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September 19th, French President Jacques Chirac stood before the
ruins of the World Trade Center, one of the first foreign heads
of state to visit the site of the previous week's attacks in New
York.
French media
reported the sight of the wreckage "visibly moved" the
president, who deplored the attacks as "the bottom of human
stupidity." Departing from French protocol, Chirac spoke to
the recovery workers in English, telling them he commended them
for their work and vowing France would stand by the city of New
York, and the United States, in their time of need.
On that day
when he pledged French solidarity, Chirac, who will seek reelection
in the spring, took a major step towards burying traditionalist
Gaullist ambivalence towards the United States. The president has,
since the September visit to New York, followed word with deed by
dispatching some 2,000 French soldiers, sailors, and airmen into
antiterrorist military operations.
Chirac began
his government career in 1967, as a junior minister for social affairs
in the government of General Charles de Gaulle. The general's backers,
both during his presidency and following his abrupt resignation
in 1969, had little ideological cohesion besides a fanatical commitment
to French "national independence," or at least the illusion
thereof. Asked to define "Gaullism," one of the general's
top lieutenants, Olivier Guichard, once said he saw no precise historical
political tradition to which to tie the movement.
Circumstances,
until the end of the Cold War, meant conservative-led French governments,
either led by Gaullists or with their participation, adopted a stance
of frequent opposition to American policies while never questioning
Paris's continued NATO membership. In 1980, Center-Right President
Valery Giscard d'Estaing was ridiculed by his opponents as Leonid
Brezhnev's "little telegraph boy" after an apparent, bizarre
attempt to act as an intermediary between Moscow and the West on
the question of Soviet military presence in Afghanistan. In April
1986, Jacques Chirac, three weeks into his second stint as prime
minister, incurred a public-relations disaster in the United States
when he said he would not have allowed U.S. Air Force planes to
use his country's air space for that year's air strike against Libya
if asked. Five years later, the Gaullist opposition asked a Socialist-led
government for assurances that French troops taking part in the
Gulf War would remain under French — read: not under U.S.
— command. Some prominent Gaullists, like former prime minister
Maurice Couve de Murville, declared French troops had no business
at all waging war on Saddam Hussein.
What, then,
changed on September 11th? For one thing, French public opinion
backs military action. A poll taken simultaneously in five West
European nations, Israel and Pakistan in mid-September showed 73%
of all French wanted their country to take part in anti-terrorist
military strikes if NATO declared it would support the United States.
French approval rates were inferior only to those observed in Britain
(79%) and well above Germany's (53%).
The public's
concern about the activities of radical Islamic groups in France
may explain why it has, on many points, rallied behind's the Bush
administration's position. It is now known that Osama bin Laden's
al Qaeda network has tried, sometimes successfully, to recruit members
among disaffected Muslim youth in working-class French suburbs.
Gaullists are normally sensitive about any possibility France might
appear too close to American foreign-policy positions. Yet, they
also know their middle-class voters' wariness about radical Islam.
The xenophobic far-right remains relatively strong in France, and
an October poll showed that 63% of the public expected "grave
incidents" involving the country's large Muslim community in
the future.
Furthermore,
Chirac, a prodigiously bright and committed statesman, is as capable
of courageous, ultimately successful moves as he is of near-lethal
political mistakes. In 1997, he decided early parliamentary elections
were his best bet for preserving a Center-Right majority in the
lower house, the National Assembly. Instead, voters returned a comfortable,
Socialist-led majority, earning their president a choice spot in
the pantheon of French political gaffes. Nonetheless, Chirac has
also taken more successful political gambles. In 1995, as France's
freshly installed president, he was widely praised for acknowledging
the country's part of responsibility in the Holocaust. All preceding
governments had argued that the wartime regime's deportation of
Jews to German death camps had nothing to do with French tradition.
Lastly, Chirac
believes that France's post-Cold War future lies within the Euro-Atlantic
community and thus has progressively discarded the most distinctive
feature of the Gaullist movement: Nationalism. He supported the
1992 Maastricht Treaty despite widespread opposition from his own
political supporters and was vindicated by his side's narrow win
in that year's referendum on European integration.
By contrast,
antiterrorist military involvement could pose a significant political
challenge to Chirac's likely main rival, Socialist Prime Minister
Lionel Jospin. The traditionally pro-NATO Socialists have followed
Chirac in approving French participation in the anti-terrorist campaign.
However, Jospin's governing coalition also includes the Communist
party, essentially a Soviet Embassy annex during the Cold War, and
the Greens, who have made anti-globalization stances a centerpiece
of their presidential campaign. Communists routinely say that military
action will not defeat terrorism, while Green presidential candidate
Noel Mamere has declared the US air strikes on Afghanistan a "declaration
of war against the Afghan people." Furthermore, the Communists
themselves have lost votes in recent years to the Trotskyist Left,
whose leader, Arlette Laguiller, said the United States "have
gotten exactly what they deserve" with the terrorist attacks.
Thus, Jospin
faces the risk of going into next year's election battle with a
coalition divided on the proper approach to terrorism. On that very
question, Chirac knows the country, and his side, are with him all
the way.
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