As I've said before, the best thing about this web site, for me, is that it's gotten me back in touch with old friends stretching back to grade school. One such is Bob Cunningham, one of the smartest people I knew when I was in college. Bob has spent a lot of time in France, speaks French and has followed French politics for a long time. He offers what strikes me as the most definitive analysis so far of the red state/blue state map we reproduced from Le Monde on the European Constitution vote:

The "granularity" of the map is finer than the U.S. red/blue state maps; the French départements on average have about the same population as U.S. Congressional districts. However, they are geographic divisions and are not allocated by population. Perhaps more comparable to (larger) counties in the U.S.

Clearly the "OUI" votes were heavily concentrated in the "elite" urban areas: Paris and the départements of Haut-de-Seine (Neuilly-sur-Seine, etc.) and Yvelines (St. German-en-Laye, Maison-Lafitte, etc.) which contain its wealthy western suburbs; Rhone (Lyons, the second city of France); Bas-Rhin which contains Strasbourg, home of the European Parliament, sitting right on the German border; and Haute-Savoie which is basically the wealthy suburbs of Geneva on the French side of the lake. I would take this to be comparable to metropolitan New York-Washington-Boston plus, say, Chicago and San Francisco.

However, the REGION of Brittany and outlying areas including Maine and the Vendée also went "OUI" though by a closer vote. Hard to explain why, though [the] explanation that they anticipated greater autonomy under an EU Constitution is persuasive. This has always been a region with a strong sense of independence; (Brittany is Celtic in its ethnic/cultural origins and the Vendée has felt estranged from Paris since at least the Revolution when, you may recall, an infamous massacre of counter-revolutionaries took place.)

The "red" areas have an interesting dichotomy. Most of it is "la France profond", i.e., the "heartland"; much of it is rural, socialist in outlook (ag subsidies) but culturally conservative. The darkest red areas are the opposite: heavily industrialized northeast France (including Lille) with high industrial unemployment, communist labor unions and rust-belt industries. You also have to note the Bouche-du-Rhone and surrounding départements which include the city of Marseilles and its hinterlands with huge North African illegal immigration issues.

So it looks like most of the "OUI" vote was the elite, transnational, wealthier urban areas, plus Brittany, etc. with its own agenda. The "NON" areas were rural/industrial socialist/anti-globalists. In addition to the economic motivation I would guess that the "NON" areas, especially the northeast and Marseilles, included a large anti-immigrant, specifically anti-Muslim vote as well. It's all of a piece to them.

To me it looks a lot like what you might get in the U.S. if there were referenda on a combination of free trade and immigration; it would be interesting to look at Perot/Buchanan votes for President by county to see the pattern there.

I've often asked myself what makes the blogosphere worthwhile. Certainly a big part of the answer is that the world is full of smart people, a large majority of whom didn't go to journalism school and don't work for newspapers or magazines. One of the basic things blogs do is give those people a voice.

The only thing that depresses me about Bob's analysis, and that of Michael Barone and other contributors, is that it tends to confirm that there really isn't much of a movement in Europe that corresponds to American conservatism.

Posted by John at 08:01 PM  |    |