On Chirac

[Mike_Edward]

Chirac's Reluctance on Iraq Is Seen as a Bid for Relevance
By ALAN RIDING
New York Times

PARIS, Feb. 22 — What drives Jacques Chirac?

As Mr. Chirac, the French president, leads resistance to American plans to use force if necessary to disarm Iraq, many French analysts are looking beyond this crisis to the man himself, and they identify a broader agenda. They see him bent on securing his place in history by forging a prominent role for France in the post-cold-war world.

"Chirac has a vision of how he'd like the world to be," said Pierre Lellouche, a conservative Parliament member who was Mr. Chirac's foreign affairs adviser in the early 1990's. "He sees a multipolar world in which Europe is the counterweight to American political and military power. In Europe, he sees a position of leadership for France. And he sees Europe as a bridge between the developing and developed world."

For some political analysts, this might look like another exercise in nostalgia for lost French glory. But Mr. Chirac, it seems, sees France in a decisive struggle to assert its relevance in the new world defined by the end of the cold war, the emergence of the United States as the sole superpower and the changes wrought in Europe by both German unification and by the imminent expansion of the European Union.

France, many analysts believe, is now less sure of its place in the world than in the 1970's and 1980's when, with Germany, it routinely defined Europe's political direction. Today Germany no longer lives in the Soviet shadow and feels more confident politically. Many French, in contrast, view Europe's integration with growing skepticism.

"I think last year's elections convinced him that France was suffering an identity crisis," said Raphaëlle Bacqué, author of the political biography, "Chirac or the Demon of Power," published early last year. "So one traditional way of repairing the French identity is to make France exist vis-à-vis the United States, exploiting the undercurrent of anti-Americanism that has always existed here."

At age 70, four years from retirement, Mr. Chirac is in a hurry — all the more since he wrecked his first chance of bringing change. After unsuccessful runs for the presidency in 1981 and 1988 and after 18 years as mayor of Paris, he finally reached the Élysée Palace in 1995. He quickly asserted French independence by resuming nuclear testing in the Pacific.

Two years later, however, he committed a blunder: he called early legislative elections, and the Socialist opposition swept into government. For the next five years, he lacked any real power and became embroiled in corruption cases dating back to his years as Paris mayor. When he ran for re-election last year, his main rival wrote him off as "aged, wasted, tired."

Yet last spring, he not only won re-election for a five-year term, but his neo-Gaullist party also seized control of both the National Assembly and the Senate. For some in his circle, it was as if a rejuvenated Mr. Chirac was starting his presidency anew.

He appointed a little-known politician, Jean-Pierre Raffarin, to be prime minister with the job of running day-to-day government affairs. Then, confident of his clout as the West's most experienced political leader, Mr. Chirac turned to foreign affairs. He named his most trusted aide, Dominique de Villepin, once described by a government official as "the son Chirac never had," to be his foreign minister. According to political experts, Mr. de Villepin has further encouraged Mr. Chirac to give France a higher international profile.

For Mr. Chirac himself, the Iraqi crisis involves a fundamental principle: war should be the very last resort. But domestic politics also play a role. Polls indicate that over 80 percent of French are strongly opposed to both an Iraq war and any unilateral display of American military might.

Another political reality is that five million Muslims live in France. Mr. Chirac may fear "that a wave of anti-Americanism in the Muslim world will translate into a storm of anti-Westernism that will affect France," said one retired French ambassador who knows him well.
Mr. Chirac himself never misses a chance to reiterate his affection for the United States. Yet while he insists that the United States is better served by honest and frank friends than by sycophants, an all-powerful United States also stands in the way of his long-term vision for France and Europe. The American leadership's penchant for ignoring European views on such topics as global warming and an international criminal court has only underlined Europe's waning influence.

As it happens, it was Germany, not France, that first distanced itself from the United States over Iraq when Chancellor Gerhard Schröder pledged during his re-election campaign last summer not to join any invasion of Iraq. But when the Bush administration stepped up its war plans in the fall, it was France that tried to stay the American hand in the United Nations Security Council, where as a permanent member it has a right of veto. Since then, it has become the leader of antiwar opinion.

"I think Chirac would have preferred more dialogue," said Pierre Moscovici, minister of European affairs in the former Socialist government. "I'm not sure the confrontation pleases him. He's not a traditional Gaullist and he's not anti-American. But on Iraq, I believe he is convinced that war is not justified."

Mr. Chirac's stance has provoked a furious anti-French backlash in conservative circles in the United States and Britain, but it has also brought dividends, not least support from many countries that also fear the American approach. This week, 52 African countries attending a French-African summit meeting in Paris endorsed the French position.

But Mr. Chirac's effort to take a leadership role on Iraq has opened deep divisions within Europe, in part because France is suspected of having a hidden agenda to restore French-German domination of Europe.

As a result, the battle within Europe over Iraq has also become the battle over Europe's future, and there Mr. Chirac's power play appears to have backfired. Not only have Spain, Italy, Portugal and Denmark followed Britain's lead in backing the United States, but 13 former Communist countries, including the 8 scheduled to join the European Union in 2004, have also supported Washington.

On Monday, after a meeting in Brussels at which European leaders papered over their differences on Iraq, Mr. Chirac's frustration spilled over. He said the countries seeking European Union membership had "missed a good opportunity to remain silent." Those countries were shaken, but Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain quickly wrote to them expressing his admiration. That not only deepened tensions with Britain but also undermined further the idea of a common European foreign and defense policy.

Even in France, Mr. Chirac's tirade did not go uncriticized. "Who `missed a good opportunity to remain silent?' " wrote Patrick Sabatier in a signed editorial in the left-of-center daily Libération. "Answer: Jacques Chirac." Mr. Sabatier said the president had treated the "other Europe" with the same disdain as Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld had shown when he spoke of "old Europe."

Within Mr. Chirac's party, there were also expressions of concern. "Chirac's approach presumes everyone shares France's view," one conservative leader said. "But the rest of Europe doesn't want France in the driver's seat."

The more immediate question is how France will vote when the United States and Britain present a new resolution on Iraq at the Security Council. But some French politicians are also beginning to ask whether Mr. Chirac has prepared an exit strategy that will enable France to mend its ties with Washington and London as well as preserve France's political gains. Outside Élysée Palace, it is still anyone's guess how Mr. Chirac will next define French interests.

 

[Strelnikov]

Washington Post: February 21, 2003
A Nation's Mystery
By David Ignatius

VAL D'ISERE, France -- Not long after moving to Paris three years ago, I was invited to speak at the Ecole Militaire, where France has trained its officers for the past several hundred years. The tomb of Napoleon is a few blocks away at Les Invalides: The emperor's small body lies encased in a massive and intimidating red marble sarcophagus.

I told the officers that I admired much about their country, including its highly professional army. But I observed that France was in danger of becoming a magnificent museum -- "a Disneyland for adults," is how I think I put it. There was an awkward silence, and later some angry questions from the officers. Not surprisingly, I was not invited back.

My comment may have been rude, but perhaps it conveyed a truth about France that lies behind its intensely bitter row with the United States. France still has the ambitions and assertiveness of Napoleon. But it lacks the military or political power to express that national will independently and positively.

So France in recent decades has chosen to express its power negatively -- by opposing actions that it believes are not in France's interest. To sum up the current Gallic politics of negation: France may not have the power to fight a war against Iraq, but it can make it damned hard for the United States to fight one, which is almost as good.

I realize I am ignoring all the specific reasons for French President Jacques Chirac's opposition to war in Iraq. Certainly hundreds of millions of people agree with him, and he has even been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. But this Franco-American breach isn't really about specifics. It's about fundamentals.

What mystifies and offends so many Americans is the way Chirac has worked to undercut U.S. policy at such a sensitive time, especially after elaborate American efforts last fall to accommodate French views. This is not what allies do, and it's hard to imagine any quick fix for this breach.

The United States has been the principal target of French negativism, but it is hardly the only one. Many of France's European allies have felt the sting of its refusal to compromise on what it regards as its interests.

At the Nice summit in late 2000, for example, Chirac torpedoed Germany's vision of a new federal system for Europe. The reason, I think, is that he understood it would destroy French national power. More recently, Chirac has demanded (and won) special protection for France's nationalized electricity industry, just as French leaders for a generation have won special protection for their farmers.

Behind this negativism lies a conservatism that is France's great national secret. Like many Americans of my generation, I grew up on French movies and books. What was French was cool, almost by definition. So it came as a shock to discover the flinty and defensive France that lies behind the perfume ads. Chirac embodies this paradox: He is a handsome, suave man who could be played in the movies by Yves Montand, but he is from a tough, hardscrabble region known as Correze, and he's as wily and calculating a politician as you'll find this side of Louisiana.

French conservatism is most evident in the nation's overwhelming resistance to political and cultural change. I once asked a friend in Chirac's inner circle: Who was the candidate of change in French politics? Who, in other words, had the revolutionary spirit of Britain's Margaret Thatcher? "No one," my French friend answered. The simple reason, he said, was that there was no constituency for change in France. People liked things the way they were. If they wanted change, they would move to America.

France's insistence on doing its own thing is infuriating. But it is also part of why France remains a special place. Many of the same Americans who are now denouncing Chirac's perfidy would doubtless love to visit France this summer -- to eat in its peerless restaurants, visit its magnificent museums, savor a culture that refuses to be homogenized.

Decorating the wall of my vacation apartment here in the French Alps is a framed poster titled "Fromages de France," displaying 36 different varieties. And that's only about 10 percent of the national cheese reserve. A country that has managed to hold on to so many smelly but delicious kinds of cheese is a natural troublemaker.

I wish I could separate the France I love from the France that drives me crazy, but I can't. The country's best and worst features are bound up in its Frenchness -- in a national obstinacy that is at once its deliverance and its ruin.


Strelnikov

 

[Strelnikov]

Washington Post: February 21, 2003
The French Challenge
By Charles Krauthammer

"It is not well brought-up behavior. . . . They missed a good opportunity to shut up." -- French President Jacques Chirac, berating Eastern European countries for supporting the U.S. position on Iraq, Feb. 17.

Chirac's outburst made headlines. It was clumsy, impolitic and revealing. But the bullying of New Europe by Old Europe is not new.

Last August, for example, Romania signed an agreement with the United States promising not to extradite Americans to the International Criminal Court. Romania is applying to join the European Union, and the European Union, for which the ICC is a pet project, was not amused. It registered its displeasure with Romania and then warned "other candidate countries which have also been approached by the United States" not to "make any more moves to agree to sign such an accord."

A few months earlier, the prime minister of the Czech Republic was attacked for making highly ungenerous statements about Yasser Arafat. "Such language is not what we expect from a future member state," declared the European Union, an unsubtle threat to the Czech application for EU membership.

The division between the New Europe (newly liberated Eastern Europe) and the Old Europe (centered on France and Germany) has long been visible. As the center of gravity of American influence in Europe has shifted east to the Iron Curtain countries, it is no accident, comrade, that the only state dinner President Bush has hosted (apart from the traditional one for the president of Mexico) was for the president of Poland.

Europe did not take to the streets against America last weekend; only Western Europe did. The streets of Eastern Europe were silent. The Poles, and their Eastern European neighbors, have an immediate personal experience of life under tyranny -- and of being liberated from that tyranny by American power. The French and their neighbors are six decades removed from their liberation. They think freedom is as natural as the air they breathe, rather than purchased at the price of blood -- American blood in no small measure.

This division in experience sets the stage for the division in politics. And for France's fury at finding an American fifth column in the New Europe. When 13 Eastern European states came out in support of the United States on Iraq, Chirac lost all reserve. His scolding of the Eastern Europeans has inadvertently demonstrated how much France's current dispute with the United States is not really about Iraq.

Sure, France has contracts and loans that will be jeopardized if Saddam Hussein is deposed. And French leaders may have dirty hands from dirty dealings that will show up when Hussein's archives are opened after a war.

Yet the lengths to which France has gone to oppose the United States show that the stakes are much higher. France has gone far beyond mere objection, far beyond mere obstruction. It is engaged in sabotage so active that it has taken to verbally attacking weaker states that dare take the American side.

Why? Sensing a world deeply uneasy about the American policy on Iraq, France seized what it saw as a unique opportunity to change the dynamics of the post-Cold War world. During the Cold War, Charles de Gaulle and his successors had tried breaking free of the United States by "triangulating" with the Soviets. De Gaulle withdrew France from NATO's military structure. France kept offering itself as a "third force." That posturing went nowhere, because France, like everyone else, depended ultimately on American power for defense against the Soviet threat.

With the end of the Soviet threat, everything changed. A unipolar system emerged with the United States dominant and unchallenged. The Iraq crisis has provided France an opportunity to create the first coherent challenge to that dominance -- and to give France a unique position as leader of that challenge. Last Friday at the Security Council was the high water mark. France stood at the head of an impressive opposition bloc -- Germany, Russia, China, perhaps seven other members of the council and dozens of other smaller countries -- challenging American policy and, implicitly, American hegemony.

The world has not become bipolar. But we have just witnessed the first serious breach of the post-Cold War unipolarity -- engineered not, as many expected, by Russia or China, but by France. France is reaching to become not only the leading power in Europe (hence the pique with those pesky Eastern Europeans) but also the leader of a new pole of world power opposite the American "hyperpower."

Not a bad vocation for a country whose closest brush with glory and empire today consists of patrolling the swamps of Ivory Coast.


Strelnikov

 

[Limeoutsider]

I think that a country that needs to be bailed out as much as France has, should have no.....how to phrse this?.....political weight.