Why the French defy America

Washington will focus this week on persuading France to soften its opposition to war against Iraq. Patrick Bishop toured France to find out why anti-Americanism is so entrenched there

In Cantigny, at least, they are grateful. The main street, winding between the low northern houses is called the Rue Première Division USA. There is a monument to the dead planted in the chalky mud at the entrance to the village.

And in his garage, 86-year-old Joseph Lefever has created a little museum, recording the times when Americans crossed the sea to come to Cantigny's rescue.

"I have three reasons to be thankful." he says. "They liberated us here in 1918. They did it again in 1944, and they set me free from a prisoner of war camp near Munich a year later." In Cantigny, perched on the wide, bare fields of the Somme, the current transatlantic row is barely registering.

The Americans are not expected to break their habit of returning, year after year, to stand in front of the monument to the 199 doughboys killed and 867 wounded in the fighting of May 1918. Then, as always, the visitors will join the villagers for a glass of wine at the mayor's house.

Cantigny, though, is only a tiny scrap of France. Most of the inhabitants are elderly, and the evidence of American sacrifices in two world wars confronts them every day.

Elsewhere, memories are shorter and sentiments harsher. For French people under 60, the ambivalence towards America was there long before the eruption of this latest bagarre.

Even America's best friends here are often dismayed by its political attitudes; even its biggest critics can be enthusiastic consumers of its exports.

The one thing that Americans can be sure of is that they will never receive unequivocal, unwavering backing from the French in their war against terrorism.

Nor, most people here seem to believe, should they be asking for it. They reserve the right to change their mind in politics - as in love. Anyone who doesn't, they imply, is not a serious, sensate or - the beloved word - logical person.

Fallings-out between France and the United States are nothing new, but it is clear that this one is different. In the past, the French have affected not to notice outbreaks of Frog-bashing by tabloid columnists or rent-a-quote politicians. This time, the jibes are stinging.

"We are now in a real war of words," says Philippe Roger, who teaches at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris and is the author of L'Ennemi Américain, a study of French anti-Americanism which became a bestseller when it appeared last September.

"According to them, we are now dirty, cowardly rats and weasels." The change of tone, he believes, merely sharpens an antipathy that has always been there. "French anti-Americanism is not a short-term phenomenon," he writes. "It is anchored in history."

He thinks that it predates the protests against the Vietnam War, the passions of 1968 - though it was strongly present in both - and French anxieties during the Cold War.

France, he says, believes it has a stake in the birth of the US through the agency of General Lafayette, who fought alongside George Washington against the British and loved the idea of America with an almost erotic intensity.

Ever since, the French have seen the US as a potential Utopia, he says, and have reacted to its failure to conform with their desires with an exasperation that has often shaded into something like hatred.

By the end of the 19th century, anti-Americanism was already providing an ideological cement that bound together the many different intellectual and social strains of French political culture.

"In a time of strident divisions," says M Roger, "anti-Americanism was the most common value in France. It didn't belong to the Left or the Right. It brought together religious and non-believers, nationalists and internationalists."

Sylvie Kauffmann is a journalist at Le Monde, the intellectual citadel of French liberalism. After eight years in Washington and New York with her husband, a diplomat, she has grown to like and respect Americans.

Nor does she have any objection to going to war against Saddam Hussein. She bristles, though, at the way Washington is setting about it.

"It's true that the French sometimes appear not to have come to terms with the fact that they are no longer a major power - but we are not the pygmies the Americans say we are, either.

"We are a medium-sized power, like Britain, which happens to have a permanent seat on the [United Nations] Security Council. You may not approve of that, but it's a fact. This gives us the power to oppose US policy in a forceful manner if we think it's right."

Mme Kauffmann feels that France proved its essential loyalty with the spontaneous flood of sympathy that followed September 11 and that it should be granted the latitude that exists within strong friendships for allowing disagreement.

"There was an incredible outpouring after 9/11, the like of which I have never seen among French people," she says. "But the Bush administration never took advantage of it… I've been struck by their total inability to do anything about anti-Americanism, to the point where I wonder whether they really want to."

Michel Kenedi, a businessman with a lifelong admiration for America, is also bewildered by what he is beginning to regard as a personal repudiation of his affection.

"I feel alienated. My two sons are half-American. I always believed that we were fundamentally the same - that we shared the same basic values, but that there was room for our differences. Now, it's like being part of the Roman empire - an empire that is more intolerant than ever of criticism."

Even the sharpest observers of America are quick to say how much they like Americans. José Bové became a hero to many of his countrymen when he led a party of Green warriors to dismantle a half-built McDonald's in his home town of Millau in the South-West. He has now become a star of the anti-globalisation movement.

M Bové, who spent three years growing up in the US, insists: "People make a big distinction between American people and the American government. America is part of my youth.

"I have a lot of friends there like Ralph Nader [the anti-corporation campaigner]." Nader, he says, exemplifies a parallel set of American virtues that counterbalance the attitudes of the current administration.

It is true that there is much - both in the ideological and material sense - that the French admire in the US and, in the past, they have been willing to acknowledge its contribution to Europe.

There are probably more Rue Wilsons - named after the last American president to try to deliver "Old Europe" from its cynical, selfish ways - than Rue Bonapartes in France.

President Wilson, like George W Bush, saw the world through thick moral lenses. Post-1918, a lasting peace could be achieved, he believed, by the application of his famous 14 points.

The programme provoked one of the great Old Europe witticisms from the French leader Clemenceau. "Even the Good Lord," he growled, "only had 10 commandments."

The nation's greatest rocker, the nuclear-tanned dinosaur Johnny Hallyday, keeps a fleet of Harley-Davidsons and produces hits with titles such as Quelquechose de Tennessee.

Jacques Chirac, currently in full cocorico mode, is, in truth, a bit of a mid-Atlantic man, who prefers beer to wine and counts his days in the 1950s - hitchhiking across America and falling in love with a Southern belle he called Honeychile - as one of the happiest times of his life.

Despite occasional ambushes mounted by traditionalists, American films and fashions continue to overwhelm the country's puny cultural defences.

Yet some Americans living in France sense schadenfreude lurking behind the affection. "People were really supportive in the aftermath of 9/11, but it was very short-lived," says Andrea Maier, an American entrepreneur who has worked for the past 10 years in Paris.

"I heard a lot of surprisingly anti-American remarks soon afterwards. They seemed to think that there was an element of retribution - that the Americans had somehow brought this on themselves."

This, she reckons, went beyond the routine condescension that she finds among friends and acquaintances. " I think, in France, if you're at all smart or sophisticated, you're expected to be slightly anti-American. It's part of being a thoughtful French person.

"The form it takes depends on your level in society. Further down the scale, people like the cars and clothes and movies - the things the Americans do well. But they deplore the ghettos and the food. The top cliché is that all America's problems stem from its Puritan origins."

Sylvie Kauffmann believes that the further up the social ladder you go, the more pronounced the hostility is likely to be. "Structured anti-Americanism is mainly found among the elite - people who have given it a lot of thought."

Intellectuals of the Left, she believes, are just as susceptible to it as those on the Right. One Frenchwoman described a dinner at which a chief adviser to the former prime minister Lionel Jospin - on hearing that she had just returned from America - exploded that he "hated these people and their country".

At a less august level, there is a willingness to accept a comic-strip view of America, especially if it is an American who is peddling it. The documentary Bowling For Columbine?, made by the pudgy dissident Michael Moore, was a box-office smash.

The cartoonists of Charlie Hebdo magazine portray Mr Bush and co. as mutants - kept alive by the fossil fuels whose continued supply they are willing to wage war to protect.

But it is Mr Bush's perceived stupidity, as much as his alleged warmongering, that generates French concern and, yes, contempt. The French expect their politicians to be clever.

"Most French people are irritated by the public postures of the American government," says Mme Kauffmann. "They despise George Bush because they don't think he's up to the job."

When he went to the Normandy beaches in 2001 for the ritual visit, his wooden performance was a letdown. "Reagan had been brilliant, Clinton had been brilliant. French people might not have agreed much with Reagan, but they could still be impressed by the show."

Reports of White House Bible study sessions baffle and alarm a people for whom religion is purely a private matter. "This really doesn't play well," said Pierre Buhler, the former French cultural counsellor in New York, who is now a visiting professor specialising in transatlantic relations at Sciences Po in Paris.

"It carries a whiff of fanaticism, dividing the world between those who are good and those who are evil. These are not categories that we feel at ease with."

He fears that the distinction that M Bové has pinpointed is in danger of dissolving. "There is a blurring of the border between anti-American and anti-Bush," he says.

"Before, people were against the US - not because of what it was, but for what it did. That difference is hardly being separated out in argument."

Anglo Saxons tend to suspect that France's bouts of contrariness towards Americans stem from an inferiority complex. But Andrea Maier is doubtful.

"Certainly, the French do find them more fascinating than they would like to. Scorn, after all, means you are paying attention. It would be easy to say they envy America, but I'm not sure it's true. The French are pretty happy with who they are."

Whatever Washington may think about the motivations of France's leaders, there is little doubt that their stance reflects a heartfelt national unease at the prospect of war, as well as profound annoyance at America's hectoring manner.

"Some people have called what is going on 'Wilsonism with heavy boots'," says Pierre Buhler. "But the difference is that Wilson wanted to share his message by persuasion. What we are seeing here is more of a bullying approach."

The French like to be asked nicely to change their minds. They prefer that the asking is done by someone who at least pretends to respect the country's glorious past and the place it stakes for itself in the history of political thought.

Bill Clinton played along. They warmed to him and sympathised during his Monica Lewinski travails, while privately mocking America - and the president himself - for a hopeless lack of sophistication in such matters.

Mr Bush has made it clear there will be no flattery - no coaxing. The French, therefore, assume that he hates them. The feeling, in many quarters, is now mutual. But the likelihood, still, is that when the crunch comes at the Security Council, chilly realpolitik considerations will prevail.

Continued defiance would launch France on a long diplomatic war which it knows, deep down, it can never win. The veto will stay unplayed, to be brandished another day.

France and America share too much history to break up now. The Americans will come back to Cantigny for many years to come - to the monument and M Lefever's little museum.

The optimists here say it is best to regard the current crisis merely as a bad patch. But it seems certain to be a lengthy one that will endure as long as George W Bush remains at the White House.

Here is another explanation for French behavior.

The Geopolitics of France

Summary

France is frequently a puzzle to Americans. The country's
behavior strikes Americans as unpredictable and designed to
annoy, without being effective. As with all perceptions -- the
French view of Americans as simplistic cowboys, for example --
there is an element of truth. French behavior is not always
predictable in a particular case, but there is a geopolitical
driver to French policy that allows the nation's apparent
inconsistencies to be understood, if not always reconciled.
France's history and geography have taught its people
contradictory lessons. On one hand, the French deeply fear being
controlled by greater powers; on the other, they have neither the
weight to single-handedly counterbalance a power like the United
States nor the effortless capability of the coalition building
needed to create a sustained alternative to greater powers. They
therefore operate in contradictory ways over time and at
different levels. This behavior derives from geopolitical
realities and not, as many Americans might believe, out of sheer
malice.

Analysis

U.S.-French relations have sunk to their lowest level since 1942,
when the United States fought French troops in North Africa.
Washington wants to invade Iraq, arguing it is in the United
States' fundamental interest. France, formally an ally of the
United States through NATO, is -- at least for now -- utterly
opposed to the invasion. In effect, one ally is opposing an
action the other ally regards as critical to its interests. That
is not a stance that an ally takes frivolously, and France is not
a frivolous country. Therefore, there is a logic to the French
position that both transcends the current situation and that can
be understood.

To understand French geopolitics, one must understand France's
great near-triumph in the 19th century and the two extraordinary
catastrophes that overwhelmed the country in the 20th century.
Napoleonic France nearly conquered all of Europe, and with it an
unprecedented global empire, but all ended in disaster. The two
World Wars of the 20th century cost France first, a generation of
men, and second, its sovereignty until liberated by the allies.
French history for the past two centuries has been the history of
extremes, from near-triumph to near-annihilation.

For France, the fundamental geopolitical problem was to the east,
across the North German Plain and into Russia. France, having
achieved a coherent national unification, confronted a Europe
that presented either strategic opportunities that diminished
France's resources to exploit or dangers that France could not
deal with alone. Before German unification, Europe became a
vacuum that dragged Napoleon in almost uncontrollably. The first
steps toward securing the nation's frontiers created an
opportunity for France to be drawn ever deeper into the east,
until its resources were depleted. After German unification,
France faced a reverse crisis -- in which the resources to the
east moved west against it.

In the first case, France reached for empire and then collapsed.
In the former case, France was forced to reach for allies. The
problem and solution was Great Britain, which was interested in
maintaining the balance of power in Europe. London did not care
who won, so long as no one did. When France tried for empire, it
was Great Britain -- protected by the English Channel from
Napoleonic power -- that manipulated and underwrote Napoleon's
defeat. When Germany threatened to dominate Europe in two world
wars, it was the British who aligned themselves with France to
prevent that from happening.

From Paris' point of view, limits to French power have led the
country either toward direct calamity or to alliances that
resulted in agony. The French experience of history is between
dominance, which it cannot attain by itself, and alliance, which
tends to work against France. Paris understands that it cannot
stand alone. It also deeply distrusts any alliance. For the
French, outsiders who take fewer risks than Paris use France as a
foil against the east.

French foreign policy, particularly since the end of World War
II, has been a search for an alliance in which France has the
deciding hand. The United States replaced Britain as the great
outside power, which both threatened French interests but also
was indispensable. Paris distrusted and depended on the United
States, much as it had Britain. This was not a French neurosis --
it was French geopolitical reality, borne of being trapped on a
continent it could neither dominate nor trust to restrain from
attempts to dominate it. France needed an ally outside the
continent, but could not really trust that ally either.

The pivotal figure of post-war French history was Charles de
Gaulle, who more than anyone represented this dilemma in French
foreign policy. He spoke for the Napoleonic claims of France,
knowing perfectly well that they were beyond his reach. It was de
Gaulle who abandoned Algeria and empire, even while speaking of
French grandeur. It was Napoleon who simultaneously reduced
French exposure while asserting French power. As such, he was
simply the expression of French geopolitical reality: too much
power not to assert influence; too little power to stand alone.

For de Gaulle, the central premise was that France -- or any
other nation-state, for that matter -- ultimately could not
relinquish its sovereign right to national security to a
multinational organization. France was part of NATO, a
transnational organization which, under its charter and internal
agreements, would treat an attack on one member as an attack on
all. Thus, if the Soviet Union invaded Germany, all NATO members
would automatically consider themselves in a state of war with
the Soviet Union.

The United States dominated NATO. The country was the major
economic power, and it had the greatest military force. Most
important, it controlled the nuclear weapons that were the final
guarantor against a Soviet invasion. The American guarantee --
never tested -- was that if the Soviets invaded Western Europe,
the United States would regard it as an attack on American soil
and retaliate with a nuclear attack, accepting the Soviet nuclear
counterattack.

This repelled de Gaulle in two ways. First, he had no objection
to alliance, but the automatic mechanisms of NATO alarmed him.
The idea that France, without a final say, could find itself at
war simply because the NATO council in Brussels passed down a
judgment was anathema to him. He withdrew France from the
military committee of NATO -- but not from NATO itself -- because
he believed French sovereignty could not be subordinated in any
way to a multinational body.

His second reservation was to the idea that the United States
would be willing to suffer a nuclear holocaust to defend Europe.
The United States, like France, had to defend its national
interests first. Therefore, while it was in Washington's interest
to convince the Soviets -- and Europe -- that it would
automatically commit suicide to defend Europe, de Gaulle did not
believe that in the final moment the United States would go
through with it. At the very least, it was an unreliable
presupposition that risked France's national security. Therefore,
de Gaulle undertook to construct France's own nuclear forces,
with a purpose, in his words, to at least "tear off the arm" of
anyone who would threaten France again.

De Gaulle operated on two principles: The first was an
unwillingness to abandon French sovereignty again, regardless of
the reason; the second was to keep from basing France's
sovereignty or self-interest on any other nation -- knowing that
in the end, no commitment could cause a nation to act in any way
other than in its own self-interest. The French image of Dunkirk
always has been one of abandonment by allies. De Gaulle had no
intention of making France the object of invasion or dependent on
allies with their own interests to pursue.

There was another dimension to de Gaulle's thinking. The United
States reacted to France's withdrawal from NATO's military
structure with anger. U.S. strategy was to contain the Soviets,
and containment required both an alliance system and deterrence -
- convincing the Soviets that NATO's response would be automatic.
Washington regarded Paris' behavior as undermining both
strategies. De Gaulle had cracked the alliance and undermined the
critical automation of deterrence. Washington saw France as
giving the Soviets an opening to split the alliance.

De Gaulle did not intend to split the alliance, but he did intend
to rectify what he saw as an imbalance of power between the
Soviets and the United States. From the French standpoint, the
United States had succeeded in containing the Soviets. In fact,
the containment was so effective that the United States now
towered above the Soviet Union in terms of power. From de
Gaulle's standpoint, while he was certainly a committed anti- communist and did not intend to tilt too far, he intended to tilt
France sufficiently to redress some of the imbalance. His
interests were not theoretical. The world was in disequilibria:
The United States had great power, and NATO had curtailed
France's freedom to act independently. A less powerful United
States and more powerful Soviet Union would be in French
interests. The United States, which never genuinely felt it had
the upper hand during most of the Cold War, saw France's actions
as threatening Western security.

A broader application of the Gaullist balance of power theory was
to create a united Europe that could serve as the balance between
the United States and the Soviet Union. For France, this was an
incredibly complex issue. On one side, given France's relative
weakness, it made geopolitical sense. On the other side, given
France's desire to never again lose its sovereignty, it made
little sense. From a purely economic standpoint, there was little
choice.

The result is the current bizarre structure of Europe. On one
side, Europe has become a real concept: Much of Europe is
integrated into a single economic entity, with a single currency
and central bank. Yet at the same time, none of the members,
least of all France, has given up sovereignty. The only unified
defense force and policy is centered on NATO, which is
incongruent with the European Union. In a conceptual sense, the
idea of Europe is chaotic, with different aspects on every
subject. Yet it matches neatly France's own complexity -- its
aspiration to lead a united Europe, its fear of abandoning its
national sovereignty to others. More than anything, the
conceptual crazy-quilt of Europe resembles the French dilemma.

There is one idee fixee in the French mind that remains
unchanged, however -- the notion of geopolitical equilibrium. If
in 1958, de Gaulle was made uneasy by American power and the loss
of French sovereignty, then one can only imagine how the current
French leadership looks at the world. Where the United States
once stood over France, it now towers. And unlike 1958, where
there was a Soviet Union that could dilute U.S. power and
attention, nothing like that exists today. The United States
essentially is contained only by its own fears and appetites.

For France, the most important task is to limit unbridled
American power. Without that, its worst nightmare, loss of
sovereignty, rears its head while its deepest hope -- reaching
again for European power -- is blocked. Therefore, the only
logical step for France is to try to create a coalition to block
the Americans, and try to stand fast as U.S. power erodes that
coalition. For France, the time since the end of the Cold War has
been a bad dream. The time since Sept. 11, 2001, has been an
utter nightmare.

France's behavior is inherently contradictory. On one side, it
wants to build an anti-American coalition. On the other side,
coalition building simply on the basis of national self-interest
is hard when dealing with a power the size of the United States.
French recourse to multilateralism, ironic in the light of its
Gaullist past and national imperatives, points to France's
dilemma and its limits. France wants to build a concert of
nations in which its own national sovereignty is guaranteed and
its right to pursue its national interests is recognized.

Therefore, France behaves in a completely predictable fashion. It
will resist the United States vigorously, seeking to limit its
global, hegemonic power. It will seek to build coalitions with
other nations. However, because it reserves the right to pursue
its own national self-interest, the coalitions tend to dissolve -
- leaving France to face the United States impotently or to
pursue its national self-interest and make its peace with the
United States.

France wishes more than anything to be sovereign. Its
sovereignty, however, is insufficient to guarantee its national
self-interest. By itself, it cannot control its destiny; it must
be part of something greater. But in being part of something
greater, the temptation to make that large thing uniquely French
strains the edifice. Without that impulse, however, France's
nightmare comes to the fore -- saving itself by losing itself to
something more important than France. Paris' behavior is neither
mysterious nor unpredictable. It is, however, incapable of
shaping history. France is caught between decisions it cannot
make.

Therefore, France's operational pattern is to resist anything
that impinges on its understanding of its national interest. The
problem is that its national interests cannot be achieved alone,
and therefore it requires accommodation. Its national interest is
torn between resistance and accommodation. This creates a pattern
that is unsettling to all concerned. The Iraqis, who thought they
could rely on France, will be surprised that France, in the end,
ultimately will prove to be an ineffective defender. The United
States, which sees France increasingly as an adversary, will be
bemused as the country realigns itself and eventually claims --
and indeed will believe -- that it has always been in the last
position it occupies.

For France, Iraq represents two national interests. First, it has
direct national interests in Iraq -- oil, defense and other
markets. Second, and more important, France understands that a
U.S. occupation of Iraq would shift the global balance of power
even more in the favor of the United States. It is therefore in
the French national interest to resist. At the same time, all-out
resistance is impossible. By the nature of its foreign policy,
France finds it difficult to hold together coalitions. Standing
alone, France cannot resist the United States, nor can it resist
a rupture with the United States.

France will resist the United States with all of its might -- but
recognizing the limits of its might, it ultimately will
capitulate, formally or informally. France will carry out its
policies on multiple levels -- opposing on one, cooperating on
another. It will appear to be perfidious, as the current term
would have it, but it is simply torn in multiple directions, torn
by competing geography, dreams and nightmares. France will move
very quickly in many directions during any crisis. In the end, it
will wind up where it began. France appears insufferable, but it
is merely trapped by geography and history.

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