French Campaigners Blind to Outside World

By JOHN VINOCUR
Politicus
International Herald Tribune
May 3, 2007

PARIS

When an interviewer asked Valéry Giscard d'Estaing the other day what he thought of the minimal attention paid to international affairs in France's presidential election campaign, he corrected his questioner.

There was no interest at all, the former president said. "It's a France living with the shutters closed," he said. "The French have been sitting around talking to themselves as if the world didn't exist."

That's largely because the candidates don't think votes based on foreign policy are there for the taking.

A country confused about how to end the misery of its high unemployment and low growth, France likes the prerogatives that come with United Nations Security Council membership and its hold on big-power status as a nuclear-armed nation. But it doesn't want to hear and think much about its diminished place in the world, or the prospect of new responsibilities and having to take sides.

In the head-to-head television debate Wednesday night between Nicholas Sarkozy, the Gaullist front-runner in the runoff Sunday, and the Socialist Ségolène Royal, international affairs, apart from Turkey's possible entry into the European Union and the EU's constitution, got a total of 17 minutes of attention at 11 p.m. in the back-and-forth that bumped and stumbled over two and a half hours.

No mention of Afghanistan or Iraq; ditto for a problematical America and an increasingly threatening Russia. It was not an evening to bolster France's claim to a slice of international leadership.

Rather it was one of disputed statistics, Royal's bursts of rage and seeming mood swings, and Sarkozy's attempts at transforming the debate's disorder and his opponent's anger into a subliminal it's-me-or-chaos warning to carry him through the final days of the campaign.

Still, the reality about France's place in the world is that Sarkozy thought too much campaign focus on it would bring him unnecessarily close to a vote-getting liability: his nonhysterical, even polite relations with those who, in the majority French view, are the awful-awfuls of the Bush administration.

As for Royal, she left what she thinks of the great beyond in confusion, praising expedient justice in China, and arguing that regardless of who was in power there, America's unilateralist nature inevitably tempted it toward the use of force.

Yet the attentive follower of the campaign could find some palpable foreign policy departures from Jacques Chirac's 12 years of French exceptionalism über alles in the debris of texts and tapes left from the candidates' six months of talk.

Sarkozy, trying hard to upset no one, avoided casting his part of those changes as the rupture in French habits he once made his creed. But the new directions are palpable in the Sarkozy approach, and they are interesting.

On Iran, Sarkozy has turned his back on Chirac's nonchalance about the effect of Iran's emergence as a military force with nukes. That idea is unacceptable, he says. "We can't be weak in this area."

Going beyond any countermeasures Chirac supported, Sarkozy has opened the door to the idea that if new Security Council sanctions against Iran become impossible because of Russian and Chinese resistance, then a group of countries could apply additional sanctions on its own.

"Nothing's excluded a priori," Sarkozy has said. "What counts is effectiveness. On sanctions outside the Security Council, that's not a problem of principle."

Sarkozy's harder position on Iran is complemented by his much tougher vision of Russia, effectively burying the years when Chirac and Gerhard Schröder courted Vladimir Putin.

Sarkozy has made clear that he has no tolerance for Russia inserting itself as a veto power into European business or the Atlantic Alliance.

"On NATO, I want the rapprochement started in Ukraine and Georgia to continue," he said. "The current political dialogue can be a possible first step toward their integration."

Asked by Le Monde if Russia should be allowed to increase its 5 percent interest in EADS, the European aeronautic, space and defense concern in which France is a participant, Sarkozy's plain answer was no. Establishing his sense of the limits of Europe's "strategic partnership" with Russia, he offered an equally plain explanation of why not: Russia's heightened involvement could threaten "our independence and national sovereignty."

Because it would be a direct disavowal of Chirac, who has backed his candidacy, Sarkozy has steered clear anything suggesting a complete overhaul of France's policy in the Middle East, where its influence in Arab countries is deeply diminished and next to nil in Israel.

Sarkozy has also reversed his earlier dismissal of Chirac's thesis of a multipolar world order, to accept his assertion that global power is spread between poles like America, Europe, Russia, China, Asia and Latin America.

But this comes unburdened by Chirac's essential subtext: one insisting that Europe's role is one of a brake or counterweight to America.

Rather, Sarkozy told a television interviewer last month that Europe was not in competition with America on the world stage.

Royal has also taken leave of some of Chirac's positions. Like Sarkozy, she opposes the proposal Chirac initiated with Schröder to drop the EU embargo on selling arms to China.

On Iran, she claims, "I was the first in France to take a very firm position." But this involves a muddled argument, repeated in the debate, that Royal has never explained away.

Contrary to the provisions of the international nonproliferation agreements that are the legal basis for action against Iran's drive for nuclear weapons, Royal wants Iran deprived of all access to civil nuclear power.

Throughout, as much as America has been a charged subject weighing on Sarkozy's campaign, relations with the United States have been a personal problem for Royal, which she never seemed intent to resolve.

While portraying Sarkozy's visit with Bush last year as an act of abject fealty, she was unable after several attempts to set up meetings in America with Democratic leaders, including Hillary Clinton. Presumably, they saw Royal's description of an incorrigible American hyper-power, largely immune to change no matter who was elected in 2008, as making her a potentially unmanageable guest.

In her last statement two weeks ago on America's role, Royal said, "I believe the world needs a multipolar force, and that the United States must not be considered as a superpower."

Huh?

The big debate provided no elaboration from either side. Far from a biting or provocative French gaze on the world, reworking Giscard d'Estaing's image, the candidates reflected only faint light from behind France's tightly drawn curtains.