CHAPTER 14

Ever Closer Disunion

Since the 1970s, France and Britain have grown to resemble each other more than any other two large states. For the first time, their wealth, populations, military power and external influence reached almost identical levels. International comparisons and league-tables showed astonishing similarities. Never before had so many French and British people visited, worked in or lived in each other’s country, appraised each other’s qualities, or understood so much of each other’s languages. The French even managed to laugh at British humour. Their leaders often proclaimed the existence of, or at least the aspiration to, a special relationship. But – and how many ‘buts’ there are! – politicians, commentators and ordinary citizens espoused conflicting views about politics, society and economic life. Rarely since the first Napoleon had they embodied such clear differences, or tried to remake Europe in their own contrasting images.

A French or British Europe? Napoleon
versus Adam Smith

It was clear to me from the start that there were two competing visions of Europe.

MARGARET THATCHER¹

At one end of the range of concepts are those states that favour institutional or indeed political projects designed to ensure the qualitative leaps dear to the hearts of all staunch Europeans, including, I am bound to say, myself. At the other are all those who, whether out of realism or for ideological reasons hold to a purely libertarian vision of Europe.

JACQUES DELORS, 1986²

Twenty-two years ago, in Paris, I was a barman . . . There was a common pot, where they told me you had to put all the tips. After two months, I found out I was the only one doing it! That was my first lesson in applied socialism! tony blair to the Assemblée Nationale, 24 March 1998

The European Community in which Britain was floundering in the 1970s was largely a French creation, its institutions and methods modelled on France. This was not due to some vision of the ‘founding fathers’, whose acts were largely pragmatic and only some of whom, notably Monnet and Schuman, were French. It was rather because of the tenacious pursuit of national objectives by generations of French politicians and officials. Germany, often expected to emerge as the real leader of Europe, did not do so, handicapped politically before 1989, economically since, and perhaps psychologically always. So ‘Europe’ could be made a lever for French ambitions: to control Germany and rival America; to serve France’s dynamic, changing but vulnerable economy; and to protect the identity of a ‘European Europe’, in which French language and culture took pride of place.

As de Gaulle had warned, Britain could not help but be the serpent in this Eden. Its governments, irrespective of party, pressed for a comparatively liberal and Atlanticist view of Europe. They supported expansion of its membership – suspected by the French, rightly, to be a strategy to subvert the system. But British governments found it much harder to lead the Community than the optimists of the Macmillan and Wilson eras had expected. This was partly because of entrenched French opposition, which readily used ‘European’ rhetoric against Britain, but also because of Britain’s economic weakness and and its leaders’ lack of confidence and of clear ideas. British politicians, accused of nostalgia for lost glories and xenophobic anti-Europeanism, usually lost the rhetorical battles, even if they had some success in modifying the reality. European rhetoric was genuinely more congenial to French than British ears, for it could be presented as the fulfilment of France’s national destiny as the European pioneer. French ‘Europeanism’ could be traced back to Victor Hugo in the mid nineteenth century (see above, page 355), to Napoleon’s jackbooted integration, to the ‘armed missionaries’ of the revolution, and to the gentler ‘republic of letters’ of the Enlightenment. So, at least, French federalists liked to see it.³

The political, economic and psychological benefits that France obtained from leadership of Europe – and even more those it hoped to obtain – tended to calm fears about sovereignty and accountability in a country traditionally highly sensitive to such matters. Yet French governments – and citizens, when they were asked – have been suspicious of genuine federalism, which would take power away from them: as one French social scientist put it nicely, French politicians wanted ‘a strong Europe with weak institutions’.⁴The ‘empty chair’ crisis in 1965–6, when de Gaulle boycotted Community business, halted supranationalist trends for twenty years. A hybrid structure of governance, one part embryonic federation, two parts association of states, was sealed by an agreement in Paris between Georges Pompidou and Edward Heath in 1971 to create a European Council. This body was as opaque and unaccountable as the Congress of Vienna, with methods that would have been familiar to Castlereagh and Talleyrand – the reason why politicians and diplomats liked it. It embodied control of the Community by its states – de Gaulle’s ‘Europe des patries’ – not by federal institutions such as the Commission and the Parliament. On this point, Britain and France – and a large part of their peoples – agreed. President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing later stated that ‘the entry of Great Britain made the federal idea, which had been dominant until then, impossible’. But that was not the crux of the problem. As Giscard put it, ‘we have to choose between a structured system and an amorphous space [un espace mou]’.⁵

This choice was the heart of the Franco-British difference: should Europe evolve towards the British model of economic freedom with a minimum of central control (the ‘amorphous space’), or the French model of an economically and socially regulated Europe (the ‘structured system’). To speak of ‘British’ and ‘French’ models is of course a simplification, for the debate crosses national boundaries. But only a slight simplification. Britain and France most of the time advocated and practised different economic, social and diplomatic strategies, and their publics showed a high level of consensus concerning them. This difference from the beginning focused on the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), which for decades demonstrated the contrast between French and British conceptions of Europe, of economics, of social policy, of relations with the outside world, and even of national identity. The British, long accustomed to a small agricultural sector and cheap imported food, dismissed the CAP as a patently unfair and expensive absurdity. The French saw it as the Community’s great achievement, creating solidarity across national borders, and protecting against merciless commercial pressures a precious way of life that epitomized Frenchness. At stake were not merely rational economic advantages, but a tissue of customs, sentiments and beliefs that had ancient roots and could rouse feelings little amenable to argument or explanation.

From the 1980s onwards, Britain and France diverged dramatically. Margaret Thatcher on one hand, and François Mitterrand and Jacques Delors on the other, pursued bold, and utterly opposite, solutions to the economic stagnation that had persisted since the early 1970s. These ideologically driven governments broke from the relative consensus of the previous generation, and extended their efforts from the domestic to the European and international arenas. From then onwards, the existence of French and British ‘models’ for Europe became unmistakable.

Britain’s road to Damascus came fairly soon after it joined the EEC. Financial crisis brought intervention by the International Monetary Fund and ‘third-world treatment’. The prime minister, James Callaghan, admitted in 1976 that ‘the cosy world we were told would go on for ever . . . is gone’. An attempt to limit pay rises caused widespread public-sector strikes in the ‘winter of discontent’, 1978–9. This brought to power a Conservative government under Margaret Thatcher in May 1979, with the stated conviction – shared by a sufficient number of the public – that drastic and radically different action had to be taken to reverse economic decline. The economic liberalization she forced through – rejection of state interventionism; the curbing of trade unions; sharp disinflation; and privatization of state-owned industries – was bitterly divisive. Uncompetitive industries collapsed and unemployment doubled. In 1981, with Britain in crisis, France took the very opposite path. François Mitterrand was elected as the first socialist president of the Fifth Republic. As euphoric crowds waved red roses, he and his finance minister Jacques Delors began a crash programme of ‘socialism in one country’, reminiscent of the Popular Front in 1936. This was the last full-blooded left-wing economic experiment anywhere in the world. Dozens of banks and industries were nationalized, bringing a quarter of industrial workers into state employment. A thirty-nine hour week was decreed, and the minimum wage substantially raised.

The outcomes were as different as the measures. By 1982–3, inflation in Britain was falling and productivity rising. Though undetectable at the time, 1985 was the watershed: before then, the British economy performed consistently worse than those of France and Germany; afterwards, it performed consistently better than they did.⁶ In France, the Mitterrand–Delors experiment caused surges in inflation and imports. Yet the economy remained sluggish and unemployment actually increased. The franc had to be devalued twice, and the IMF and the West German government threatened to withdraw support. Delors imposed austerity to control inflation. In 1983 France pegged its economic policy to that of Germany – the end of its economic autonomy, and a strong reason to try to ‘Europeanize’ Germany’s financial power. Mitterrand and Delors concluded that they had failed because France had been too small. What was needed was action on a bigger, European scale, so that politicians could master economic forces: ‘Only Europe,’ declared Mitterrand, ‘allows politics to restore its power.’⁷

Mitterrand’s desire to assert politics over economics recalls a point already made: that the French have never been convinced by the ideas of Adam Smith (see above, page 65). Free trade has never been a popular political and moral crusade, as in nineteenth-century Britain. Significant French liberal economists over the last two centuries can easily be counted on the fingers. Right- and left-wing politicians have agreed in deploring ‘untamed liberalism’ and exalting a benign State as champion of the general good. Small businessmen and farmers, armed with votes as early as 1848, and willing to use the barricade as well as the ballot-box, have long practice in forcing politicians to pay heed to their wishes, which have usually included protection against ‘unfair’ competition. Politicians have been correspondingly aware of the electoral benefits of having favours to distribute. The economic role of the State grew in France as elsewhere between the 1930s and the 1990s, and indeed it grew more than in most countries. This greatly increased the political weight of beneficiaries of the public payroll (57 per cent of the population) and many more who shared in a complex system of rights and privileges in employment and benefits.⁸ A uniquely homogenous elite, with at its apex theénarques(graduates of ‘ENA’, the Ecole Nationale d’Administration, founded in 1945, smaller than the smallest Oxbridge college) dominated politics, the civil service and business. By 1997, ENA had produced two of the three previous presidents, six of the eight previous prime ministers, and the leaders of the three main political parties.⁹ All this added up to a durable cross-party consensus in favour of economic and social protection, state intervention, mandarin values, and ‘Europe’ – what is often called la pensée unique. Thatcherite liberalization challenged and affronted it, and made very few French converts.

FRANCE AND THE FALKLANDS WAR

We wanted to affirm our solidarity with Great Britain, which . . . had been the victim of aggression against both its national interests and its national pride.

FRANÇOIS MITTERRAND¹⁰

In so many ways Mitterrand and the French were our greatest allies.

JOHN NOTT, secretary of state for defence.¹¹

Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands on 2 April 1982 – the first time those lonely territories had ignited a crisis since 1770 (see above, page 159). Mitterrand phoned Thatcher the following day to pledge support, overruling his foreign minister, Claude Cheysson, who wanted to side with Argentina on ‘anti-colonialist’ grounds. Mitterrand declared that ‘we are the allies of the English, not of Argentina’, and to do otherwise would be politically ‘catastrophic’. Moreover, France had island colonies of its own. The trickiest complication was that France had sold arms to Argentina, including Mirage and Super-Étendard aircraft and a small number of Exocet anti-ship missiles, of which five were operational. These missiles were a serious threat to the British taskforce: one of them was to sink the destroyer Sheffield. The Argentinians had ordered fifty more Exocets, but the French halted shipments. They also found excuses to delay deliveries to Peru, in case they reached Argentina. The French did not withdraw technicians who were in Argentina putting weapons into service; but they gave the British complete technical information about Argentinian military capacities, including how to deal with Exocets. The French air force flew a Mirage and a Super-Étendard over to East Anglia so that RAF pilots could get to know their capacities. The latter were relieved to discover that in dogfights they were no match for Harriers.¹²

Politically, Mitterrand maintained a ‘middle position’, supporting Britain against aggression, but urging negotiations over the islands. This placed France closer to Britain than most European countries except Norway. In some ways they were more consistently supportive than the vacillating United States, though of course less so than most of the Commonwealth. Within the EC, the French supported economic sanctions against Argentina, against Irish and Italian opposition. But they could not resist taking advantage of British vulnerability to overrule them on the Community budget and the CAP – ‘European solidarity ought not to be one way’, said a French MEP. For the first time since de Gaulle had introduced a national veto into European deliberations, that of Britain was overriden.¹³ In the UN, the French abstained (rather than voting with Britain) in a ceasefire resolution in June. Yet in the view of the historian Philip Bell, French assistance went further than self-interest; and for once the ‘Atlantic triangle’ of Britain, the USA and France worked.¹⁴

Thatcher was personally grateful to Mitterrand. The French, however, were aggrieved that the British did not repay the favour when the French secret services blew up a Greenpeace ship, Rainbow Warrior, in Auckland harbour in 1985 – ‘They shouldn’t have dragged us through the mud,’ thought Cheysson.¹⁵

Mitterrand and Thatcher had a strange relationship. Mitterrand regarded her as a ‘petty-bourgeois ideologue’ and she thought his economic ideas ‘barmy’. But he was a ladies’ man, despite or because of a certain reptilian quality, and thought he could influence her by ‘turning on the charm’ with the elaborate courtesy the British consider typically French. His notorious remark (repeated in varying forms) that she had ‘the eyes of Caligula/Stalin and the mouth/legs of Messalina/Marilyn Monroe’ may have reflected genuine appreciation of the ‘sole woman among all these men, the flower brightening their austere labours’, as well as French imperviousness to political correctness.¹⁶ She, in some ways a francophile in the usual British manner – she relished the lavish cuisine and collected the menus – enjoyed all this and rather liked him. She also remembered with gratitude his support during the Falklands War. This did not, of course, prevent antagonism over the disproportionate British contribution to the Community budget, a consequence of the CAP, which made it the only net payer. Both tried to outwit the other over figures: Thatcher, more attentive to small print than the princely Mitterrand, who was presiding over the European Council, secured a substantial rebate in 1983, and provoking a presidential outburst about ‘perfidie, mascarade, malhonnêteté’.¹⁷ Relations were not improved when, during a visit by Mitterrand to London in 1984, a French security man tested Scotland Yard by planting plastic explosive in the French embassy – a trick by which the British were not amused.

At first, Britain and France had pursued their respective liberal and socialist experiments in isolation. ‘Europe’, which during the 1970s had been dormant, brought them face to face. Thatcher’s economic successes had an impact throughout Europe and beyond. So did Mitterrand’s failures. The British gained the confidence and opportunity to press for European liberalization. This was their old refrain, but now pushed as an ideology and a programme further than previous governments would have wanted or even conceived. And it now chimed with changing ideas and practices in Europe and elsewhere in the world. A Whitehall paper, ‘Europe – the Future’ (1984) was the precursor of the 1986 Single European Act (SEA) creating a Single Market ‘without internal frontiers in which the free movement of goods, peoples, services, and capital is assured’. This was the first general liberalizing measure since the Common Market had been created, and ‘Mrs Thatcher’s baby’.¹⁸ It was pushed through by her appointee to the Brussels Commission, Lord Cockfield, a former Trade and Industry minister. His plan was accepted ‘without much opposition’ by the Commission.¹⁹ The SEA set up the ‘European Union’ and held out the prospect of a genuine European market by gradually removing more than 300 non-tariff barriers to trade, including in public contracts, state aids, financial regulations, agreements in restraint of trade, and discriminatory standards. The major recent history of European integration describes this as ‘perhaps the greatest single contribution ever made to the construction of Europe’, and – only slightly tongue in cheek – hails Margaret Thatcher as the ‘founding mother of the new Europe’.²⁰

Internal liberalization of the Community ‘complemented, reinforced, and furthered the worldwide trend’ towards freer trade.²¹ The Single Market plan gave impetus to the international trade negotiations of the Uruguay Round of 1986–94, which began to abolish industrial tariffs and liberalize services and investment. A more powerful World Trade Organization was created to pursue these aims. A start was made on agricultural reforms, although the CAP (and comparable American and Japanese agricultural protection) survived to scandalize both liberals and Third World lobbyists. Numerous bilateral trade agreements were concluded over the next decade between the EC and other states, though the EC trade commissioner Leon Brittan’s proposal for a treaty with the USA creating a ‘New Transatlantic Market’ was firmly squashed by the French in 1998. All EC countries increased their trade outside the Community.

The Single Market project potentially changed the Community’s raison d’être and the role of the Commission. As Ernest Bevin might have said, this Trojan horse was full of Pandora’s boxes. The key principle of ‘mutual recognition’ by member states of each other’s standards (if an article was suitable for sale in one country, it was suitable for sale in all) meant that Brussels would not be needed to negotiate and formulate complex ‘harmonization’. Liberalization threatened to make EC institutions increasingly redundant, as both its internal barriers and external boundaries were dismantled. In a speech at The Hague in May 1992 Thatcher said that a free-trade Europe ‘does not need a Commission in its present form’. A Thatcherite EC would inevitably evolve into thezone de libre-échange the French had always abhorred. Like Marx’s classless state, ‘Europe’ would wither away.²²

This prospect – for many of those who realized the implications – was anathema. Liberal enthusiasts who regarded the free market as an unalloyed good were never a majority, or not for long, even in Britain. Many people – including some of Thatcher’s own supporters – considered it a necessary evil. Many others considered it an evil tout court. Jacques Delors, who in 1985 went from being Mitterrand’s ill-starred finance minister to president of the European Commission, took a more moderate view: economic change was inevitable, but it had to be directed and firmly regulated.

Delors and Thatcher had wary mutual respect. They were similar in their interest in ideas, attention to detail and driving ambition. Their discussions, recalled Delors politely, were ‘always fascinating’.²³ They contrasted with their cautious, pragmatic, indolent colleagues, led by Mitterrand and the German chancellor Helmut Kohl. Born the same year, Thatcher and Delors were perfect embodiments of two cultures. She was a Protestant individualist, a daughter of the nation of shopkeepers (Grantham branch), an inheritor of Nonconformist values of work and self-reliance, and an alumna of the hard school of Westminster politics. He was a Catholic paternalist, by birth and career part of the financial bureaucracy, an activist in a white-collar Christian trade union, whose entry into politics had been as a back-room adviser until translated to the ivory tower of the European parliament. He was a sincere disciple of Personalism, a Christian ‘Third Way’ philosophy fashionable in the 1930s to 50s, which rejected both capitalism and totalitarian mass politics as inhuman, and aspired to create social and economic systems based on human creativity and solidarity, not on liberal individualism and competition. Some Personalists advocated dismantling the nation state through regionalism and non-partisan (i.e. unelected) federal institutions. The collapse of his and Mitterrand’s strategy in the early 1980s did not convert them to liberalism. Rather, it convinced them that France must accept greater European integration than hitherto contemplated. They realized, in the dictum of intelligent French conservatives facing revolution, that everything had to be changed so that everything could remain the same. Delors’s appointment as president of the previously inactive Commission was his last chance to create a ‘European model of society’ that would be ‘France . . . partly Germanized and writ large’.²⁴ It would have to be economically successful enough to preserve the social benefits conferred by postwar Christian democracy and socialism – in Delors’s own words, ‘to be a hope, a model and a shelter in a world turned upside down by globalization’.²⁵ This was an attractive message, including in Britain, where it converted Labour and the trade unions from their traditional anti-Europeanism. In short, while Thatcher saw ‘Europe’ as a step towards globalization, Delors gave it a new purpose: as a haven from Thatcherism.

Delors’s audacious strategy was to use Thatcher’s Single Market as an opportunity to lead Europe simultaneously in the opposite direction. He argued that the Single Market, because it removed existing national controls, required the Commission’s powers to be extended into the environmental, social, monetary and regional fields. He repeatedly insisted that both the Single Market and enlargement of the Community had to be preceded by greater political integration and an extension (‘deepening’) of the Commission’s regulating authority. This was made possibly by part three of the Single European Act (SEA), accepted reluctantly by Thatcher, which extended the ‘competencies’ of the Commission. Although this was presented as functional and economic, in fact it was ideological and political – to create, in Delors’s own words, an ‘organized space’ rather than a ‘free trade zone’.²⁶ A considerable economic price, in terms of slow growth and unemployment, was worth paying to this end, and particularly in preparing for monetary union, conceived as a federalizing measure. Delors did not underestimate the danger Thatcherite liberalism posed to his ‘European Model’. He believed that he had only a limited time to counter it.

Delors’s ‘frantic state building’²⁷ proceeded by increasing the economic, regulatory and political powers of the Commission, and ‘elevating his own position’, wrote an admirer, ‘well beyond what the Commission’s institutional configuration formally allowed’.²⁸He packed the Commission with French officials led by énarques Pascal Lamy and François Lamoureux. New ‘structural’, ‘regional’ and ‘research and development’ funds were means of winning allies in politics and business, especially in major recipient countries such as Ireland and Greece, whose finances were transformed by a tidal wave of cash. All politicians bribe people with their own money; but Delors had the irresistible advantage of being able to bribe them with other people’s money, and make them feel virtuous for pocketing it. The inevitable result was waste, corruption, and the permanent installation in Brussels of an international army of lobbyists. The Commission became what one highly pro-European British official called ‘Tammany Hall with a French accent.’²⁹ The Delors strategy was christened the ‘Russian doll’ method by Lamoureux: ‘inside it is another one, which leads you to another . . . until it is too late to turn back’. According to an insider, ‘the trick was putting together complex packages which . . . could appeal to differing member state interests’. An important aspect of this was to find ‘proposals that played enough to British neoliberalism to lower the British guard against the further pooling of sovereignty down the line’.³⁰

The ‘Russian doll’ strategy created an integrationist momentum. It was difficult to resist, especially when the only weighty opponent was the increasingly isolated Thatcher, who rejected integration as economically damaging and politically unacceptable. Delors’s activity brought down on him the opprobrium of parts of the British press, almost equalled by later French denunciation of the mild-mannered British trade commissioner Leon Britten, demonized as a Thatcherite Genghis Khan. Admittedly, the populist francophobia of the tabloid Sun (whose headline ‘Up Yours, Delors’ won notoriety) bore little resemblance to the silky intellectual anglophobia of Le Monde or the Nouvel Observateur. Apart from support from within France, Delors had the weighty advantage of an alliance with Helmut Kohl. Germany’s ‘Rhenish capitalism’, stable, consensual, with high levels of social welfare, and yet internationally competitive, had influenced Delors. Problems caused by rigidity and high costs had begun to appear in the 1970s, but the picture was still impressive. Moreover, the problems, so hard to remedy, were an argument for protecting the system against ‘unfair’ competition by extending German-style social policy throughout the Community. The end of the Cold War and the increasing prospects of German reunification made Kohl eager to win allies and reassure his partners, especially the French, that Germany was a ‘good European’. Delors responded by astutely welcoming German reunification while Mitterrand and Thatcher clumsily urged delay. So a Kohl–Delors alliance solidified. Mitterrand, once reunification had happened, decided that further European integration was ‘the only response to the problem that confronts us’,³¹by tying a more powerful Germany into tighter economic and political structures.

Delos’s Commission was a nimble political player, not weighed down by accountability to electors or responsibility for consequences. It was a dream factory, whose job was ‘to create and promote plausible scenarios’.³² It could select popular causes, such as environmental protection, regional aid, health and safety and workers’ rights, enshrined in the Social Charter (1989). This incidentally aimed to isolate the British, make Thatcher ‘domestically vulnerable’, and pave the way for later British U-turns.³³ Thatcher was increasingly unpopular at home, as shown in election results in the later 1980s, and weakened by the open dissension of powerful colleagues, notably the foreign secretary Geoffrey Howe and the chancellor of the exchequer Nigel Lawson. Both wanted to compromise with Delors’s strategy, and thought Thatcher’s stubborn resistance doomed.

THATCHER AND THE REVOLUTION, 1989

In July 1989, Mitterrand presided over a huge political carnival in Paris to celebrate the bicentenary of 1789: the revolutionary tiger was now a cuddly toy. Western leaders met for a summit, and many other world politicians were invited. Thatcher gave Mitterrand a first edition of A Tale of Two Cities, one of the formative books of her youth.³⁴ Le Monde ran interviews inviting visitors to pay tribute to the revolution and France’s unique historic role. Many played the game, producing some rather burlesque results: for example, the Austrian Kurt Waldheim (later exposed as a war criminal) praised the Declaration of the Rights of Man. Le Monde kept Thatcher for the climax, on 13 July. In reply to a teasing question – had human rights begun with the French revolution? – she referred briefly to Judeo-Christian tradition, Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights and the Glorious Revolution. This was hardly new to the French: the great liberal François Guizot had taught in the 1820s that ‘everyone knew’ the importance of Magna Carta. Other interviewees had made similar points. Daniel Cohn-Bendit – the 1968 student leader ‘Danny the Red’ – had even mentioned Magna Carta. But Le Monde gave a front-page headline and a cartoon to Thatcher. Who was provoking whom? For her many critics it was Thatcher, commonly presented as an aggressive, insular francophobe. Christopher Hill, a veteran left-wing historian, summoned her to ‘apologize to the people of France’.

Le Monde’s view of Margaret Thatcher’s refusal of the revolution’s Phrygian bonnet. Just visible are her protruding teeth – symbol of British womanhood.

Thatcher fell from power in November 1990, brought down by a Conservative Party rebellion initiated by the party’s most Europhile wing. Yet the Thatcherite implications of the Single Market legislation remained. Delors knew this, and ‘sometimes doubted that [European] unification would happen in the way he wished’.³⁵ But he was an ‘active pessimist’ – a Personalist term meaning that you should persist even if you expect to fail. There was an inescapable tension between furthering liberalization through the Single Market and the World Trade Organization while simultaneously extending social protections which, however popular, increased costs and rigidities. The danger was to make ‘Europe’ a mechanism for shifting investment and jobs elsewhere. No less serious was rising disquiet among the citizens of the member countries. The much discussed ‘democratic deficit’ was inherent in Monnet’s blueprint for supranational management by apolitical experts. It was acceptable as long as their activities were narrowly defined and largely invisible. The more Thatcher and Delors brought ‘Europe’ into everyday life – respectively by removing old protections and imposing new restrictions – the more the deficit became glaring. The Single Market threatened vested interests while the ‘Russian dolls’ method of integration meant, in Delors’s own words, ‘drawing up the marriage contract before asking the couple [‘Europe’ and its peoples] if they wanted to wed’.³⁶ His solution was to press ahead before opposition grew too strong – his aim, he said, was a federation by 2000 – and to create popular consent afterwards, on the pattern of nineteenth-century nation-building: ‘We have made Europe, now we must make Europeans’.³⁷ What Delors termed cultural management – semi-official lobbies, subsidized cultural activities, youth groups, prizes, 400 endowed professorships, 1,700 teaching projects, edifying schoolbooks, films and videos – would inculcate pride in being European and an acceptance that ‘ever closer union’ was the goal of history.

The Maastricht Treaty on European Union (February 1992) formally tied Delors’s programme of ‘economic and monetary union’ to the Single Market. The gamble almost failed. The Danes voted in a referendum against ratification. Mitterrand too called a referendum, expecting a convincing Yes to counteract the Danish No. The French government’s appeal to the voters was couched in traditionally patriotic terms: ‘France at the head of Europe’ magnified the power of ‘sovereign France’, and provided protection for its social system, economy and culture against the outside world.³⁸ As one slogan put it, ‘Napoleon would have voted Yes.’ But the French electorate, as prone to grumbling as the Grande Armée, followed its politicians on 20 September 1992 by the narrowest of margins: 51 to 49 per cent. Broadly, the Yes vote, urged by all the mainstream parties, was urban and middle class; the No, that of workers and farmers, angered by attempts to liberalize the CAP.

Mitterrand, in an election broadcast to reassure his voters, had stated (wrongly) on 3 September that the planned European Central Bank would be subject to political control, implying a more relaxed monetary policy. At this, the international currency markets ‘freaked out’, argues the historian John Gillingham, and began a series of speculative assaults on the already creaking Exchange Rate Mechanism, which coordinated the values of EC currencies. The speculators forced devaluations in Finland, Sweden, Italy and Spain. The climax came when sterling was forced out of the system on ‘Black Wednesday’ (16 September 1992), four days before the French referendum.³⁹ Thus, a political ploy by Mitterrand struck a heavy blow to John Major’s Conservative government – being ‘at the heart of Europe’ with a vengeance. But the humiliation proved beneficial to the British economy which, for once without the burden of an overvalued currency, performed buoyantly. Britain, for a mixture of political and economic reasons, subsequently stayed outside the single currency, the Euro, introduced between 1999 and 2002 – the crowning achievement of French strategy to Europeanize the financial power of Germany and to create an economic and political system capable of standing up to America in the global economy.

Both Thatcher and Delors had left office with the painful conviction that the other had won. But the tug-of-war between the British and French models continued unabated. British politicians liked to repeat that they were ‘winning the argument in Europe’, but they were certainly not doing so in France. The disagreement was as stark as ever: faced with the tide of global competition, should one plunge into the surf or shore up the dykes? French governments clung to the CAP and in 1998 the employment minister Martine Aubry (Delors’s daughter) introduced a compulsory thirty-five hour week. Despite EU injunctions to apply competition policy and open their market, French governments continued to direct and protect industries whether formally by State shareholdings and grants, or informally by pressures and favours. They reiterated demands that this ‘industrial policy’ should be adopted officially by Europe, and repeatedly condemned Single Market competition as irrational and destructive. Colossally expensive failures of ‘national champions’ were shrugged off. The losses to the taxpayer caused by one such champion, the bank Crédit Lyonnais, were reckoned to be the equivalent of a month’s holiday for every French family. The burning down of its Paris headquarters cut short potentially embarrassing enquiries. Other financial black holes over the years were Air France (saved by Delors personally), the computer manufacturer Bull, the conglomerate Vivendi and the technology group Alstom. Such collapses engendered recrimination and a string of prosecutions of buccaneering industrialists previously lauded as heroes – and even of a few greedy politicians. Yet the principle of such a policy was rarely contested, and the British alternative of non-intervention, as followed by Thatcher and her successors, seemed to entail reckless sacrifice of the industrial base of the economy in favour of fragile service industries – not a tempting prospect. So the French treasury continued to make huge grants and preferential loans, in defiance of Single Market competition policy. Public utilities such as Electricité de France and France-Télécom, protected at home from foreign purchase or competition, were able to buy up utilities in other European countries, particularly in deregulated Britain. Despite these efforts, France lagged economically. Traditional industries languished: the last French coalmine closed in April 2004. The Stability and Growth Pact, the guarantor of the Euro, made things worse by its deflationary effect. It was openly broken by France and Germany after 2003, and in 2005 they forced its abandonment. The British Treasury were pleased, because it showed that they had been right to stay outside the Euro. The French were pleased, because it showed that they had the power to break or change the rules. Only the smaller states were not pleased, because the demise of Jean Monnet’s vision of the rule of law and regulation by neutral experts exposed their weakness.

Evidence of French economic decline, especially in comparison with Britain, became a subject of lively debate in the 2000s. But there were few calls for British-style liberalization, seen as destructive, harsh and politically suicidal. A generation of readers of progressive newspapers such as Le Monde, Libération and Le Nouvel Observateur, and the many French admirers of radical British film-makers such as Ken Loach, shuddered at the Dickensian horrors of the new Britain, with its armies of beggars and its bumptious millionaires. France and Europe had to be spared its successes no less than its failures. Events strengthened this repulsion. The ‘mad cow’ crisis of the 1990s and fears of the spread of BSE to humans led the French government to impose a ban on British beef imports, which was maintained with public support until 2002, three years after the EU lifted its own embargo. Here was an unmissable opportunity to trumpet the superiority of French agriculture and the value of the CAP. French visitors to England refused to touch anything associated with meat; children were forbidden to eat sweets that might contain gelatine. Newspapers sniffed out a secret organization smuggling the deadly beef into France with the aid of the British army, while the perfidious Tony Blair exported animal feed to France that was banned in Britain.⁴⁰ The directors of a chain of restaurants were imprisoned for serving British steaks. When the ban was finally lifted, not surprisingly imports did not revive. In 2001 came the foot and mouth epidemic in Britain, with mass slaughter and burning of animal carcasses shown repeatedly on television. ‘The medieval glow of funeral pyres’ was condign retribution for ‘twenty years of ultraliberalism’.⁴¹ The lesson was reiterated that the British model was a public danger compared with the wise interventionism of the French model. Controversial and highly publicized business decisions such as the closing down of all Marks and Spencer stores in France and the ‘delocalization’ of Hoover from Burgundy to Scotland provided further proof of the menace. Articles appeared with headlines such as ‘England: total crisis’ and ‘The illusions of ultraliberalism’.⁴² No one talked about ‘Carthage’ – classical education was as moribund as in Britain – but the idea of the ‘nation of shopkeepers’ was not far away. The Sangatte refugee camp (finally closed under British pressure in November 2002), from which non-European migrants stowed away on Channel Tunnel trains to England, encapsulated the difference. The French, relieved yet somewhat offended that asylum-seekers were so eager to leave France, blamed Britain’s deregulated system: no identity cards, lax policing, and a ‘grey’ economy of menial jobs. The British were being punished where they had sinned.

So the ‘French’ and ‘British’ models continued in sharp opposition. It was not negligence that made France one of the most recalcitrant countries (Britain was one of the quickest) in applying Brussels directives. In 2004, the supposedly liberal finance minister Nicolas Sarkozy laboured to prevent the bankrupt Alstom from being taken over by ‘foreigners’ – the German firm Siemens. The EU Single Market commissioner, Frits Bolkestein, exclaimed in exasperation that ‘I cannot help feeling that I am in a time warp. I have to pinch myself to make sure that I am not back in the 1960s, 1970s or 1980s . . . To listen to recent statements by French and German politicians, you would think the [single market] strategy had never existed.’ He criticized them for favouring their own companies, while aiming to handicap new EU members by forcing up their costs.⁴³ Trade between EU members had stagnated. ‘Anti-dumping’ measures (against allegedly unfair competition) and other non-tariff barriers were estimated in 2004 as equivalent to a 40 per cent import tariff on manufactured goods from outside the Union, rising to 60 per cent for ‘hi-tech’ products. The CAP, despite reforms, kept Europe’s food prices 50–60 per cent above world levels. Two decades after the Single European Act, only 16 per cent of member states’ own purchases fully applied Single Market rules, and tight restrictions remained on trade in services – Britain’s strongest suit.⁴⁴Hence, its chronic trade deficit with the rest of the EU, above all with France. Bolkestein’s modest plan to begin to apply the Single Market to some services caused an outcry in France, and was squashed by Chirac, with German support, in March 2005. Some British trade unionists wanted Britain to imitate French protectionism. The chancellor, Gordon Brown, retorted that ‘the old integrationist project . . . the vision of a trade bloc Europe, is fatally undermined’. Significantly, these comments were made in a speech on ‘Britishness’.⁴⁵ But Delors’s former assistant François Lamoureux, still a senior official in Brussels, proudly declared that ‘Europe today . . . is not a liberal Europe. It is extremely regulated [to preserve] a certain social model.’⁴⁶ As in the days of Thatcher and Delors, Europe was heading simultaneously in opposite directions.

The commitment to enlarge the EU in 2004 – most popular in Britain and least in France⁴⁷ – brought the perennial differences to a head. Bringing in much of eastern Europe would make the CAP and Delorean subsidies unaffordable. Moreover, the new states were disinclined to follow the French model. As the British thought they were coasting to victory, the French took pre-emptive action. Disagreement with the Anglo-Saxons over Iraq had revitalized the ‘Franco-German couple’. In October 2002, without consulting other governments, Chirac persuaded the German chancellor Schröder to agree to preserve the CAP for its existing beneficiaries, keep its budget rising, withhold structural funds from new EU members, and curtail the rights of their citizens to work in Western Europe – in short, to preserve the ‘French model’ by excluding new members from full participation. He later boasted to the French electorate that ‘80 per cent of aid to French farmers comes from Europe. We were the only ones who wanted it. How did we manage it? By an understanding with our German friends.’⁴⁸ This French coup caused an angry exchange between Blair and Chirac. It was a costly victory for France, whose single-minded defence of its own interests, its bending or defiance of EU rules, and its overt lack of sympathy for the new member states meant that any idea of France as leader of the new Europe had evaporated. Whereas de Gaulle had wanted Europe to be a ‘lever’ for French power, it had become in French eyes principally a barrier against change. Although claiming to be the ‘dynamo of Europe’, the ‘Franco-German couple’ had really become its brake, as the two sick men of Europe struggled to prevent an enlarged community from running away from them.

A Convention on the Future of Europe, appointed in February 2002 to suggest ways of bringing the EU closer to its citizens, instead set out to ‘deepen’ it by drafting a Constitution before the accession of the new members. Britain urged simpler and more flexible rules, and its foreign secretary Jack Straw urged that the Constitution should be ‘just a few lines’.⁴⁹ But the Convention, chaired by the former French president Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, produced several hundred pages. EU leaders met in Brussels in June 2004 to approve the draft constitution and choose a new Commission, an unprecedently difficult task. Differences were aggravated by recrimination over the war in Iraq, which exploded into European politics.

At least one neutral observer supposed that the Blair government must only be pretending to support a dying federalism in order to maintain British influence in Brussels and Washington until the French model inevitably gave up the ghost.⁵⁰ If so, it was a convincing performance. Blair tried to push the bloated Giscard Constitution through Parliament as a mere ‘tidying up exercise’. But he surrendered to political and media pressure in April 2004, and conceded a referendum. The French government, scarcely concealing its annoyance, felt obliged to do the same. Thus a match was applied to the combustible material that had been accumulating since the days of Thatcher and Delors. Opinion polls left little doubt that the British electorate would vote No. Le Monde, always suspicious of cross-Channel machinations, feared that Blair would lose the referendum, ‘drag the constitution down with him’ and thus ‘deserve the thanks of perfidious Albion’.⁵¹ The British government scheduled their referendum as late as possible, in 2006. This left the possibility that some other country – perhaps Poland – would save them by voting No first. Or, if all the other members voted Yes, they would be able to deploy the usual desperate argument that Britain dared not ‘miss the European train’ and face isolation.

Was the Constitution the last chance to fix the ‘French model’ into law before the new member countries could have a say? Would it have been the means of finally imposing the ‘British model’ on a reluctant France? Or was it an exercise in equivocation that would have generated years of political and legal wrangling? We shall never know. But the debate in Britain and France showed how wide the cross-Channel divide had grown. In Britain, critics attacked the EU for interfering too much. In France, they condemned it for not interfering enough.

So Near and Yet So Far

Always when we left, with peeling noses and regret, we promised ourselves that one day we would live here. We had talked about it during the long grey winters and the damp green summers . . . And now, somewhat to our surprise, we had done it. We had committed ourselves. We had bought a house, taken French lessons, said our goodbyes, shipped over our two dogs, and become foreigners.

PETER MAYLE, A Year in Provence, 1989

Based in the UK, you have more of the feeling that you’re part of the global economy. France seems to do business at a slower pace. The culture of entrepreneurship, although it has developed a lot recently, is certainly less developed in France than the UK.

French businessman in London, 2000⁵²

The English hate the French. Who reciprocate . . . A purée of prejudice on a bed of inherited loathing. The French consider the English to be arrogant islanders, eating boiled lamb with mint, and not knowing how to be seductive. The English consider us talkative, arrogant, dirty, smelling of sweat and garlic, flighty, cheating and corrupt . . . The English love France, but not the French.

Le Point, 30 July 1999

The 1990s saw the beginning of an unprecedented cross-Channel migration. The explosion of tourism is part of the story: in 2000, 11.9 million Britons – one in five! – spent on average a week in France, and 3 million French a long weekend in Britain.⁵³ But residence, not tourism, is the real novelty. By the end of 2002 some 74,000 adult Britons held cartes de séjour giving them the right to work in France, an increase of a quarter in ten years. The total figure for residents was higher, including dependants, pensioners, and above all intermittent residents. Here is an unprecedented phenomenon: official French figures estimated that 600,000 houses were owned by Britons.⁵⁴ This equated roughly to one for every thirty British families. The traditional holiday areas of the Midi remained the favourites. But the West saw a new influx (with a rise of 120 per cent in Brittany), as did rural areas of the South, such as Languedoc and Gascony. The biggest increase of all was in newer, cheaper regions such as Poitou-Charente (170 per cent).⁵⁵Some less sunny regions, however close and even picturesque, such as Nord-Pas-de-Calais, Lorraine and Champagne-Ardennes, saw declines. Cheap flights, cheap car ferries and high-speed trains made distance less of a factor.

The arrival of the French in Britain from the 1990s onwards is more striking still in both quantity and novelty: for the first time ever, there were more French in Britain than British in France. French consulates registered 91,500 French citizens resident – an increase of 250 per cent in ten years. The real number, however, was estimated to be around 300,000, with probably about two-thirds in the London area. Over the same period, the number of British residents in Paris fell by nearly a quarter, as businesses escaped French labour regulations by concentrating in London. Britain in a few years hugely outdistanced Germany and Belgium, long the main European destinations of French migrants, and equalled or overtook the United States. The French in Britain, unlike those in other countries, were varied in status and much younger, most in their twenties.⁵⁶

These movements renewed a very old difference, manifest since the eighteenth century. ‘No Frenchman ever goes to England for pleasure, he never lives there by choice, and thinks only of coming back as soon as possible’ has long been a familiar refrain.⁵⁷This was no more strictly true than its corollary that the English only went to France for pleasure – there were 1.5 million British business trips to France in 2000 compared with 1 million French business trips to Britain⁵⁸ – but it was broadly true. Most French came to Britain to make money; most British went to France to spend it: at least 5 billion euros a year, a significant boost to the rural economy. The prosperous middle-aged British families who bought property in Languedoc in many ways resembled their forbears who had settled not far away in Pau. The relative cheapness of France has for centuries permitted a genteel lifestyle, with a pleasant climate, sparsely inhabited countryside, and gastronomic pleasure.

Similarly, the young French men and women prominent in the restaurants, bars, football teams and offices of what French newspapers called ‘the European Eldorado’ were not so different from the wig-makers, dancing masters, maids, waiters and cooks who had preceded them over three centuries. French craftsmen have always been better trained in certain luxury occupations. London had long been a magnet, but the boom of the 1990s multiplied its attractiveness. In 2003, for example, one-third of the graduates of the Lyon business school went to work in the City – more than went to Paris. The modern equivalent of the dancing master is perhaps the football manager: Arsène Wenger, after a mediocre playing career in France, went to Paris to learn scientific sports management and to a Cambridge language school to learn English. ‘The professor’ had a transforming impact on English football in the 1990s by applying professional rigour to the training of Arsenal, which he made one of the world’s best teams.

Unemployment in 2004 was twice as high in France as Britain, and youth unemployment, estimated at 26 per cent (double in ethnic ghettos) was the highest in Europe.⁵⁹ Those who did find a job were subject to seniority in promotion, still important in French firms. Those seeking work, or trying to change careers, sought opportunities in England, often intending to stay for a few months or a few years, obtain experience, and improve their English. Nowhere else in Europe or America offered this. L’Express’s business supplement Réussir published an eighty-four-page special in 1999 giving advice on studying in England, finding a job and setting up a business: ‘Here, when you’re young, you can start from scratch’; ‘For the English, only results count; the school you come from doesn’t matter and careers are less political.’ French firms large and small set up British operations, or even moved there: by 2004 there were 1,700 French companies employing 330,000 people. Lower taxation and less regulation were powerful attractions. In Britain, it took two days and £200 to set up a business; in France, thirty-five times as much and forty times as long.⁶⁰There was a brain-drain of entrepreneurs in new industries, such as Philippe Foriel-Destezet, creator of the world’s leading personnel services company, and Marc Lassus, ‘the dot of French dotcom, the Fifth Republic’s answer to Bill Gates’.⁶¹ The French ‘Silicon Valley’ was the Thames Estuary. Seven of the 2004 French national football team were employed by English clubs, whose pay rates, under British taxation, gave them on average five times as much cash as at home. The departure from Paris to London of the ‘supermodel’ Laetitia Casta in 2000 ruffled patriotic feathers because she had modelled for the official statue of Marianne, the symbol of the Republic that adorns every town hall. No less a personage than a former minister of the interior, Jean-Pierre Chevènement, warned darkly that not only would she find London rents higher than in Paris, and the Tube less good than the Métro, but ‘if she gets sick, which I hope she won’t, the healthcare in a British hospital will be far short of French hospitals’.

As Chevènement predicted, many French Londoners did find the Great Wen hard going. L’Express told its readers they would be amazed by the tolerance for eccentricity, the amount of beer drunk, the respect given to customers, the informality of work relationships, and the ease of finding a job.⁶² Not very different, in fact, from what was being said in the 1750s. Most intended to stay for a fairly short time, so the level of integration with the natives or even with each other was limited. A monthly magazine, Ici Londres – an ironic echo of the 1940s – carried lists of French shops, dentists, doctors, clairvoyants, lonely hearts, and groups for playing belote. Families unwilling to rely on British state or private schools had to brave the living costs of the West End to be close enough to the Lycée Charles de Gaulle in South Kensington. This replaced Soho as the nearest thing to a French colony. The nearby embassy and consulate, the cultural institute and the lycée spawned cafés and bookshops, and streets adorned by elaborately casual teenagers who could have come straight from the Boulevard Saint-Michel. Fulham boasted a French pub. Provincial towns acquired their smaller French colonies. But all in all their presence attracted little notice. Institutionally, it was barely visible outside London: the single French lycée might be compared with thirty in Spain; the two consulates with Britain’s five in France; the two French churches with eight British churches and thirty chaplaincies.⁶³ This no doubt reflects the suddenness of the French influx, and probably a tacit admission that to establish a noteworthy official cultural presence in Britain would be too costly in money and effort.

As young French people went to share in the excitement and profits of the ‘British model’, older British people and their families sought the security and comfort of the ‘French model’. The high-speed trains, well-kept motorways, small provincial airports, plethoric medical care, and subsidized cultural events gave pleasure unalloyed by thoughts of the tax bill they entailed. Even British Conservatives expressed admiration for French hospitals and state schools. Rural France was the recipient of a unique devotion going well beyond considerations of price, convenience and weather, and which, as we have seen (see above, page 406), dates back to the nineteenth century. Now, however, there was a rush to buy property, whereas earlier generations had rented. Cashing in the huge increase in house values in Britain enabled them to buy and renovate properties ranging fromchâteaux to chaumières abandoned as the rural population dwindled. French Property News circulated lists of desirable residences. Owning a corner of France, and making it a second or even a first home, came to embody the Arcadian dream close to British hearts, but unobtainable at home at a reasonable cost. Those buying houses in France gave their reasons as ‘lifestyle’, a ‘slower pace of life’, a ‘traditional rustic’ atmosphere. One estimate is that half the buyers were retired, a quarter came for holidays, and a quarter – and growing – came to seek a new, less ‘stressful’, career.⁶⁴

Becoming foreigners, as Mayle puts it, could be a rebirth, shedding old identities. But rebirth is testing, particularly when the midwife is a French notary, mayor or tax inspector. Many sold up within the first three years; thereafter, they tended to stay.⁶⁵Television programmes followed the adventures and misadventures of intrepid purchasers of overgrown vineyards, run-down caravan sites and ramshackle hovels without plumbing. Expatriate estate agents, advisers, architects, builders, landscape gardeners and troubleshooters multiplied to service them. Books on how to manage in France were published. Magazines such as France (‘Your passport to France and the French way of life’) encouraged potential settlers with tourism features, basic information (‘Petit déjeuner, as the French refer to breakfast’), tips on house-hunting, avoiding mosquitoes, or learning French fast, and weightier advice on French tax law. The prevailing tone was one of enthusiastic goodwill towards a society depicted as a quaint but benevolent Ruritania: ‘Can you imagine a law whereby parents have to name their offspring from a government list? Incredible, but it was statutory in France until 1981.’⁶⁶ There were more than 100 British clubs and societies, including the Dordogne Ladies Club, established in the mid 1980s (which organized shopping trips to Bordeaux and a Christmas bazaar), the Dordogne Old Gentlemen, branches of the British Legion, and a number of cricket teams.

This might recall the expatriate exclusiveness of the Pau Hunt or the English Club. One French newspaper indeed complained of ‘colonials’, and pointed out that Christopher Patten, the last governor of Hong Kong, had exchanged the Peak for the Brussels Commission and a house near Albi. But modern British settlers, unlike their forerunners, yearned to be accepted by the locals. This was an important part of the appeal for enchanted admirers of Peter Mayle. A study of Basse Normandie found not only that all wanted to be part of the community, but that most thought they already were. In a few cases, this is undoubted: there have been British-born mayors, municipal councillors, and a parish priest. On the whole, though, Normans considered British participation to be ‘very superficial’; their knowledge of the economy, culture and politics ‘elementary’; and their competence in French ‘very limited’. Not all Normans were flattered to be regarded as picturesque natives of a rural backwater. There was little hostility towards the newcomers (though a few still considered them ‘the hereditary enemy’), but not much enthusiasm either, except for those in poor rural areas who benefited economically. The friendliest elements were the young, the middle-class, and those who spoke English. Some criticized the British for being mean, keeping to themselves, and spending all their time renovating their houses. They also suffered some guilt by association with ‘booze-cruisers’ and football hooligans, being suspected of a penchant for drunkenness and violence. Worst of all, they might raise property prices beyond local reach – by 35 per cent between 2000 and 2002 in Aquitaine. Old-established francophiles deplored the arrival of ignorant newcomers: ‘One foreign family in the village in enough.’ Peter Mayle raised hackles among his neighbours by attracting coachloads of tourists. In Chamonix – ‘an English suburb for all but tax purposes’ – 10 per cent of the population was British. The French joked uneasily that in Charente there was now one Englishman per village, but in Dordogne, there was only one Frenchman per village. A politician warned that ‘when 80 per cent of the population of Dordogne is English then it will not quite be Dordogne’.⁶⁷ As far as we know, no equivalent fear has yet been expressed about the fate of South Kensington.

THE TUNNEL: BREAKTHROUGH

During the Second World War, the old tunnel workings at Sangatte had been blown up by the Germans, while from Shakespeare Cliff the British had kept a wary ear open for possible secret digging. Revival of the tunnel idea in 1954 – the fiftieth anniversary of the entente cordiale – had other historical echoes. The suggestion was made by Paul Leroy-Beaulieu, an administrator of the still surviving 1874 tunnel company and the grandson of Michel Chevalier, the French negotiator of the free trade treaty of 1860 (see above, page 364).⁶⁸ In 1956 the Suez Canal company, having lost its canal, joined the project. With Britain’s attempt to join the Common Market, the idea took on new significance. It was briefly discussed by Macmillan and de Gaulle, and de Gaulle’s ‘Non’ did not kill the project. The real problem was money: the British Treasury and the French finance ministry were hostile. But the promoters kept promoting, and after Britain finally entered the EEC, a tunnel seemed an important symbol of the new era. In 1973, a treaty and convention were signed, ninety years after the first works had been suspended. However, the costs were daunting, and no one wanted an ‘underground Concorde’. The project was suspended again in 1975, with 1,000 yards of tunnel dug. At least one prominent French politician took this as proof of Britain’s ‘weak taste for Europe’.⁶⁹ It was Margaret Thatcher who revived the project at her first summit with Mitterrand, on condition that it was paid for by private capital. A report in 1982 readopted the 1970s plan for a bored railway tunnel, rather than one made of prefabricated segments, a bridge or some combination. Banks and small shareholders – largely French – were tempted, to their subsequent chagrin, by low cost estimates and wildly optimistic traffic forecasts. The Tunnel was opened by the Queen and President Mitterrand on 6 May 1994. He remarked that French travellers would have leisure to admire the Kent countryside, owing to the modest speed of the trains in England. At last, after 138 projects over 192 years, British coyness had been overcome.

The British and French thus came into contact with each other more often, longer, and for more reasons than ever before. Both wanted certain things from the other, and tended to ignore the rest. No doubt there were exceptions. There must have been young French entrepreneurs who frequented the Tate galleries, sampled country pubs, and went walking in the Cairngorms. Equally, there were doubtless British home-owners in Provence who followed the political reports in Le Monde, read the latest French novels, and became experts on local history. But was there that urgent interest in each other’s life and culture that gripped so many in the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries?

One test is the exchange of books.⁷⁰ The French published far more English books in translation, and imported far more in the original, than the British did French books. Is this one more proof of philistine British insularity and cultivated French cosmopolitanism? Not quite. French imports were fairly narrow in range. Most were children’s books, language textbooks, or non-fiction best-sellers such as Le Livre Guinness des Records. Some of the more popular British authors – the novelist and essayist Julian Barnes (‘the incorrigible francophile’ – L’Express); the historian Theodore Zeldin, and indeed Peter Mayle – were those who wrote admiringly about France. If the French translated more contemporary English fiction, the British continued to buy large numbers of nineteenth-century French novels. The British also imported more serious non-fiction works than did the French, a sign of their more outward-looking academic world. Some, such as Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s Montaillou, even became best-sellers. Philosophical and critical works, by Foucault, Derrida, Lacan, Barthes, Bourdieu, Braudel and others, had huge influence in Anglo-Saxon academia. The French showed no comparable interest in any anglophone intellectual, however eminent.

Popularity, in both books and films, often reflected established expectations.⁷¹ P.D. James and Ruth Rendell (one of whose novels was filmed with authentic creepiness by France’s master of suspense, Claude Chabrol, as La Cérémonie) owed some of their success to a genre which the French considered quintessentially English – the murder mystery. A similar comment could be made about some successful French authors in Britain, such as Michel Houellebecq – porn, philosophy and provocation had long been considered quintessentially French. Eroticism was also the subject of Catherine Breillat’s Romance (1999), which changed film censorship in Britain by being the first mainstream film showing unsimulated sex and being given an ‘18’ certificate: the British Board of Film Censors explained that it was ‘very French’.⁷² Critics agreed: it displayed ‘the venerable French tradition of philosophy in the boudoir’, cutting ‘straight to the heart of sex in a way that Bridget Jones would never understand’.

Among younger age-groups, there were signs of a less stereotyped interest, perhaps reflecting the mutual attraction of London and Paris. There was a large market for light-hearted and/or highly romanticized depictions of the cities, hence the success of writers such as Nick Hornby and Helen Fielding, and of films such as Amélie or Notting Hill. In music Daft Punk (two Frenchmen) were highly fashionable in the 1990s, and objects of intense study in the British musical press. The most startling cultural phenomenon of the turn of the century, however, was an international craze for British-inspired books and films intended mainly for children – Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings. In 2000, the four best-selling works of fiction in France were all ‘Arri Pottair’ novels, of which 7 million copies were sold in four years. It is impossible to imagine even a fraction of the same audience being interested by any book or film set in the real Britain, whether contemporary or historical.

Both countries had a voracious appetite for South American, Indian, African and American films and novels – often the same ones. The French (leaving aside Harry Potter!) bought more German, Italian, Belgian and American novels than British. With a few exceptions, contemporary French novelists had limited sales in Britain, and only a few serious weeklies carried occasional reviews of untranslated French works. One British publisher blamed French writers for being inward-looking, complacent and provincial.⁷³So however one qualifies the picture, the general French and British publics in the 2000s showed a far shallower interest in each other’s contemporary cultures than at key moments in the past. Yet this was a time of unprecedented personal contacts between the two peoples. Was it simply that familiarity bred indifference?

Both nations tended to value in each other echoes of a more prestigious past, rather than a prosaic present. These inchoate but ingrained feelings emerged in advertising images, consumer goods and opinion polls. Advertisements for British and pseudo-British products in French magazines emphasized refinement, aristocracy, exclusivity, tradition, even, occasionally, eccentricity – all old themes. (A famous Paris department store’s 2005 display of a fashion line startlingly called ‘Essex Girls’ is perhaps the exception to the rule.) Jaguar and Rover cars were sold for their leather seats and wooden trimming more than their mechanics. The imagery was ‘English’, even when it featured tartan.⁷⁴ The French upper classes still liked having English nannies, and some drawled in what could seem a slightly English intonation. The Paris shop Old England, for generations owned by the same (French) family, supplied expensive tweeds and mackintoshes to bon chic bon genre Parisians: its ideal was ‘something with history and a rustic element’. The style of expensive casualness was predominantly masculine, as it had been for over two centuries; and – as during all that time – its peak of elegance was when worn by French women.

Advertising for French goods in Britain was similarly conventional: the old themes of chic and sexy. A widely shown series of television advertisements for Renault cars in the 1990s featured a pert, quintessentially Left Bank ‘Nicole’ (played by a Czech actress), her raffishly sophisticated ‘Papa’, his mistress, his mother, and the family chauffeur – a sort of miniature Pagnol story oddly redolent of the 1950s. This is perhaps why more recent advertising for cars attempted first to be more openly erotic and then steadily less ‘French’. There seemed to be a general trend away from emphasis on French or British images de marque, which may reflect strained cross-Channel relations. An exception is Stella Artois beer, brewed in Britain and marketed through comical ‘Jean de Florette’ rusticity. Where Frenchness signified modernity, it was in female fashions and cosmetics. French masculine images (except the occasional macho footballer) apparently did not appeal to British male consumers. This may echo the gendering of national stereotypes that appeared in the late nineteenth century (see above, page 450).

Opinion surveys gave bizarre insights into what the mixture of nostalgia, current affairs and memory boiled down to. Fairly searching studies in the 1990s and for the centenary of the entente cordiale in 2004 showed much continuity and some change.⁷⁵Ancient stereotypes were alive and well. The British associated the French with elegance, refinement, culture, talkativeness, gastronomy, seductiveness and arrogance. The French associated the British with humour, eccentricity, insularity, coldness, principle, egotism, drunkenness, tradition and snobbery, and thought that ‘five o’clock tea’ was a universal British custom. These notions would have been familiar to Dr Johnson and Abbé Le Blanc, and to Flora Tristan and William Makepeace Thackeray. They are deeply rooted in literature, memory and language. Reality was often bent to fit them: hence the durable popularity of the puerile comedian Benny Hill in France, regarded as a brilliantly surrealist manifestation of British humour, or the belief in Britain that French footballers talk philosophy. A small proportion of each nation continued to think the other smelly and repulsive, though in fact both had improved their personal hygiene beyond recognition. Yet there were also changes. The British admired the once ignored French countryside – a constant theme of weekend supplements – while the French, who once universally praised the British landscape, no longer noticed it. Nor did the French any longer admire the British political system. Many British continued to judge the French ‘cowardly’ (something that would never have occurred to Marlborough or Wellington, who would rather have seen reckless courage as a French characteristic). Some once universal clichés seemed to be fading. The French less commonly described the British as ‘perfidious’ or ‘hypocritical’: indeed, they regarded their strongest characteristic as ‘sticking to their principles’ – not seen as an unalloyed virtue. Nor were the British any longer regarded as sportifs. Both nations still regarded each other as independent, selfish, proud and arrogant – very old complaints arising from irritation that the others ‘can be so proud of their country to the extent of failing to perceive the paragon across the Channel’.⁷⁶ Yet contrary to a widespread view influenced by the (usually jocular) francophobia of their tabloid press, the British appear to like, admire and trust the French considerably more than the French do them.⁷⁷

If these notions of the other were ingrained, they were based on only the skimpiest knowledge of geography, history, culture or politics. Frequent coverage in each other’s press – tourist spreads, advice on what to see in Paris and London, book and film reviews, and frequent articles on fashion – left little definite impression. Only London and Paris, with Big Ben, the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre pyramid and the Arc de Triomphe, struck immediate chords, along with Oxford and Cambridge. The millions who travelled in the 2000s seemed to pick up little general knowledge. In history, only the great upheavals were recalled: the British knew about the French revolution, and many French remembered Waterloo, but otherwise the Second World War was the only shared event that left a deep mark, with de Gaulle and Churchill bestriding the common memory. Among politicians, only the incumbent French president and British prime minister were known across the Channel, along with Margaret Thatcher. Apart from the royal family, always prominent in French consciousness, few British contemporaries were recognized. Knowledge of each other’s culture was just as sketchy. The French knew about Shakespeare, and the British, the Impressionists. Contemporary culture left little or no trace. For the British in the 1990s, Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre were still the intellectuals to conjure with, and the most famous Frenchwomen were Edith Piaf (thirty years after her death) and Brigitte Bardot – the only French actress engraved in British memories nearly forty years after Et Dieu créa la femme.⁷⁸ In most cultural perceptions, there seemed to be a long time-lag. Almost every British broadcast item on France was accompanied by the accordion music popular in the 1950s. Music (not however that of Purcell, Elgar, or Britten) was the aspect of British culture that the French in 2004 said they admired most, though the names they recalled were from a generation or two earlier – the Beatles and the Sex Pistols. Though 80 per cent of the British expressed admiration for French art, culture and creativity, the only contemporary names those polled in 2004 recognized were those of footballers – and, for a highly knowledgeable 1 per cent, the burly actor Gérard Depardieu. Six out of ten could name no living French person at all.⁷⁹In short, the British rather like France for what they think it was; the French rather dislike Britain for what they think it is.

As always, each country offered the other a mirror in which to examine itself. For a generation after 1960, the British saw in a successful and assertive France a measure of their own decline. When from the 1980s that decline, at least economically, was reversed, they saw in French ‘lifestyle’ – from trains à grande vitesse to lunches of extrême lenteur – a reminder of the cost of their own revival in terms of spending cuts and workaholism. This was a message that many in France were eager to listen to, as it confirmed their determination to defend the ‘French model’ both at home and in Europe. But dissenting voices increased, and in the 2000s bookshops were piled with tracts asserting that France was now in decline. Some even pointed to Britain as the example that a French revival would have to follow.

LANGUAGE: VOTING WITH YOUR TONGUE

Recall the quip of Charles V: one speaks Spanish to God, French to men, Italian to women, and German to horses . . . He doesn’t envisage that one should speak the Goddams’ idiom to anyone . . . even horses!

charles de gaulle^{80 6}

There is an interdependence between the economic power of a nation and the radiation of its culture . . . this is why the spread of French culture in the world must be ceaselessly reinforced and extended.

VALÉRY GISCARD D’ESTAING⁸¹

No country has been more sensitive about language than France. A concern to preserve the new international status of French emerged as early as the eighteenth century. It has always been a political as well as a cultural issue, because French has been both a means and a sign of influence. As material power declined, its language, values and culture still ensured France a unique prestige. The State strove to maintain this: in 2000 there were 85,000 agents culturels working abroad, and considerable efforts were made to consolidate La Francophonie, roughly a linguistic counterpart of the Commonwealth. The reduction of the international use of French explained much of France’s pessimism towards the outside world. Public bodies such as the French Academy or the Ministry of Culture were concerned with one enemy: English. French borrowings from other languages caused little disturbance. No one insists on calling a pizza a ‘flan aux fromages’ or a corrida a ‘concours tauro-machique’. In contrast, thanks to the Haut Comité de la Langue Française, software is officially le logiciel and email le courrier électronique. The Toubon Law of 1994 (introduced by the minister of culture Jacques Toubon) required the exclusive use of French words in all official contexts, including conferences and lectures supported from public funds. ‘The use of a language is not innocent,’ explained the minister. ‘It becomes . . . an instrument of domination.’⁸² French and European regulations – promoted by Paris – aimed to protect French commercial culture from American competition, for example by limiting the amount of American pop music that could be broadcast. Fashionable French performers, presumably seeing a gap in the market, started recording in English – and some British critics felt that they had the advantage of being able to sing lyrics such as ‘mmm baby, I feel right’ with greater conviction. The French authorities also maintained many regulatory and technical barriers in telecommunications and broadcasting systems, in dubbing and subtitling. ‘Europe’ had long been seen as the strongest bulwark against what Toubon (nicknamed ‘Allgood’ by his irreverent compatriots) called ‘Anglo-merchant culture’.⁸³ English was banned from the European Commission’s press room until 1995. But European integration in fact became one of the greatest vectors for English. After the 2004 enlargement, the Commission was largely anglophone – despite the French government’s offering sybaritic French lessons to new Commissioners in a château near Avignon. Some British and French officials think that this linguistic shift must subtly change how Brussels thinks, though the repellent jargon appropriately nicknamed ‘le Bad English’ suggests that its cogitations will remain less than limpid. Even the French finance ministry began to use English internally, when discussing documents destined for Brussels, where all economic and financial reports were drafted in English. A self-appointed watchdog, the Académie de la Carpette Anglaise (Academy of the English Doormat), gave an annual ‘civic indignity’ award (the ‘English Doormat’) to ‘deserters’ among the national elite who ‘collaborated’ in the spread of English. More significant than the existence of this eccentric body was the telling range of those it stigmatized, who included the president of the European Central Bank; the Brussels mandarin Pascal Lamy; the head of Presses Universitaires de France (for publishing a management textbook in English); and the boss of Christian Dior, for marketing beauty products with ‘anglomaniac’ names. But even the Académie’s own webpage advertised immersion language courses in London and an English-language dating agency in Paris. Campaigning to prevent the use of English seemed ever more blimpish.

The great change took place at the grass-roots: the French learned English, or, as some prefer it, American. Only a generation ago, educated French people rarely spoke English, and read only a little. Those who regarded themselves as knowing English were rarely fluent. Leading academics published major works without reference to anything published in English. In the 2000s, it became rare to find any fairly educated person who did not understand some English, and reasonable fluency was common. The 2004 Thélot Report on educational reform urged more teaching of English at primary school (winning its author an ‘English Doormat’). Since the 1960s, a period at a language school in Britain had become a rite of passage for many French adolescents. Cradles of the French elite such as ‘Sciences Po’ and ‘HEC’⁸⁴ began teaching whole courses in English. European integration in higher education proved a further vehicle for anglicization, as student exchanges created a large influx of students to Britain – 50,000 full-time undergraduates in 2004 – not balanced in the other direction. Visionary French europhiles aimed to redress the balance by requiring compulsory study in two countries for all Europe’s university students.

Inevitably, the British bothered less and less to learn other languages, though they remained the world’s main foreign learners of French.⁸⁵ Anglo-Saxons could travel and do business in English, a convenience they paid for by monoglot cultural impoverishment. The French could no longer regard their language as the world’s principal cultural medium – a status it had, in fact, held quite briefly. But they were compensated by the stimulus of having to learn another language, and this, to a society that had traditionally been rather inward-looking and stay-at-home, was of incalculable long-term importance. The alternative would have been increasing marginalization: to reverse the old joke, ‘Fog in Paris, world isolated.’

Size Matters

Countries constantly compare themselves with their neighbours, but few do so with the compulsive concern of France and Britain. Commentators and politicians in both countries constantly proclaim themselves ‘the world’s fourth-largest economy’, after the United States, Japan and Germany.⁷French commentators talk confidently about being the world’s ‘third military power’, or even its only ‘world’ power apart from the United States. If British voices rarely make such a claim, few would concede primacy to France. Opinion polls regularly show that each country regards itself as considerably more important than the other.

For the first time in their histories, the two countries are keeping neck and neck. Their populations are, despite France’s much larger territory, now practically identical. On broad measures of economic, social and cultural development, little separates them, despite their trumpeted differences of approach to education and health care. In intriguingly miscellaneous areas of life – age of first sexual intercourse (the French reported losing their virginity on average a month earlier), sporting achievement, artistic activity, even cigarette-smoking and murder rates – they are similar or identical. Some striking differences, as in road deaths, may be narrowing. Alcohol consumption too is converging, as the French cut down and the British binge. The Corruption Index does show a difference, with Britain still considered the world’s cleanest large state: here France shows alarming signs of deterioration.

Where the Franco-British comparison engenders controversy is when it affects real and perceived power: that is, in economic performance and military force. The two economies are comparable. Both are leading traders in both ‘visibles’ (goods) and ‘invisibles’ (money and services). Each has characteristic advantages: for example for Britain the City of London (helping to make it the world’s second exporter of services), and for France tourism (two-thirds of its earnings from services). The two economies have become so similar in size that patriotic statisticians disagree as to which is larger, and small fluctuations in the values of the pound or the euro can be sufficient to make one appear wealthier than the other. Yet the trends are clear. In the post-war period, French growth was markedly higher, and in 1960 France’s GDP per head overtook Britain’s. From the 1980s the trend reversed. British growth-rates overhauled those of France from the early 1990s. Its wealth per capita overtook that of France in the mid-1990s, making the British for the time being the richest of Europe’s large nations.

Growth Rates (real GDP: 1991=100)

Wealth (British GDP per person as a percentage of French GDP per person)

THE NON-IDENTICAL TWINS⁸⁶

	France	Britain
Population	60.4 m	60.5 m
Density (per sq km)	108	244
GDP	$1,911 bn	$1,927 bn
GDP per head	$28,600	$30,200
GDP growth, %	1.7 3
Inflation, %	1.6	1.5
Total labour force	27.2 m	30.2 m
Unemployment, %	9.8	4.8
Annual hours worked	1,500	1,750
National debt as % of GDP (and OECD ranking)	50.9 (10th)	40.4 (16th)
Government spending (% of GDP)	53.5	40.7
Trade as % of world exports (and ranking)	5.18 (6th)	6.74 (4th)
Invisible trade as % of world exports	5.61 (5th)	10.91 (2nd)
Trade balance (2003–4)	$4.6 bn surplus	$88.4 bn deficit
Main trading partner Cross-Channel exports87	Germany perfume, plastic, rubber, paper, cars, furniture, fashion products	USA chemicals, metal goods, machinery, electricals, men’s and sports clothes
Productivity in manufacturing (% increase, 2000–02)88	13.7	11.3
Direct incoming foreign investment 1994–2003	$351.6 bn	$463.1
European ranking (2004)89	2nd	1st
Competitiveness (2004 world ranking)90	27th	11th
Human Development Index	92.8	92.8
Nobel prizes	44	88
Universities ranked in world top 2591	0	4
Corruption (10=clean)	6.3	8.7
Health spending as % of GNP	9.7	7.7
Life expectancy	79 years	78.2 years
Av. age of first sexual intercourse (1998)92	16.6	16.7
Prison population	63,000	73,000
Murders (1999)93	953	927
Road deaths (1996)94	8,080	3,598
Smoking (annual cigarettes per capita, and European ranking)	1,303 (13th)	1,106 (14th)
Alcohol (annual per capita)	11 litres	8 litres
Book sales (annual)	$2.5 bn (7th)	$4.3 bn (4th)
Foreign aid (annual)	$4.2 bn	$4.6 bn
Olympic gold medals (1896–2004)	200	197
Rank in Eurovision song contest (2005)	23rd	22nd

French commentators pointed to their superior productivity per worker, and their regular (though declining) trade surpluses – bigger with Britain than with any other country. This showed the strength of the French economy in certain areas (e.g. cars, luxury goods, tourism, food processing), higher investment, and a somewhat better trained workforce. This view minimized British strength (notably in financial services, the only sector potentially able to benefit, rather than suffer, from the economic renaissance of China and India). It also overlooked the disadvantages for France. High productivity was the consequence of a highly regulated labour market with uniquely heavy payroll taxes, which made firms install machines rather than employ workers. Many refused to expand if it meant taking on more staff. Most incoming foreign investment therefore went into the high-productivity industrial sector, creating few new jobs. The consequence was chronic unemployment and under-used capacity. The facts of higher British growth and lower unemployment impinged on French public awareness – by 2005 it was something ‘everyone knows’.⁹⁵ In the simplest terms, in Britain the State took less, more people had jobs and they worked longer hours. In France, the State and public sector were unusually big, unemployment unusually high, and those with jobs worked less. It was, of course, possible to prefer one model to the other, as cross-Channel migration demonstrated. Though the Labour government followed a less market-oriented policy than the Tories, the difference between Blair and Thatcher was still less than that between Blair and Chirac. By some criteria, Britain in the early 2000s was economically more like the United States or Japan than like France. In some ways this divergence was widening, confirming Britain as the least ‘European’ of the EU economies. The share of Britain’s trade with the United States had been rising since the 1990s, while that with the EU had been falling. Gordon Brown observed that 80 per cent of Britain’s potential trade lay outside the EU. Continental investment in Britain for a time collapsed after 2002, while that of the United States forged ahead, making Britain by far the biggest destination for American capital, bigger than the whole of Asia, and the largest European recipient (with France second) of foreign investment. Britain was Europe’s biggest foreign investor by far, and it invested twice as much outside as inside the EU.⁹⁶

But it was not clear how long the economic divergence between Britain and France would continue. Tony Blair assured the European Parliament in 2005 that it was a ‘caricature’ that Britain was ‘in the grip of some extreme Anglo-Saxon market philosophy’: he had ‘increased investment in our public services more than any other European country’.⁹⁷ Britain was indeed converging with the euro zone in levels of taxation, public borrowing, and public sector employment and spending, which rose 64 per cent in eight years. Incoming foreign investment, for years far ahead of France, temporarily fell far below ($14.6 bn in 2003 compared with $45.3 bn to France) and the longer-term trend was unclear.⁹⁸ In 2005, British economic growth slowed abruptly to its lowest since 1993, and some forecast that French growth would overtake it in 2006 for the first time in two decades.⁹⁹ While Britain moved towards France, France seemed ready to move towards Britain and – more importantly – many commentators began to recognize publicly that ‘Europe’ could not shut out the rest of the world, and especially the growing economic power of Asia. An official report admitted ‘the limits of our model’, and declared that France must slash the ‘stifling’ level of public spending, slim the public sector, reduce public debt and become less ‘afraid’ of the outside world.¹⁰⁰ To evade the ‘French model’ of legal employment protection, private-sector employers were increasing the number of part-time workers and short-term contracts. To plug the gap in state revenues, in 2005 privatization of gas, motorways and electricity accelerated. It therefore seemed possible that France and Britain were set to change economic places once again. Yet foreign investors remained sceptical that France would really change,¹⁰¹ and the sudden political storm in 2005 over the EU Constitution demonstrated how deep and strong public hostility to economic liberalism remained, especially, of course, in the public sector.

Europe’s Warrior Nations

France must continue to behave as a great power precisely because she no longer is one.

CHARLES DE GAULLE

In recent years, Britain has punched above her weight in the world. We intend to keep it that way.

DOUGLAS HURD, foreign secretary, 1992

Our two nations understand power. They are not afraid of it; they are not ashamed of it either. Each wants to remain a force for progress in the world

TONY BLAIR to the Assemblée Nationale, 1998

The dividing line . . . is between those who have a neutralist, pacifist or hedonistic vision of Europe and an idealistic vision of international relations, and the others who are aware that the world is still governed by balances of power . . . France and Britain should be on the same side on this point.

HUBERT VEDRINE, former foreign minister, 2004

Britain wants to punch above its weight in the world. So does France. Or at least, their politicians and diplomats do. It is an unusual and risky ambition. Most countries prefer to punch below their weight. Most European countries are happy not to punch at all. This has been described as the contrast between Europe’s ‘Venus’ and America’s ‘Mars’.¹⁰² Britain and France, however, are Europe’s surviving Martians. Both emphasize their armed forces as a symbol of national identity and international influence. They are the only European states regularly willing and able to use military force far from home. It has cost them a vast amount of treasure and a steady trickle of blood, with substantial effects on their economic and political lives. The British believe more than any other European nation that war is sometimes justified. The French want to make the EU a military power.¹⁰³ This proclivity both divides and unites them.

French commentators, following de Gaulle, stress France’s unique independence, equipped with its own conventional and nuclear arms. As de Gaulle put it, ‘let us drink from our own cup: it may be smaller but at least it’s ours’. In fact, France’s nuclear deterrent always relied on NATO early-warning systems and other technical cooperation to make it viable.¹⁰⁴ The British, in contrast, were often discounted by the French as dependent on, and hence mere auxiliaries of, the United States. French politicians have therefore claimed to be the only genuine European great power, and hence the leader and protector of Europe. This argument has never been accepted outside France. Tireless efforts to promote independent European military force have borne little fruit, and in practice require the cooperation of the pro-NATO British. French independence has been costly, not only in money. French armed forces could not acquire the best equipment – unless it happened to be French. France also paid a diplomatic price for independence, such as the unpopularity of nuclear testing in the Pacific Ocean. In intelligence matters, being outside the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ system handicapped it. With the exception of small expeditions in Africa, it lacked the ships and aircraft to transport major forces. Moreover, its Europe-focused armed forces were based until 2002 on short-service conscription, with a small volunteer element outweighed by large, poorly trained, poorly equipped and inflexible conscript forces. They were incapable of operating at the highest professional and technological level, either alone or in conjunction with the Anglo-Saxons. All in all, its military independence has been more symbolic than real.

Two conflicts revealed the differences between British and French capacities. In the Falklands War in 1982, Britain dispatched a self-sufficient task force a long distance, and, despite risks, defeated Argentina near its home ground. France could not have attempted the equivalent. The First Gulf War in 1991 showed up the weakness of its army. A small light mobile force had to be scratched together by pulling professional soldiers out of their normal units, and it could play only a symbolic role well away from the main American-British force. Notional independence was nullified by actual impotence. So the French revolutionized their armed forces. The nuclear deterrent was cut back, and conscription was phased out between 1996 and 2002, abandoning the cherished republican principle of a citizen soldiery. For the first time in its history, France decided to copy the British army.

The long Balkan tragedy from 1991 to 1999 was the bloodiest episode in European history after 1945, costing certainly tens of thousands, and possibly hundreds of thousands of lives. For Britain and France, the break-up of Yugoslavia was a test of their capacity and ambition to be the military leaders and guardians of Europe. The United States had no wish to be involved, and the European states had no wish to involve it. The crisis was proclaimed as ‘the Hour of Europe’. France and Britain took charge. The French had clear ambitions. In the view of the British foreign secretary Douglas Hurd – relatively francophile but none the less suspicious – their aims were for ‘France and French policy to shine’; for ‘a big European army in Yugoslavia and an Anglo-French protectorate’; and – as always – to promote a European military power independent of the United States. For the British government, after the removal of Margaret Thatcher, going along with the French was an opportunity to demonstrate its new position ‘at the heart of Europe’. ‘Defence in Europe is not an opt-out subject for us – like the Social Chapter,’ declared Hurd. ‘Working with the French is an important aspect.’¹⁰⁵ Britain and France directed European policy, and must bear responsibility for its outcome. They stubbornly misread the crisis, and their unwillingness to allow other approaches dragged out the agony.¹⁰⁶

Unfortunately for the peoples of disintegrating Yugoslavia, neither London nor Paris was willing or able to back its political pretensions with corresponding military force. Neither were they willing to let the situation resolve itself – which would have been a brutal but logical alternative. Instead, a succession of British and French generals and semi-retired, mainly British, politicians (including Lords Carrington and Owen) went out to try to run the affairs of the Balkans. Both British and French liked to justify their involvement in international affairs by claiming great experience in such matters, inherited from imperial days. This time it led them astray. An erroneous consensus developed on three points. First, that this was an incomprehensible ‘tribal’ conflict based on ancient hatreds, in which all sides were equally blameworthy. Second, that it would prove a ‘quagmire’ (analogies with Vietnam and Northern Ireland were common) which would absorb hundreds of thousands of soldiers and cause enormous casualties. Third, that the Serbs were indomitable and practically invincible (here it was common to make fallacious references to the Second World War). The conclusions drawn from these assumptions were that the proper attitude of outsiders was to refuse to take sides, to avoid military involvement except in a humanitarian role, and to press for a compromise that would necessarily favour a Greater Serbia. A UN arms embargo favoured the Serbs, who were already well-armed. These views were the height of ‘realism’, showing a refusal to be ‘simplistic’; and critics were met with angry and contemptuous dismissal.

But the analysis was wrong. The crisis, far from being lost in the mists of Balkan history, was caused by the aggressiveness of the ex-Communist Serbian regime of Slobodan Milosevic, first against Croatia, and subsequently against Bosnia and Kosovo. Events would show that he could be defeated with relative ease and expedition. British and French politicians and soldiers developed an odd rapport with the Serbs. For the French, not least President Mitterrand, this was based on a confused sense that they had been allies during both World Wars, and that they had to be conciliated. The British agreed. It was repeatedly stated that vast German forces had been unable to defeat the Serbs between 1941 and 1944. While those in office in Paris and London bore the primary responsibility, their highly pessimistic view was overwhelmingly supported by British and French politicians of all parties, and by soldiers and experts, whether official, academic or journalistic. The intelligentsia of both countries showed excessive confidence in their own judgement, in which lack of real knowledge was eked out with inaccurate and misapplied historical and political analogies. A few genuine experts who knew from their own experience that the received wisdom was a distortion were ignored.¹⁰⁷

The Anglo-French consensus was disastrous. It prolonged the conflict and unintentionally encouraged Serb aggression, accompanied by organized rape, massacre and ‘ethnic cleansing’. Yet the policy was persisted in even when it was clearly not working, and London and Paris went to great lengths to defend their policy when the Clinton administration in Washington began reluctantly to advocate a policy of ‘lift and strike’ – lifting the arms embargo to Bosnia, and launching air strikes against Serb military targets. Hurd wrote in his diary that ‘Our prudent stance looks feeble and inhumane. Yet I cannot think that air strikes would settle anything much and a ground operation to deal with snipers etc would be interminable.’¹⁰⁸ Conservative ministers derided internal critics such as Thatcher, and the French socialist ministers ignored left-wing advocates of ‘humanitarian intervention’. Those running policy in both countries could not contemplate a change that would condemn their earlier stance. Moreover, the British and French, having finally agreed to commit a few troops for humanitarian purposes, found that these became in effect hostages against further military action. The secretary-general of the French charity Médecins sans Frontières condemned the situation as a ‘shameful farce’.¹⁰⁹

During the course of the Balkan imbroglio, an even greater disaster occurred in Africa: the Rwanda genocide of 1994. Both the British and French, as the main former colonial powers, had a feckless record of semi-involvement in African affairs. The French had since the 1960s pursued a neo-colonial policy in west and central Africa, run by a small inner circle reporting to the president. In pursuit of commercial advantages, strategic bases and prestige, there had been few scruples over methods, and corruption was rife. Paris had propped up several regimes with money, arms and troops, and received favours in return. One of these was the Hutu ethnic government of Rwanda, especially as it was francophone whereas the Tutsi opposition was regarded in Paris as ‘anglophone’ and too close to the Anglo-Saxons. In April 1994, the Hutu authorities ignited a genocidal attack on the Tutsi minority in which 800,000 people were slaughtered. The French were slow to react, and then continued to play politics under the cover of the United Nations, ‘protecting the génocidaires and permanently destabilizing the region’.¹¹⁰ The British, bogged down in the Balkans, looked the other way. No other country took an interest until it was too late.

By late 1994, Britain’s Balkan policy was ‘falling to bits around us’¹¹¹ and Whitehall was increasingly condemned for preventing action. Dénouement came in 1995. Continued Serb shelling of the Bosnian capital Sarajevo caused a new British commander to order air strikes against Serb ammunition dumps, the first such action of the war: one of his French predecessors had been sacked for urging it. The Serbs responded by seizing UN soldiers – including thirty British – as hostages. In July 1995, Serbian troops overran the ‘safe haven’ of Srebrenice, and slaughtered several thousand Bosnian men and boys. Although a small Dutch force had been the nominal protectors, the ultimate failure was an Anglo-French one. The new French president, Jacques Chirac, broke ranks with the British, and agreed to American demands for serious military intervention. London, alarmed at the prospect of a Franco-American agreement excluding them, hastened to agree, and a small Franco-British Rapid Reaction Force, created some months earlier, was dispatched. The crucial element in the new strategy was American air power, however, supporting counter-attacks by Croatian and Bosnian forces. The Serbs, belying earlier predictions, retreated rapidly, and a compromise agreement was signed at Dayton, Ohio. Many observed that this could have been done years earlier. As well as devastating former Yugoslavia, the war had damaged Anglo-American relations. The British were criticized for stubborn timidity. Americans referred to Suez and the 1930s. Thatcher is said to have compared Hurd with Chamberlain, and Chirac similarly condemned previous Anglo-French policy towards the Serbs as ‘like Chamberlain and Daladier’.¹¹² Some American politicians openly questioned the value of the ‘special relationship’ and of NATO as a whole.

Under military and political pressure, the French and British drew together. In Hurd’s view, ‘Bosnia brought service cooperation between the British and the French to a new postwar high.’¹¹³ In 1993 and 1994, steps were taken towards air force and nuclear deterrence coordination. The 1997–2002 French defence programme spoke of a ‘privileged partnership’ with Britain, and the new Blair government signed a military agreement in 1998 at Saint-Malo which led to a European Rapid Reaction Force being set up in 2000 round a Franco-British core. The signatories, as always, did not agree on what they were aiming at. The British foreign secretary stated that ‘collective defence is not the job of the European Union [but] remains the job of NATO’. The French foreign minister said that the aim was to ‘go beyond’ NATO, but Chirac agreed to ‘put a little bit of NATO in it’ as a concession to London.¹¹⁴

BANGS AND BUCKS

French conventional and nuclear forces were still considerably larger than the British in the early 2000s, though the trend was convergent as the former ended conscription. In spending terms Britain, France and Japan were almost identical, outdistanced only by America – hugely – and, according to some measures, by China, slightly. This, given Japan’s essentially defensive stance, and the immobility and technical limitations of Chinese, Russian and Indian forces, made Britain and France the world’s most effective second-rank militarily powers.¹¹⁵ Both had taken a ‘peace dividend’ by slashing spending in the 1990s, along with the rest of Europe. But they were the only European states to increase defence budgets modestly from 2003, and they were accounting for two-thirds of total European spending on military hardware. France’s effective military power was hampered by its policy of independence, including a sizeable, expensive and obsolescent nuclear deterrent. It was also handicapped by the hybrid nature of its forces, until conscription was finally phased out. Conversion to all-professional forces and modernization of equipment required money and time: full completion was planned for 2015. Much French material was out of commission or inferior – for example the Leclerc tank, the Mirage fighter without night vision, and warships capable only of patrolling. Post Cold War requirements – coercion of ‘rogue states’, operations against elusive terrorist networks, and peace-keeping in failing states – needed trained personnel, able to react rapidly and deploy widely, using expensive detection and communications equipment, and armed with precision weapons. Crucially, Britain had spent considerably more on equipment, research and development for its smaller professional forces. Its willingness to buy weapons and equipment abroad increased their effectiveness. The Royal Navy had a greater capacity than the French navy to project force at a distance.

MILITARY FORCE¹¹⁶

(world ranking in brackets)	France	Britain
Defence spending (2003)117	$35 bn (4th)	$37.1 bn (3rd)
as % of GDP	2.5	2.4
Defence personnel (incl. civilians)	428,000	304,000
Soldiers (2004)	134,000	113,000
Sailors and marines (2004)	42,866	40,880
Aviation (2004)	60,990	53,390
Expenditure on equipment (2003)	$7.2 bn	$8.7 bn
Expenditure per soldier (1999)	$92,400 (15th)	$167,000 (3rd)
Ships (2003)
Aircraft/helicopter carriers	2	3
Major surface ships	23	31
Submarines	10	15
Nuclear warheads	348 (4th)	185 (5th or 6th)
Aircraft (combat)	329	324
Armoured fighting vehicles	754	1,026

Both countries maintained arms manufacturing as a foundation of national security and an important source of foreign earnings and diplomatic leverage. Both have wasted vast sums on individual and joint projects – arguably inevitable where diplomatic criteria outweigh military and economic ones, and doubly so if ambitions exceed capacities. It would be hard to decide whether to give the booby prize to France’s accident-prone nuclear aircraft carrier, the Charles de Gaulle, or to Britain’s share in the fabulously expensive Eurofighter. In a triumph of hope over experience, in June 2004 the two countries agreed on joint construction of up to three largely identical aircraft carriers. The main contrast, however – which reflected a basic Franco-British ideological difference – is that the British government fostered international competition in its arms supply, and the British arms industry was genuinely more independent of government and active in both inter-European and trans-Atlantic links. The French government retained very close relations with its arms manufacturers, bought major weapons only from them, and was not involved with America. To buttress the relationship, by 2004 arms companies owned some 70 per cent of the French press.”¹¹⁸ France pressed for joint European military projects, including for spy satellites and telecommunications, and aimed at a European military aerospace industry. Cynics might suspect that the goal was a sort of military Common Agricultural Policy, with France as the main beneficiary and Britain the main contributor. As an arms manufacturer and exporter, despite a notoriously unscrupulous sales policy, it had usually been far less important than Britain. However, a 50 per cent fall in British arms exports in the early 2000s, and a surge in French sales – many of them at below the cost of manufacture – to the Middle East, Taiwan, India and Pakistan, made it the world’s third largest supplier. Britain (which mainly supplied Commonwealth countries) fell to sixth place.”¹¹⁹

Although British and French military power appeared on paper to be broadly in balance, the defence minister, Michèle Alliot-Marie, appointed in 2002, was ‘shocked’ to be told that in equipment and deployability all three armed forces remained ‘significantly below the British’.¹²⁰ A leading American defence expert told Le Monde that Britain was the world’s second most powerful country ‘in influence and world role’, and Germany the third.¹²¹ France was determined at least to catch up with Britain, which would otherwise dominate any European defence organization, and it officially announced a ‘special partnership’ with Britain. All would depend on how much each country was willing and able to spend. Both faced similar dilemmas. State spending, borrowing and taxation had reached levels considered politically dangerous and economically damaging. Both had budgets heavily committed to welfare and to a growing civilian public sector. Both had pensions crises looming. But both wanted to be able to operate independently or as leaders of a European coalition. The British wanted to stay technologically advanced enough to operate alongside the United States, the French, to lead Europe as a counterweight to the United States. This meant heavy expenditure on technology – including continuing bills for past mistakes – at the expense of manpower. France substantially pushed up its defence spending, breaking the European Union Stability and Growth Pact in the process; it demanded first that defence spending should not be counted, and then simply ignored the pact. In July 2004 Britain – whose state finances had swung in five years from a large budget surplus to a large deficit – managed a nominal increase in defence spending, but accompanied by large cuts in manpower, regiments, tanks, ships and aircraft. Yet people, not just gadgets, were needed for peacekeeping and to meet increasing overseas commitments. Financial logic – despite political differences – pushed the two countries towards cooperation where their interests overlapped. The French, for example, largely abandoned their military protectorate over francophone Africa in favour of coordinating ‘spheres of influence’ with Britain; and despite the quarrel over Iraq, the joint aircraft carrier project was in theory to begin in 2006–7.

Did all this show that both countries were indeed punching above their weight? Exasperated by the Iraq disaster, one left-wing commentator raged that Britain spent ‘more than all Europe except France on defence we can’t afford [like] distressed gentlefolk keeping up appearances, making ourselves ridiculous and obnoxious to our real equals, the Europeans . . . isolated from Europe, reviled in most of the world, still posturing absurdly . . . we must give up punching at any weight, beyond peacekeeping contributions to UN and European forces’.¹²² Some right-wing commentators agreed with the conclusion, if not the sentiment. Yet France and Britain were among the world’s richest states, with wide interests and obligations. For them to play a part in world affairs – however particular policies might be judged – was in no way anachronistic or ridiculous. Arguably, they were punching below their weight – or, to drop the boxing metaphor, were unwilling to pay the price of their pretensions. They were spending far less than the USA (or indeed Greece) as a proportion of GNP, and little more than Norway. If the American effort was some indication of the cost of international ambitions, it indicated that Britain and France would need to increase defence spending by a third – unthinkable in either country. British and French politicians often justified a special role for themselves less by the facts of wealth and power than by claiming a superior wisdom that ‘new’ powers could not match. The experiences of the 1990s and 2000s amply showed that wisdom was as rare a commodity in London and Paris as elsewhere. Was this an argument for them to give up the ‘posturing’ and mind their own business? That would mean leaving the United States the sole actor on the world stage. If the two countries were serious about not wanting this, they would somehow have to pay the cost. To claim responsibility without power risked doing more harm than good, to themselves and to others.

Jacques Chirac was elected president in 1995, and Tony Blair became prime minister in May 1997. Ironically, given later events, the former was unusually Atlanticist, and the latter, enthusiastically ‘European’. Both embarked on new and ambitious foreign policies. Chirac began a short period of nuclear-weapons testing in the Pacific, and announced greater involvement in NATO. The French, encouraged by the British, had begun attending NATO summits in 1995 for the first time in thirty years, but they intended it to be on their own terms: ‘the extent to which we participate in the alliance will reflect the degree to which it changes’.¹²³ Their aims were to be treated as equal to the British, and to develop an autonomous European means of action within the NATO system. Chirac proposed, and then imprudently announced in September 1996, that a European officer (i.e. a Frenchman) would take over command of the southern sector of NATO from an American. When the Americans demurred, Chirac was seriously embarrassed, and developed a serious grudge.¹²⁴ Blair’s policy was intended to be more principled, assertive, and effective than that of his Conservative predecessors, and both restore Britain’s relations with the United States and place it at the centre of European affairs. This led to an unparalleled frequency of military action: five times in six years.¹²⁵ Though Blair has claimed the legacy of Gladstone, he is really the heir of Palmerston, with a similar combination of idealism and bombast: ‘I am a British patriot,’ he proclaimed in 1997. ‘Britain in my vision is not Britain turning its back on the world – narrow, shy, uncertain . . . We are a leader of nations or nothing.’¹²⁶ But he arguably lacked Palmerston’s hard-headedness, and he certainly lacked Palmerston’s power.

The new government, buoyed up by popularity at home and the interest they aroused abroad, defined a new ‘ethical’, even ‘post-modern’, strategy not tied to traditional concepts of national interest or national sovereignty. The aim was to do good and to feel good. The first act was participation in a US-led bombing campaign in Iraq in November 1998. The second, in 1999, was in the Balkans, following more Serb aggression in Kosovo. A meeting with the Serbian leader Milosevic at Rambouillet, jointly chaired by the French and British foreign ministers Hubert Védrine and Robin Cook, failed to stop the violence. Blair urged first a bombing campaign against the Serbs, and then pressed for ground troops, promising if necessary the largest British military expedition since 1945. Eventually, NATO forces, led by Britain and France, and Russian troops, occupied Kosovo to impose peace. The process was far from bloodless, it outraged the pacifist Left, it precipitated a vast refugee crisis, and it left a violent and unstable aftermath. Yet it was generally regarded as the lesser evil, and a success for the new doctrine of ‘humanitarian intervention’, formulated by the French Left, taken up by Blair and supported by most of the Labour party. The United Nations had not given its approval, but the sanction of NATO, the EU, and majority opinion was taken to give sufficient justification to what Blair thought was the first-ever ‘progressive’ war. France and Britain were in unison. The main Balkan troublemaker, Milosevic, was overthrown.

Hubris beckoned. Failures in the 1990s had been due to timidity: on this, Downing Street and the White House agreed. The diplomatic and military experts, always pointing out difficulties, had been in charge when catastrophe struck Bosnia and Rwanda. Blair, a man previously uninterested in foreign affairs, had enrolled both Europe and America in his Balkan policy. Boldness and new ideas had worked. Those who had advocated the use of force against Milosevic would advocate it against Saddam Hussein; those who had opposed it in Bosnia would oppose it in Iraq.

The destruction of the Twin Towers in New York on 11 September 2001, it has often been said, changed the world. But it did not change everything. The Iraq problem predated it. The nature of that problem seemed clear. Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi dictator, had used chemical weapons. He had attacked his neighbours. He had developed long-range artillery and missiles, and there was plausible evidence that he still intended to make or buy chemical, biological or nuclear ‘weapons of mass destruction’ – the soon notorious ‘WMDs’. His main preoccupation was his old enemy Iran, itself aiming at WMDs. Victory over Iran would have made him the dominant figure in the Islamic world, with potential control of a large part of the world’s oil. Since the invasion of Kuwait and defeat in 1991, Iraq had been sporadically subject to UN economic sanctions and inspections to forestall rearmament. This policy was more effective than anyone realized, and more than Saddam dared to admit: he no longer had WMDs.

Saddam’s priority was to end UN sanctions and controls. He made various secret offers of rapprochement with the United States, which were ignored. Nevertheless, controls were breaking down. One reason was because of the appalling suffering they caused the Iraqi population – aggravated by Saddam for propaganda purposes. The other was the reluctance of any countries but the United States and Britain to enforce them. The UN Oil for Food programme (1995) – ostensibly to allow necessities to be imported to relieve the people’s sufferings – gave Saddam a means of buying political and economic friends. Russia and France were the largest recipients of secret payments and of trade.¹²⁷ Here the role of France – and Russia, China and others – became important and controversial, if not sinister. At best, it showed a desire to engage with and influence Saddam. At worst, it was corrupt and reckless. The Iraqis believed, somewhat simplistically, that France’s interest was purely mercenary, especially concerning oil. They thought that greasing palms in Paris would give access to Chirac.¹²⁸ Why they should think so is plain: the financing of political parties was one of the murkiest aspects of French life, and the source of widespread and contagious corruption at home and abroad. But French motives went deeper, and were linked with their great-power ambition.

The origins of their policy lay in the 1920s, when Iraqi oil formed part of the spoils of the First World War. To assert influence in the Middle East in rivalry with the ‘Anglo-Saxons’ was a later obsession of de Gaulle, and to grab a share of world markets in the strategic areas of nuclear power, arms sales and oil was a continuing preoccupation of his successors. In 1972, the young second-in-command of the Baathist regime, Saddam Hussein, was invited to the Elysée Palace, where he assured his host that he had ‘chosen France’ – which had the inestimable advantage of not being Britain, Russia or America. France began selling arms, and its oil company Total secured privileges. Jacques Chirac’s first venture into foreign affairs, as a youthful prime minister, was establishing personal contact with Saddam. In 1975, he invited him to visit French nuclear installations, treating him to a weekend tête-à-tête in Provence and a gala reception at Versailles. Chirac announced that France was aiding Iraq to acquire two reactors and 600 French-trained technicians. Saddam told an Arab newspaper that this was ‘the first step towards the production of an Arab atomic bomb’.¹²⁹ The Israelis – France’s earlier protégés – put a stop to that by bombing the first unfinished reactor on 7 June 1981. Iraq’s attack on Iran that year increased the demand for French arms – which Arab governments urged Paris to supply. France (like the USSR) was happy to oblige. Iraq had become France’s second most important source of oil, while its war helped keep the French arms industry afloat: 14 billion francs of exports in 1981, 13 billion in 1982. Iraq soon owed so much money, as the finance minister Jacques Delors pointed out, that France had to help it win. France’s most modern aircraft were delivered, some taken from its own navy. The defence minister stated that ‘Iraqi security is an imperative of French national defence’.¹³⁰ The oil company Elf – a factotum of the French government, and later the focus of a string of corruption prosecutions in the 2000s – made itself at home in Baghdad.

The First Gulf War caused a chill. Mitterrand and his ministers tried literally until the last hours to persuade Saddam to withdraw peacefully from Kuwait, but then felt obliged to take part in the UN-sanctioned Coalition campaign, although the defence minister, Jean-Pierre Chevènement, resigned in protest. French politicians, the oil and arms industries and other business interests restored relations in the 1990s, anticipating the end of UN sanctions. From the late 1990s, French firms were angling to supply aircraft, military vehicles and other armaments. In 1997, the French, Russians and Chinese pressed for the end of sanctions and of UN weapons inspections. Saddam duly began to block inspections, and the inspectors were withdrawn. This was dangerous, as it encouraged the Americans and British to fear the worst. In 1998 – over French and German opposition – they launched air strikes on supposed weapons development sites. France successfully brokered a compromise, but withdrew from enforcing controls. During 2000–2001 the French and Russian governments – whom Saddam played off against each other – pressed the UN to declare that Iraq had disarmed, to end weapons inspections, and to lift sanctions. French businessmen went to negotiate reconstruction and oil contracts. Lobby groups and ‘solidarity’ committees in Paris were encouraged with ‘copious amounts of oil money’.¹³¹ Remaining sanctions were increasingly ignored by many countries, prominent among them France, which bought oil, sold agricultural produce and arms, and signed public works contracts – already worth 1.6 billion euros in 2001. The Iraqi foreign minister observed that Paris was adhering to the letter of sanctions but not the spirit.¹³² All had an eye on big future profits. Their greed made the situation dangerously unstable.

No one knew whether Saddam Hussein had disarmed and abandoned his military ambitions. If he had, normalization of relations would be possible and perhaps beneficial, if – a big if – Saddam was thereby induced to behave better towards his own people and his neighbours. If not, the end of sanctions would let him off the leash to use Iraq’s oil wealth to perpetuate domestic oppression, resume a WMD programme and prepare further aggression. Blair was alarmed by ‘scary’ intelligence reports on Iraqi weapons. He was eager to do something to ward off future danger, and discussed the problem with President Clinton. As early as November 1997 Blair said privately that Saddam was ‘very close to some appalling weapons of mass destruction. I don’t understand why the French and the others don’t understand this.’¹³³ His perplexity was comprehensible: the French, like the other powers and the UN experts, assumed that Saddam still had weapons and plans for more, and they expected that weapons inspections would find evidence. Unless some new means of containment could be found, a war to remove him – especially in the aftermath of the 11 September attack on New York, which heightened American desire for pre-emptive action against ‘rogue states’ – was likely. The only hope of peaceful containment would have been a united front of the Western powers to intimidate Saddam, in which France, as Saddam’s best friend in the West, would have been pivotal. Blair hoped that the French would broker ‘a face-saving way out’. But Saddam was told by his intelligence service in May 2002 that a prominent French politician had assured them that France would use its position on the UN Security Council veto any military attack.¹³⁴ If this encouraged Iraqi over-confidence, it was fatal, because the Americans were already willing to go to war.

The ‘special relationship’ had never been so special as during 2001–3. Churchill had never had – and would never have accepted – such absorption into Roosevelt’s government, nor Thatcher into Reagan’s. Blair, for domestic and diplomatic reasons, persuaded the sceptical George W. Bush to use the United Nations procedure against Saddam Hussein, and promised that he would ‘deliver’ European support. It seems likely that in return he pledged to fight alongside the Americans if necessary – an outcome that suited his own inclinations and reading of events.¹³⁵ He seems to have made this decision privately during the spring or summer of 2002 – perhaps, piquantly, in France in August while communing with nature in the Pyrenees.¹³⁶ In a reversion to seventeenth-century government, British state policy was made by Blair and his small entourage in an inextricable tangle of vision, audacity, deceit and incompetence. Their intimate contact with Washington surpassed that of Charles II with Versailles – though with no known equivalent of the Duchess of Portsmouth. The Cabinet was supine, content with occasional ‘unscripted’ briefings.¹³⁷ Its Defence and Overseas Policy Committee and its Intelligence Committee never met. The Foreign Office was bypassed, and legal advice given short shrift. Constitutional government had effectively been suspended by a prime minister convinced that the road to heaven was paved with good intentions. Hence the amateurish use of ‘sexed up’ intelligence information, the elementary errors of fact, and the frenetic and futile efforts to ‘deliver’ Europe and the UN by a handful of excited and rather ignorant courtiers in Downing Street. Preoccupied with selling rather than questioning policy, they were constantly surprised by events, and misunderstood the views of other states, above all the French.

The growing crisis revived the jaded ‘Franco-German couple’, as German public opinion was increasingly hostile to American policy. One insider commented that for the first time, Franco-German relations passed from wary politeness to real cordiality. Chancellor Schröder was glad to follow Chirac’s lead – a situation from which the French were eager to profit. This had repercussions on EU politics. A Franco-German agreement to preserve the CAP was sprung on the British at the Brussels EU summit on 24 October 2002 (see above, page 652). Blair denounced the deal as illegitimate and a blow to Third World farmers. Chirac – who had earlier lectured Blair on what his son ‘little Leo’ might one day think about what Daddy had done in the war – was livid. Perhaps grown used to the deferential treatment accorded to Fifth Republic presidents, he buttonholed Blair, ticked him off for being ‘bad-mannered’ (mal élevé) and cancelled the annual Franco-British summit. This was a priceless moment for those who recalled his famous laddish interjection during a Thatcher tirade in 1987.⁸ A British witness saw them like ‘lads looking for a brawl outside a pub on a Friday night.’¹³⁸ Personal relations between the two men, originally quite friendly, became increasingly antagonistic.

Far less has been – and doubtless far less will be – disclosed about goings on at the Elysée and the Quai d’Orsay than those in Downing Street. Any French government was certain to try to rein in American action, and preserve its long-cultivated status as friend of the Arabs. This was not only to preserve its sleazy and profitable economic foothold, and ensure payment of huge Iraqi debts. French politicians are highly sensitive to their Mediterranean position on the ‘fault line’ between Europe and the Arab world,¹³⁹and to the number and feelings of their own Muslim citizens. Whether Chirac, known to be a headstrong character, and his foreign minister Dominique Galouzeau de Villepin, a decorative, aristocratic-sounding career diplomat with political ambitions and Napoleonic nostalgia, had a long-term plan for handling Saddam is unclear. It seems unlikely, however, that they planned an outright confrontation with the Anglo-Saxons. The French intelligence services were cooperating with their allies as usual, and Paris was putting pressure on Baghdad to give way.¹⁴⁰ Paris agreed to Resolution 1441 (8 November 2002) imposing stringent demands on Iraq, but denied that this automatically sanctioned war if the demands were not met. French policy was to use its contacts in Iraq and other Arab countries to persuade Iraq to accept more extensive weapons inspections. Presumably this was intended to save the Iraqi regime or at least protect France’s influence in the Arab world. Yet from September 2002 to January 2003, the French – unlike the Germans – said that they would if necessary take part in military action, as they had done in the first Gulf War. However, this was only to happen if Saddam resisted weapons inspections, and if the UN Security Council approved an invasion. In January 2003, the Americans and British began sending troops to the Persian Gulf. On 7 January, Chirac told the French armed forces to prepare to participate.¹⁴¹ But Saddam, rather than resisting UN demands, was allowing weapons inspectors to search for evidence of WMDs, and playing for time. Paris in effect supported him by calling for delay while the inspectors pursued their ‘long and difficult work’. But the Anglo-Saxons could not keep armies in the Gulf indefinitely. They would inevitably use them unless Saddam capitulated by allowing ever more stringent inspections, which would mean the end of his prestige and probably of his power. Rapidly and publicly, the French and Anglo-American positions diverged.

The Franco-British relationship failed to provide a transatlantic bridge, the idea cherished by British politicians from Bevin to Blair. Cross-Channel diplomacy was barely operating. Influencing public opinion became more important than inter-governmental good manners, let alone serious consultation. Opinion in France and elsewhere so detested American policy that Chirac and Villepin must have been simultaneously tempted and impelled to give it voice. This was an opportunity for Chirac, reelected in 2002 in demeaning circumstances – some of his supporters using the slogan ‘better a crook than a fascist’⁹ – to become a true national leader. For Villepin, a romantic nationalist obsessed with reviving French grandeur,¹⁴² it was a chance to proclaim opposition to superpower arrogance as in the glory days of de Gaulle.

British and French policy spectacularly collided in January 2003. On the 20th, Villepin, to widespread applause, announced at the UN that ‘nothing today justifies military action’ – indicating that France might use its UN veto. There ensued a trial of Franco-British diplomatic strength inside and outside Europe, watched with some bemusement by the Americans. The French and German parliaments held a ceremonial joint meeting at Versailles. On 30 January a public letter of support for American policy over Iraq from Blair and seven, and eventually fifteen, European prime ministers, was drawn up without French (or indeed British) diplomats being informed. One French commentator described the declaration, which spoke on behalf of ‘Europe’, as being ‘written on English dictation’.¹⁴³ Perfidious Albion, thought the French, had deliberately and publicly split Europe to please the Americans – just what de Gaulle had always feared. Moreover, Blair had enlisted new and candidate EU states in defiance of Franco-German leadership. The abrasive American defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld declared gleefully that France, Germany and their supporters were merely ‘old Europe’. Chirac reacted with characteristic unsubtlety, telling ‘infantile’ new EU members that they would shut up if they knew what was good for them. This underlined France’s barely concealed desire for a ‘two-tier’ Europe.

Either Blair or Chirac faced humiliation. On 20 February, the French privately urged the Americans to drop the idea of a UN resolution to authorize an invasion, and act without one, so as to avoid an open split in the Security Council.¹⁴⁴ This indicates that Chirac was trying to avoid a final confrontation. The Americans suggested that Britain might prefer to keep its troops out of the invasion of Iraq, which would remove the need to return to the Security Council. But Blair insisted on full British participation and hence on a new Security Council resolution. He needed this for domestic reasons, as Labour MPs grew unwontedly restive and protesting crowds filled the streets. Demonstrators in London sang the ‘Marseillaise’ and the embassy received a flood of letters praising French policy – an espousal of French leadership unseen in Britain since the 1790s. In France, public opinion was overwhelmingly against a war, and some observers think that only at this late stage did French policy become fixed.¹⁴⁵ After a short meeting with Chirac at Le Touquet on 2 March, Blair seems to have convinced himself that he could win the French over, and the British were foolish enough to hint publicly that Chirac was about to give in.¹⁴⁶ The Guardian (2 March) thought that the French were ‘almost certainly willing . . . to wage war on Iraq and to play their part in post-Saddam reconstruction’.

The British soon realized that this was an illusion. The two foreign ministers swapped honeyed insults at the UN, Straw addressing Villepin with forced matiness as ‘Dominique’. French and British ministers chased each other round the world trying to drum up votes in the Security Council. ‘Francophonie’ and Commonwealth contacts were mobilized. Robert Mugabe, the Zimbabwean dictator, was welcomed to Paris as a gesture to Africa – an act the British regarded as shameless. Blair angrily concluded that Chirac was out to wreck his position in Europe and even bring him down. Chirac might well have harboured similar suspicions. On 10 March the latter blundered. In a broadcast interview, he said that ‘whatever the circumstances’ France would vote against – that is veto – the Anglo-American UN resolution ‘because there are no grounds for waging war in order to . . . disarm Iraq’. Whitehall seized on this, with what the French considered typical perfidy, as a way of escaping a UN vote. If the French were going to veto a resolution, said the British, then the process was nullified – an argument the attorney-general privately dismissed as lacking any basis in law.¹⁴⁷ The French and their supporters claimed that the British argument was a pretext: Britain would have lost the vote anyway. In that case, why did Chirac promise to veto? Blair described Chirac’s position as ‘foolish’ and ‘irresponsible’. Straw called it ‘the Napoleon route – and remember who won’. The French ambassador was greeted by a jubilant Foreign Office official waving Le Monde and saying ‘It’s such a gift, we won’t stop there.’ Villepin complained of ‘comments unworthy of a country which is both a friend and a European partner’.¹⁴⁸

Euphoria created by the quick victory over the Iraqi army in April 2003 was soon overshadowed by darkening disillusion. The political damage done by false and exaggerated intelligence concerning WMDs – surely the most important peacetime failure since 1939 (see above, page 536) – and by a range of errors, follies and unintended consequences, including domestic terrorism in Britain, was immense. Press comment in both countries recalled the great phobias of the past, stressing Chirac’s dishonesty and Blair’s sycophancy, with suggestions too that the latter had gone mad, descending into religious mania, ‘New Age lunacy’ and ‘off the peg mysticism’.¹⁴⁹ The attacks went beyond the politicians to the nations themselves.

A British view of a raddled Marianne wooing Saddam Hussein.

But ‘Anglo-Saxon’ reverses did not mean French victory. An optimistic French socialist at first declared that the anti-war protests had meant that ‘a new nation was born in the streets – the European nation’. But an influential critic discerned the ‘collapse’ of France’s whole postwar strategy.¹⁵⁰The Coalition’s subsequent difficulties spared France the ‘diplomatic Agincourt’ it seemed to face when Saddam was overthrown. Nevertheless, Paris’s loss of authority in Europe and impotence to influence world events was flagrant. Its call for a European summit to create a new defence organization – a gauntlet thrown down to the British – rallied only the Germans, the Belgians and the Luxemburgers. Countries such as Poland and Portugal that had supported the Anglo-Saxons might well have regretted their involvement, but they did not forgive Chirac’s arrogance or forget his weakness: token forces from half a dozen European countries served for a time under British command in southern Iraq. Blair immediately, and Bush reluctantly, tried to shore up the swaying Atlantic bridge by approaches to Paris and Berlin, with little or no response. Both sides continued to insist that they were in the right. Bush’s re-election in November 2004 was an undoubted setback for Paris, where it had been hoped his defeat would bring in a more amenable administration. France (and Germany) refused to take part in peacekeeping and reconstruction in Iraq: the French agreed to contribute one officer! This enabled them to take a high moral tone, and in any case outraged public opinion would not have allowed involvement. But it perpetuated the split between ‘old Europe’ and ‘new Europe’, underlined the isolation of Paris and Berlin, and deprived them of a voice in Middle Eastern politics at a crucial time. The idea of a Franco-German political union (reminiscent of the abortive Franco-British unions of 1940 and 1956) was floated in November 2003. As the French prime minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin put it, ‘If the Europe of 25 fails, what is left for France? Just the Franco-German rapprochement.’¹⁵¹ This would once have been sensational. Now, hardly anyone took any notice. There was unprecedented difficulty in forming and then approving a new European Commission in 2004. Its dominance by ‘free-marketeers and Atlanticists’ (according to Le Figaro) led by José Manuel Barroso, one of the signatories of the notorious January open letter, caused gnashing of teeth in Paris, and a mounting realization that ‘Europe’ was slipping away from them.

French public opinion, here expressed by the country’s most popular cartoonist, had no doubt that Blair was lying.

The crisis once again underlined the remoteness of a genuine European defence and foreign policy, even if it were possible to create an institutional façade. The French knew that they needed the involvement of Britain, Europe’s leading military power, if such a policy was to be credible. Though a French diplomat repeated the usual line about Britain having to choose – ‘Either they are with us, united in Europe where they should be, or they are destined to become . . . something like an American state’ – behind the scenes they feared that the British would ‘lose interest’ in a defence partnership amid the post-Iraq recriminations.¹⁵²

Forty years earlier, Dean Acheson had dismissed as ‘played out’ Britain’s role based on the ‘special relationship’ and the Commonwealth. After the Iraq invasion its prime minister was hailed by some commentators as the ‘real vice-president’ of the United States (ironically, a proverbially powerless office), and he was regarded across America as a combination of Winston Churchill and Nelson Mandela. Britain was part of a coalition with Australia which also drew in a large group of European states. When Acheson spoke, Britain, choosing a European future, had withdrawn from ‘east of Suez’. Now it had most of its front-line forces in Iraq. France, nearly forty years after the fall of de Gaulle, had opposed the Anglo-Saxons more vehemently than the General had ever done. History’s fundamental lesson is that the future will always surprise us. But it also teaches that our reactions to its surprises are shaped by habits of thought and sentiment that are very durable. So, despite frenetic negotiations and the appearance of uncertainty and suspense, Blair and Chirac ended up predictably playing Churchill and de Gaulle in miniature. Long-established assumptions about national interest, and instinctive sympathies and prejudices, were strong among the publics of both countries, as well as among politicans and diplomats. Neither government had much freedom of action: the grooves were too well worn. France’s cherished ambition of opposing Anglo-Saxon dominance of NATO had been taken further than ever. But the object of that policy – a strong, French-led Europe standing up to America – evaporated. Britain’s equally cherished policy of being a transatlantic bridge had proved highly dangerous in terms of domestic policy, and incompatible with Blair’s previous ambition to join with France and Germany in leading the EU.

DESPERATE TO BE FRIENDS: CELEBRATING
THE ENTENTE CORDIALE, 1904–2004

Irony was heaped on irony when, amid the bitterest row for a generation, both countries gamely set out to commemorate the centenary of the entente cordiale. The nineteenth-century philosopher Paul Renan famously declared that national solidarity required a willingness to forget unhelpful history. International solidarity required no less. Academics (including ourselves) participated in numerous conferences and produced papers and books. Cross-Channel businesses provided modest subsidies for celebrations. Parties were held. Programmes were broadcast. Supplements were printed. The Queen, following her father and great-grandfather, set out to charm the French public in April, the centenary of the signing. The French, staunch republicans and avid royal-watchers, responded. The royal visit probably explains why the entente gave rise to more and deeper discussion in France than Britain. The Grenadier Guards marched down the Champs Elysées on 14 July, making the point that British and French, despite fallings out, were Europe’s warriors: ‘Our military relationship has . . . brought our two countries together.’¹⁵³ The French radio, nervous of hostile demonstrations, falsely explained that the Guards were merely for show, not combat troops like those in Iraq. Chirac’s return visit in November made less of a stir, though his being treated to a command performance of a musical version of Les Misérables in the Waterloo Chamber at Windsor caused some French journalists to suspect a mysteriously subtle insult.

In both countries, there was a praiseworthy desire to be nice, and, as the historian Philip Bell has put it, to present the relationship as they would like it to be. The French press conjured up the sort of England they liked, in which eccentricity, cups of tea and fictional detectives were prominent. At grass-roots level there were dozens of touchingly odd celebrations, which showed how extensive personal contacts had become: the Warwick Chapter of the Commanderie du Taste Saumur held a banquet; Chester had a rally of vintage French cars and a commemoration of the 1918 armistice; a tram in Sarajevo was painted red white and blue.¹⁵⁴ But despite personal bonhomie, opinion polls showed that political feelings had been affected by Iraq. Only 9 per cent of the French expressed ‘great trust’ in the ‘pro-American’ British, compared with 28 per cent who greatly trusted the Germans. Only the Americans and the Russians were trusted less. The British trusted the Americans far more than they trusted the French. A more extensive study of French public attitudes showed that the ‘English’ aroused the strongest and least favourable reactions of all European peoples. A free word-association test produced ‘conceited’, ‘snobbish’, ‘rude’, ‘haughty’, ‘cold’, ‘selfish’, ‘arrogant’, ‘hypocritical’ and ‘unpleasant’; though there apparently survived a small minority of traditional anglophiles who thought of ‘pragmatic’, ‘elegant’, ‘funny’, ‘courteous’, ‘gentlemanly’, ‘nice’, ‘tolerant’, etc. There was wide agreement that the English were very different: ‘insular’, ‘monarchist’, ‘anti-European’, and ‘independent’.¹⁵⁵

It is common in both countries to express pained surprise over the persistence of ill feeling, though the causes are ever more plain. More surprising is their equally deep-seated desire to be friends. It is hard to think of any other two countries that so strenuously demonstrate cordiality, with the possible exception of France and Germany. This of course is a clue: lavish expressions of affection are intended to exorcize hostility. But as the jollifications of the Warwick Chapter of the Commanderie du Taste (and many like them) demonstrate, the British and French also find each other intriguing, amusing, and even agreeable, as they have for centuries. And they are much more like each other than they suppose – more than the British are like the Americans or the French are like the Germans. If we were to take a word-association test ourselves on Franco-British similarities, we would come up with ‘cynical’, ‘irreverent’, ‘stoical’, ‘bloody-minded’, ‘individualistic’, ‘tolerant’ – and of course ‘self-righteous’.

2005: Déjà Vu All Over Again

Hegel says somewhere that all great personalities and events in world history reappear in one fashion or another. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.

KARL MARX

The ‘Anglo-Saxon model’ . . . is based on social inequalities accepted by the British but which would seem intolerable here . . . One cannot expect a people that made a revolution, guillotined its king and hung aristocrats on lamp-posts to have the same conception of social relations as a monarchy where one of the chambers of parliament is composed exclusively of lords.

Le Monde, 5–6 June 2005

I am a passionate pro-European . . . I believe in Europe as a political project. I believe in Europe with a strong and caring social dimension. I would never accept a Europe that was simply an economic market . . . But tell me: what type of social model is it that has 20 million unemployed?

TONY BLAIR to European Parliament, 23 June 2005

Blair is a worse version of Thatcher. Just as arrogant but selfish too.

JACQUES CHIRAC, June 2005¹⁵⁶

On 29 May 2005, the French people rejected the European Constitution, scorning their government, shattering all the mainstream political parties, and leaving the country politically rudderless. The referendum campaign and its aftermath – including a No vote in Holland a few days later – made the half-century struggle between France and Britain again explicitly the focus of European politics, as in the time of de Gaulle. Indeed, as a perceptive French journalist pointed out, the ‘No’ of 2005 fundamentally resembled de Gaulle’s ‘No’ to British entry in 1963 – both expressed ‘persistent suspicion’ of the consequences for France of Britain’s links with the wider world.¹⁵⁷

The French vote was by far the most important event in Franco-British history for nearly half a century. It nullified the strategy followed by the British governing elite since the 1960s: to clamber on board the departing European train with as much good grace as they could muster. Blair had long proclaimed his mission to ensure that Britain would never be ‘isolated or left behind’, and he had committed himself to joining the Euro and adopting the constitution. The French vote enabled him to drop the British referendum, saving him from terminal humiliation – opinion polls indicated over 70 per cent ‘No’. He adroitly seized the chance to redefine what it meant to be pro-European. An admiring opponent commented that it was ‘just the same as what many of us have always meant by Eurosceptic’.¹⁵⁸ So ended for the time being the British divide over ‘Europe’. Blair was restored to a position of authority at home, and became, above all in French eyes, the dominating figure in Europe. With astounding good fortune, he was due to take over as chairman of the G8 group and as president of the European Council. Meanwhile, as if to underline his resurgence, the largest peacetime assembly of warships in history met at Portsmouth to celebrate the bicentenary of Trafalgar. Even the award of the 2012 Olympic Games to London on 5 July was interpreted by the French as a triumph for Blair’s irresistible magnetism, as a defeat for French ideals of non-commercialism and le fair-play, as proof of the power of ‘the Anglo-Saxons’, and as another alarming symptom of France’s waning global influence. The customary cross-Channel exchange of media insults was cut short by the tragedy of the London terrorist bombings on 7 July. A few months earlier, such an event would have shaken Blair’s position, but now it silenced criticism.

In retrospect, the French No vote seems predictable: they had almost voted No to the Maastricht treaty in 1992, had always been suspicious of true federalism (‘One does not impose on our country that which does not please us’¹⁵⁹), and had been growing disenchanted with an expanding and liberalizing ‘Europe’. It had been easy enough to expect that ‘as cherished traditions of domestic and foreign policy collide, the question of whether present European policy is compatible with informed democratic consent may soon have to be faced’.¹⁶⁰ Yet if predictable, the vote was not predicted. Opinion polls indicating opposition to the Constitution were discounted. It seemed unthinkable that the French would really resist the customary appeals to national pride as historic leaders of Europe and national fear of being isolated in an unfriendly world. Giscard proclaimed that the Constitution would make the EU ‘a political power that will talk on equal terms to the greatest powers on our planet’.¹⁶¹ This quasi-nationalist ambition was the strongest argument for the French public. In the bluntest terms, ‘to say No to the European constitution is to say Yes to Bush’. But economic fears were overtaking political hopes. The French socialists had gained in the 2004 European elections by campaigning ‘against a liberal Europe’. Almost everyone, not least previously pro-European Catholics, strongly opposed the accession of Turkey (supported by Britain), which if it happened would mark the end of de Gaulle’s ‘European Europe’ and create ‘a multicultural space, elastic and without identity’.¹⁶² France raised a unilateral barrier against eventual Turkish entry by changing its own constitution to forbid further EU enlargement unless sanctioned by a special French referendum. Attacks in Brussels and Strasbourg on the British budget rebate, on Britain’s opt-out from rules on maximum working hours, and on the Bolkestein directive to introduce a single market in services (see above, page 651) showed that French politicians shared public disquiet. But the publicity given to these disputes in France increased the feeling that ‘Europe’ was going wrong.¹⁶³ Even French federalists who supported the constitution as a step towards ‘a European republic’ criticized it as ‘not social enough, not federalist enough, not democratic enough, too complex, too liberal’ and giving too much to ‘the English’.¹⁶⁴

The crux was summed up by Dominique de Villepin, soon to be prime minister: ‘We do not want a liberal Europe – which would signify the victory of the British vision of Europe as a mere market.’¹⁶⁵ Supporters of the Constitution insisted that it would prevent this disaster. Jacques Chirac, in his televised attempt to rally the public to vote Yes, insisted that the Constitution would prevent ‘an Anglo-Saxon, Atlanticist Europe’. When a journalist remarked on the lower level of unemployment in Britain, he replied that this was due to ‘methods and social rules . . . that would not be accepted or acceptable to us’. In private, he put it more bluntly: ‘Over the years the English have wrecked their agriculture and then their industry. Now they only survive due to property inflation, financial speculation and their oil and gas.’¹⁶⁶

Having barely given a thought to the pros and cons of Europeanism for years, the French now surpassed the British in suspiciousness, and began scrutinizing the Constitution’s small print with an attention and sense of civic responsibility that few political cultures could match. The document’s virtuosic ambiguity challenged their much-vaunted ‘Cartesianism’. On one hand, it contained the familiar Delorean elements of a ‘social market economy’ and new ‘competences’ for the Commission, including new powers to regulate public services. On the other hand, its Articles 1.3 and 1.4 would make ‘an internal market where competition is free and fair (non faussée)’ and ‘free circulation of persons, services, goods and capital’ part of Europe’s basic law. Opponents seized on these words. Glossed in the light of the Bolkestein directive, they threatened an influx of foreign workers – whether Polish plumbers or British bankers – who would not be subject to French labour laws, and hence would be able to undercut French workers. This became the central theme of the campaign, as headlines leaked the contents of a suppressed government study warning that 200,000 jobs in services might be lost.¹⁶⁷ Supporters of the Constitution pointed out that the offending phrases had been in all the past European treaties. In vain: much of the French electorate, at least by implication, now rejected the very basis of the original Common Market.

The vote gave a 55 per cent No. Exit polls showed that fear of unemployment was the key. Only sixteen of France’s 100 departments – the most affluent and the most Catholic parts of the country – voted Yes, though usually narrowly. Enthusiastic Europeanism was confined to the wealthiest suburbs and quarters of Paris and to the Pacific and Caribbean territories. In mainland France, the only socio-economic groups that voted Yes were big business, the liberal professions, academics and the retired. Young voters and the traditional Left voted emphatically No. What shifted the balance from a tiny Yes in 1992 to a substantial No in 2005 was defection among the numerous public-sector middle class such as teachers, nurses, social workers and civil servants,¹⁶⁸ and consequently, of part of the Socialist Party, their political representative. This group favoured the political vision of ‘ever closer union’, but only on condition that it would protect le service public and hence their jobs against ‘ultraliberal’ competition.

The shock to the French political and intellectual establishment was profound. This was far more than simply a rebellion against the politicians in power, whose expressed opposition to the ‘British vision of Europe’ was the same as that of the electorate. It was the voters’ verdict that those politicians – despite their insistence that the Constitution reflected French ideals and traditions – were failing to ensure that Europe remained the bulwark of France. An entire vision of history and of the future, and of France’s place in it, was thereby called into question. Perhaps after all, mused one commentator, ‘the tide of history in Europe’ was running towards ‘the desires of Albion’.¹⁶⁹ The chancellor of the exchequer, Gordon Brown, emphatically agreed:

the assumptions that became rooted in the very idea of European integration were that a single market and single currency would lead to tax harmonization, a federal fiscal policy, and something akin to a federal state. But by its very nature globalization changes all this . . . Identities have remained rooted in the nation state . . . the old assumptions about federalism do not match the realities of our time.¹⁷⁰

The French flatteringly over-estimated Whitehall’s foresight, assuming that somehow the British had planned this all along. Blair was hailed, bitterly and sometimes admiringly, as the new ‘strong man of Europe’.

Chirac’s first public statement after the referendum took up the challenge: ‘I shall act . . . in defence of our national interests . . . resolutely respecting the French model, which is not an Anglo-Saxon type model.’¹⁷¹ His reported private reaction was typically blunt: ‘that conceited prat Blair . . . is only too happy with the No vote. You’d think he gets off on it. He wants to use the British presidency to grab the limelight . . . I won’t put up with his English arrogance.’¹⁷² Chirac’s gambit was familiar, and expected in both London and Paris: to attack the British rebate secured by Margaret Thatcher, and thus embarrass Blair at home and isolate him in Europe as his presidency began. The British response was equally obvious: to attack the Common Agricultural Policy, what Chirac called ‘their idée fixe’. Worryingly for the French, their special relationship with Germany seemed in doubt, as Blair’s new enthusiasm for ‘modernizing’ the EU was said to be shared by the German opposition leader Angela Merkel, soon to be the German chancellor.

The sinking of the Constitution marked a kind of velvet revolution in the EU. By exploding the last of the Enlightenment grand narratives,¹⁷³ according to which ever closer union was historically predestined for Europe and hence beyond democratic choice, it had shaken every certainty. The strategy of European leadership followed unwaveringly and brilliantly by France’s governing elite for half a century had, concluded Le Monde, met its Waterloo, marking ‘a formidable victory of Great Britain over France and its idea of Europe’:

Never has Albion seemed so perfidious and so lucky . . . For the French electors have, by their vote, satisfied two long-cherished English hopes: they have dealt a blow, perhaps a fatal one, to the project of political union; and they have driven a wedge into the Franco-German alliance.¹⁷⁴

Blair, previously assumed to be nearing a disappointing end to his career, had stumbled to victory. The French people gave him the chance to make his mark on history. His arresting mixture of statesmanship and showmanship linked him with other charismatic British leaders at crucial moments of rivalry with France – Pitt the Elder, Palmerston, Lloyd George, Macmillan. He suddenly had thrust upon him the greatest opportunity of any British politician since Bevin to shape the future of the Continent.

But as Bevin had found, Europe was hard to shape. Six months later, as the British presidency ended in December 2005, little had been discussed about the future of Europe, and nothing decided. Paris’s spoiling tactics, implacably pursued, had been effective against a British government that seemingly had no idea what to do beyond exhortation. The British ambassador explained in Le Monde (4 January 2006) that Britain had delayed putting forward any precise suggestions in case they aroused opposition. French commentators realized with open relief that there was to be no European revolution, and that even British aspirations to reform the budget were insubstantial. On the headline-catching symbolic issues, the CAP actually increased its share of EU spending, while Britain gave up part of its budgetary rebate, in direct contravention of Blair’s declaration to the European Parliament. Chirac proclaimed in his 2006 New Year broadcast that France would continue to lead Europe towards a more ‘political’, ‘social’, protectionist and interventionist future. His message was diffused in all twenty-four languages. But even the French press doubted that anyone was listening. France had won a short-term tactical victory, but had shown again that it was incapable of any positive initiative in European politics.

So French and British visions remained as contradictory as ever, and their resolution was postponed indefinitely. However, the one significant act of the British presidency had the potential to force a decision: the beginning of formal negotiations for the admission of Turkey to the EU. Turkish membership, bitterly resisted by many in France and elsewhere, could finally destroy the aim of an ‘ever closer union’, and so dilute the EU into that ‘vaste zone de libre-échange’ feared by de Gaulle. Or it could, on the other hand, divide the Continent into the ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ circles that French policy favoured. The European ‘Great Game’ is still to be played out.

⁶ ‘Goddams’ – les Godons – is an old French nickname for the English, derived from their frequent swearing.

⁷ In purchasing power, however, they are joint seventh – behind China, India . . . and Italy!

⁸ One version is ‘Est-ce qu’elle veut mes couilles?’ (‘Does she want my balls?’) An alternative, more idiomatic and untranslatable, is ‘Ça m’en touche une sans faire bouger l’autre.’ See L’Express (14 November 2002), and Le Monde (4–5 April 2004).

⁹ The French electoral system combined with the collapse of the Socialist Party made the ageing right-wing demagogue Jean-Marie Le Pen the only other candidate, which forced the Left to vote for Chirac.