Charlemagne. The longest day, revisited

How different views of D-Day affect transatlantic ties

THE 60th anniversary of D-Day on June 6th will be a very long day. It will begin with a joint Franco-American ceremony on Utah beach and continue with a lunch for assembled world leaders in Caen, the Normandy town nearest the D-Day beaches. But perhaps the most significant ceremony will be saved for the early evening, when Jacques Chirac and Gerhard Schroder - the leaders of France and Germany - meet at the Caen Memorial. Most attention will naturally focus on the very presence of a German leader at the commemorations of the Normandy landings - an honour that was withheld from all previous German chancellors - and thus on a moment that Mr Schroder says means that “Germany's long journey to the West has now been completed.”

But the place the two leaders have chosen to meet also says a lot about today's politics - and the split that has opened up in the western alliance over Iraq. For most Americans and Britons, the narrative of D-Day is blessedly uncomplicated. It is a story of heroism and sacrifice, and of good triumphing over evil; one that has been re-told with increasing frequency with the passing of the years in films like “The Longest Day” and “Saving Private Ryan”. For the best-selling American historian, Stephen Ambrose, D-Day was above all the story of heroic young Allied soldiers: “None of them wanted to be part of another war [...] But when the test came, when freedom had to be fought for or abandoned, they fought.”

The Caen Memorial, the largest museum commemorating the D-Day landings, is a few miles from the Normandy beaches but a world away from Mr Ambrose's celebratory style. It calls itself a “museum for peace”, and relatively little of its exhibition space is actually devoted to the Normandy landings. Instead crowds of school-children are led through galleries dedicated to the tragedies of the 20th century and on to a series of rooms devoted to peace studies. The rooms that are concerned with the second world war are decorated with sobering messages like the dictum of Fenelon, a 17th-century writer, that “All war is always civil war, for it is always man against man.” The peace rooms are full of useful pedagogic suggestions such as “The European Parliament can be a model for a future global parliament.”

If the Anglo-American view of D-Day remains predominantly about the triumph of democracy over fascism, the view presented at the Caen Memorial prefers to focus on the evils of all wars and the need for peace and reconciliation. Of course, the two views are not mutually exclusive. The Caen Memorial does not gloss over the evils of Nazism; and no American president would deny the need for post-war peace and reconciliation. But there is a marked difference of emphasis - a difference that is of more than historical interest.

Venus and Mars

The argument over Iraq last year was on one level simply about questions of political judgment. Was Saddam hiding weapons? Would an American-led invasion of Iraq improve matters in the Middle East? But lying behind the arguments were different attitudes to the use of force in world affairs, attitudes which were shaped in large part by very different lessons drawn from the history of the second world war. George Bush has explicitly compared the liberation of France and the liberation of Iraq, reminding American soldiers recently of the heroism of Eisenhower's troops and then adding: “That spirit carried the American soldier across Europe to help liberate a continent. It's the same spirit that carried you across Iraq to set a nation free.” In the run-up to the invasion, comparisons between the reconstruction of Iraq today and the reconstruction of post-war Germany and Japan were a staple of American neo-conservative discussion.

The European politicians who opposed the invasion of Iraq also drew upon memories of the second world war - but to quite different effect. Joschka Fischer, the German foreign minister, lamenting the gap in understanding between his country and the United States, put it down to the fact that “The Americans had no Verdun on their continent. In the United States there is nothing comparable to Auschwitz or Stalingrad.” Mr Chirac has famously said that “War is always an admission of defeat and always the worst of solutions.”

The view that Americans are from Mars and Europeans from Venus - that Americans believe in force, while Europeans aspire to a peaceful utopia - was made famous before the Iraq invasion by Robert Kagan, an American neo-conservative. Like all striking theses, from “the end of history” to the “clash of civilisations”, it has since been subjected to searching critiques, as academics have picked holes in the argument. It has been duly noted that post-war Europe has not always been averse to war; and that the martial United States has often shown a marked aversion to taking casualties. American public opinion is also not as dismissive of international law and the United Nations as the cruder versions of the Kagan thesis would have it.

Yet anybody comparing the Caen Memorial with the works of Stephen Ambrose must conclude that Mr Kagan hit upon something. Opinion polls also clearly support the idea that there is now a very wide gap between the American and the Franco-German view of war. In 2003 a poll for the German Marshall Fund asked respondents whether, under some conditions, war is necessary to obtain justice. Some 55% of Americans said they agreed strongly with that statement. In both France and Germany, however, just 12% were prepared to agree strongly. The two countries may have fought each other to a standstill, following three successive German attacks on France between 1870 and 1945. But 60 years after D-Day, France and Germany seem to have come to an identity of views about war. It is that view that Mr Chirac and Mr Schroder will be endorsing, when they meet at the Caen Memorial on June 6th.

Commentary feature looks at Europe-US relations at the time of the 60th anniversary of D-Day.

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