Biagi Law of 2003.

In Germany, too, the coalition agreement between the Social Democrats and the Christian Democrats includes a provision that extends from six months to two years the trial period during which an employee can be dismissed without explanation - the same duration contemplated in Villepin's CFE law. In all of these European countries, the new employment laws seem to be accepted as inevitable.

In France, by contrast, the statist tradition - which, as Alexis de Tocqueville so aptly observed, harks back to the ancien regime and which is equally shared today by both the Gaullist and socialist ideologies - is strongly linked to a marked distaste for the strictures of economic liberalism. Since the French Revolution, the imperative of equality has often triumphed over the concern for liberty. As a result, the French are enamoured with the welfare state in all of its manifestations.

Not even the obvious failures of the French social model in today's environment - mass unemployment (reaching 25 per cent among the young), huge public deficits, the blockage of social mobility - have diminished its public prestige. It would be much more logical to take inspiration instead from the Scandinavian model of "flexi-security", which combines employment flexibility and social security (albeit at the cost of a tax burden that France would not easily accept).

Add to all this the French preference for ideological confrontation and the absence of a culture of negotiation and compromise, to say nothing of consensus, and one can understand why so many reform projects in France end up being contested in the streets. Indeed, quite significantly, most observers have automatically associated the recent disturbances with those of May 1968, which continues to hold a strange fascination for the French. In truth, however, other than reflecting the French preference for the politics of the street, the two phenomena have nothing in common.

So is France unreformable? Certainly not. The country has been transformed profoundly in recent decades. Whether it is the break-up of public monopolies, such as electricity, gas, telecommunications and even the post office, or the replacement of military conscription by a professional military, or pension reform, France has changed much more than is commonly believed. This is particularly true in regard to French companies, which have remarkably adapted to the demands of international competition.

But much remains to be done: the entire educational system, up through the university level, requires serious reform, and many taboos regarding employment rules, social security and the functioning of the state must be questioned. What the experience with the CFE shows is not that reform is impossible, but that it cannot be unilaterally imposed. Time must be taken for explanation, consultation and negotiation. In a society like France's, marked by uncertainty about the future and in great need of having its self-confidence restored, the time taken to build consensus and create legitimacy for further reforms will certainly be well spent.

Raphael Hadas-Lebel, author of "101 Words about French Democracy", is a member of the Conseil d'Etat and a professor at the Institut d'Etudes Politiques in Paris.

Copyright: Project Syndicate.

Raphael Hadas-Lebel