France and Germany are left to wonder: Did they carry things too far?
John Vinocur International Herald Tribune Wednesday, March 19, 2003
PARIS In the end, beyond the maneuvering, the rhetoric, the professed convictions, there are questions now in Paris and Berlin about whether their opposition to an American-led war on Iraq has gotten a bit out of hand.
.
In Berlin, a reporter talking to a German official heard that the Schroeder government initially believed Iraq was a one-issue crisis, narrowly confinable to disagreement on the military undertaking and the painful although surmountable problem (in the middle term) of Germany's nonparticipation.
.
But reacting in fear of isolation, the official suggested, Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder and Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer's willingness to subordinate Germany to a French view of confrontation with the United States on many wider fronts has brought the government to a position it now finds an awkward fit with Germany's long-term interests, outside the two men's realm of when they ran for re-election on a pacifist platform last September.
.
In very less specific terms, this notion of things having gone too far appeared to suffuse remarks on Monday by Fischer that American policy was absolutely nonimperial in nature, that the United States was the irreplacable element of global and regional security, that there was no alternative to good trans-Atlantic relationships and that he well understood how the new East European membership of the European Union could have a "very different view" of their security than this or that EU founding member.
.
Even in normal, less electric times, this was a vision France could not sustain. If part of it also suggested that Germany's existential need for smooth relations with Eastern Europe was whipsawed by President Jacques Chirac's warning to the EU's new members that he required them to choose current French and German global policy over that of the Americans, then it also complemented concerns in Paris that Chirac's Brezhnev-style blunder - explained away here as hearty Chiraquian straight-talk - was one among many.
.
These concerns have made for the first real breach in the French media's amen chorus that has punctuated their president's breakaway run since January from the last half-century's Western notions of international order.
.
For the first time, French publications, reporting on the disarray of political analysts, are now asking: Who are we against, Saddam or Bush? Or: Where was the sense in Chirac's promising a veto of a new UN resolution when such a gesture was not an absolute necessity? And even: How did France manage to reject British revisions to its draft resolution last week hours before Iraq did?
.
"Have They Gone Overboard?" this week's cover-story in Le Point, a center-right newsmagazine, wondered over a picture of Chirac and Foreign Minister Dominic de Villepin. Its lead editorial's response was mostly yes, noting viperishly that France was rather good at accommodating itself to any detestable status quo. But that hardly signaled some kind of special unease, no more than the middle-ground financial daily La Tribune did in saying Tuesday that France would pay dearly for its gratuitous threat of a veto.
.
Instead, the notion that a botch may well be at hand for France came in a well-researched article in the current issue of the left-populist magazine Marianne, normally a font of anti-American tweaks and bellows, which analyzed recent French diplomacy under the title, "Visionary Policy or Operetta-Style Gaullism?"
.
It said France always sought if possible to propel its own policies with a European motor but found that its disagreement these days with many of the EU's members and candidates about the French desire for a Europe defined by its opposition to America eliminated any hope of a common policy.
.
Quoting Aymeric Chauprade, who teaches geopolitics at the French War College, the article told of his criticism of France's resistance to American "domination" as piecemeal, without any overall plan, and judging its flirt with Russia and China at the United Nations as old stuff and without basic effect on Moscow and Beijing, whose ties with America are priorities for them.
.
"As for Germany," Chauprade said, "if it changed its line (from its present stance), it could return to its role within American strategy. Not France."
.
Philippe Raynaud, a political scientist, was asked by the magazine if France over the long haul could sustain the position that had brought Chirac so much international media attention and public relations success over the last months. "We don't have the moral incentive, or the necessary elites," he replied. "At the top level, our diplomacy asserts a will for independence. On a daily basis, everybody accepts French decline."
.
There were other, more palpable aspects of French policy that caused discomfort among the French. Therese Delpech, a Frenchwoman who is director of strategic affairs at the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission and a commissioner in charge of Iraqi affairs for the UN's control, verification and inspection commission, pointed to a French dilemma if American or British troops were felled by Iraqi chemical or biological arms.
.
"In a case like that, it will be very difficult (for France) not to participate," she said. "You've got to look (the situation) straight in the eye. If chemical weapons are used against American or British troops, that's really going to be very difficult."
.
De Villepin referred to the issue Monday, telling a radio interviewer that in those circumstances, France would be alongside what he called "its precious friends." When an American official in Washington was asked if knew of such a contingency, he said no and called the French gesture "meaningless."
.
Germany could have a problem within a vaguely similar context. The present government has consistently repeated its commitment to the existence of the state of Israel. But its reaction in the event of an Iraqi attack on Israel with weapons of mass destruction is unknown. Saddam Hussein's missiles armed with conventional warheads hit Israel during the first Gulf War.
.
Alongside the question of whether France and Germany, each in its specific way, have moved into problematic or unsustainable positions through the Iraq confrontation is the considerable distance between the two government's political realities.
.
Fischer could obviously not have been speaking for France when he told the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on Monday "that when I look at the 21st century world, I see no basic change in the interests of North America and Europe." He insisted there was no breakdown in trans-Atlantic relations and that he wished a strategic debate had taken place after the Sept. 11 attacks that might have led to a new clarity that he is sure will come eventually.
.
But the daily politics of both countries are perhaps more determinant. Each faces great economic difficulties, but Chirac is screened from public anger by the protective institutional layer of a prime minister, Jean-Pierre Raffarin, whose approval ratings are in rapid decline.
.
Schroeder, described this week by Der Spiegel magazine as "the uncourageous chancellor" because of what it said was the meekness of his new economic reforms, benefits from none of the unanimity of support that buoys Chirac. If he were to run now for chancellor, Schroeder's Social Democratic Party would have about 25 percent backing, polls say, compared to about 50 percent for the Christian Democratic opposition. The CDU leadership states it would have signed the letter of eight EU countries rejecting the French-German position on Iraq and would have backed Britain's second UN resolution that France promised to veto.
.
In this environment, the United States does not regard Germany lost as an ally, but as a country that might actively seek rapprochement at some point after the conclusion of an intervention in Iraq.
.
In the case of France, however, Chirac, with more than four years to go on his presidential term, has taken a posture in relation to both the domestic political landscape and the international scene that provides little obvious mobility short of self-ridicule.
.
In the sense of the French having brazenly overreached, while the Germans were stuck holding on to Chirac's shirttail, that has some of Germany's foreign policy professionals regarding the circumstances with irony and tinges of regret. Whatever Fischer says, theirs is a Germany that could come out of the war with deteriorated relations with America, tarnished ones with an Eastern Europe it did not quickly raise its voice to defend and ties well short of full confidence with France.
.
For the French, the regrets may not yet be full blown. But what is moldering now is a parallel sense of France's having eaten up all its room for maneuver, and all the potential of its star-turn in the run-up to the war through an excess, in the words of a German official, of the French "prestige imperative."
.
It is this possible miscalculation that is jogging those few French critics publicly asking if their country has overplayed its hand.
< < Back to Start of Article PARIS In the end, beyond the maneuvering, the rhetoric, the professed convictions, there are questions now in Paris and Berlin about whether their opposition to an American-led war on Iraq has gotten a bit out of hand.
.
In Berlin, a reporter talking to a German official heard that the Schroeder government initially believed Iraq was a one-issue crisis, narrowly confinable to disagreement on the military undertaking and the painful although surmountable problem (in the middle term) of Germany's nonparticipation.
.
But reacting in fear of isolation, the official suggested, Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder and Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer's willingness to subordinate Germany to a French view of confrontation with the United States on many wider fronts has brought the government to a position it now finds an awkward fit with Germany's long-term interests, outside the two men's realm of when they ran for re-election on a pacifist platform last September.
.
In very less specific terms, this notion of things having gone too far appeared to suffuse remarks on Monday by Fischer that American policy was absolutely nonimperial in nature, that the United States was the irreplacable element of global and regional security, that there was no alternative to good trans-Atlantic relationships and that he well understood how the new East European membership of the European Union could have a "very different view" of their security than this or that EU founding member.
.
Even in normal, less electric times, this was a vision France could not sustain. If part of it also suggested that Germany's existential need for smooth relations with Eastern Europe was whipsawed by President Jacques Chirac's warning to the EU's new members that he required them to choose current French and German global policy over that of the Americans, then it also complemented concerns in Paris that Chirac's Brezhnev-style blunder - explained away here as hearty Chiraquian straight-talk - was one among many.
.
These concerns have made for the first real breach in the French media's amen chorus that has punctuated their president's breakaway run since January from the last half-century's Western notions of international order.
.
For the first time, French publications, reporting on the disarray of political analysts, are now asking: Who are we against, Saddam or Bush? Or: Where was the sense in Chirac's promising a veto of a new UN resolution when such a gesture was not an absolute necessity? And even: How did France manage to reject British revisions to its draft resolution last week hours before Iraq did?
.
"Have They Gone Overboard?" this week's cover-story in Le Point, a center-right newsmagazine, wondered over a picture of Chirac and Foreign Minister Dominic de Villepin. Its lead editorial's response was mostly yes, noting viperishly that France was rather good at accommodating itself to any detestable status quo. But that hardly signaled some kind of special unease, no more than the middle-ground financial daily La Tribune did in saying Tuesday that France would pay dearly for its gratuitous threat of a veto.
.
Instead, the notion that a botch may well be at hand for France came in a well-researched article in the current issue of the left-populist magazine Marianne, normally a font of anti-American tweaks and bellows, which analyzed recent French diplomacy under the title, "Visionary Policy or Operetta-Style Gaullism?"
.
It said France always sought if possible to propel its own policies with a European motor but found that its disagreement these days with many of the EU's members and candidates about the French desire for a Europe defined by its opposition to America eliminated any hope of a common policy.
.
Quoting Aymeric Chauprade, who teaches geopolitics at the French War College, the article told of his criticism of France's resistance to American "domination" as piecemeal, without any overall plan, and judging its flirt with Russia and China at the United Nations as old stuff and without basic effect on Moscow and Beijing, whose ties with America are priorities for them.
.
"As for Germany," Chauprade said, "if it changed its line (from its present stance), it could return to its role within American strategy. Not France."
.
Philippe Raynaud, a political scientist, was asked by the magazine if France over the long haul could sustain the position that had brought Chirac so much international media attention and public relations success over the last months. "We don't have the moral incentive, or the necessary elites," he replied. "At the top level, our diplomacy asserts a will for independence. On a daily basis, everybody accepts French decline."
.
There were other, more palpable aspects of French policy that caused discomfort among the French. Therese Delpech, a Frenchwoman who is director of strategic affairs at the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission and a commissioner in charge of Iraqi affairs for the UN's control, verification and inspection commission, pointed to a French dilemma if American or British troops were felled by Iraqi chemical or biological arms.
.
"In a case like that, it will be very difficult (for France) not to participate," she said. "You've got to look (the situation) straight in the eye. If chemical weapons are used against American or British troops, that's really going to be very difficult."
.
De Villepin referred to the issue Monday, telling a radio interviewer that in those circumstances, France would be alongside what he called "its precious friends." When an American official in Washington was asked if knew of such a contingency, he said no and called the French gesture "meaningless."
.
Germany could have a problem within a vaguely similar context. The present government has consistently repeated its commitment to the existence of the state of Israel. But its reaction in the event of an Iraqi attack on Israel with weapons of mass destruction is unknown. Saddam Hussein's missiles armed with conventional warheads hit Israel during the first Gulf War.
.
Alongside the question of whether France and Germany, each in its specific way, have moved into problematic or unsustainable positions through the Iraq confrontation is the considerable distance between the two government's political realities.
.
Fischer could obviously not have been speaking for France when he told the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on Monday "that when I look at the 21st century world, I see no basic change in the interests of North America and Europe." He insisted there was no breakdown in trans-Atlantic relations and that he wished a strategic debate had taken place after the Sept. 11 attacks that might have led to a new clarity that he is sure will come eventually.
.
But the daily politics of both countries are perhaps more determinant. Each faces great economic difficulties, but Chirac is screened from public anger by the protective institutional layer of a prime minister, Jean-Pierre Raffarin, whose approval ratings are in rapid decline.
.
Schroeder, described this week by Der Spiegel magazine as "the uncourageous chancellor" because of what it said was the meekness of his new economic reforms, benefits from none of the unanimity of support that buoys Chirac. If he were to run now for chancellor, Schroeder's Social Democratic Party would have about 25 percent backing, polls say, compared to about 50 percent for the Christian Democratic opposition. The CDU leadership states it would have signed the letter of eight EU countries rejecting the French-German position on Iraq and would have backed Britain's second UN resolution that France promised to veto.
.
In this environment, the United States does not regard Germany lost as an ally, but as a country that might actively seek rapprochement at some point after the conclusion of an intervention in Iraq.
.
In the case of France, however, Chirac, with more than four years to go on his presidential term, has taken a posture in relation to both the domestic political landscape and the international scene that provides little obvious mobility short of self-ridicule.
.
In the sense of the French having brazenly overreached, while the Germans were stuck holding on to Chirac's shirttail, that has some of Germany's foreign policy professionals regarding the circumstances with irony and tinges of regret. Whatever Fischer says, theirs is a Germany that could come out of the war with deteriorated relations with America, tarnished ones with an Eastern Europe it did not quickly raise its voice to defend and ties well short of full confidence with France.
.
For the French, the regrets may not yet be full blown. But what is moldering now is a parallel sense of France's having eaten up all its room for maneuver, and all the potential of its star-turn in the run-up to the war through an excess, in the words of a German official, of the French "prestige imperative."
.
It is this possible miscalculation that is jogging those few French critics publicly asking if their country has overplayed its hand.
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