<nettime> French School of Economic Warfare

["nettime's_roving_reporter" <nettime-l@bbs.thing.net>]

PARIS, Nov 25 (Reuters) - With its war on British beef and black sheep
role in international trade talks, France seems like the last country in
the world that needs to learn how to defend its interests in the
globalised market. 

In fact, as the World Trade Organisation summit to consider a new
"millennium round" of trade negotiations nears, Paris seems to be flexing
some protectionist muscles with mounting demands to shield its films and
farmers from U.S. competition. 

But at a small business school tucked down a side street near the military
academy Napoleon once attended, France ranks as weak and ill-prepared,
encircled by threatening competitors and held back by short-sighted
managers. 

Hoping to come to its defence, the private School of Economic Warfare has
worked out a curriculum that sounds more like James Bond than the Harvard
Business School. 

The course list bristles with entries on military strategy, intelligence,
subversion, martial arts, agitprop, psychological manipulation and the art
of polemics. 

Computers and the Internet play a central role, especially when linked to
topics like info-war, computer attacks and the "info-destabilisation of
companies." 

THE NEW AGE OF INTELLIGENCE

Even the less cloak-and-dagger courses have an aggressive edge --
lobbying, networking and information management. 

"This is the new age of intelligence," Christian Harbulot, director of the
two-year-old institute, told Reuters. 

"The information society is revolutionising the economic balance of power.
The stronger one is not the one who spies on the other, it is the one who
controls knowledge." 

The military air about the school is no coincidence. 

Harbulot used to work for a subsidiary of the French arms export agency
and got its help to launch the school in 1997. One of his lecturers is
retired General Jean Pichot-Duclos, former head of the French military
intelligence school. 

A small but growing number of the 25 students taken in each year comes
from the military. But Harbulot denies this is a not-too-covert school for
spies. 

"If we want to be clever and illegal, our life expectancy would be very,
very short," he insisted. 

"Our main weapon is not poison or a revolver, but an operation of
encirclement and intrusion by knowledge." 

Harbulot recalled how public pressure scuttled the proposed Multilateral
Agreement on Investment (MAI) last year and could help save Europe's farm
subsidies at the WTO's trade talks. 

"We are a school where the principal weapon is the art of polemics," he
said. "Polemics is really a French art. It can become an arm in a broadly
understood culture of intelligence. 

"In the food trade, we can ask whether one can produce goods that harm
public health? Can we sell chickens stuffed with antibiotics?  Tobacco
products with addictive additives? 

"There are lots of info-wars behind those questions." 

"FRANCE SHOULD SAY NO" 

In their book "France Should Say No," Harbulot and Pichot- Duclos identify
the targets their knowledge should attack. 

"Thinking lucidly about the future of our country implies that we dare to
say 'no' to a hegemonic America, a vassal Europe and a submissive France,"
they wrote. 

Harbulot, who was a Maoist activist in the 1970s, sees international
business competition in terms reminiscent of the ancient Chinese military
strategist Sun Tzu. 

"You have to find the point of equilibrium in the balance of forces," he
said. "One should seek out the adversary's weak points and work out how to
reveal them. 

"You have to weaken the other. It's obligatory. The best way is to weaken
him where he does not even know he is weak." 

Asked what this meant for France in international trade talks, Harbulot
said his country was no longer strong enough to impose its will but still
had enough clout to frustrate others. 

"For France, the most offensive strategy is to seek a balance," he said. 
"We must temper the appetites of bigger competitors -- but for that we
must be able to act tactically." 

NO SIGN ON THE DOOR... 

The one-year course of study at the School of Economic Warfare, which is a
division of a larger private business school known as ESLSCA, costs 52,000
francs ($8,176) for university graduates and 64,000 francs ($10,060) for
mid-career entrants. 

Harbulot said about three-quarters of the graduates from the first two
years have found jobs in information management and some in the
intelligence field. 

"We have very few foreign students," he said. "We wanted to have Germans
and there have been a lot of articles in the German press, but they seem
to be suspicious." 

The foreigners are not the only ones who are wary. Access to the school is
through a storefront with an unmarked door and Venetian blinds blocking
the view through the front window. 

Asked why there was no sign, Harbulot laughed: "We didn't want to frighten
the neighbours!" 

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