Spotlight: Selling Globalization to France

Christine Lagarde stands out in most places, and not just because she is 1.80 meters, or nearly 6 feet, tall.

Lagarde, the French trade minister, sounds less French and less like a politician than perhaps anyone else in her government. She gets along with Americans. She uses expressions like "bottom line" and avoids others, like "economic patriotism." And she is determined to tackle one of the tougher tasks in her country.

"I have to sell France to the world and globalization to the French," Lagarde, 51, explained matter-of-factly during an interview at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January.

Her job title, she said, is in fact a bit misleading. The European Union has long been representing member states like France in international trade talks, limiting the say of national trade ministers. Instead, Lagarde considers herself an ambassador of France to the world and an ambassador of the world to France.

As a former chairman of Baker & McKenzie, a law firm based in Chicago, and someone who lived in the United States for six years, she would seem to be well-placed on both fronts. She was a regular at Davos long before she joined the center- right government in Paris two years ago — a move she described, with tongue in cheek, as defecting "to the other side."

But doing business in France has never been easy to sell abroad, even for someone who moves with ease among the world's leading executives. "Wherever I go, I hear the same complaints: the 35- hour week, too much bureaucracy and difficult labor unions," she said.

Meanwhile, in France the term globalization has become synonymous with "delocalization," or the migration of jobs abroad. It was here that the image of the Polish plumber blossomed and that a mix of rumored and real foreign takeover bids led to government maneuvers to keep national champions in French hands.

"Globalization is often seen as a threat, despite the fact that we are actually among the most open economies and benefit from it," Lagarde said. "It's paradoxical: the openness of France alongside our fears of the world."

One reason that the French are so skeptical about globalization, she said, is language. "We feel a bit left out, because the language of globalization is English," she said. Her own English is impeccable.

Yet despite the protectionist reputation of France, 1 in 7 French employees works for a foreign business, compared with 1 in 10 in Britain and 1 in 20 in the United States. Almost half of the top 40 companies listed on the Paris stock exchange are owned by foreign investors, she likes to point out. France is also the third-biggest recipient of foreign direct investment in the world.

Lagarde announced this month that nearly 40,000 jobs had been preserved or created in France in the past year, thanks to U.S., European and Asian investments — a sign, she said, that despite high labor costs, foreign companies value French productivity.

One of Lagarde's mantras is that foreign investors and French people both need to get over their favorite clichés. She has been choosing unusual ways to accelerate that process.

In Davos, she touted the assets of France by attending several parties in a "smart scarf," a cloth containing a computer chip with a bright orange digital slogan running across the bottom that matched her bright orange blazer. "Slow Food and Fast Trains," the slogan read — a formulation she had come up with herself.

Despite Lagarde's atypical background and business-friendly outlook, some of her negotiation partners on the international scene lament that ultimately she is locked into her role as French trade minister — and all the baggage that title brings with it.

"She is not autonomous," said Pascal Lamy, a fellow Frenchman who heads the World Trade Organization and has known Lagarde for 15 years. "She is a minister of a country that still has a profoundly mercantilist DNA. In that sense she is like her predecessors, just with a smile and a more cosmopolitan style."

At home, Lagarde, a former participant in synchronized swimming, is banking on a carefully choreographed educational campaign to market globalization. She has asked a panel of 15 independent experts, ranging from chief executives to economists, to report to her this month with ideas of how to communicate more effectively about globalization in everyday life.

One of her own ideas was a globalization label or bar code on imported goods, signaling whether the country of origin had signed up to the Kyoto climate protocol, banned child labor and observed human rights conventions.

When she travels around France, this daughter of two teachers stops off at local schools to give talks about the global economy, and her ministry recently issued shiny booklets highlighting the benefits of international trade for schoolchildren.

In one of those booklets, 10-year-old Zoé learns from her red socks that they have traveled from a cotton field in Mali via a Moroccan textile factory to a French shop, while her video game explains that it was designed by Japanese engineers, made in China and has many little sisters who have gone to the homes of children in North America.

"If you show people the benefits of globalization they otherwise take for granted, you're halfway there," Lagarde said.

What is the other half? "More reforms," she said, without hesitation. Will Nicolas Sarkozy, the French interior minister, whom Lagarde is backing in the presidential race, deliver — especially on promises to shake up labor laws?

"We will know very quickly, within the first three months, I reckon," is her cautious reply.

Either way, Lagarde said, "in a world that moves constantly, we cannot afford to be rigid."