March 14, 2003
For France and Germany, Still No Love Lost
By JOHN TAGLIABUE
ARIS, March 12 — When the Élysée Treaty binding French and German destinies was signed in 1963, one of its provisions was to spread the study of French by German schoolchildren and German by the French.
If the Marie Curie Lycée, on a broad avenue leading to Versailles, heavy with history between the two countries, is any measure, the ideal of integration through the shaping of young minds has far to go toward realization. The school boasts a German partner school in Paderborn, and many of its pupils spend weeks with families across the Rhine in Germany. Yet only 10 percent of Marie Curie's students take German, while 80 percent take English.
A few hundred miles east, in Hamburg, conditions are much the same at the Heilwig Gymnasium, a high school north of the German port city's center. English is the required first foreign language and French is studied by only a small proportion of the school's 690 pupils. For German high school students, French is a language of culture and refinement. Of the dozen or so pupils who chose French this year for special study in their last two years, almost all were girls.
French, said Mareike, 18, "sounds pretty, it's soft, that's why girls choose it; it's elegant." Janek, 18, the sole boy in the group, said he risked heckling from other boys, and that some of them regarded him as a sissy for choosing French.
The choice of languages by French and German schoolchildren, and the views they have of one another that motivate it, underscores the continuing division of Europe's two largest nations. The fact is that France and Germany do not love each other, even as their politically-willed solidarity — most recently reflected in their oppososition to American policies toward Iraq — has been the basis for the evolution of the European Union.
France and Germany, aided by the United States, arose from wartime ruin and overcame centuries-old rivalries with a vision of cooperation that brought prosperity and peace to a Continent plagued by war.
In 1963, Charles de Gaulle and Konrad Adenauer signed the Élysée Treaty. By the 1990's, France and Germany were so intertwined they were able to join other European countries in agreeing to abolish francs and marks and adopt a common currency.
Yet not even the advent of the euro has papered over the fact that French-German integration may have worked at the institutional level but has scarcely entered the hearts of the two countries' citizens.
"Talk about French-German relations had become a prayer wheel," said Brigitte Sauzay, a Frenchwoman who commutes between Paris and Berlin as an adviser on French affairs to Chancellor Gerhard Schröder. "Always the same thing: thanks to the French and Germans' stability, prosperity and peace in Europe."
In January, Jacques Chirac, the French president, and Mr. Schröder celebrated the 40th anniversary of the Élysée Treaty by pledging to pump new life into the relationship. They proposed common cabinet meetings, joint embassies abroad, a striving for common positions on defense and foreign policy and even joint citizenship for French and Germans with a common passport.
Whether such arrangements are workable remains unclear. But beyond the purely bureaucratic issues, larger matters loom.
The German-French reconciliation was crucial for Europe. Gradually ever larger numbers of countries united around the two. French-German unity became the magnetic core around which a 15-member European Union, soon to be expanded, coalesced.
But the 1990's and the end of the cold war were a difficult decade for their relations. German reunification created a behemoth at the center of Europe, a third larger than France. This made French officials uneasy that France's influence would become more marginal.
Still, France and Germany remain determined to pursue something close to their original vision of a federal Europe. A European constitution is being drafted at a convention in Brussels.
Yet in many ways their priorities are not those of other European states. Central European countries that have emerged from decades of Soviet dominance, and are to join the union soon, are wary of centralized authority.
France and Germany have also found that their resistance to war with Iraq has not been shared by several neighbors, including Britain, Spain, Poland and Romania.
"The temptation is great for the present administration in Washington to exploit Europe's weakness and to split apart this bothersome creature, the European Union," former German chancellor, Helmut Schmidt, said. "I consider the E.U. in its present situation very much endangered."
Washington, he said, could come to regret tampering with these decades of European achievement.
The dream of a unity that would overcome the wounds of two world wars began in the early 1950's with the European Coal and Steel Community. In Saarbrücken on the French-German border, a European university arose.
To enhance cooperation, German cities and schools found partners in France. Efforts were made to form joint French-German military units. In 1991, both countries started Arte, a joint satellite television channel dedicated to deepening each country's familiarity with the music, film and theater of the other.
When Mr. Schröder took office, he hired as an adviser on France Ms. Sauzay, who had previously helped several French presidents understand and deal with the Germans.
But the realty is sobering. Arte's audience, after rising rapidly in the early 1990's, has stagnated at about 13 million viewers. In France, where it is most popular, with about 9 million viewers, it is identified with Parisian elites and, as a satellite station, is often not available in rural areas that lack cable to distribute the satellite feed.
In Germany, where about 4 million people watch it, Arte remains an orphan as a result of Germany's fragmented cultural politics, in which responsibility for television lies with the individual states.
Closer military cooperation remains a distant dream, as Germany cuts back on defense spending and France, under Mr. Chirac, boosts it, though for projects like a new nuclear aircraft carrier to project French power, rather than for the joint units closer cooperation would require.
But nowhere is the elusiveness of the dream more evident than in the schools.
While France remains for the German students the font of refinement and culture, the French pupils still regard Germany for its economic might, despite Germany's present weakened economy. Asked what came to mind at the mention of Germany, the French students said economic prowess. "The biggest trade partner of France," said Vincent, 17, a pupil at Marie Curie.
European integration has always gone ahead under American security guarantees, and that arrangement holds. In some ways both sides are more influenced by the United States than by each other.
One of the few animated moments in the discussion with the French students came when talk turned to rap music. German rap was bad, the French students agreed, probably because rap was little suited to the guttural German tongue.
"They listen to French rap," said Pierre, 19. Yet both the French and German students conceded that rap was in origin at least American.
But European patriotism? No thank you. Asked whether they felt more European, or French or German, the French students replied that they were French and the Germans German. |
