That Was The Week That Was 01 – 05 March 2021
The fundamental angst of being French – Too much; too classy; too… shrug
God does not play dice’ Einstein once said. He may be hard, but he is not bloody-minded, as this can be put. My preference is the simpler ‘God has a sense of humour’. Personally, I have to hope that She does. I have to hope that, but were I French, I would be sure of it. Is there a country more blessed, more evidence of providential grace than France? Is there a country more likely to go to hell and back with self-doubt and existential angst before realising it? Again and again?
This week we saw the divine sense of humour in action. Theologians will tell you that God is everywhere, and if that is true, it must be true that She is even to be found in WTO rulings. That calls for faith, because no-one would go to a WTO ruling for divine inspiration. The best, most classic of all WTO rulings is the famous banana case, which in more than 10,000 pages of judgements is the immortal sentence ‘Only a banana is like a banana.’ but the Airbus-Boeing case is now giving that case a run for its money.
I am sure that you are completely across the case, so I will not summarise its various outs and ins, but suffice it to say that at each and every stage of the proceedings each side has proudly, and voluminously, told the world that it had won. Victory! A clear and decisive win, each side asserts. Hundreds and hundreds of appeals, and further actions and further twists; as well as thousands and thousands of pages of decisions later, it has come down to this: pinot noir, and technical supremacy.
Both sides claiming that they have won allows both sides to impose countervailing sanctions on the other side to match up for and to make up for the amounts of state aid they claim has been, wrongly, given. Clearly, whilst it is fun to impose a tariff on an aircraft of your nation’s competitors, making them more expensive to purchase, there must be more to life than that? That is too narrow a focus on narrow bodies. An area, it has to be said, that Boeing has not had a great time of recently.
So both sides sat and plotted and plotted; and looked for advantage until they spotted; the most obvious carotid. They worked out how to impose maximum pain; something that might be felt in Spain and Maine and Champagne.
Champagne was the clue for the US side. Not only a tariff on aircraft but a tax on the import of French wine! Scaré bleu! This put the French into a huge, existential tail spin. Which industry to support more – which of their national champions was more deserving? It was un dilemme énorme. Many a gasket was blown in Toulouse, Champagne, Bordeaux and Burgundy over this huge problem. Brexited Britain worried about its whiskey, but hey ho.
What to do? What to do? Then, in the critical, fourth reel of any decent thriller movie, the US blinked. The tariff on Boeing must have been hurting. Desperate to prove that the deck chairs on the good ship USA had been moved around, the US agreed to take away the tariffs. Good news for wine drinkers in the US, good news in Toulouse, good news in Champagne, Boudreaux and Burgundy and good news in Paris.
Cheers. Votre santé.