French foreign policy. After Iraq

How France could improve its foreign policy

IT IS easy from afar to caricature France's foreign policy. The country's pretensions to exert significant global influence are overblown. Its forays into the Middle East, Asia and Africa often seem designed to promote not a worthy alternative view of the world but its own commercial interests, especially defence sales, spiced with a nostalgia for la Francophonie. And too much Gaullist bluster, most recently on Iraq, appears to be motivated by the desire to upset and undermine the United States, still France's most important ally.

Caricatures usually have some basis in truth - and these ones are no exception. Yet the real story of French foreign policy is more complicated than this implies. France, like Britain, has legitimate historical and cultural reasons to assert itself in the world. Both have every right to press home their commercial advantages, as indeed has America. And it is understandable, even right, that a mid-sized European power should occasionally perceive its interests in the world as being different from America's. Indeed, one of the arguments for constructing a common foreign and security policy in the European Union is precisely that the European view of world affairs is likely, sometimes, to diverge from the American one.

Yet, even conceding that point, it remains unhelpful that France so often resorts to a knee-jerk anti-American stance in its foreign policy. Its dispute with America over how to deal with Iraq may have been genuine; and it is understandable that the French, having opposed the start of the war, do not see it as their job to help finish it. Yet France gains nothing from further fighting and greater instability in that country. Even if the French government sticks to its insistence on never, in any circumstances, sending troops there, it could be more supportive - for instance, by offering to relieve American and British forces elsewhere in the world. It would help France to climb down from its own strident position on Iraq if the Americans toned down their own strident anti-French rhetoric. But the effort should be two-sided: the French should drop their anti-American rhetoric too.

The other way in which France could improve its foreign policy is to subsume it more often within a wider Europe's. The French, like the British, have tended to see Europe's common foreign policy only as a vehicle which can put more oomph behind policies that reflect their national interests. To put it in Gaullist terms, Europe works solely when it is France writ large. But in an EU of 25, soon to be 27 or more, this is unlikely to be a fruitful approach. The French have, for example, damaged their effectiveness by dealing condescendingly with the new EU countries from central Europe. They have woken up late to the fact that they and the Germans can no longer run the show. Instead France, again like Britain, should be doing more to build alliances around an expanded Europe.

More weight, less counterweight

This is not to suggest that a wider Europe, any more than France alone, should deliberately pursue a foreign policy at odds with America's. The EU may have a different emphasis when it comes to handling neighbours, such as the Balkans or Russia, or regions with which its members have special links, such as Africa, but its strategic concerns will be similar. Indeed, a stronger Europe, better able to deal with conflicts and problems in such countries, ought to be in America's interests. But to be a counterweight would be counterproductive.

Editorial discusses how France could improve its foreign policy.

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