Thomas P.M. Barnett :: Weblog

■"France to Protect Strategic Sectors From Foreign Deals," by Jo Wrighton, Wall Street Journal, 30 August 2005, p. A3.

■"China pulls rug out from Rupe," by Elizabeth Guider and Patrick Frater, Variety, 29 August-4 September 2005, p. 5.

Here's how I know that the U.S. scaring off foreign ownership in its economy is a backward and stupid concept: the French are all for it.

France faced a takeover bid for a major metals and mining company by a Brazilian one. My, that is a threat to France's economic future, which certainly should be about the high-tech industry of mining. Paris is also fending off interest from foreign companies in its planned privatization of its large toll-road companies (I can almost hear it: "Do you want to pay tolls to the Chinese to drive down what used to be a French road!").

So France is coming up with an official list of untouchables. Word is Paris will allow Pepsi to buy food company Danone, which surprises me. Isn't yogurt a source of national pride in France?

Is this pathetic or what? Old Core France resorting to protectionism to stop rising New Core powers from buying its companies.

Yes, yes, France. Hold onto those "strategic" toll booths. Your very standing in the global economy of the 21st century depends on it.

And France is supposed to be a pillar of the EU that's gonna clean America's economic clock down the road? Imagine Florida telling Michigan what "strategic" companies it could or could not buy!

So what about China telling Rupert Murdoch that he can't launch a channel via cable systems in northern China (We're talking a measly 400 million households here, because, hey! It's just northern China!)? Is that China acting similarly?

To a certain extent yes, but my impression is that this new push back on foreign control over media outlets in China has as much to do with Beijing wanting to tap that blossoming domestic market in order to grow its own media giants than it has with controlling media content. As Murdoch has proven plenty of times in Asia, he's not about pissing off the censors so much as empire building (his company Star TV is accused of peddling satellite dishes in China without permission, and few things scare authoritarian governments more than satellite dishes), and China's government wants to give its own media companies time to grow up with that market and thus eventually take on the challenge of media content exports to the rest of the Core, as Japan has done so nicely in recent years.

But yeah, keeping their fingers on the censorship button is likewise a desired goal for the Party. Don't expect that attitude to change any time soon. Remember, everyone wants connectivity, but not everyone wants the resulting content flow, so restrictions on the latter are to be expected as the cost of increased connectivity.