Jacques Chirac: Can Gaullism work today?

Date: 29/03/03

Historical parallels may be giving comfort - for the time being - to France's president in his continuing row with the Americans

“IN FRANCE'S view, if it is unthinkable that America's war apparatus will be annihilated on the spot, there is, on the other hand, no chance that the peoples of Asia will submit to the law of the foreigner who comes from the far shores of the Pacific, whatever his intentions, however powerful his weapons. In short, as long and cruel as the ordeal must be, France is certain there will be no military solution.”

So said France's President Charles de Gaulle in Cambodia in 1966, in a speech attacking America's policy in Vietnam. The American ambassador in Paris, Charles Bohlen, immediately sent a telegram to his bosses in Washington: “It is extraordinary to me that an alleged ally of the US would present...so erroneous a picture of cause and effect. De Gaulle appears to heap all the blame for the situation, its origin and development in Indochina, on the US explicitly...I realise how unwise it is to answer de Gaulle publicly but I wonder in this case if some corrective measure should not be applied. Otherwise the de Gaulle version of events will have a high degree of acceptance, not only here in France but in other countries of the world.”

So is history repeating itself in the bitter Franco-American divisions over the Iraq crisis? Not entirely. For one thing, President Jacques Chirac, whose political lineage is avowedly Gaullist, does not equate Iraq's Saddam Hussein with Vietnam's nationalist-minded Ho Chi Minh. For another, he shares the American goal of finding and removing any Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (if not necessarily the goal of removing Mr Hussein). And, whereas America's Vietnam war lasted for years, no French analyst seriously believes that Mr Hussein can hold out for more than a few weeks at the most.

Yet there are enough similarities to disturb those who have hitherto taken transatlantic friendship for granted. The diplomatic exchanges between France and America are now, as they were then, icily polite at best. Multilateral institutions are at risk. Mr Chirac's decision last month, along with Germany and Belgium, to block NATO help to Turkey recalls de Gaulle's famous withdrawal of France from NATO's military structure in 1966. Most people around the world do, indeed, agree with France's current “version of events”. And American popular sentiment is angry. Just as American restaurateurs now pour good French wine down the drain, so too in de Gaulle's day.

The question is how long such tensions will last this time - and what will be their repercussions. For all their headlines implicitly denouncing “America's war” (Britain and Tony Blair tend to be dismissed as America's poodles), France's journalists are well aware that the world has changed since de Gaulle's time and that modern-day Gaullism has its limits.

The pro-Chirac L'Express magazine, for example, commented recently that though one could certainly criticise the way America and Britain had chosen to go to war, and though George Bush's “messianic imperialism” was “disturbing”, it was also true that “the anti-Americanism gaining ground in Europe and encouraging - across the world - our diplomacy of pacifism will have serious consequences: we have assumed the responsibility of breaking the unity of the democratic world and of relying on allies who share little of our values. In short, we have deliberately chosen to split our natural base and to cosy up to countries that do not belong to it. Why?”

Good question. The official reply is that France has done nothing of the sort. Both Mr Chirac and his foreign minister, Dominique de Villepin, stress that France and America share the same values and, in terms of disarming Iraq, the same goal. The difference of approach is one of analysis and of tactics: Iraq, they say, is not an imminent danger; the UN arms inspectors should have been allowed enough time to do their work; and the risk of a precipitate war is that it will breed more of the terrorism that America tries - unconvincingly - to link to Mr Hussein.

Some qualms, then?

Moreover, France, they insist, never ruled out an eventual use of force, and for critics to say otherwise is a “false indictment”. As for the accusation that French obduracy has rendered the UN Security Council irrelevant, the retort is that the fault lies with the Americans, who always wanted “regime change” and therefore war, and with the British, who went along with the Americans and now use France as a scapegoat for their failure to find majority support within the Security Council.

But what if the official reply falls on deaf American ears? Though Mr de Villepin and his opposite number, Colin Powell, talk regularly enough, albeit in less warm tones than before, Presidents Bush and Chirac have not telephoned each other since February 7th. Moreover, a growing minority of voices on the Gaullist right are worried that their president's current attachment to a professed pro-UN, anti-war principle has put France in a position where it is failing to influence events in the Middle East while at the same time damaging the idea of a European foreign and defence policy - and of course NATO.

All this may augur ill for French business and its potential role in the reconstruction of Iraq. Hence some behind-the-scenes head-scratching by France's economics ministry and its big businessmen on how to ensure access to an Iraqi market for which France has been the biggest supplier under the UN's programme of limited sanctions.

Will these Franco-American tensions augur ill for Mr Chirac, too? In as much as his popularity ratings are linked to the economy, perhaps they will. But since France's prime minister is there to take the blame, its president will probably emerge unscathed, at least at home. Moreover, since President Bush must face the voters first, in the 2004 election, it is Mr Chirac, secure until 2007, who can afford to relax. Meanwhile, with his eye on the history books, Mr Chirac can cast his mind back to the 1966 crisis. Who is better remembered worldwide: President Lyndon Johnson or Charles de Gaulle?

Historical parallels may be giving comfort - for the time being - to France's President in his continuing row with the United States.

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