In an admirable new analysis in Survival, the journal of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, Frédéric Bozo and Guillaume Parmentier discuss the implications of the presidential elections that will take place this year in France and next year in the U.S., warning against an overestimation of the rapprochement likely to follow between the two governments under new leaders.
There are limits on how far this can go. The easy assumption in both the U.S. and France is that the Franco-American hostility of 2003 and after is ended (“freedom fries” and all that), France having been proven tragically right. A new American government in 2009 is expected to be alliance-friendly and multilateralist.
Paris, March 8, 2007 – Europe ranks fairly low among Washington’s current preoccupations, and France even lower. Iraq and Iran are on top of the list, but no one in Europe wants to help George Bush punt the Iraq war into 2009, when a new administration will take power and assume the blame for how it all ends.
The NATO Europeans are reinforcing an unwise U.S. policy in Afghanistan, but Afghanistan has not yet claimed a major place in Washington’s attention, although that will soon come. France was the first to send special forces to Afghan stabilization in November 2001, and now is the first to withdraw them, as the mission moves towards Iraq-like counter-insurgency.
France has always been America’s major continental European ally, whether Washington liked it or not (and usually it did not).
Despite Germany’s economic power, France has always been the leading political power on the continent (which is not the same as being Europe’s political leader, which it is not). It is Europe’s second-ranking economic power and its first-ranking military power, Europe’s only operationally autonomous military actor.
In an admirable new analysis in Survival, the journal of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, Frédéric Bozo and Guillaume Parmentier discuss the implications of the presidential elections that will take place this year in France and next year in the U.S., warning against an overestimation of the rapprochement likely to follow between the two governments under new leaders.
There are limits on how far this can go. The easy assumption in both the U.S. and France is that the Franco-American hostility of 2003 and after is ended (“freedom fries” and all that), France having been proven tragically right. A new American government in 2009 is expected to be alliance-friendly and multilateralist.
The three leading candidates for the French presidency take for granted post-Iraq accommodation with the U.S.
The conservative Nicolas Sarkozy said in Washington last September (to a Daughters of the American Revolution gathering!) that he was ashamed of France’s “arrogant” hostility to the American invasion of Iraq. Under party pressures, he has since backed into a more Gaullist affirmation of French foreign policy independence, but certainly as president would present no risk of emulating Dominique de Villepin.
His Socialist opponent, Ségolène Royal, says that France should make its foreign policy decisions independently, but does not share the anti-American bias of some Socialist circles. The third candidate, centrist Christian Democrat François Bayrou, has American family. His wife’s aunt married an American soldier and lives in Des Moines, and the families visit one another.
However family sentiments do not make foreign policy, and the recurrent tensions between France and the United States have had objective sources. France as the leader of European unification had firm postwar support and close relations with Washington. The France that torpedoed the European Defense Community in 1954 and invaded Suez in 1956 infuriated Washington.
DeGaulle took France out of NATO when Washington refused a leadership directorate, and subsequently followed a dual policy of U.S. alliance on essential Western interests and opposition to what he considered American hegemonic initiatives. Giscard d’Estaing and Jacques Chirac both began by “normalizing” relations with the U.S. but subsequently saw divergent French and American interests. Washington in 2003 took up a policy of trying to divide the European Union, which persists today. New American and French presidents will in their turn bow to the reality that American and European interests differ.
Neither France nor Europe has a security problem that American can solve. Neither France nor much of old Europe believes that Middle Eastern or Asian military expeditions are relevant to the terrorist problem. They fear an American-Israeli attack on Iran, which either will already have happened or will remain a possibility under a new American administration. They have different assessments and objectives concerning Lebanon, Syria, and Israel-Palestine.
The French are unwilling to see NATO turned into an American strategic “toolbox.” Security solidarity seems to them better assured on purely European terms, which the U.S. resists as undermining its influence in Europe. But because of its Mideastern focus and concern about China, the United States is no longer the “European power” it once was. The overall European attitude towards U.S. leadership was 64% positive in 2002. It is now 57% negative.
The United States, even with a new Democratic president, will probably maintain its globalized political and security conceptions, its belief that it is “at war” with terrorists, radicals, failed states and international disorder, and must conduct an activist, interventionist and militarized foreign policy directed towards the utopian goal of uniting the world under democratic leadership. The French, like many other Europeans, do not find the world so threatening, nor so easily divided between good and bad, nor do they think it will become united.
They are sensitive to issues of sovereignty and allergic to American policies that take allies as subordinates, as in the matters of CIA kidnappings in Europe, “rendition” of prisoners, and secret prisons placed outside legal jurisdictions. They find this uncomfortably reminiscent of past unpleasantness in Europe, and would like most to see this end under a new American government. In this, they may be gratified. They are less likely to see change in overall American policy.
