M. le Président's imperiousness
Mark Steyn
National Post
Thursday, February 20, 2003
The Madness Of King Jacques is definitely this year's break-out European arthouse hit. President Chirac's latest outburst came at the big Euro confab on Monday, when he reprimanded those wannabe EU members in the east for their public support for America. Why, the impertinence of it!
"It is not really responsible behaviour," M. le Président declared. "It is not well brought-up behaviour. They missed a good opportunity to keep quiet ...
"Romania and Bulgaria were particularly irresponsible," he continued, "when their position is really delicate. If they wanted to diminish their chances of joining Europe they could not have found a better way."
Good thing he's not one of those arrogant bullying American cowboys, huh?
This reaction was not unexpected. Last autumn, M. Chirac cancelled a meeting with Tony Blair because of le rosbif's appalling lèse-majesté. The British Prime Minister had said something not to the President's liking on the subject of agricultural subsidies and Jacques took it personally: "You have been very rude," he huffed, "and I have never been spoken to like this before."
I don't doubt it. Three decades ago, when then Prime Minister Chirac personally negotiated France's nuclear reactor deal with then Iraqi Vice-President S. Hussein, he understood full well that Baghdad wanted weapons-grade uranium, and what they wanted it for. But Saddam was always very polite and respectful and never put his hand on the suit, and so Chirac did the deal. The President is supposed to be a Gallic charmer. It is said that, on the last visit of Boy Assad to Paris, Chirac attempted to seduce the Syrian dictator's wife. I don't blame the old legover maestro: Mrs. Assad is one hot-looking dictatorial armpiece. The trouble now is that M. Chirac wants to extend his droit de seigneur to the entire continent and, for those who don't want to lie back and take it, the charm quickly turns to menace. You missed a good opportunity to shut up, baby, if you know what's good for you.
The problem for the subjects of this advice -- Central and Eastern Europe -- is that they're not looking for a good opportunity to shut up. They were shut up by the Soviet Union for half-a-century, and memories are fresh enough that they're in no great hurry to repeat the experience. From the current Prime Minister (and former King) of Bulgaria to the Foreign Minister of Slovakia, European leaders wasted no time telling Jacques to take a hike. "In the European family there are no mummies, no daddies and no kids -- it is a family of equals," said Polish Foreign Minister Wlodzimierz Cimoszewicz.
The papers were even better. I particularly enjoyed this editorial from Romania's Expres:
"We can ask ourselves what France and Germany did in 50 years of communism for all the countries in the Eastern bloc. The answer is simple: nothing else than business! To us, who were moaning in the prisons of communism, they sent only friendly greetings ... Communism wrung our neck while the honourable democracies issued communiqués. And now they are surprised that all the countries in the former communist bloc do not give a damn about obsolete stratagems of France and Germany."
You go, girl! Incidentally, if anyone in Europe other than elderly members of the Ceausescu family remembered him, Canada's Pierre Trudeau would also be in that pantheon of non-glory. But there's more:
"Bucharest knows who values Romanian friendship and who considers Romania little more than a colony ... Now it is the time to take into consideration what the leader of the Conservative Party, Ion Lahovary, the father of Martha Bibescu, once said: 'A coalition joined by England always gets a victory.' We have had enough failures with France and Germany!"
Magnificent! Why isn't that guy writing for us? We should hire him and fire our own editorials editor, Jonathan Kay, who, judging from yesterday's column, has gone deplorably soft on the Frogs. My colleague's line is that disagreement over Iraq is not about Saddam but about the potential benefits of removing him: It's the Anglo-American plan to bring liberty, law and democracy to the Middle East vs. Continental skepticism about whether Western concepts such as democracy can be exported to the Arab world. As Mr. Kay sees it, this wariness of Anglo-American idealism has its roots in France's experience in Algeria.
Hmm. The French weren't attempting to export democracy to Algeria, they were trying to retain it as a colony. And their antipathy to Anglo-American representative democracy derives not from the Algerian mess but the four decades since, when they came to realize that, generally speaking, dictatorship in Africa, Asia, Latin America, Eastern Europe works out pretty well for the French. Many of Africa's worst thugs have been veterans of the French colonial army, from Giscard d'Estaing's pal, the late Emperor Bokassa, a cannibal whose fridge was in violation of EU food storage regulations, to Chirac's buddy, the Togolese mass-murderer Gnassingbe Eyadema. They even had a man, Jacques Foccart, Monsieur Africa, whose job for decades was smoothly integrating new dictators into French geopolitical strategy. This week's arrival in Paris of Commonwealth pariah Robert Mugabe is a reminder that there is nobody so disgusting that M. Chirac will not kiss cheeks with him.
It was Reagan and Thatcher who spoke up for freedom, not the dictatorial butt-kissers of the "détente" school. This isn't "naïve" or "idealistic": On the contrary, as we've seen in recent weeks, the export of liberty has brought Britain and America many new friends. The spread of democracy throughout Europe, Latin America, even parts of Africa poses a challenge to Chirac: He's running out of "clients."
So the President has resoundingly confirmed my thesis of a week ago that for him this is about Europe, not Saddam. Was it just a temper tantrum on Monday? Hardly. A day later, the French Defence Minister sternly reminded the Eastern countries that Paris was fully capable of blocking their accession to the EU. They mean it. Right now, a smaller Franco-German EU looks more appealing than a larger organization in which Tony Blair can muster a sizeable caucus of kindred spirits.
Meanwhile, apropos the war, M. Chrétien, bringing up the rear even in a convoy of yesterday's men, has now gone over to the Chiraquistas. Hey, all you Bush-bashers out there, try and imagine the trigger-happy Texan telling Canada to "shut up" or it's gonna get shafted.
The Anglospherist tradition (a category that no longer includes our decayed Dominion) is genuinely multilateral -- in the sense that they respect the right of sovereign nations to decide which side they're on. You persuade them, but you don't order them. M. Chirac, ever since his days at ENA, France's prestigious school for high-flying civil servants, has taken a more dirigiste view of things, at home and abroad. He has now made it plain that to be a good "European" -- or at least to qualify for EU membership, which isn't quite the same thing -- you must be anti-American. Under the French concept of a "multilateral" body, there's only one side you can be on and Paris will decide which it is. It's no coincidence that this view is rejected most vigorously by those whose memory of dictatorship is most recent.
If I were a loopy CBC-type multilateralist, if I honestly believed all good in the world came from the UN and Co., I'd be getting mighty steamed at M. Chirac. Whatever the dangers of the "rush to war," this non-rush to non-war is doing more damage every day to the international arrangements all you multilateral fetishists take for granted. Right now, American "imperialism" is less of a threat to NATO and the UN than French imperiousness. Are you really sure, like the dictator's wife, you want to get into bed with the wrinkly old swinger?
Jonathan Kay is right: For the French, Algeria casts long shadows. The trouble is for them the EU is an Algeria substitute, a Greater France, in which Romania is, as that newspaper noted, "little more than a colony." For the East's new democracies, if it's a choice between American or French patronage, that's easy. As a waggish Czech diplomat says in The Economist this week: "One thing we learned from the 1930s -- no more security guarantees from France."
The only question is whether to formalize arrangements via some sort of TAFTA, a Transatlantic Free Trade Area that would encourage commercial ties without infringing on sovereignty. Right now, with more European leaders backing Bush than Chirac, that's not a can of worms the French want to chow down on. But in this non-rush to non-war every day opens up more of the multilateralists' ancient cobwebbed assumptions. Your call, Jacques.
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