With friends like these
By Christopher Caldwell
Financial Times; Feb 14, 2004
This is a very comprehensive analysis of the Right and Left governments in the main European countries, and their position towards the US. There are also - not surprisingly, if you know European history - friends of America on the Left, and rivals of the Bush Administration on the Right. Be aware that the author is a columnist for the FT but also for The Weekly Standard, the influential magazine of the US Neoconservatives.
When Henry Kissinger, the former US Secretary of State, went to Berlin about a year ago to assess what he calls the "psychological situation" of young Germans, he got a rude surprise. At a roundtable set up by the German Marshall Fund, an American foundation that promotes transatlantic ties, Kissinger met a dozen young leaders - including Bundestag members from the conservative Christian Democratic Union and its Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union - both a traditional source of support for Washington.
Kissinger was told that anti-American sentiments, the balder the better, could draw big applause at political-party rallies. Mostly this happened at Green Party rallies, but Social Democrats, and even some Christian Democrats, now also stood and cheered when the United States was anathematised.
"It was not a hostile meeting," Kissinger recalled in an interview, insisting that his surprise not be taken as anger. "It's a new generation that is trying to find its own identity. It's not burdened by the war, not obsessed with economic recovery. That means that they are not automatically pro-American."
In its diplomacy, as in its military strategy, the United States is discovering that it has a very shaky idea of who its real friends are. In the old days, it was very clear where the instinctive pro- Americans, or "Atlanticists" were to be found. They made up most of the Christian Democratic parties everywhere, and an influential right-wing rump of the Socialist parties in Germany, Scandinavia and Britain. And some of today's pro-Americans are still on the right: Germany's CDU still backs America, as do the British Tories, although not unanimously, and particularly not when Labour is in power. Beyond them, though, today's Atlanticists are an unfamiliar mix of New Labour (in its British and Dutch variants), continental human-rights activists (particularly in France), Eastern European ex-dissidents and post-cold war parties of the right (in Spain and Italy). It would be surprising if America's future foreign policy did not take some account of which Europeans like it, and which don't.
Dennis MacShane, Britain's Labour minister for Europe, tells me that I shouldn't overstate the shift in support. There were, he says, always important exceptions to the rule that America's friends in Europe were on the right. De Gaulle called the United States the biggest threat to world peace as early as 1965, while in Britain, Labour's support has been broader than the American right tends to remember.
"The roots of European social democracy are anti-communist," says MacShane. "European social democracy has far more in common with American values, including the war on terrorism, than with any other ideology." The European left should never feel embarrassed about siding with the US, provided the US is a progressive force, MacShane thinks. In the 1980s, they should have remarked (but mostly they didn't) that Ronald Reagan was, by many measures, tougher on South Africa than Europeans were.
Today, he thinks they should be quicker (but they're pretty slow) to embrace the sympathetic parts of George W. Bush's agenda. "I look at Bush, who has rejoined Unesco, talked about legalising eight or nine million immigrants from Mexico, and massively increased help for HIV/Aids," MacShane says. "This is not what we would call a hardline, right-wing agenda."
But MacShane's "we" doesn't embrace all or even most of his own party, and it sells poorly in continental Europe.
In France, Senator Jean Francois-Poncet was a pillar of Atlanticism during his term as Valery Giscard d'Estaing's foreign minister in the 1970s. He isn't one any more. He says now the Euro-American battle over the Iraq war exposed differences that cannot be ignored, and Europe marches to a different drum. "What you have to face," he told me calmly, "is that the Franco-German position had the overwhelming support of public opinion all over Europe."
Johannes Rau, Germany's president and a social democratic Atlanticist, made the same point at the height of European agitation against the war when he said: "In some ways, Europe has never been more united."
And this anti-American unity is being voiced in the traditional sancta of pro-Americanism. At a conference last summer in Berlin - sponsored by Atlantik-Brucke (Atlantic Bridge) and the American Council on Germany, two groups whose raison d'etre is bilateral comity - the rapporteur Daniel Casse, a former aide to the first President Bush, said morosely: "What I heard was that America had to be 'checked', 'tamed', 'steered', 'counterbalanced' and 'Europeanised'."
Bundesbank president Ernst Welteke sounded wistful as he recalled that "'chewing gum' and 'chocolate' were the first American words I could speak". These were the good old, Good American, days. Now, he said, "a rift is slowly developing, and has been since the end of the cold war". Amity was no longer a glue. All that could be hoped for was that interests would remain common. Winding up his remarks, he reached for the John D. Rockefeller adage that: "Friendships founded on business work better than businesses founded on friendship." One could say the same of China or Russia. Or, nowadays, Libya.
There are still "classic" pro-Americans in Europe, even in France, who think that Europe and the US, because of shared values and civilisation, will always wind up in the same geostrategic boat. Claude Goasguen, who represents Paris's wealthy 16th arrondissement, likes to remind visitors to his office in the National Assembly that he is a Breton who hails from Finistere, France's westernmost point, "turned towards the Atlantic". Goasguen is as nationalist as any French politician, but he thinks it bad for France to "wind up in a 'minority camp' in the West".
Alain Madelin, who stood on the Liberal Democrat ticket for the French presidency two years ago, is with him and with the Americans. On a sunny morning in his office in the seventh arrondissement, he says that he is unhappy that France has, in the past 12 months, become the "Mecca" of European anti-Americanism. "I'm not pro-American for the joy of being pro-American. When the United States was backing Pakistan, I opposed them. But I'm with the Americans strategically. Still, we have to realise that this is the end of the generation that lived the war. They don't have the same feeling for America, deep down."
For Madelin, those who would understand the current international predicament must realise that we live in an age of individual networkers. "The 20th century was the century of unlimited confidence in states," he says. "The 21st is rediscovering confidence in people." Madelin has made contact with like-minded political thinkers in Europe. In Venice recently, he discussed French-American links with the US under secretary of state, John Bolton, a high priest in the neo-conservative temple. Pierre Lellouche, who was the only French assembly member besides Madelin to vocally support the war, has kept up contacts in the United States, and, during the run-up to war, organised meetings for a handful of sympathetic Paris intellectuals every Tuesday night in Paris.
But such networking among individuals is as nothing compared to the anti-American, anti-war forces which control dozens of anti- globalisation and leftist websites and, in several European capitals, could put close to a million people onto the streets. And it is little compared with the rhetoric that President Jacques Chirac and foreign minister Dominique de Villepin can muster - to great applause - when they excoriate America. Many conservative parliamentarians describe a window of potential sympathy for the US that is even wider, saying wistfully that the stance of the French right towards the United States would be different if Alain Juppe - prime minister at the beginning of Chirac's first seven-year term - had been president. (The eventual chances of that, of course, moved from slim to none with Juppe's conviction in late January on corruption charges.)
Others speak of conservatives in the government who are much more pro-American than they let on in public. Interior minister Nicholas Sarkozy, for instance, who is emerging as a future rival to Chirac after spending much of January on high-profile diplomatic visits to Egypt and China, has siblings in the US.
Even if there were many pro-Americans who dared not speak their name, it probably wouldn't matter. After half-a-century of being set by the right, no matter who was in power, French foreign policy has seen its centre of gravity shift leftwards in the last half- decade. In recent French debates, there has been little difference between left and right. According to Senator Francois-Poncet, the two sides differed little in the past year's contretemps with the US, except in one respect. "The left," he said, "played a role in insisting that Chirac must follow his logic all the way to the end."
The old links and ties which sustained the right across the Atlantic have gone, in part because the necessity to stick together in face of the Soviet threat from the East, and the socialist challenge from within, have also gone. Atlanticism no longer finds its deepest roots in Christian democracy.
Europeans often look for an explanation of this estrangement in something George W. Bush "did". But perhaps the explanation rests in Christian Democracy - or in Christianity. The idea of Christianity as a conservative force has been an illusion for a long time. First, it is not a force. The weakening of piety (probably) and church affiliation (certainly) since the second world war have led the German CDU to transform itself from wooing Christians through church groups into wooing consumers through television. And the Italian Democrazia Cristiana could not manage even that transition, shattering into several tendencies after the "Clean Hands" corruption investigations of the early 1990s.
Also, the Christian churches are not particularly conservative. According to Franco Venturini, of the Italian daily, Corriere della Sera, Italy's Eurocommunists found it necessary, by the end of the cold war, to back Nato. But "in the Christian Democrats you had the opposite phenomenon because they were basically Catholic and Catholics are basically pacifist". The result was surprising: "By the time of the Kosovo war," says Venturini, "the former communists behind Massimo D'Alema were more pro-American than the former Christian Democrats."
This increasing pacifism among Christians may explain the large number of rainbow-coloured flags reading "Pace" ("Peace") that one saw throughout Italy during protests over the US/UK Iraq invasion - and still see, a little tattered and grubby now, in many Italian streets. Most Italians believe that the chief constraint on the Berlusconi government's ability to adopt a stance of full-throated Atlanticism has been the anti-war position of the Pope.
The issue now is: can the United States, and particularly the neo- conservatives who believe in the use of force to defend Western values, connect with like-minded people in Europe to create a new international alliance? Here is the first problem: in the United States, the neo-conservatives are on the right. In Europe, their natural home is, or has recently been, on the left.
In France, for example, the intellectuals most often associated with support for the war in Iraq were the filmmaker Romain Goupil, the philosopher Andre Glucksmann, Bernard Kouchner, a founder of Medecins sans Frontieres, and the novelist Pascal Bruckner.
Sitting outside a pub near Les Halles, Bruckner tells me he's all for a "European neo-conservatism". In his mind, this would mean a European army that would take aim at the weak links in the world's totalitarian chain. He thinks it would have an advantage over its American variant, because Europeans - partly by virtue of the French and British colonial administrative traditions - have been more rooted in other cultures than the US has, and may have formed a better sense of how to respect local cultures, recognise the local power-elites and administer transition governments. Early on in the Iraq invasion, Bruckner was struck by how much more successful British troops had been in controlling Basra and the south of Iraq, compared to the Americans who were running the rest of it.
This brand of "neo-conservatism" is not an emulation of America's; it may even reflect a distrust of it. Europe's problem, as Bruckner sees it, is not that it has drifted too far to the left - for the left-right concept is one that he considers "totally discredited". Nor is Europe's problem simply anti-Americanism.
"Anti-Americanism can only be very ambivalent," he says, "where American culture sets the tone. The French are voting for America - in the market place - all the time." Rather, Bruckner says, "our great problem as Europeans is that we want to exit from history. Sometime after 1989, we developed the belief that barbarism could be refuted intellectually." Here, he makes clear, he is speaking primarily of France and Germany, not the UK.
Italy is both the same and different. There, as mentioned, Christianity has drifted into the orbit of the left, taking some formerly conservative Christian Democrats along with it. As in most continental countries, a large majority of Italians opposed the war. But Italy also has, in Silvio Berlusconi, a leader who revolutionised his country's media - and through them, his countrymen's politics - by importing American television.
Parliamentary deputy Enrico Letta is a member of the Margherita Party, a branch of Christian Democracy that, when the collapse in Italian parties came, sided against Berlusconi. As Letta explains it, the big change came in the 1980s, and it was Berlusconi the media wheeler-dealer - as opposed to Berlusconi the politician - who brought it. As he took over one Italian television network after another, Berlusconi Americanised the country. US television changed Italians' priorities, drawing them away from politics and towards consumerism.
"Berlusconi brought a model of television from the US," Letta says. "Not just a business model but a programming philosophy." Just as Tony Blair had to move his party's base from the mill to the university before he could take over his country, Berlusconi had to move his country's culture into the television age before he could reap the political benefits. Berlusconi knows what his countrymen think, because it is he who made them think it. In concrete terms, says Letta, the result is an American-style party system, in which weak parties compete for control of a strong government - the opposite of the old Italian system. Berlusconi's Forza Italia is just such a weak party. The majority of those supporting the government, in this view, are Republicans (in the American sense). "We, in turn," Letta admits of the opposition, "have become more and more similar to American Democrats."
This implosion of Italy's party system may be laying the groundwork for a more durable pro-Americanism than the old Christian Democrats could offer - and, not for the first time, it could be pioneering a new trend in Europe. After all, Italy has been the only one of the EU's six founder nations to offer the US its steady support for the past two years. Personality explains part of it. Something in US president George W. Bush, and the America he represents, is very attractive to Berlusconi. According to the Corriere's Venturini, "Berlusconi thinks: 'They will understand me... That is the country of the self-made man. Here in Italy, people will tell me I used to play piano on cruise ships. In America, they don't care. They even like that. In Italy, they tell me I'm not a real politician. In America, they distrust real politicians.'"
Different metaphors are possible: Giancarlo Loquenzi, a Senate aide, prefers to compare Berlusconi to the New York mayor, Michael R. Bloomberg. Bush - unlike Schroder and Chirac - never criticised Berlusconi's election in 2001, and Berlusconi's camp includes such US admirers as defence minister Antonio Martino, who imbibed a good deal of American philosophy through his participation in the free- market Mont Pelerin Society.
In Britain, Mark Leonard, director of the Blairite Foreign Policy Centre, says there is a new strain of Atlanticism which is "revolutionary rather than status-quo". This new strain attracts a certain number of Conservatives - Leonard names the Times columnist, Michael Gove, and the MP Michael Portillo - who believe in "a neo-conservative idea of democracy".
But he also recognises that the Atlanticist project has a great appeal to part of the left. "This is a left that thinks the American tiger can be ridden to promote human rights," he says, "which is fine, except for two problems. The first is American nationalism - we're not Americans. The second is an impatient belief on the left that to deal with big problems, we are going to have to develop a more multilateral way." While Leonard thinks that certain Europeans are too obsessed with multilateralism - those who would not have attacked Serbia in 1999 without a UN mandate, for instance - he thinks the US is far too inclined to go it alone.
Israel is central to the ideological divide over Atlanticism. Much attention has been given on both sides of the Atlantic to the rising tide of anti-Semitism in many European countries, especially France. Less focus has been given to pro-Israeli movements and initiatives. Claude Goasguen says: "There are about a hundred pro- Israel people in the National Assembly, and it's among them that Atlanticists can be recruited."
Berlusconi's refusal, in the six months of Italy's EU presidency, to meet with Palestinian strongman Yasser Arafat, despite an EU directive to the contrary, can be understood as placing him on the pro-American side of the Atlanticist divide. In general, though, support for Israel is haemorrhaging away in the political classes of Western Europe. In Germany, that support came primarily from political leaders - Helmut Kohl, Johannes Rau - whose generation is dying off, and whose immediate successors are evidently much less inclined to nail their colours to the Israeli mast.
By contrast, former leftists are moving to the Zionist cause as they swing to the centre, and so is one major party of the right - a party which would have been the last one would have thought could take such a position. Gianfranco Fini's post-fascist Alleanza Nazionale party, heir to Mussolini's fascists, was once viscerally hostile to the Jewish state - but Fini made an official visit to Israel last autumn.
As European integration comes to revolve increasingly around foreign-policy questions - from defence, to the Turkish candidacy for membership - hard and unavoidable decisions present themselves. Politicians on both right and left feel that Atlanticism has become a zero-sum game: they cannot take a firm stand in favour of the United States (through bilateral agreements, for instance) without endangering the European project.
It's a state of play, paradoxically, that favours the emergence of traditionally Eurosceptic Britain as a model for smaller European states. Particularly in Italy, politicians note with interest (or jealousy) Britain's ability to balance two roles - an occidental/Atlantic/Nato one and a European one. Italian Senate aide Giancarlo Loquenzi says he hopes his own country can replicate Britain's "not-so-ritual vision" within Europe.
As Italy took a hard line to protect its position on milk quotas during recent EU Common Agricultural Policy negotiations, Margaret Thatcher's name was frequently invoked.
For Giuliano Ferrara, the charismatic former communist who now edits the Berlusconi-friendly daily, Il Foglio, the Blair government represents the triumph of the political ideas of "a certain right" in Europe. "Blair acknowledges that we now live in a shareholder society." says Ferrara. "He has been consistent in foreign affairs with both Clinton and Bush." But others, inside Italy and out, doubt that the country has the means to emulate Britain's diplomatic bigamy. Enrico Letta considers the idea that a traditionally pro-EU Italy can replicate Britain's freedom of action within Europe to be delusional. France's Senator Francois- Poncet thinks Blair's stance is a dangerous one to imitate in the first place: "The British think they are in a better position by being largely subservient to the Americans," he remarks. "I would say that they wildly overstate their influence."
The point, however, is that Britain is more important in Europe because it is now becoming evident that dealing with America and dealing with the EU are not separate issues. As Gianni Bonvicini of Italy's Institute for International Affairs put it, "There is an increasing feeling that the Europe relationship can't be monopolistic. It can't mean giving up other relationships."
And Britain is the only EU-member country, at present, that is managing both relationships satisfactorily. Even French foreign minister Dominique de Villepin seems to recognise the indispensability of British military capabilities to European construction, particularly after those capabilities have been enhanced by 10 months of battlefield exposure to American technology and logistics. "There will be no Europe without a European defence," de Villepin wrote recently, "and there will be no European defence without the United Kingdom." That is why, for the Anglo-Franco-German summit recently announced for February 18, Britain appears to hold all the trumps.
Transatlantic ties are now shifting to different bases, but the bases still exist. Henry Kissinger is correct to say that the new generation of Europeans is not automatically pro-American. But neither need it be automatically anti-American. And others tend to miss the present Europe-wide unease about the European project. In the wake of December's Brussels summit, this unease has reached its highest level since the Maastricht agreement. The gloom arises, in part, from the failure at Brussels to find a constitutional voting formula acceptable to both the large countries (particularly Germany and France) and the medium-sized ones (particularly Poland and Spain.) But it also rests on the inability over the past year to find a common European voice on foreign policy, and specifically on the US.
In January, in a thoughtful Brussels post-mortem, the Le Monde writer, Thomas Ferenczi, speculated that "one of the most visible causes of the exhaustion of the European project is the retreat of those political forces that defended it, come hell or high water, for the past half-century." By this, he meant the Christian Democrats and the Social Democrats, the former transformed into Chirac-followers and free-marketeers, the latter losing significant numbers of voters, in France, to a more charismatic extreme left. These are the two parties, Ferenczi says, with a natural link to the total history of Europe - one through religion, the other through the Enlightenment.
But they are also the parties with a natural link to the foreign policy Europe has pursued through the longest period of peace in its history. For that reason, it may be hard to strike at the roots of the European relationship with America without striking at the roots of the project of European construction. Politicians increasingly see this link. Dennis MacShane, who is so impatient with European attempts to paint George W. Bush as a radical rightist, says: "What I recognise as a hardline agenda is anti- Europeanism from the British right. Like anti-Americanism from the Continental left, it's a politics that leads nowhere." This is a two-way street. If Washington sees the same link as MacShane, it will resist the temptation to damage the EU. And indeed, in the past year, the US has moved steadily away from defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld's evocation of an "Old Europe" and from a White House aide's urging that the Bush administration work towards the "'disaggregation' of Europe."
In most of his speeches since his visit to Warsaw last year, Bush has stuck to the line that one need not choose between the US and Europe. On one hand, the US has shown - for instance, through its threats, believable or not, to deny Iraq contracts to those unwilling to aid the coalition last spring - that it will not sit idly around if European countries seek to poison its bilateral relationships with other European allies. On the other, the US has dropped any larger project of undermining Europe's project of self- government, seeing that it risks creating a pretext for anti- Americanism that politicians across the political spectrum can endorse.
It is with such considerations in mind that Devon Cross, an American philanthropist whose career has included service on the Pentagon's Defence Policy Board, showed up in London in January. Cross hopes to start an NGO that will link American policy-makers and strategists with European journalists and publics - and, she hopes, promote a better understanding of how American foreign- policy thinking works and what the American government is trying to do. While she is a longtime friend of Donald Rumsfeld, and might be called a neo-conservative in the US, Cross says she will make it a priority to bring to London the widest possible variety of foreign- policy voices, from Bush Republicans (she has invited the under secretary of defence, Paul Wolfowitz, to participate) to Clinton Democrats (such as the former CIA director James Woolsey) to the human-rights activists of the Democratic left (who cluster around the Freedom House Foundation and American organised labour). This varied coalition is what Americans naturally think of when they think of the political constituency for their foreign policy. But it is not what Europeans think of.
And that is just the point, according to Cross. Her view - that America is losing the battle for the world's hearts and minds by neglecting "public diplomacy", of the sort that its government, foundations and labour unions carried out throughout the cold war - is held quite widely in the US.
Cross's London operation is the first fruit of such thinking, but it is hard work starting up an organisation that aspires to do the work of such lavishly funded, celebrity-studded cold war organisations as the Congress for Cultural Freedom. The Chelsea house where she had hoped to locate her operation fell through, but at least now the organisation has acquired a name: The Policy Forum. Which is an improvement from the time Cross first had the idea to start such an organisation, at the nadir of trans-Atlantic relations in the days following the launch of Operation Iraqi Freedom. "Back then," said Cross on her first day in London, "I had thought of calling it Operation Just Show Up."
Christopher Caldwell is an FT columnist and a senior editor at The Weekly Standard
From this conservative "intelligence gathering" news service, this view of France's diminishing influence in the world and how the government is trying to address it is a useful example of this country international standing today. It deals with the visit of Dominique de Villepin to 4 of the main Latin American countries in a effort to gather support for its world view (about the UN, and Iraq among other issues).
Comment from Strafor.com: "Confronted with the reality of its diminishing power, France had two options: accept its new second-tier status in a world dominated by U.S. economic and military might, or chart a new course to ensure Paris continues to be a force in global affairs -- at least in the eyes of the French, if not in fact."
Stratfor.com - France: Seeking Influence in Latin America
France: Seeking Influence in Latin America
Summary
French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin visited Latin America as Paris is intensifying efforts to craft a new foreign policy to reverse its waning influence in global and European affairs. In practice, the new bilateral relations Paris is seeking with key countries in Latin America likely won't have any major impact on geopolitical developments there.
Analysis
Over the past year, France has seen its influence significantly diminish in the arena of global affairs and within the European Union. This has greatly upset France, which likes to think of itself as a leading voice in the world; after all, it has a permanent seat on the U.N. Security Council and, with Germany, is a co-founder of the European Union.
Lately, France's perception of its place in the world has taken a beating. First the Iraq war, which Paris opposed bitterly in a joint alliance with Berlin, demonstrated that French foreign policy did not match the European Union's foreign policy. France and Germany tried to make their anti-war position the common EU foreign policy, but seven countries voted instead to back the United States. In the end, French President Jacques Chirac and German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder wound up looking to all the world like a pair of curmudgeons who the Bush administration and many of their EU peers simply ignored.
More recently, Paris has realized that the inclusion in May 2004 of 10 new EU members -- several of which also supported the Bush administration on the Iraq war and the fight against global terrorism -- will weaken French influence within the union even more. The incoming members have made it clear to Paris and Berlin that they will not let the Franco-German alliance dominate them on foreign policy or anything else.
Confronted with the reality of its diminishing power, France had two options: accept its new second-tier status in a world dominated by U.S. economic and military might, or chart a new course to ensure Paris continues to be a force in global affairs -- at least in the eyes of the French, if not in fact.
In recent months, Paris has intensified a far-reaching diplomatic offensive designed to make France a key force in a multipolar alliance of developing powers like China, Russia, India and South Africa. This week it was Latin America's turn. French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin made a five-day trip to Chile, Argentina, Brazil and Mexico from Feb. 2 through 6 to lay the foundations of a new alliance between Paris and the four countries in Latin America that France perceives as having any real importance to its interests.
From the Bush administration's perspective, the only ramification of French efforts to strengthen relations with these countries is that the new allies likely will try to speak with a more coordinated voice on Latin American foreign policy issues. This means that Paris might take positions on specific issues like Colombia, trade or Cuba that would run counter to U.S. interests.
However, Washington won't pay much attention -- just as it doesn't pay much attention to Brazil, Argentina and Mexico on these matters.
The official theme of de Villepin's visit was "Latin America and the new international order." He did not meet with Mexican President Vicente Fox, but he met with the presidents of Argentina, Brazil and Chile -- underscoring the importance these three South American countries assign to closer relations with Paris.
France clearly views Brazil as the Latin American pillar of the new alliance that would support multilateralism against U.S.
unilateralism. European diplomatic sources in Buenos Aires told Stratfor on Feb. 5 that the Chirac government views Brazilian President Luiz Inacio "Lula" da Silva as the most credible and geopolitically relevant head of state in Latin America today.
Argentina and Chile are perceived as being pulled along in Brazil's wake. Mexico is viewed as important because of its membership in the North American Free Trade Agreement and the free trade agreement it already has with the European Union.
Although de Villepin's trip didn't produce any major political announcements or economic agreements, France's new foreign policy foundations in Latin America were laid. They include securing Latin American support for a major overhaul of the United Nations, most particularly the U.N. Security Council. Paris might not be happy about the prospect that new EU members will create a more vigorously, pugnaciously democratic union, but it does want an expanded and more democratic U.N. Security Council to prevent the United States from unilaterally imposing its will.
De Villepin also obtained an endorsement from all four governments of the French position that power in Iraq should be transferred to U.N. authority as quickly as possible. He argued that this is a necessary step toward bringing democracy to Iraq more quickly and restoring the U.N.'s credibility and authority in a multilateral world. Of course, that power transfer also would help French companies gain faster, broader access to international reconstruction contracts, and would help Paris press its claims over its existing prewar contracts with the Hussein regime in oil and other sectors of Iraq's economy.
At each stop, De Villepin pledged his support on matters specifically important to these countries. For example, in Chile he said the territorial conflict with Bolivia is strictly a bilateral matter, but added that borders between nations are "intangible." Many Chileans interpreted this statement as supporting their position against Bolivia, though in fact the Bolivians also could see it as endorsing their position against Chile.
In Argentina, he pledged French approval of the March 2004 review of Argentina's agreement with the International Monetary Fund.
Senior fund officials warned recently that Buenos Aires could face trouble with the IMF if it doesn't tangibly progress on restructuring between $88 billion and $100 billion in defaulted debt. However, the pledge suggests that Paris is willing to continue approving IMF loans to Buenos Aires even if the debt talks remain stalled, as Stratfor thinks they likely will.
In Brazil, de Villepin stroked da Silva's ego when exalting Brazil's role in the new multipolar international order -- and in Mexico, he pledged that France will help make the May 28-29 Latin American-EU summit in Guadalajara a success. In short, de Villepin didn't bind France to any entangling commitments. For example, he didn't offer to relax French opposition to liberalizing agriculture in any future trade deal between the EU and the Mercosur customs union.
Ultimately, the new relations Paris is pursuing in South America likely won't translate into a surge in French investments and aid there. Nor will France change its position on some policy positions, such as in agriculture, that are dear to South American hearts. However, the presidents de Villepin met with were happy to host him. At a time when the Bush administration isn't paying much attention to the region, de Villepin's tour probably felt like balm on a sunburn.
Senegal is moving closer to the United States, and gaining more space in its relationship with France. France, for its part, has a hard time maintaining the level of aid and cooperation it implemented in the past, the kind that allowed it to "punch above its weight in the world," as the author writes. This is obviously a smart move made by Abdoulaye Wade's government and it could prove excellent for Senegal, even if it "produces peanuts, not oil," a harder commodity to catch Washington's flickering interest.
This story illustrates one of the main Paris resentments. There is certainly a "different view of the world" as Chirac or Villepin like to say. The Gaullist search for France's and Europe's independence is real. Nevertheless, nobody could deny the French nostalgia for its waning power and influence and the resentment towards those that occupy the spaces it is forced to leave. Unsurprisingly, there is more bitterness if the new comer is a close friend, and if it is as arrogant as the French use to be.
The New York Times - America Tugs at French-Accented Lands: It's Not Peanuts
China and the US, "the Empires of the XXIst century" have a "very great alliance" according to which the US buys products made in China, while China keeps the yuan low. This contributes to US growth and allows a low dollar while China industrializes.
Europe's, and Japan's export suffer from this situation. It takes away growth and jobs from their economies. But the US say that with 8% growth in China and 4% in the US it's important to keep the two engines of the worlds economy at full speed.
According to the author "while the midjets further divide, the giants unite."
The coming G7 meeting should be interesting.
Le Monde - La très grande alliance entre les Etats-Unis et la Chine contre le reste du monde
La très grande alliance entre les Etats-Unis et la Chine contre le reste du monde
par Eric Le Boucher
LE MONDE | 24.01.04 | 15h39 • MIS A JOUR LE 24.01.04 | 17h31
Les Chinois s'apprêtent à engranger une nouvelle année de croissance à 8 %. Les Américains ont trouvé la stratégie pour réatteindre les 4 % annuels, comme dans la seconde partie des années 1990, sous Clinton.
"Vous m'achetez mes produits", dit la Chine. "Oui, mais vous me financez", répliquent les Etats-Unis. C'est la TGA, la très grande alliance, des deux empires du XXIe siècle. L'accord explicite entre 1 milliard 300 millions d'individus qui se ruent vers les usines de la côte chinoise pour sortir de la misère agricole et les 280 millions les plus riches de la planète qui veulent continuer à consommer comme des fous.
Un jour, cela changera. Dans vingt ans, dans trente ans, les premiers en voudront à mort aux seconds de n'être que leurs ouvriers. Mais, pour l'heure, l'agriculteur loqueteux est content de fuir les rizières façon Mao, et le consommateur américain est ravi de changer de chemise, de téléviseur et, demain, de voiture pour pas cher. Top là pour la TGA !
NAINS EUROPÉENS
L'euphorie des signataires éclatait à Davos, au Forum économique mondial. Les Chinois s'apprêtent à engranger une nouvelle année de croissance à 8 %. Les Américains ont trouvé la stratégie pour réatteindre les 4 % annuels, comme dans la seconde partie des années 1990, sous Clinton. Chine et Amérique mènent le monde, fort d'une TGA qui, selon la banque Morgan Stanley, n'est pas "circonstancielle mais stratégique", "qui durera longtemps" et qui constitue "une zone économique commune de facto couplée à une union monétaire". Bref, tandis que les nains européens se divisent, les géants s'associent très étroitement... S'associent contre eux. Ou, sinon "contre" eux, en tout cas égoïstement, suivant leurs seuls intérêts liés, écrasant au besoin ceux des vieux pays d'Europe et ceux du Japon.
Reprenons. L'Amérique, après l'éclatement de la bulle en 2000, est tombée en récession. Pour relancer la machine, les autorités n'ont pas mégoté : baisses massives des impôts par George W. Bush, baisse massive des taux d'intérêt par Alan Greenspan, patron de la Réserve fédérale (Fed). Dopée aux stéroïdes, la croissance est repartie. Cette stratégie a des conséquences qui, selon certains économistes, menacent la durabilité du rebond. En gros, leur critique consiste à dire que ce sont les étrangers qui financent cette reprise et que cela ne peut durer.
Les comptes du budget fédéral sont passés d'un excédent de 3 % à un déficit de 4 %, même Chirac est battu ! Il faut financer ce trou. Or, parallèlement, la soif du consommateur américain a provoqué un afflux d'importations. Les firmes américaines se sont elles-mêmes délocalisées pour réimporter leurs produits à prix réduit. D'où un deuxième déficit, celui des comptes courants, qui ne date pas de Bush mais qui s'est creusé jusqu'à 5 % du PIB.
Ce trou-là signifie que les pays exportateurs aux Etats-Unis accumulent des montagnes de dollars. Et qui dit abondance dit baisse de prix : d'où le recul de la monnaie américaine. Si le dollar baisse, les bons du Trésor nécessaires au financement budgétaire vont trouver de moins en moins d'acheteurs. Sauf à en monter les taux, ce qui pourrait étouffer la reprise.
LES DEUX DÉFICITS
Il était frappant à Davos de voir que la majorité des américains, industriels, banquiers, y compris les économistes, repoussent ce scénario noir qui est, au contraire, adopté par une majorité des européens présents. les américains croient à un scénario rose du règlement en douceur des deux déficits "jumeaux", budgétaire et commercial. L'arme en est la baisse du dollar. Son recul va favoriser les exportations américaines, contrebalançant les importations et réduisant ainsi le déficit courant.
Quant au trou budgétaire, pas de panique. Il se trouve que ce sont les Asiatiques qui le financent pour presque la moitié : la banque centrale du Japon achète des bons du Trésor américains, par tonnes, pour éviter que le yen ne monte (trop) ; la banque centrale de Chine, aux ordres du gouvernement, acquiert ces mêmes bons du Trésor dans le cadre que l'on sait, celui de la TGA, qui permet à Pékin d'ouvrir chaque jour de nouvelles usines de biens exportables aux Etats-Unis.
La baisse du dollar revient à prendre de la croissance et des emplois chez les autres. Chez qui ? Le 20 septembre 2003, lors de la réunion du G7, Américains et Européens s'étaient entendus pour que les Asiatiques, gros exportateurs vers les Etats-Unis, acceptent de réévaluer leur monnaie et de prendre donc une part du fardeau. Les Européens, qui venaient de voir l'euro gagner 20 % sur le dollar, trouvaient qu'ils faisaient seuls les frais du rééquilibrage américain. Le Japon a refusé, il achète au contraire des dollars sur le marché des changes, comme on l'a vu.
UN G7 SANGLANT EN FÉVRIER
La Chine aussi a refusé. Pour ne pas avoir de souci monétaire, elle a collé sa monnaie sur le cours du dollar, s'incluant dans une union monétaire de facto avec l'Amérique, son premier client, contre lequel elle ne veut pas de perte de compétitivité. Pour l'instant, elle estime qu'il n'est pas dans son intérêt de se décoller du dollar. Autrement dit, les Européens risquent de continuer à payer la facture. La prochaine réunion du G7, le 7 février, risque d'être sanglante.
Comment mieux équilibrer les efforts mondiaux ? Européens et Japonais ne trouvent pas logique de voir que ce sont eux, pays à faible croissance, qui voient leurs monnaies réévaluées. "Ils ont raison", soulignait à Davos Jean-Philippe Cotis, économiste en chef de l'OCDE, qui réclame, côté chinois, une réévaluation du yuan et, côté américain, "des mesures rapides et fortes de réduction du déficit budgétaire".
Pourtant, les Américains ont un argument de poids à faire valoir. En substance : "Nous sommes, avec la Chine, les seules locomotives mondiales. Les reprises, chez vous, n'ont pas de ressort interne ; elles viennent de chez nous, de nos importations. Alors, pourquoi vouloir ralentir les locomotives ? Tout le monde y perdra."
Nous sommes prévenus : Amérique et Chine ne céderont rien. Le seul espoir pour les Européens qui veulent arrêter la destructrice chute du dollar viendra des Etats-Unis eux-mêmes. Quarante députés républicains se plaignent des déficits de Bush, qui commencent à inquiéter les électeurs américains.
Eric Le Boucher
• ARTICLE PARU DANS L'EDITION DU 25.01.04