WHY should anyone, least of all in the United States, be interested in France? It is understandable that American policy toward Europe now vacillates between a vague sense of dutiful attachment to Britain and a rather unattractive gamble on the inevitability of German domination. By contrast, France’s leading role in the appeasement of Serbia, her anti-American posturing in everything from commercial negotiations to relations with Iraq, and her curiously antiquated political and economic structures seem to make her as irrelevant as she is absurd.
Like many questions, this one reveals much in being asked. People would not wonder if France still counted, were policy-making all over the world not infected by a rampant economism that equates economic strength with political importance. Communism was the materialist vision par excellence, but its apparent collapse has not been accompanied by a decline in similar presuppositions in the West.
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