THREE days before Britain takes over the EU presidency, France staked out its opposition yesterday to Tony Blair’s drive for reform and insisted that the majority of states backed France’s vision of Europe as a political power to match the United States.

Philippe Douste-Blazy, Foreign Minister in President Chirac’s Government, showed in his first interview with British and American media that Paris was in no mood for compromise after the collapse of the Brussels summit two weeks ago. He made clear that the struggle was on for the future direction of Europe.

M Douste-Blazy, 52, the former Health Minister with no background in foreign affairs, revived M Chirac’s ideas about Europe vying with the United States in a “multipolar world”. The President toned down this doctrine over the past two years because it antagonised the Bush Administration at the time of the Iraq invasion.

Europe was at a turning point after Dutch and French voters rejected the constitution, said M Douste-Blazy, who is a cardiac surgeon and one of the most ambitious politicians in the Government led by Dominique de Villepin. The EU must tell its voters that it wants to become “a real pole of power comparable on the commercial and industrial . . . front with the US, China and eventually India and Brazil, ” he said. “Do we want that or a free trade zone?”

France has historically charged Britain with trying to turn the EU into a mere trading area. M Douste-Blazy said: “The political union of Europe is a pole of power. France is not alone in this. The view is shared almost unanimously across the European Union.” M Douste-Blazy, who pays his first official visit to Washington on July 4, took issue with a definition of the EU that, he said, had been given by Gordon Brown, which said that the EU should be a mediator between nation states and a globalised world. He said: “On the contrary, there has to be a European space of a kind which exists nowhere else. We have to say what it is, or people do not understand.”

Mr Blair deliberately sabotaged the Brussels summit by demanding reform to farm spending as the price of giving way on Britain’s rebate from the EU budget, M Douste-Blazy said. “The truth is . . . that some people want to dismantle the common policies of the Union.” The minister’s remarks reinforced the view that France has no intention of playing to Mr Blair’s agenda for “root and branch reform” to spending, starting with the Common Agricultural Policy, which he depicts as a wasteful anachronism.

Giving the first French response to Mr Blair’s speech at the European Parliament last week calling for EU reform, M Douste-Blazy said that France was happy to discuss modernising Europe, but not at the cost of the CAP, “one of our most successful common policies”.

The tough line reflected M Chirac’s strategy of deflecting heat from France’s own troubles through the time-honoured ploy of picking a quarrel with Britain.

British officials in Paris are relieved that the approach is not working because the President is politically discredited and Mr Blair’s argument for reform has been making an impression through the media.

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