France’s diplomacy: Against America? Moi?

Date: 15/03/03

Not all President Jacques Chirac's friends share his confidence

“WHATEVER the circumstances,” says its president, “France will vote no.” In other words, America, Britain and Spain - all of them France's allies in NATO - will not get their UN Security Council resolution leading, in the French view, automatically to war with Saddam Hussein's Iraq. “War is always the worst solution,” goes the French president's refrain, with additional arguments that the UN inspections are working and that Iraq's weapons of mass destruction (“of which there are certainly still some”) do not pose an immediate threat to world peace.

So does Jacques Chirac see himself as a new Charles de Gaulle, setting France's policy against America's, almost regardless of the risks, both political and economic? Announcing France's intentions on March 10th, President Chirac deftly deflected his television interviewers. De Gaulle, he said, had never opposed America for the sake of opposing it, but only to protect France's interests. Still, he added, “I can't help but be flattered by the comparison you're trying to make.”

Indeed. Not so long ago Mr Chirac was being written off as a conviction-free opportunist, dogged by scandal and fatally weakened after the voters in 1997 condemned him to “cohabit” for five years with a coalition government led by his Socialist opponents. Now, since his own re-election last year and the ensuing rout of the left in a general election, he is riding high. In France his supporters control all organs of the state; in the European Union he has renewed France's alliance with Germany, to the discomfort of Britain and others; and on a still broader stage he has, it seems, persuaded Russia and China to share France's opposition to the tactics of the Bush administration.

But is he also riding for a fall? In immediate terms, obviously not. In France his policy on Iraq, crafted in conjunction with Dominique de Villepin, the hyperactive foreign minister who is almost a son to the president, is extremely popular. In a poll taken just before his television interview, 64% of the sample thought France should take no part in any war not approved by a UN resolution - and 69% thought France should veto any such resolution. In the same poll, 82% had a “bad image” of President Bush and 81% blamed America for the worsening of its relations with France.

Where the public leads, the politicians follow. Mr Chirac is being praised even by his political opponents. The Socialists' leader, François Hollande, “shares his views” on Iraq and the UN; so does the Communists' national secretary, Marie-George Buffet; so, too, Jean-Marie Le Pen of the extreme-right National Front. Bernard Kouchner, a former Socialist minister and the founder of the Medecins Sans Frontieres organisation, is a rarity: he says a war to remove Saddam Hussein would be justified on moral grounds. Meanwhile, elsewhere in Europe, Mr Chirac's policy conforms with the opinion of the public if not always of their political leaders; in Tony Blair's Britain, for example, the French embassy reports getting letters by the sackload in Mr Chirac's support.

The question, however, is for the longer term. The French left is by instinct anti-American. So, too, is much of the French right; after all, its roots are Gaullist and so nationalist. But there are nonetheless plenty of French Atlanticists to point out the risks that present French policy poses for France, the European Union, NATO and, indeed, for the UN.

One of them is Pierre Lellouche, an MP who advised Mr Chirac when he was mayor of Paris. Last month, after Mr Lellouche and several other Atlanticists met Mr de Villepin to press their case for a less confrontational stance with America, he quoted the foreign minister as acknowledging that a French veto “would be firing a bullet in the back of the Americans”, implying that France would try to avoid casting its veto by ensuring either that there was no Security Council resolution to vote on or, if there were, that it would fail to get the necessary majority of nine out of 15.

Did Mr de Villepin really say that? The foreign ministry formally denies it. So do Mr Lellouche's companions at the meeting. There are malicious whispers that Mr Lellouche, a Tunisia-born Jew who is vice-president of the parliamentary friends-of-Israel group, is too close to Israel's prime minister, Ariel Sharon. Mr Lellouche, noting his colleagues' denials, comments that as a keen game-shot he perhaps has “a major hearing problem”.

Yet, whatever its provenance, his metaphor is worryingly valid. François Goulard, a member, like Mr Lellouche, of the Union for a Popular Movement majority in parliament, says that around 25% of its parliamentarians are against a veto. One, Jerome Riviere, has now written - in English - to his American counterparts to express his sadness over the current tensions and his wish “to ensure that the friendship between our nations prevails”.

It may in the end. But meanwhile French businessmen and economists are beginning to worry about a potential backlash: lost contracts (they say that only American firms are so far being sounded out for the reconstruction of post-war Iraq); fewer American tourists and less American investment.

Yet Mr Chirac, constantly professing his liking for America and Americans (and announcing a willingness to let their aircraft use French airspace en route to Iraq) does not seem to worry. In his television interview he brushed aside the idea of American retaliation: “I know the Americans too well to imagine they would use that kind of method.” So too the idea that the EU is being weakened: “I know Europe well. I'm perhaps one of those who knows best how it works. Once this crisis is over, it won't be divided at all. Europe's history is marked by a series of crises, from which, each time, it has emerged stronger.” The French must hope, in Mr Chirac's quest for “a multipolar world in which Europe counts and exists”, that he is right.

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