Paris
FRANCE’S FOREIGN MINISTER Dominique de Villepin made a visit last week to London’s International Institute for Strategic Studies–he saw no members of the Blair cabinet–and refused to answer the question: “Who do you want to win the war?” (The French government later issued a clarification, saying that de Villepin was already on record as wishing victory for the U.S.-led coalition.) Meanwhile, the latest edition of Le Canard Encha né, France’s weekly paper of humor and political gossip, claims French president Jacques Chirac told a meeting of his counselors on Monday, March 24: “If the Americans announce that they have discovered such arms [i.e. weapons of mass destruction], they should offer evidence that the arms are really of Iraqi origin.” Such incidents show how tough Chirac is willing to be–and how big a price he is willing to pay–to press France’s case against the U.S. war in Iraq. What’s in it for him? What’s in it for his country?
When it comes to politics, notes Jean-Michel Helvig, the editorial page editor of the daily Libération, “you can never totally rule out sincerity.” Chirac’s views are much like those of 87 percent of his countrymen–of every political persuasion. Most Frenchmen believe the war against terrorism has been going perfectly fine until now, Helvig says. The proof is that, since September 11, al Qaeda has failed to strike against the heart of the West, hitting only its periphery–in Bali, Jordan, and Tunisia, for instance. A longtime right-wing adviser to Chirac agrees. “The president is a creature of instinct,” he says. “A great deal in the American account of the Iraq situation sounded false to him.” Even Claude Angéli of Le Canard Encha né, who co-authored a book about France’s (and Chirac’s) relations with Saddam, is unconvinced of the need to invade. “No one [in France] understands this war,” he says. “If people are marching in the streets defending Saddam Hussein en connaissance de cause, you can tell the American case is weak.”
But one can never rule out politics, either. Chirac’s stance against the United States has offered him powerful insulation against domestic problems that were gathering when the Bush administration brought the issue of Saddam Hussein to a head. In February, France’s unemployment rate rose by 0.8 percent–the third consecutive monthly leap. It now stands at 9.2 percent. Chirac had come to power last year promising (in a page stolen from the 2000 campaign of George W. Bush) a 30-percent tax reduction over the next five years. After splashily doling out 5 percent of it last year, his government now finds itself out of money. Chirac and his prime minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin are required under the European Union’s “stability pact” to keep their budget deficit under 3 percent, and this year they’re not even going to come close. So they plan to ask the European Commission to exempt France from the stability pact for this year, citing “exceptional circumstances”–namely, the war in Iraq. (No such exemptions were sought by the countries actually involved in the war.)
In Germany, Gerhard Schröder’s political headaches show that there are limits to how well a European politician can insulate himself from bread-and-butter matters by striking a popular antiwar stance. For now, Chirac has the support of the whole of his parliament, with the exception of two fellow conservatives, Alain Madelin and Pierre Lellouche, who are vocally pro-war. But a considerably larger group of politicians worries that the government’s attitude toward the United States has been too hard-edged, and this group includes the most popular member of Chirac’s cabinet, interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy. (This is one of the reasons that Sarkozy’s name does not figure in the swirl of rumors in Paris about a possible replacement for the feckless Raffarin come early summer.)
In fact, it is worth questioning how deep the widespread French antiwar sentiment is in the first place. The much-publicized anti-American rallies in recent weeks have been noteworthy for their noise, but they draw from an extremely narrow range of society. The one I attended in Rouen on March 22 mustered about 1,500 people, roughly evenly divided between three groups. There were young Arabs and beurs (carrying placards in Arabic). There were aging Stalinists (carrying placards reading Défense militaire inconditionelle de la Corée du Nord! and Pour une révolution politique prolétaire!). And there were representatives of France’s anti-globalization movement (whose placards included an amiably offbeat one reading–in English–Masturbation is not a crime!). These groups, particularly the last, may represent a force in French democracy, but (a) they are not evidence of any kind of middle-class groundswell in la France profonde, and (b) they express loyalties that can easily be wrested from a basically conservative politician like Chirac.
When intimates of Chirac discuss his thinking on Iraq, they like to stress American blunders that began poisoning the relationship after September 11. Some of these blunders were strategic, according to the French account. For the Chirac entourage, Vice President Dick Cheney has a special place in the pantheon of blame. But whereas in Germany and elsewhere in Europe, Cheney is the public symbol of America’s doctrine of “preventive war,” in France he stands for what former foreign minister Hubert Védrine derided as American simplisme on Middle Eastern matters–specifically, the belief that once Saddam is removed from power, a domino effect of positive consequences will render the Arab world’s other problems easier to resolve.
Whether or not this is true of Cheney, French politicians, almost to a man, exhibit a parallel simplisme under which, once the Israeli-Palestinian standoff is resolved to the Palestinians’ liking, the differences between Islam and the West will similarly shrivel. (As Chirac told Egypt’s Al-Hayat newspaper during his November 2001 circuit through the Middle East, “The tragic persistence of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict underlies resentment and frustration in the Muslim world. . . . Extremism feeds off it, and uses it as a pretext.”)
At times, however, Chirac’s circle views America’s fault as diplomatic rather than strategic. His advisers insist that they did not believe the United States was bent on war last September when Chirac, along with Tony Blair, pressured the United States into proceeding through a U.N. resolution. At that time, Chirac wasn’t bent on avoiding war either. He believed that the U.S. military buildup in Kuwait and the (ultimately failed) diplomatic preparations for an invasion force in Turkey were necessary. And on January 7, Chirac even delivered an address to the French armed forces in which he warned them to be “ready for any eventuality.”
In this reading, the turning point came on Monday, January 13, when Chirac’s top foreign policy adviser, Maurice Gourdault-Montagne, met in Washington with national security adviser Condoleezza Rice and deputy secretary of state Richard Armitage, and, according to a source close to Chirac, “came back with the conviction that the U.S. would go to war no matter what.” A week later came the moment Americans view as the turning point: De Villepin, after begging Powell to break his Martin Luther King Day obligations to attend U.N. meetings, after having dinner with him the night before, announced France’s de facto defection from the use-of-force coalition in a press briefing after the session. And there France’s position has remained. “We are not sure we’re right,” says one Chirac aide. “But the problem is, America claims to see a direct threat from Iraq, and hasn’t explained it to us.”
One must not be too credulous about the French narration of diplomatic blunders. Last week, Le Monde questioned the insistence of France and other European countries that the United States squandered a lot of credibility by not using NATO to carry out operations in Afghanistan. In fact, according to Le Monde, France insisted during talks in Washington in the earliest days after September 11, 2001, that it was not ready to wage war against any poor country under the U.S. aegis, and that it was not ready to join in any more general campaign against “state sponsors of terrorism.” Complaints about the non-involvement of NATO emerged only later.
FRANCE’S DEFECTION from the American war effort has not been a pure public-relations windfall, even in Europe. At a press conference before his departure for the United States, British prime minister Tony Blair warned that the alternative to the present international system “is this concept of rival poles of power in the world, and that is a profoundly dangerous concept.” More bruisingly, the philosopher André Glucksmann, one of France’s rare pro-war intellectuals, bemoans that France’s position has thrown it into alliance with Russia, which Glucksmann calls, with reference to Chechnya, “the only country in the world today that is fighting a genocidal war.”
Those close to Chirac acknowledge that the president has made a few mistakes. Chief among these was accusing the pro-American governments of Eastern Europe of being “badly brought up.” (“He wanted to be undiplomatic,” says one adviser. “But he wound up going beyond undiplomatic.”) And many politicians on Chirac’s side worry that he has become “intoxicated” with his stance. It would be hard not to be, when events have given Chirac such a high profile outside of France that Germany’s leading newsmagazine, Der Spiegel, now describes him as “The Kaiser of Europe.”
No one in France denies that the institutions out of which postwar Europe was built have been put at risk by the Franco-American contretemps. Says one former Chirac aide, “Our foreign policy is now based on the only trump that is left to us: the seat at the Security Council”–not promising in a weakened U.N. Most deeply damaged is NATO, into which Chirac himself brought France in 1996. The European Union, too, has been split into two factions, and Chirac is said to estimate the chances Europe can emerge intact from the wreckage at 1 in 2. But there is another way of looking at the damage. In the U.N., France appears to be taking up a role as leader of “les peuples” who oppose the Iraq war. In Europe, France hopes to engage a new “hard core”–Germany, Belgium, and Luxembourg–in an “E.U. defense initiative” that would bring the continent a step closer to military independence from the United States. And that may be the big thing France gains from its Iraq position. It is a measure of how far the rupture has gone that certain Frenchmen–certain powerful ones–may now view the overturning of the postwar order as less a risk than an opportunity.
Christopher Caldwell is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard.
