France and Britain. Agreeing to disagree

Date: 08/02/03

The leaders of Britain and France kiss and make up, sort of

THE last words, smilingly offered in French, were Tony Blair's: “There are many more things that unite us than divide us.” Cue for a polite end to a half-day Franco-British summit, talked up in gushing terms on February 4th by France's President Jacques Chirac: “Rarely have I seen such an entente cordiale as that which came spontaneously through in our meeting today.”

The trouble is that what divides them is, for the moment, more pressing. Mr Blair's Britain is a willing warrior in any war to rid Iraq of Saddam Hussein and his alleged weapons of mass destruction. In contrast, Mr Chirac's France is so reluctant that recently it hinted at casting a veto in the UN's Security Council. At this week's summit Mr Chirac repeated his conviction that “war is the worst of all solutions”; in the meantime, he said, the inspectors should be allowed to get on with their work, “which in the past had proved very effective”. While dodging questions on how long inspectors should be given before France might join a war, Mr Chirac noted that before the UN inspectors were withdrawn from Iraq in 1998, they had destroyed more arms than America and its allies did in the Gulf war of 1991 itself.

Since the French position on this was already obvious to the British, the two sides agreed swiftly to disagree. They also glossed over a divergence of views about Zimbabwe, a country mentioned only in passing in a joint document promising Franco-British co-operation in the thankless task of bringing peace and development to Africa. France has invited Zimbabwe's dictatorial President Robert Mugabe to a France-Africa summit due to take place later this month. The invitation comes despite Britain's opposition and a European Union ban (due for renewal on the eve of the Franco-African summit) on visits by Mr Mugabe. Without him, though, France's Africa summit may flop. For that matter, if he does get his visa, he might feel entitled to one for the EU's African summit in Lisbon in April, which in turn would be a flop because it would then be boycotted by Mr Blair and several other EU leaders.

So no wonder the summiteers decided that Zimbabwe was a subject best left for the diplomats in Brussels to sort out. After all, a leaked document to Le Monde just before the summit appeared to show that the British government last month had agreed to Mr Mugabe's visit but had then been too edgy about it to make it public. In the end, the easiest compromise may well be to let Mr Mugabe go to the Paris summit but abandon the EU event in Lisbon.

Yet even with Iraq and Zimbabwe off the table, the summiteers can still argue that their taxpayers had their money's worth. One reason, apart from a feel-good agreement for more educational and commercial exchanges, is that Mr Blair and Mr Chirac claim to have restored momentum to the collaboration on defence that they signed at a summit in St Malo in 1998.

Part of this is commercial: a British decision last week to share the building of two aircraft carriers between BAE of Britain and Thales of France will create the economies of scale to let France build another aircraft carrier to float alongside the Charles de Gaulle. Part is operational: training and procurement will be co-ordinated and one aircraft carrier, British or French, will be permanently available. And part will be political: the two countries will work together to develop the EU's “capacity for rapid reaction to meet its own objectives and to strengthen the European contribution to the establishment of a NATO Response Force.”

To all this Messrs Blair and Chirac can add a large measure of agreement on the EU's future. Britain is happy enough with the recent Franco-German idea of a president representing the EU's governments and another elected to represent the European Commission, plus a single EU “foreign minister” answerable to the governments. So they had a right to smile for the cameras in Le Touquet, a town put on the map by Britain's smart set of the 1920s (before the British bombed it in the 1940s).

The question is how long the smiles will last. Quite apart from Iraq and Zimbabwe, deep differences remain over EU farm subsidies. There will doubtless be more fights over niggly subjects such as the British rebate. Even those with conveniently short memories are well aware that this week's summit was supposed to have happened last December, but was abruptly postponed by Mr Chirac in October after he and Mr Blair had exchanged sharp words in Brussels.

Never mind. Next year will be the entente cordiale's centenary, promising another smiling chance to declare that agreements count more than disagreements.

Report of the Anglo-French summit meeting, Le Touquet, 4 February 2003. Smiles all round, but tensions still exist over CAP reform, Iraq and Zimbabwe

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