Eurosceptic tide rises in France

Date: 14/01/1999

French parliamentarians will decide next week whether to approve changes to their national constitution, in order to fall in line with the Amsterdam Treaty. Simon Coss analyses the bitter tensions underlying the debate

General De Gaulle must be spinning in his grave. This was not at all what he had in mind when he and the EU's other five founding fathers sat down to draw up plans for what was to become the European Union.

If the owner of one of this century's most famous profiles knew that his beloved patrie was about to change its constitution in order to allow 14 foreign powers to have a say in key policies such as immigration, he would be horrified.

Yet that is precisely what is due to happen at the Palace of Versailles next Monday (18 January), when members of France's two houses of parliament - the Sénat and the Assemblée Nationale - gather to decide whether or not to modify Articles 88-2 and 88-4 of the Fifth Republic's founding charter.

The constitution needs to be modified in order to allow France to ratify the Amsterdam Treaty because, as it stands, the new EU treaty and the French constitution are incompatible - notably because of Amsterdam's clauses on immigration and asylum.

Faced with this situation, something had to give, and it was not going to be the deal reached after a year-long Intergovernmental Conference and almost three days of hard bargaining between EU leaders in the Dutch capital in June 1997.

Next week's vote will almost certainly approve the modifications to the constitution, paving the way for the treaty to be ratified by France in the spring.

The Amsterdam question has, however, once again highlighted an increasingly strong strain of Euroscepticism in France.

The country's attitude to European integration has always been somewhat ambivalent. De Gaulle saw the EU as a loose confederation of independent member states which could help France to maintain its sphere of influence as its old global empire began to crumble.

As the European Community's most influential founding member France was, to a large extent, able to shape the new body in its image and ensure that on most issues, 'French' and 'European' interests coincided. To put it bluntly, Paris ran the show.

But with each successive increase in the number of EU member states and the range of policy areas governed by Union laws, France's influence has been slightly diluted.

The European Commission's Directorate-General for competition (DGIV) has become ever more severe in its views on traditional French dirigisme: the practice of supporting favoured state-run or quasi-public enterprises with generous loans, public procurement contracts or financial subsidies.

The advent of the single market and the General Agreement on Tarrifs and Trade (GATT) world trade deals approved by the Commission and endorsed, after protracted wrangling, by EU governments have also had a profound effect on France's traditionally protected national markets.

As this process has continued, a growing number of French citizens and politicians has begun to ask: "Just what are we getting out of the EU anyway?"

The most recent evidence of this increasing Euroscepticism was the announcement by Charles Pasqua, the cigar-chomping former interior minister, that he intended to stand in this June's European elections on his own anti-Amsterdam ticket.

Pasqua, who is a member of President Jacques Chirac's Gaullist Rassemblement Pour la Republic (RPR) party, has been a high-profile player on the French political scene for years.

His decision to announce his candidature for the Euro-elections on 1 January, the same day that Chirac delivered his traditional new year's address to the nation, was clearly designed to cause the president maximum political embarrassment.

Pasqua argues that Chirac has sold out on his Gaullist ideals and is preparing to lead France into a Europe where its influence and national sovereignty will be fatally undermined. He is insisting on a referendum to ratify the Amsterdam Treaty, as was the case with the Maastricht deal in 1992. Chirac is, however, almost certain to opt for ratification via the parliamentary route.

Texts currently being circulated by Pasqua's newly created Demain la France (Tomorrow France) movement read like vintage speeches by the UK's notoriously Europhobic Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.

"Europe is being built like an empire. Every people, every nation is being asked to give up its sovereignty and its liberty for the benefit of technocrats in Brussels," the organisation warns. "Today, Europe means the money in Frankfurt, the law in Luxembourg and technocratic decisions taken in Brussels."

IT IS not just the French right which has a strong Eurosceptic wing. The Communist Party, which holds two ministerial posts in the current government, is vehemently opposed to Amsterdam. The country's Interior Minister Jean-Pierre Chevènement, who recently returned to work after recovering from a coma last autumn, is also a well-known EU-doubter.

Indeed, Prime Minister Lionel Jospin was himself elected on a promise that he would not put France's generous welfare system in jeopardy in a bid to meet the single currency convergence criteria. Outside the rarefied atmosphere of the Parisian political élite, more and more ordinary French citizens are also beginning to ask questions about the country's membership of the Union.

Almost any business you care to visit will reel off complaints about the accursed normes européennes which they have to comply with. Many people also feel they are being forced to adopt 'precarious' Anglo-Saxon working methods, such as short-term contracts or reduced holiday and pension cover, as a result of EU membership. Yet more worry that their essential 'Frenchness' is under attack by a creeping Brussels-inspired homogenisation.

France's extreme right-wing National Front Party is not playing a major role in the current European debate as it is busy tearing itself apart in a leadership battle between its founder Jean-Marie le Pen and moderniser Bruno Mégret.

However, in more normal times, the party has enjoyed considerable electoral support - evidence of the strong anti-European feelings held by many French people.

IT IS clear that the public debate on Europe has become far more heated since the Maastricht referendum. Many observers argue that this was really the first time that the implications of France's EU membership were fully explained to the general public.

The French media have often been criticised for taking a broadly pro-Union, pro-government line when it comes to European matters. The country's most influential newspapers and television programmes have all tended to start from the premise that the EU is basically a good thing.

It was only when just under half of the country (49%) voted to reject Maastricht that the opinion-formers began to realise they had better sit up and take notice of what was happening on the ground.

Even now, however, the tone of the debate in France does not compare with the shrill, often ill-informed and alarmist manner in which EU issues are discussed in the neighbouring UK.

Champions of the Union cause also insist that it would be wrong to conclude that France has lost its grip on EU policy-making completely. Last May's fiasco over the appointment of the first president of the European Central Bank, when Chirac delayed the end of the special summit on the euro for 12 hours until he won a promise that a Frenchman would succeed Dutchman Wim Duisenberg, showed that Paris is still capable of getting its way when it wants to.

But it is clear that France is having to stamp ever harder to make its mark on the Union. Europe has come a long way since the days when De Gaulle could bring the whole edifice to its knees simply by refusing to turn up for meetings.

Major feature.