• tal@lemmy.todayEnglish
    571·
    2 months ago

    President Emmanuel Macron said Monday that the French government was not involved in the arrest of Telegram founder and CEO Pavel Durov.

    Just to be clear for anyone else who did a double take, there is a language issue here.

    In the US, “government” is typically used to refer to a much broader chunk of institutions than the term is in the UK.

    In the UK, the “government” is the figures selected by Parliament to run the executive portion of state’s institutions and the people those people appoint – basically, the prime minister, and the cabinet. So, currently, the UK has the Starmer government.

    In the US, this is referred to as the “administration”. Currently, the US has the Biden administration.

    In the US, “the government” refers to not just a small handful of elected figures at the top of the executive, but the entire shebang – the Executive Branch, Legislative Branch, and Judicial Branch are all part of the government. All of the state institutions belong to the government.

    So in the American sense of the term “government”, saying that “the French government was not involved” is kind of nonsensical. Law enforcement and the judiciary – who would indeed be involved in arrests and such – are all part of the government. If the French government weren’t involved, it’d be, oh, I don’t know, some foreign government sending people in masquerading as French police. The author here is using the term in the British sense of the word – he’s saying that the elected officials at the top portion of the executive part of the state institutions were not involved. In the US, the equivalent statement would be “the Macron administration was not involved”.

    EDIT: I recall doing a much larger double-take the first time I read a British newspaper headline saying that “the British government has fallen”. In the UK, that just means that the agreement in Parliament to permit a chosen set of people to continue to run the executive portion of the state has ended in disagreement. At that point, there will be snap elections, a new set of legislators chosen, and the new set of legislators will choose a new set of figures to run the executive portion of the state institutions.

    In the US, the phrase would mean that the state is no longer functioning, and things have descended into anarchy, an immeasurably-more-serious situation.