{"id":21,"date":"2003-02-07T00:00:35","date_gmt":"2003-02-07T00:00:35","guid":{"rendered":"0"},"modified":"2006-09-28T12:08:00","modified_gmt":"2006-09-28T12:08:00","slug":"france","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/?p=21","title":{"rendered":"France"},"content":{"rendered":"

Trent<\/a> and Joe<\/a> have launched a discussion here about France and our relationship. Instapundit<\/a> and Vodkapundit<\/a> have weighed in as well. <\/p>\n

In reading these, I kept getting a vague discomfort, kind of like the feeling you get when the moules<\/I> you eat aren\u2019t bad but aren\u2019t really right either. First let me lay out some foundations.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not an expert on France, French politics, or modern European international politics (I don\u2019t think Trent, Joe, or the others are, either\u2026that\u2019s not a disqualification, just a comment on the limits of my and our knowledge and experience). I do have some<\/u> direct experience; my first wife is French, and she and I traveled and stayed there frequently for ten years and lived there for a year a long time ago while I finished work on my Masters. Her late father was a general in the French Air Force (the real deal; he flew bombers from England during WWII, and served in Indochina and Algeria, as well as a tour as an attach\u00e9 in Washington D.C.), and was on the board of one of the three largest French companies when I knew him.<\/p>\n

My advisor in Berkeley also was a student of French history and economics, and even published a book, Modern Capitalist Planning: the French model<\/A> on the subject.<\/p>\n

I say this just to give some perspective to my opinions\u2026I have no special knowledge; these opinions come from my memory of wide-ranging discussions with a number of interesting people, and the fact that I still read Le Monde occasionally. <\/p>\n

First, I think that Trent and Steve are just flat wrong when they criticize France for not acting like an ally. They are right that France isn\u2019t acting like an ally, but wrong to assume that it is or ever was.In my impression, the driving force behind French international politics is the simple desire to carve out a space where France\u2026even as a second- or even third-class world power\u2026can lead. And those areas are twofold: defining the bureaucracy that they hope will subsume national governments, and in dealing with Africa and the Middle East, where they feel that their \u2018benign\u2019 colonial history\u2026to them their willingness to withdraw from Algeria and bring the pieds-noirs home counts as that\u2026gives them special status as the \u2018portal\u2019 between these regions and the West.<\/p>\n

We in the U.S. are cming to perceive a great conflict between Islamist forces and the West, while the French see the Islamists as people who can be dealt with, leader to leader, and see an great opportunity for France (and Europe) as becoming the gateway between the oil-rich Middle East and the West. <\/p>\n

This is totally in line with French diplomatic history in which the major defining principle has been to define themselves against whoever is in power at the moment; first their peer power, Prussia, then England, then the United States. They have always been comfortable that with their \u2018realism\u2019 and diplomatic skills, they could reach some rapproachment with the other side, whether that was the Soviet Union, Libya, or now Iraq.<\/p>\n

Our frustration with France comes from our (not unreasonable) assumption that a) since we keep bailing them out of military difficulties; b) we rebuilt their economy twice; and c) they lived under our military protection for twenty years, they would act as allies and assume that our interests were parallel, with small differences involving metric v. English measurement and whether we would sell Michelin or UniRoyal tires to various third-word accounts.<\/p>\n

They don\u2019t feel that way.<\/p>\n

They loved DeGaulle for navigating between the force fields of the U.S. and the Soviet Union, and for developing the \u2019force de frappe\u2019<\/I> which they felt ensured France\u2019s military independence. <\/p>\n

Trent argues that they are in the midst of a \u2018moral collapse\u2019 as state and corporate corruption combines with the increasingly ungovernable banlieues<\/I> (50\u2019s and 60\u2019s suburbs largely occupied by African and Arab immigrants) and an elite that has lost its philosophical compass.<\/p>\n

Let me suggest an alternative theory, which I believe better accounts for the facts.<\/p>\n

France is a bureaucratic state, with both the government and private sector fully enmeshed in a dirigiste<\/I> bureaucracy, with all of the problems which that may entail (see my own writing<\/a> on the subject). The French have what would be, to many of us, a flexible morality that goes beyond the public acknowledgement of the Prime Minister\u2019s mistresses and illegitimate children, and to the notion of \u2018favors\u2019 of various types, both political and corporate.<\/p>\n

The political compass of the bureaucracy is not only their own individual advancement, but the institutional advancement of France, and the empowerment of France in a world dominated by larger and more powerful players. The EU would set this triumph in cement, as France joins hands with Germany and takes over Europe.<\/p>\n

France has never cared about the U.N. or international process except as a forum in which it could maneuver to maintain its independence.<\/p>\n

The French are vaguely amused at our \u2018moralistic\u2019 view of international affairs. They pride themselves on cold-eyed realism, and in fact can be astoundingly bloody-minded when it suits them (see the Rainbow Warrior<\/a>, pretty much anything<\/a> about the Algerian war). If the 9\/11 attacks had happened in Paris and say, Toulouse, large parts of the Middle East would be smoking holes right now, U.N. mandate or no U.N. mandate.<\/p>\n

France, like most of the cities in Europe, has for years had a crime rate that would stagger a politician in the U.S. Criminals recently robbed an armored car with a RPG; in the 70\u2019s and 80\u2019s, well-off families (like my in-laws) kept \u2018beater\u2019 cars in town, and luxury cars at their homes in the country. The locks on the doors of their Ave de la Gde Armee apartment \u2026 in the late 1970\u2019s \u2026 put to shame the security systems I see on my friends\u2019 in New York or Chicago. <\/p>\n

It is increasing, and there are strong reactions to it … Le Pen as one example. First, the signals of social breakdown Trent discusses are not unique to France (see the recent decision by police in the U.K. not to investigate property crimes), and second, the ‘breakdown’ is highly unlikely to happen, because before it gets to that state, I predict that we will see an authoritarian crackdown that would make moderate Republican fans of \u2018law and order\u2019 blush. I believe that one reason that the French are more sanguine about this is that they are convinced that the GSIGN can and will deal with any domestic disorder before it becomes a true threat to the social order.<\/p>\n

France is, to the best of their belief, pursuing a path that is in the best interests of France.<\/p>\n

Now, I think they are wrong; I think they are wrong as they place their reliance in a bureaucratic legitimacy; wrong in their vision for Europe; and wrong in their approach to the issues posed by Islamist Arabs.<\/p>\n

And I\u2019m amused to taunt them as members of the \u201cAxis of Weasels\u201d.<\/p>\n

But it\u2019s a crucial mistake to pound the table and attribute their actions to impending moral and social collapse; it\u2019s a mistake because it prevents us from dealing with them in a clear-eyed, rational, forceful yet respectful manner. They aren\u2019t going anywhere. Our relationship with them is going to change; but in the next decades we will need all the temporary allies we can get, and we can hope that it will doubtless change again.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Trent and Joe have launched a discussion here about France and our relationship. Instapundit and Vodkapundit have weighed in as well. In reading these, I kept getting a vague discomfort, kind of like the feeling you get when the moules you eat aren\u2019t bad but aren\u2019t really right either. First let me lay out some […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=21"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=21"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=21"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=21"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}