The Elysée
Treaty turned 50 this week, a grand occasion for official hypocrisy, reporting
ineptitude and a garish mixture of flonflons
and umpah. Here is my attempt to make some sense of what is being celebrated.
France
always tried to think of itself as a Great Power on the world stage, which is
all the more surprising since it spent
most of its modern life as clearly the underdog in the (numerous) fights it picked up: with
the Habsburgs in the 16th and 17th centuries, with Britain in the 18th century,
with everyone in Europe under Napoleon and finally, to tragic consequences, with
Germany after 1870, a silly border dispute that caused two world wars and
resulted in 60 million deaths or so.
But then,
in under twenty years, in spite of all the noise it kept making, it clearly
became a dwarf in international politics. There were three
stages in that fall:
- first, 1940-45, when its legitimate
government, Vichy's Etat français,
sank into collaboration with Nazi Germany before being swept away with it.
To cover-up, De Gaulle started the official lie that France was part of
the victors, with a seat on the UN's Security Council, which prevented
France from looking hard at its fabric and has greatly concurred to
keep-it reform-free.
- second, Suez in 1956, when the United
States told it, as well as Britain and Israel, to pack up their field
victory, go play in their room and stop bothering grown-ups. Suez was a defining moment for all three countries,
all of them wowing for such a thing to nether happen again to them, but choosing
widely different paths towards that goal. Britain and Israel cozied up to
the US, hence the "special relationship", while France decided to
go it alone and build its own nuclear might.
- and finally when it gave up the last remnant
of its colonial Empire, Algeria, in 1962. It was then left as a moderately
significant European country, a tad larger than the European average, for
sure, but with little real clout left.
Nevertheless,
it went on pretending being a world power, thanks to two crutches:
- blackmailing the US, a "bribe me or
else" strategy initiated by De Gaulle, which was particularly
effective and credible in view of the impressive size of the "enemy
within" in France, namely a huge and highly organized French Communist
Party, which used to and collect between 20 and 25% of the popular vote and
to this day has never been blacklisted by French society as an enemy of
democracy.
- making use to its own advantage of Germany's
terrible criminal record. In the 1950s, the FRG, slightly more populated than
France but economically much better organized, was denied a formal role in
international institutions because of its past. It desperately wanted a
new, clean reputation, and being friends with its former arch-enemy seemed
a no-brainer to that effect. Moreover it refused on principle, for commendable
therapeutic purposes, to do anything that could in any way remind of its
pre-1945 militarism. It was thus clearly anxious to acquire an ally that
could speak for it on the international stage and eventually use force,
which it had so thoroughly renounced. It thus went out of its way to
please France, claimed to be its equal or even its vassal, paid for every French
whim, even the most harmful (like the absurd Common Agricultural Policy, which
ate up most of the EU's budget for 35 years in subventions to mainly French
farmers and ... did in fact a lot of long term harm to France by keeping
its agriculture backward) and allowed France to continue to travelling
first class with a second class ticket both militarily and diplomatically.
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