Chirac Goes American
Down with nationalism?

n 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.