Meanwhile, in Paris, President Jacques Chirac planted himself behind Charles de Gaulle’s old desk at the Elysee Palace. Like his hero, he too sat in defiant isolation–opposed to the war, opposed to the Iraq reconstruction schemes that Blair and his friend Bush were cooking up and opposed most of all to the prospect of a new world order dominated by the United States.
As the world’s TV cameras focused on Mesopotamia’s battlefields, a new front is opening up in Europe. Britain and France have long had different visions of their shared future. These differences have sharpened under the leadership of the Gaullist Chirac, a 70-year-old champion of the European status quo, and the younger, reform-minded British prime minister. But Iraq has greatly upped the ante. It has forced the two leaders to take sides–with America or against it. The battle over Europe, and who speaks for Europeans, has thus begun in earnest.
The opening skirmishes quickly turned bloody over last month’s failed second U.N. resolution authorizing war against Iraq. Nearly two weeks into a conflict that France calls illegal, a second and similar fight is brewing. The proximate cause: the role of the United Nations in the postwar reconstruction of Iraq. The day before he flew to Washington, Blair declared uncompromisingly that the United Nations “must be centrally involved.” But by the time he stood with Bush at twin Camp David podiums on Thursday, he had changed his tune. Yes, the United Nations must oversee humanitarian relief, he agreed–but he was not prepared to challenge U.S. plans for a Pentagon-run civil administration in the war’s immediate aftermath. “There are undoubtedly important things that the United Nations will be able to do,” said a senior U.S. administration official. “But this is not East Timor, this is not Kosovo, this is not Afghanistan.” For his part, Chirac was no less categorical. As far as he’s concerned, “there will be but one authority” in postwar Iraq–the United Nations. Any Security Council resolution suggesting otherwise would be tantamount to “justifying military intervention,” and France would veto it.
A full-frontal collision may yet be averted. In London last week, French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin, lecturing at London’s International Institute for Strategic Studies, called for the two nations to mend their differences. “We have the same sense of independence,” he said. “We have the same sense of our countries’ global role.” Blair, too, hopes for healing–not only between France and Britain, but also among other European countries. If the war and its fraught diplomacy has split Europe, “the aftermath could be good,” says Dominique Moisi of the French Institute of International Relations in Paris, because it offers a chance to “come together for the peace.”
Perhaps. But much depends on what Washington does once the fighting ends, as well as the degree to which European coalition partners follow America’s lead. As de Villepin clearly suggested in his remarks, ties that too closely bind Britain to the –United States will continue to divide it from France. There’s also the fact that “a lot of poison must still be cleared out of the system,” as John Palmer of the European Policy Centre in Brussels puts it. A big reason for that, Moisi notes, is that what started out as a lofty contest between Blair and Chirac for pre-eminence in Europe has descended, lately, into a catfight “about personalities.”
Except for the fact that they govern two great European powers, Blair and Chirac have little in common–starting with age and politics. A former Army officer, civil servant and two-time cabinet minister, Chirac was already serving his second year as prime minister when Tony Blair, fresh out of law school, worked for a summer in the bar of a Paris hotel in 1976. While Chirac built his four-decade political career to the right of center, Blair began as a man of the left. His move to the center and his deft reconstruction of the Labour Party paved the way for a huge victory in 1997 over the Conservatives, who had ruled Britain for 18 years. Social Democrats across Europe looked to Blair’s modernization of Labour as a guide for breathing new life into their own lackluster parties.
While Blair was riding high, Chirac as president was straitjacketed in a “cohabitation” government with Socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin. He cast off those political chains a year ago, after winning 82 percent of the vote against the controversial right-wing nationalist Jean-Marie Le Pen in an election in which the entire French political establishment threw its weight behind him. Ever since, Chirac has been flexing his Gaullist muscles. Concerned about Blair’s closeness to Bush and determined that Europe should become a counterbalance to American global hegemony, Chirac began driving wedges between Britain and the Continent–and between Europe and America.
Living up to his old nickname, Le Bulldozer, Chirac has made it amply clear that he is not to be trifled with. In a single week in February, he shrugged off vociferous British protests and welcomed Robert Mugabe, the Zimbabwean dictator and scourge of the British Commonwealth, to a summit of African leaders in Paris. He rebuffed American and British entreaties to back the second U.N. resolution that would have authorized war against Iraq. He rejected a NATO package of aid to Ankara. And he humiliated Central and Eastern European countries that had publicly supported U.S. and British policy on Iraq, even threatening their membership in the European Union.
Through it all, Chirac and Blair have tried to maintain an entente cordiale. They were at times more than cordial. In November 2001, Blair played host to Chirac, who had just celebrated his 69th birthday. Among the guests was 18-month-old Leo Blair, who toddled over to Chirac at one point and gave him a gift, a small leather case. He even wished the president a happy birthday–in French. (Alas, his father’s fluency hasn’t done him much good of late.) By November of last year, however, the mask of friendship had slipped. Blair reportedly resented an intemperate allusion to Leo at a NATO meeting, when Chirac wondered aloud how Blair could look his son in the face in 20 years and admit that he had helped to start a war.
Blair returned fire last month. Like Washington, he blamed the failed U.N. diplomacy on France. The British press was less restrained. It marveled at the political second coming of a politician once written off as a cynical has-been, dogged by multiple corruption charges over his career–“like many of his African guests” at the Paris summit, The Sunday Times added acidly. The Sun tabloid slimed him in schoolboy French: chirac est un ver. (“Chirac is a worm.”)
Pierre Hassner of the Center for International Studies and Research in Paris suggests that the “implicit rivalry” between Blair and Chirac centers on the age-old question “Who speaks for Europe?” But that answer depends on a newer and equally important question, “Which Europe?” Today’s EU is more than ever a work in progress. Its current 15 members are a welter of alliances that shift to and fro, depending on the issue. With the addition of 10 new nations in 2004, Europe’s internal politics will become dizzying. But that may be nothing –when it comes to foreign policy. The shifting constellation of allegiances has hopelessly muddled Europe’s stand on the world’s No. 1 preoccupation at the dawn of the 21st century: America’s global dominance as a military, economic and cultural force. For political as well as economic reasons, the incoming members of the “new” Europe are far more likely to line up with Britain (and America) than with France and the rest of un-America.
So begins the postmodern struggle for the mastery of Europe. Britain in many ways remains on the periphery of the European experiment. It is not part of the single-currency scheme, for example. But Blair is convinced that two things place Britain–not France–at the true heart of an evolving Europe. One is that it is essential to “get America and Europe working again together as partners, and not as rivals,” as he said last week. As he sees it, Britain is the most natural bridge-builder. The other is the power of his reformist ideals–in particular, his desire to deconstruct the European welfare state and dismantle many of its protectionist economies. Europe should be chiefly an economic–not a political–union, he believes, and should model its free-trade future after America.
Such thinking appalls Chirac. Like any good French president, he believes France is the engine of Europe. It has long led the drive toward integration, partnering with Germany, and it should continue to do so. His vision is of a federal Europe, and he is far less a reformer than Blair when it comes to Europe’s traditional economies. He sees Britain as something of a Trojan horse within Europe’s gates, a surrogate and advocate for America–and thus a certain rival, if not at times an enemy.
How this competition plays out depends much on Iraq. If the war ends without massive civilian casualties, and if Europe (and especially France) is coaxed into a reconstruction effort that substantively involves the United Nations, then transatlantic tensions will abate. So will frictions between Britain and France. The chances are high that enlightened self-interest will sooner or later trump any personal animosities between Chirac and Blair. After all, says Frank Vibert of the European Policy Forum, both men are “politicians up to their eyeballs.” But make no mistake. With Europe up for grabs, France and Britain cannot be just friends.
With William Underhill in London, Tracy McNicoll in Paris and Stefan Theil in Berlin
