The dramatic cultural and economic changes currently shaking the globe are still often met in France with parochial, irrelevant conversations, a symptom of the insular intellectual bubble in which the country has been trapped for far too long.
Meanwhile, a major paradigm shift is occurring, whereby white men from Western Europe and North America are no longer calling all the shots. In many ways, what used to be seen as the periphery is swiftly becoming the center, as the countries we still clumsily call “emerging” — China, India, Brazil, Turkey, Indonesia and others — are doing much more than that.
Young French people need to go abroad, to work, to travel, to see how things can work differently in cultures and countries that don’t play by the same old rules — and then come back to France, and reinject some of the energy and enthusiasm they’ve absorbed to help reconcile the broader population with the global reality that France has shunned for far too long.
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