Future holds possibility for cooperation with Bush administration
November 14, 2004 - St. Louis Post-Dispatch - NewsWatch
PARIS - There was a palpable sense of disappointment in France when it became clear that George W. Bush had won a second term in office. Four more years of a leader who profoundly flummoxes them was almost too much to bear.
What these four years will mean for both sides of the pond has become a hot topic. Will Americans continue to empty Bordeaux on the sidewalk and eat “freedom fries” while the French continue to be, well - French? Or, despite the initial negative reaction here, are there signs of a rapprochement? The answer seems to be both.
The current state of affairs suggests that things couldn’t get much worse. After the nasty fallout between France and the United States over the invasion of Iraq, Bush occasionally used France and its president, Jacques Chirac, as the butt of jokes in his campaign speeches. Across the Atlantic, 65 percent of the responses in a poll for the French daily, Le Parisien, called Bush’s re-election a “bad thing.”
For most here, the sentiment over the past four years could better be described as anti-Bush, rather than anti-American. The French chalked up his first election as a fluke, pinning their ire on the man and his administration, not on the American people. Now, however, some fear that French discontent could broaden from the man alone to the larger population that elected him.
“What I’m worried about is an entrenchment of anti-Americanism,” says Pierre Hassner, a specialist in Franco-American relations, author and professor emeritus at the prestigious international relations school, the Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques.
The flummoxed feeling of the French along with a sense of the distance that’s been created between the two countries over the last few years seems to be summed up by the head of the centrist UDF party, Francois Bayrou, “U.S. society is in the process of making choices we no longer understand.”
It’s the unilateralist my-way-or-the-highway style of Bush and his administration that irks most here. Add to that his open references to his faith, which contrast sharply with the French government’s strict separation of church and state, along with the two countries’ dispute over Iraq, and you begin to understand where Bayrou is coming from.
The knee-jerk reaction to the re-election among some French politicians has been to throw more weight behind the work to create a European constitution. In the months before the election, it was an initiative that seemed to be losing steam, but now it’s gaining favor among those who want to see a unified Europe emerge as a counterbalance to the United States.
“If (Bush) continues in a way that is seen as unilateralist, little by little it’s going to push Europe into constructing its identity,” says Stephane Rozes, opinion director at the French firm, CSA, the company who ran Le Parisien’s poll.
“Everything will depend on what Bush does,” he says.
“Chirac might actually enjoy the Bush re-election to push this (European) agenda,” says Hassner.
“There’s got to be a middle road,” he says, “and for that, the conflict between Israel and Palestine is key.”
Whereas the United States and Israel had sidelined Yasser Arafat in their road map talks, French President Jacques Chirac called him, “a man of courage and belief who embodied for 40 years the Palestinian battle for recognizing their national rights” while pledging to work for the creation of “a viable Palestinian and democratic state, living side by side in peace with Israel.”
French sympathy for the Palestinians stems from France’s historic connection with the Muslim world in both northern Africa and the Middle East. It also has a Muslim population of over 4 million in its borders. France is also where Arafat was cared for at a military hospital from Oct. 29 until his death on Thursday.
However, the near opposite tacks that France and the United States take on the issue may actually be a key to kick-starting the peace process after the death of Arafat. Hassner sees each side’s ties to the region as an advantage to finding resolution.
“Each side should push where it helps the most, with France using its influence on Palestine and the U.S. on Sharon,” he says.
In terms of the Middle East, Israel and Palestine may be the only place where an increase of cooperation is foreseeable between the United States and France in the next four years.
“The Iraq misunderstanding is total and does not look like it’s going to get any better,” says Richard Labeviere, editor in chief at Radio France Internationale and author of “Dollars for Terror: the U.S. and Islam,” a near-prescient book that came out in English in 2000 and became a reference work after 9/11.
Hassner explains French resistance to joining the United States in Iraq in historical terms. “We’re colonialists at heart,” says Hassner, citing one-time French colonies Indochina and Algeria, “and we know about humiliation of our own people on our own territory,” citing the first two World Wars. “We know (occupying a country) doesn’t work like that - it always comes back to get the oppressor.”
“It’s a bleak landscape,” says Labeviere, referring to the tension between the two countries, “but there are a few bright points.”
“Military cooperation between our two countries is actually working very well - we see it in the Cote d’Ivoire and in Haiti,” he says, “and we see it in the fight against terror.”
Will things be better between France and the United States four years from now?
“I don’t know if Bush wants to budge and I’m not sure Chirac does either,” Hassner hedges. “A rapprochement? Who knows? A lot of things can happen in four years.”
Joe Ray is an American freelance journalist living in Paris. He can be reached via his Web site at www.joe-ray.com.
