The French Way (40 page)

The Gulf War, Bosnia, the European pillar, the Uruguay Round, Africa, the Middle East, Cuba, Iran, Operation Desert Fox, Kosovo—it was a long list of confrontations with the “indispensable nation.” Few, if any, of these skirmishes, which focused on international security, geopolitics, humanitarian crises, and trade, went well for France. In the unipolar world American power prevailed. And if one looked beyond these kinds of encounters to rivalries over technology and popular culture, America loomed equally large. The French foreign minister, Hubert Vedrine, added up this list and coined the term
hyperpower
for the United States. In 1997 he declared, in a celebrated speech, that “in this liberal and globalized world, there is today only one great power: the United States of America. It's particularly obvious in the domain of strategy. It's equally true in economic affairs….The United States benefits from assets denied every other power including Europe: political weight; the supremacy of the dollar; the control of communications networks; the dream factories; new technologies, the Pentagon, Boeing, Coca-Cola, Microsoft, Hollywood, CNN, the Internet, English. This situation is almost without precedent.”
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The term
hyperpower
rapidly entered the lexicon of international relations and just as quickly antagonized the U.S. government. President Chirac, later noting how the term incensed Americans, sent them “into overdrive,” told an American journalist he would not use it, but explained it was not pejorative: French children used the prefix
hyper-
as they did
super-
.
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After the Kosovo and Desert Fox skirmishes the Clinton administration became concerned about how the world, especially Europeans, viewed its power and unilateralism: the State Department referred to it as the “hegemony problem.”
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Officials in Washington read reports showing that two-thirds of the globe's populace saw the United States as the single greatest external threat and Sandy Berger, the national security adviser, worried about America being perceived as “the biggest rogue state in the world.” The president warned his staff against triumphalism and addressed the issue in Aachen, Germany, on the occasion of receiving the Charlemagne Prize, which honored him for his leadership in promoting European integration. “There is a perception in Europe that America's power—military, economic, cultural—is at times too overbearing,” Clinton stated. But in their heart of hearts U.S. officials took pride in their hyperpower, or as Berger, speaking of Kosovo, confided, “I never have bought the ‘indispensable nation' thing; it has always bothered me because it sounds a little too triumphalist, but when it comes to something like this, America has to lead.”

The French response to the full-blown emergence of America as the hyperpower was articulated at the end of the 1990s primarily by the Gaullist president Jacques Chirac and by the socialist prime minister and foreign minister Lionel Jospin and Hubert Vedrine. These officials, and other sympathetic foreign policy experts, spelled out their grievances, focusing on the general deportment of the United States toward France, the construction of a European defense, and the authority of international organizations.

“Imperious” was the common charge against the indispensable one. In a long interview intended for an American audience Vedrine
acknowledged cooperation with the Clinton administration; dialogue, he noted, “has never been more intense or consistent” and “in Kosovo we worked together in the spirit of true partnership.” But then the foreign minister retracted much of what he had just said. “America as a whole can see itself only as the leader,” he complained, and “when the United States works with others, it always has a hard time resisting the temptation to tell them what to do.”
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Jacques Andreani, the former ambassador to Washington, was even more candid. America's success in the post-Cold War era, Andreani wrote, led it toward condescension and unilateralism. It tended to ignore its European allies when disagreements arose and acted without consultation, as if its views had universal validity. The French, he added, resented the way the Americans classified others as good or evil, and championed principles like “open markets” that were in fact self-serving. Andreani scolded Bush and Clinton for confusing their “benevolent hegemony” with the general interest.
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Bypassing international organizations was a second major grievance. After Operation Desert Fox, Jospin assailed American and British air strikes for moving relations between Baghdad and the United Nations backward—away from negotiation and toward confrontation. “The United States often acts in a unilateral way and has trouble achieving its ambition of mobilizing the international community,” he observed.
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In general, French officials considered the Clinton administration's willingness to intervene militarily in Kosovo without explicit UN authorization a dangerous precedent. The Republicans on Capitol Hill were singled out for their isolationist tendencies—for example, the Senate's rejection of the Test Ban Treaty—and blatant disdain for the United Nations. Washington, in the eyes of French foreign policy makers, had retreated from its early postwar multilateralism and its former respect for international agencies like the WTO. Presidents Bush and Clinton, unlike their predecessors in the era of President Harry S. Truman, had not lived up to their promises of multilateral diplomacy and respect for the consent of the international community.
The reality of the “new world order,” according to Andreani, has been “NATO [acting] in the role of gendarme armed permanently with a blank check.”
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Washington's apparent hypocrisy about European defense was another major irritant. Years of struggling with Americans over constructing the European pillar left Paris deeply suspicious of Washington's professed interest in sharing responsibility. The Americans, according to Vedrine, “have always been for sharing the burden. They've never been much for sharing the decision making.”
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Or, as Chirac exclaimed in an interview in the
New York Times
, Washington's criticism of the European Rapid Reaction Force almost caused him to fall off his chair: “The Americans kept saying Europe had to do more for its own defense, so we finally said, all right, we will. Now you shouldn't criticize us for doing what you wanted us to do.”
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These appraisals led the French foreign policy establishment to revise the way they addressed the hyperpower in the last few years of the twentieth century. They dubbed this approach the new realism.
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Realism began with the premise that France was still a global power. France may be overshadowed, but, according to Vedrine, it still numbered among the elite nations. Of the nearly two hundred nations of the world, he reasoned, France was one of the five or six with global influence. He referred to assets like France's seat on the UN Security Council; its military forces, alliances, and diplomatic stature; its place in the G7; and its business and economic resources. “And we also possess our soft power,” he noted; “our language, our intellectuals, our culture, our writers, our nonstate actors, our artists, our music, our cuisine, the beauty of our country, our image.”
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Yet the disparity in power with the United States convinced Vedrine that his compariots needed to be realistic. If France had “good cards” to play in international affairs, it needed to stop “acting like the Great Nation” whose voice everyone was supposed to heed.
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It was “unhealthy” to insist upon the universality of French civilization and believe France occupied “a position close to the center of the world.” He scolded the French for their
arrogance, which deceived themselves and provoked others. “We are a country that has trouble facing up to the reality of the world,” he admitted.
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In dealing with the Americans Vedrine rebuked the French for “routine and vain aggressiveness that led to nothing” and only compromised efforts to convince “other essential partners” from working with France.
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“Let us try to have relations with the United States that are normal, calm, dispassionate and useful,” he suggested.
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The proper way for France to deal with the hyperpower was to “perform a delicate but indispensable balancing act.” France should say yes when it was in its interest to do so and to say no when it was not, he explained; “That's what it means to be friends that are allied but not aligned.”
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The new realism in transatlantic relations formed one element of a grander vision that looked beyond the unipolar world. The antidote to the hyperpower was multipolarity and multilateralism—a formula that some American officials saw as merely a device to check the United States. A multipolar world, according to Chirac, described a global equilibrium based on several centers of power such as India, China, Japan, and Russia, as well as the EU and the United States; the latter two occupied a certain privileged status. In 1998 the French president observed, “It's in everyone's interest that we are heading toward a multipolar world. The United States, to be sure, is at the top. Europe, in spite of its problems, is growing stronger.” And so were others. “All this is leading us toward a world composed of several poles of political, economic, and cultural power.”
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The unipolar world, according to the French president, was giving way inevitably to a multipolar system and the only question was whether or not this transition could be accomplished peacefully. And in a multipolar order not even the hyperpower could act alone; it needed Europe. Security in the unipolar world was precarious, Chirac warned, especially when the American Congress “too often gives in to the temptations of unilateralism and isolationism.”
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In other words, Gulliver could be either too rambunctious or too reticent for the French to feel safe.

President Chirac was explicit about Europe's future: “My ambition is for the [European] Union gradually to assert itself as an active and powerful pole, as an equal with the United States, in the world of the twenty-first century, which…will be multipolar.”
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The European Union should equip itself “with all the instruments of a real power,” alluding to the creation of the Euro and “a Europe with a credible defense, capable of acting either within the Atlantic alliance or autonomously according to the nature of the crises.”
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Multilateralism
was the twin of
multipolarity.
It was a term Americans once used to describe a virtuous approach to world trade, but in the Gallic vocabulary of the 1990s it referred to locating decision making and legitimacy in a multilateral institutional setting like the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization, or the European Union. These institutions represented progress in international relations as nations moved from national sovereignty and confrontation toward shared sovereignty and international cooperation. Strengthening multilateral bodies would offset American dominance. The French president hammered away at the pretentions of the United States and NATO: “France cannot, and will not, accept an organization of regional defense arrogating to itself the role of world policeman, [a] role entrusted by the charter of the UN to the Security Council and to it alone.”
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Tying down Gulliver with international institutions and rules was the aim.
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Looking back, one might ask: How, and how well, did fin-de-siecle France cope with the U.S. hyperpower? What would a report card on French transatlantic diplomacy show ?

Negotiating alone with the U.S. government usually turned out badly. Mitterrand's project at “rebalancing the alliance” by building a European defense capacity outside NATO, which had only tepid support from the Germans, was checked by the Americans and other Europeans who preferred the status quo. Similarly, Chirac, acting in virtual isolation on the question of NATO enlargement, had to surrender
his agenda and concede to Clinton. And without backing from its EU partners in the GATT negotiations, France could not restrain the Americans. To be sure, the U.S. government's modus operandi for treating the cantankerous Gauls was to isolate them, but the tactic did not necessarily persuade the French to surrender. As Jacques Andreani noted, “The certainty of being on the right path and in the right leads Americans to treat our critiques with disdain and our country's advantages with condescension. Their major argument is that France is often alone in its critiques and its objections. It is the only argument that, by its very nature, does not impress the French. For them, it is possible to be right all alone, which does not mean that one is right because one is alone.”
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Negotiating with European support or through international organizations as an alternative, however, did not achieve much better results. Even though Chirac enjoyed considerable backing from other Europeans for his project of constructing a European pillar within NATO, he failed to convince the Clinton administration. The United States simply refused to share command with the Europeans. And in the case of the reappointment of Boutros Boutros-Ghali as secretary-general of the UN, France lined up the entire Security Council against the United States, but the latter ignored the august body and named its own candidate. Or when France and the United Kingdom tried to use the UN to control NATO, as they did during the final stages of the conflict in Bosnia, they only frustrated the United States without deterring it. France had more success utilizing international bodies and rules on trade issues, especially when it enjoyed EU support and invoked the WTO, as it did in blocking the United States on sanctions against Cuba, Iran, and Libya.