Germans desperate to sell France on EU
Globe and Mail ^
PARIS -- Those French citizens who thought they would spend a quiet day at the Louvre this week have found themselves assaulted by German youths, dozens of them, intent on plying them with blue-and-yellow flags, heaps of literature and long, impassioned arguments.
"I'm asking you, as fellow Europeans, to think about whether you want my people to retreat back into our old history," Hans-Stefan Stemmer, a 20-year-old Berlin university student, told a bewildered elderly couple in fluent French the other day in the museum's elegant courtyard. They declined his offer of European Union flags, but said they'd think about his entreaties.
Mr. Stemmer and hundreds of his comrades are part of a desperate last-ditch effort this week by leaders across Europe to persuade the French to vote in favour of adopting the European Union constitution in a May 29 referendum.
To the shock and horror of French leaders, the people seem prepared to defy the wishes of the elite and cast a majority Non vote. That would invalidate the constitution, which requires approval by all 25 EU countries.
Nothing seems to have worked. Polls this week show the Non side with a slight lead over the Oui vote, even though all the major French political parties are in favour, as are every major newspaper and TV station, most magazines and a truckload of celebrities, from Gérard Depardieu to Jeanne Moreau, who have been hauled in front of TV screens with increasing desperation.
None of it was working, so this week, it was time to bring in the Germans. The students have been bused from across Germany to beg and plead on French streets for people to cast a Oui vote, in the belief that French citizens, suddenly disillusioned with their media and politicians, are more likely to listen to rank outsiders.
Yesterday, German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder added his voice, delivering a speech in the French city of Nancy. "France assumes a big responsibility," he said, "the responsibility not to let down . . . other Europeans over the constitution."
It was not supposed to work this way. The French like to say that they invented the idea of European unification back in the 1950s, and they have long been enthusiastic supporters of the EU's rapid expansion into a full-scale United States of Europe.
Everyone had expected France's far right, led by Jean-Marie Le Pen, to vote against the constitution in defence of French nationalism and out of fear of an immigrant influx (though the constitution gives the EU, which has conservative views on such matters, new power over immigration).
But something surprising happened: French voters on the left, and not just on the Communist fringes, have turned against the document, arguing it is a purely big-business trade document that says almost nothing about the social Europe, the progressive wealth-redistribution policies and ecological and labour-regulation restraints that have been a major part of the EU dialogue for decades.
And unlike many of the constitution's advocates, they seem to be reading the document, in sometimes obsessive detail, and winning over minds with their apocalyptic interpretation of its contents. While the constitution does not expand Europe's free-trade regime and liberal economy beyond the status they have held for more than a decade, its opponents object to the fact that the constitution celebrates them and places trade and commerce on a prominent berth.
If French Prime Minister Jacques Chirac and his allies want to win the vote, they will have to deal with a lot of people like Marie Christine Callet, a business consultant who has been unemployed recently.
"I have always been in favour of Europe, and I was going to vote yes to this, but then I began to read it," she said in her book-filled apartment in the Les Halles district of Paris. "It says almost nothing about social policies; it reads like a treaty of capitulation to multinational capital."
Many French citizens, even those who, like Ms. Callet, are politically moderate, are fearful of what they call "liberalism," which refers to the type of independent economy with little direct state involvement practised in Britain and North America. (Ironically, the constitution's opponents in most other countries argue that it will create a bureaucracy that will spread French-style socialism across Europe.)
So the Non leaders say they have achieved great success with their slogan, plastered across Paris: "No to inscribing liberalism into the constitution. We can create a better Europe." Ms. Callet, and thousands like her, seems to have taken those words to heart.
It is the Germans who have been brought in to argue against this case. Joschka Fischer, Foreign Minister and Leader of the German Green Party, made the case pointedly yesterday.
"The left should defend the prospect of a social Europe, and that should lead it to act in favour of Europe, not against Europe," he said in an interview with French newspaper La Croix. |
