‘That’s old Europe.” Seldom can three little words have provoked such a collective splutter. Every French and German politician I had ever heard of (and quite a few that I hadn’t) erupted in indignation at the irrepressible Donald Rumsfeld’s dismissal of their stand on Iraq.
Yet Rumsfeld’s rebuke is positively mild beside some of the language being applied in the United States to the peace-loving Europeans. “Euroweenies”, “cheese-eating surrender monkeys”, “destined to slip down the Eurinal of history” and a “pain in the butt” are only some of the more printable insults.
Anti-Americanism in France has a long history. But now for the first time it is matched by knee-jerk anti-Europeanism coming from all sorts of Americans from the taxi driver to the defence secretary. The difference is that the bomb-happy rednecks don’t worry about the limp-wristed frog-eaters nearly as much as the French worry about the onward march of American power and influence through the world — and especially through France.
Seldom has the gulf between Boston and Brest looked more immense. How distant now seem the days immediately after September 11, when Le Monde could run the headline “Nous sommes tous des Américains”.
In the political action as well as the language the contrast could not be more vivid. The United States and the rest of the world wait for the interim report from the weapons inspectors, for President Bush’s state of the union message and for imminent military action against Iraq. Meanwhile, at Versailles last Wednesday, Jacques Chirac and Gerhard Schröder and their parliamentarians gathered to celebrate 40 years of the Franco-German treaty.
On the surface it was, in the words of another great American, “déjà vu all over again”. Nothing much had changed in 40 years: the velvet and gold, the trumpeters, the orotund oratory, the genuine affection between the two nations and the relief at having finally ended a century of terrible wars.
In 1963, as in 2003, the purpose was not entirely innocent reconciliation. Then, as now, the French were itching to build up a counterweight to the overweening Anglo-Saxons. Only eight days before the signing of the Elysée treaty, General de Gaulle had issued his shattering “non” to British entry into the Common Market and at the same time had told President Kennedy that he wasn’t interested in taking part in any multinational nuclear defence. Similarly, last week’s fete followed hot on a bilateral agreement between France and Germany on their plans for the European Union. For the umpteenth time Britain was left flat-footed and out in the cold.
Nothing new there then? On the contrary, the realities are very different. If history is being repeated, it is on Karl Marx’s schedule; first time tragedy, second time farce.
In 1963 two ancient titans, de Gaulle and Konrad Adenauer, were leading two renascent nations out of the ruins of war. Now in their different ways France and Germany are led by two weaklings. Schröder survived the German elections only by resorting to a humiliating pacifist stance which he didn’t even sound as if he believed in. Chirac managed to see off an ancient fascist and now exercises more or less unfettered power, which, as ever, he doesn’t seem to have much clue what to do with except cling to the Franco-German pact.
However, the newer members of the EU, as Le Monde has the grace to point out, don’t think of the Americans as demons at all. After all, if the Yanks had gone home, as those old post-war French graffiti used to demand, half of those new members would not be free today.
In Britain, too, you can feel the change. Whenever Macmillan or Wilson or Heath or Major was “let down” by the French, there was an audible “ouch” throughout the Establishment. Our foreign policy had been derailed again. We didn’t know where to turn.
But now? I haven’t met anybody outside the Foreign Office who gives a toss. This is not hiding a chagrin born of repeated disappointments. It is simply a recognition that these diplomatic bluffs and rebuffs have little impact on the real world. Bilateral councils and secretary- generals for Franco-German relations don’t create a single extra job in Lille or Leipzig.
Forty years of the Elysée pact have not stopped unemployment in Germany rising to 4m. Nor has it prevented competition from Japanese car makers or Australian and Californian wine makers. Nor were some of the more achievable aims of the pact ever fulfilled.
It was, for example, agreed in 1963 that German should be given priority over English in French schools. In practice, today only 15% of German schoolchildren learn French and only 16% of French schoolchildren learn German. To rub in the reality, France’s own schools minister said in London last week that “teaching foreign languages, particularly English, is absolutely indispensable”.
On recent visits to Germany I have found businessmen and academics alike in despair at the failure of their government to embark on any kind of reform. In international tests the once fabled German schools are beginning to perform rather worse than the British. Above all, there is a readiness in this country to tear up something that isn’t working and start again which is simply absent on the Continent.
Last week the British government also went back to 1963 — to bring back realistic university tuition fees, which were finally abolished in that year. As a result, British universities now have a chance of approaching American standards and leaving overcrowded and underfunded continental universities further behind.
The government’s plans to introduce a vocational option for 14-year-olds go even further back, to Rab Butler’s 1944 act, which envisaged a tripartite system of grammar schools, secondary moderns and technical schools. No such radical reforms would have a chance of squeezing through the timid and arthritic politics of Paris or Berlin.
No doubt France and Germany will in due course recover that marvellous post-war elan which took them from their ground zero to the heights of the 1960s and 1970s. But it is silly to pretend they have begun to recover it yet.
You have only to look at the barmy scheme they have just concocted for not one but two elected presidents of the EU to see that an incestuous politics of gesture and posture is no sort of answer. Whether you agree with them or not, the painful reality is that the opposition of France and Germany poses only a minor inconvenience to whatever the Americans choose to do in Iraq.
Rumsfeld is a cantankerous old boy. His three little words were wounding and were meant to wound. They recall Dean Acheson’s remark that Britain had lost an empire but had not yet found a role. That hurt, too. But in the long run it did us good.
