France
: Champion of
a Multipolar World
May 14, 2003
By Marcel H. van Herpen
Some
observers consider the recent standoff between France and the
United States
to be a
temporary event. They stress the fact that we have witnessed similar
crises before, as in Suez in 1956 or in
1966, when de Gaulle left the military organization of NATO. Such an
assessment, however, does not take into account the fundamentally
different situation of today. There is a growing discrepancy between the
French vision of its own place in the world and the real world as it has
developed around it. If we have a closer look at the French foreign policy
premises, we will see that it is characterized by three basic assumptions.
These are:
1.
France
considers
itself a pivotal great power.
2.
France
can only play
this pivotal role in a multipolar
world.
3.
France
considers a
multipolar world the best guarantee of international relations that are
based on a multilateral
approach.
France
favors a strong
role for international fora, especially for the Security Council of the
UN, of which it is a permanent member. Such a role will not only
strengthen international law, but also confirm
France
’s great power
status.
To
what degree are these basic assumptions still valid? Let us first look at
the French self-image of its position as a great power. It is clear that
France
’s
international position is in relative decline. In the 1950s and 1960s,
when
France
lost its
colonial empire, it embraced
Europe
and found in the
Europe
of the Six a vehicle to reassert itself.
However, its position as the undisputed leader of
Europe
was gradually
undermined when
Europe
took in more
members. The coming enlargement with ten new countries will dilute French
influence even further, notwithstanding recent initiatives to counter this
trend by a revitalization of the significantly weakened French-German axis
and the establishment on
April
29, 2003
of a European
Security and Defense Union with
Germany
,
Belgium
and
Luxembourg
.
France
’s great power
status seems to be ever more defined by two remnants of the past: its
nuclear deterrent and its permanent seat on the Security Council.
Second,
there is the French preoccupation with multipolarity. Why? This
preoccupation is based on the idea that only in a multipolar world can
France
play the
independent international role that is à
la hauteur of its ambitions. Also, here
France
has been
confronted with an adverse development. After the demise of the
Soviet Union
, the
US
has emerged as
the undisputed global leader: the world has become unipolar. In
France
there exists a
certain nostalgia for the Cold War era. In this period the world was not
ideal, because not multipolar, but its bipolarity offered (Gaullist)
France
a relative
independence vis-à-vis both superpowers.
France
is painfully
conscious of the fact that it has a strongly reduced marge
de manoeuvre in a world dominated by what the French call - with a
mixture of repulsion and envy – the American ‘hyperpower’ (l’hyperpuissance américaine). In his 1978 work (La lueur de l’espérance – réflexion du soir pour le
matin),
Jacques Chirac already clearly expresses his preference for a multipolar
world. He wrote:
The French should not believe that their country is
destined to become a small power without influence on the destiny of the
world…
After
having stressed the French ‘mission’ and its ‘grandeur’, he
continued:
The world has nothing to gain from the American-Soviet
dyarchy. When we oppose ourselves to it, we not only defend our
independence and our interests, but also the freedom and the peace of the
world. Among all states
France
is one of the
best placed to take the lead of a resistance … that will not fail to
attract sympathy and support.
Twenty-five
years later, one could almost read this text as a blueprint for the recent
French stance in the Security Council, when it threatened to veto a second
resolution on
Iraq
.
Third,
there is the fact that the French government seems to consider a
multipolar world a necessary precondition for a multilateral approach. In
the French vision, a unipolar international system, dominated by one
hyperpower, will automatically lead to a unilateral approach of the
hegemon. Both, however, are not necessarily connected. You can have a
unipolar world in which the leading power has a multilateral approach, as
was the case under the
Clinton
administration,
and you can have a multipolar world dominated by a unilateral approach of
the different state actors, as was the case in the pre-World War II
period.
We
may conclude that the three above mentioned factors: the frustration about
France
’s relatively
declining international status, its reduced playground in a unipolar
system, together with the equation of unipolarity with unilateralism, has
brought President Chirac to fundamentally review his foreign policy. No
longer restricted by a cohabitation with the Socialists, he can - at last
- do what he already long ago decided to do: to systematically oppose
American power in order to create a second, countervailing power. In this
strategy, he considers
Germany
and some
smaller European states, including
Russia
, and possibly
China
, to be his
natural allies.
The
question is, however, if Chirac’s obsession with multipolarity will not
cause a lot of damage: first to the transatlantic relationship, second to
the EU, which is deeply divided as a result of his approach, and finally
to
France
itself.
Chirac’s view of the virtues
of a multipolar world might be a little bit too rosy. Maybe he has in mind
the mutually balanced ‘concert of nations’ of nineteenth century
Europe
. But that
period was a short exception in
Europe
’s long,
bloody, multipolar history. As Pangloss in Voltaire’s “Candide”, who
discovers that the real world is not ‘the best of all worlds’, Chirac
(or at least future French Presidents) might find out that a multipolar
world is not ‘the best of all worlds’, but an utterly dangerous place.
The
‘unipolar moment’, far from being a danger, could, on the contrary
offer a unique window of opportunity to both Americans and Europeans to
shape a world according to Western values. This presupposes that the US
and
Europe
should work
closely together, combining their hard and soft power (and in the
partition of roles, Europeans should not concentrate exclusively on soft
power, as Americans should not on hard power). Americans and Europeans
have a similar interest in fighting international terrorism, in preventing
the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and in solving the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict. They equally share an interest in reforming
the Arab world from a politically, economically, and culturally stagnat
region, governed by autocrats, into a modern, democratic and prosperous
part of the world.
In
France, the danger of an American ‘neo-imperialism’ has been invoked
(see,
for example, Alain Frachon and Daniel Vernet, “L’école néo-impérialiste
américaine”, in Le Monde, September
19, 2002),
in which references are made not to the post-World War II period in which
the United States successfully re-ordered the world, but to the pre-World
War I situation in which President Theodore Roosevelt conducted
"gunboat diplomacy." The problem with the allied intervention in
Iraq
, however, could
in the end prove not to be a
U.S.
‘neo-imperialist’ overcommitment,
but a
U.S.
undercommitment. Niall Fergusson rightly calls the
United States
“a reluctant
ruler of other peoples.” And he adds: “The American approach has too
often been to fire some shells, march in, hold elections and then get the
hell out – until the next crisis.
Haiti
is one recent
example, Kosovo another,
Afghanistan
may yet prove
to be the next.” One could
add now
Iraq
to this series.
Instead of dreaming of a multipolar world,
Europe
-
France
included-has an
interest in assisting the
United States
in the enormous
task of building a prosperous and democratic
Iraq
. Because only a
long-term commitment of the whole transatlantic community can guarantee a
stable peace in the
Middle East
.
Marcel H. van Herpen is Director of the Cicero Foundation, a pro-EU
think tank (www.cicerofoundation.org).
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