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Internationally isolated, fighting economic decline .. yes, we're talking about France. Quotable:

Nicolas Baverez, a historian and economist, has led this fall's doom-and-gloom pack of books and essays. His manifesto: a 135-page bestseller titled "France Is Falling." His thesis: The country's economy, politics and society have sunk into paralysis because leaders have consistently and self-destructively resisted change and refused to accept the realities of a modernizing, globalizing world.

Baverez blames an antiquated, statist mentality for unemployment mired at near 10%, economic growth near zero, crippling strikes, the deaths of almost 15,000 people during an August heat wave that overwhelmed a health system on vacation, and other maladies both tangible and existential.

In contrast to the United States, Baverez writes, French leaders believe "the more things change, the more must be done to change nothing.... This political, economic and social immobility, which is also intellectual and moral, has plunged France into decline.

"The autism of a political class moored to the models of the 1960s and 1970s has ... [degraded] the nation." ..

Although Baverez is no fan of U.S. foreign policy, he dismisses Chirac's approach as a futile attempt to make France a kind of high-minded referee of international affairs. Throwing around "words of power without means of power," he said, masks France's fading role in a divided Europe and in a world shaped by the military and economic might of the United States.

"France finds itself in complete isolation in the world and in Europe," Baverez writes.