Timing is bad for France to lose appetite for hard work

BANGALORE, India — It was extremely revealing traveling from Europe to India as French voters (and now Dutch ones) were rejecting the EU constitution — in one giant snub to President Jacques Chirac, European integration, immigration, Turkish membership in the EU and all the forces of globalization eating away at Europe's welfare states. It is interesting because French voters are trying to preserve a 35-hour workweek in a world where Indian engineers are ready to work a 35-hour day. Good luck.

Voters in "old Europe" — France, Germany, the Netherlands and Italy — seem to be saying to their leaders: Stop the world, we want to get off; while voters in India have been telling their leaders: Stop the world and build us a stepstool; we want to get on. I feel sorry for Western European blue-collar workers. A world of benefits they have known for 50 years is coming apart, and their governments don't seem to have a strategy for coping.

One reason French voters turned down the EU constitution was rampant fears of "Polish plumbers." Rumors that low-cost immigrant plumbers from Poland were taking over the French plumbing trade became a rallying symbol for anti-EU constitution forces. A few weeks ago Franz Muentefering, chairman of Germany's Social Democratic Party, compared private equity firms — which buy up failing businesses, downsize them and then sell them — to a "swarm of locusts."

The fact that a top German politician has resorted to attacking capitalism to win votes tells you just how explosive the next decade in Western Europe could be, as some of these aging, inflexible economies — which have grown used to six-week vacations and unemployment insurance that is almost as good as having a job — become more intimately integrated with Eastern Europe, India and China in a flattening world.

To appreciate just how explosive, come to Bangalore, India, the outsourcing capital of the world. The dirty little secret is that India is taking work from Europe or America not simply because of low wages. It is also because Indians are ready to work harder and can do anything from answering your phone to designing your next airplane or car. They are not racing us to the bottom. They are racing us to the top.

Indeed, there is a huge famine breaking out all over India today, an incredible hunger. But it is not for food. It is a hunger for opportunity that has been pent up like volcanic lava under four decades of socialism, and it's now just bursting out with India's young generation.