France joins U.S. fan club as Britain slips leash Dan Bilefsky | International Herald Tribune | 28 October 2007
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/10/28/europe/sarkozy.php?page=1 When Nicolas Sarkozy was a teenager thinking of politics for his future, his father, a Hungarian immigrant, advised him to go to America. With an ethnic-sounding name, he said, the boy would get more votes there. Nicolas stayed in France. But aides say the man who is now France's president never forgot his father's advice. "Under his presidency," said David Martinon, a spokesman for Sarkozy, "it is no longer taboo to be pro-American and to be French." In recent weeks, in fact, it has seemed as if a mirror has inverted the two sides of the English Channel: France has cast itself as America's new best friend while Britain, America's special buddy, behaves like an embarrassed relation. Many in Europe have watched with bemusement as Sarkozy's Socialist foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, has entertained the possibility of war against Iran and Sarkozy talks of France rejoining NATO's military command structure after a 40-year absence. Meanwhile, his tax-cutting finance minister, Christine Lagarde, quotes from Tocqueville's "Democracy in America" and admonishes the French to "stop thinking so much" and work harder, earn more and get rich. And things could get chummier in November, when Sarkozy is to go with President George W. Bush to Mount Vernon, the mansion of George Washington - a reminder that France helped Americans break their original bonds with England. Meantime, a chill wind blows from the other side of the Channel. Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who vacations in Cape Cod, has nevertheless been steadfast in Britain's retreat from Iraq, determined to shed the image of his predecessor, Tony Blair, as America's lap dog. British officials say his stiff upper lip during his recent White House visit was a subliminal warning: The "special relationship" will be special again when someone else is in the Oval Office and British troops are out of Basra. While the change of command in both France and Britain goes far in explaining this inversion of roles, some politicians, writers and intellectuals in both countries argue that there is more at work than meets the eye. Could it be, some ask, that deep down the British have disliked the United States more than the French have all along? Or that the French find America more bearable when it has proved itself inept at exercising the power they so clearly envy? Martinon, the spokesman for Sarkozy, argued that talk of a new French pro-Americanism was "grotesque," since the French have been pro-American all along, loving Hollywood movies and Big Macs with abandon. The difference now, he said, is that they are no longer hamstrung by a leftist elite that uses anti-American snobbery to divert attention from France's own failures. Others counter, however, that skepticism of America remains as quintessential a fact of French life as the baguette. "Non, non, non, this French pro-Americanism is nonsense," said Bernard-Henri Levy, the famous French intellectual and an avowed pro- American who rejected any hint that the French had learned to love America while the British had learned to hate it. The roots are deep, he said. Since the 19th century the French have seen America as a nation of so many creeds that it has become antithetical to the French idea of nationhood, in which one identity - being French - subsumes all others. That this "non- nation" saved Europe three times in the last century - from the Kaiser, Hitler and communism - continues to make French people "crazy," he said. "One man, Sarkozy, is not going to change this." Still, Bush may have inadvertently brought France closer to the United States. Hubert Vedrine, the socialist politician who coined the term "hyperpower" to describe America, said that the French remained skeptical of Washington's recent unilateralism, but that they might find the United States, chastened by the war in Iraq, more endearing. "No one believes that Bush has suddenly become a multilateralist," he says. "But maybe now there is a feeling that the U.S. is less menacing." In Britain, conversely, America's perceived failure as a colossus may have invited a new contempt for what is viewed as an incompetent heir to Britain's imperial legacy. "There is an awareness that America is successor to the British Empire and the global empire that we were a century ago - and perhaps some disappointment in its performance," said Anthony Browne, a thinker behind the Conservative Party leader David Cameron. But that may go only so far, he added: "Britain has invaded Iraq three times and our imperial adventures are indirectly responsible for many of the world's trouble spots, including Afghanistan, Palestine, Burma and Pakistan. So we are hardly in a position to chastise the United States for screwing up." Others say something far deeper is at work. Ron Asmus, a State Department official in the Clinton administration, cited a recent survey by the German Marshall Fund, where he now works. It showed that support for "U.S. leadership in world affairs" dropped in Europe to 36 percent from 64 percent in 2002; British support had the steepest drop. "It is not just about Iraq," Asmus said. "Many Britons look at the United States and see a country that has stopped being a modern model for the world, but rather a nation where the gap between rich and poor is the greatest it has been since the 1920s." For all the talk of a cross-Channel flip-flop, Dominique Moisi, of the French Institute of International Relations in Paris, insisted that it should not be exaggerated. France, he said, would never send troops to Iraq. And if it resumes a full role in NATO, it will only be strengthening Europe's role at the expense of the United States. "The French didn't hate the United States yesterday and love it today," he said. "Rather, the failure of America is the failure of the Western world, and France wants to be a winner."
