October 30, 2002

Simon Jenkins

Love America. Hate France. All else is local government. For two centuries this has been the guiding maxim of British foreign policy. Every Prime Minister should repeat it each morning as he shaves, and each evening as he prays. “Love America . . . hate France.”

Tony Blair has taken his time. His bond with Washington is not in doubt. If Genghis Khan were in the White House Mr Blair would be praising his leadership qualities and the human rights record of the Mongol hordes. But he has been alarmingly decent towards the French. The Francophobic blood of Henry V, Marlborough, Wellington, Churchill and Margaret Thatcher has thinned in his veins. Mr Blair dabbles in bistros, chateaux holidays and baccalaureates. He sends his children to oratories. Can he really be entrusted with the Pas de Calais?

Yet on Monday Mr Blair entered the Commons with a jaunty step and proceeded to drape the dispatch box in the Union Jack. He had lost all patience with the French. He spoke briefly of “good news” from the Euro-summit, but behind his back the spin-doctors were at work. He had been furious, “turbulent”, indeed the French had said “very rude”, to the French President, Jacques Chirac. The latter’s conspiracy with the Germans on farm support was the last straw.

The British public has been starved of a good French row. Beef did not count, because Britain was initially in the wrong. Asylum-seekers were good for a whinge, but Britain kept enticing them with jobs and dole. Here at last was a truly perfidious deal between Paris and Berlin, a carving-up of £20 billion of subsidy, a conspiracy against the Third World and Eastern Europe. A bad-tempered French President browbeat a weak German Chancellor into reneging on commitments to farm reform reached, with Britain in the lead, last year. It was almost too good, too bad, to be true.

In an outburst gleefully confirmed by Downing Street, M Chirac complained after his encounter with Mr Blair that he had “never been spoken to like this before”. (Given what we know of Madame Chirac, this was serious.) For good measure, the French President cancelled a pre-Christmas Anglo-French summit at Le Touquet, delighting the local goose population. He may regard Mr Blair as nothing but Washington’s poodle, but he must have known he was humiliating him. Mr Blair knew it too. If this was being “at the heart of Europe”, he had better act the thrombosis.

In this matter, Mr Blair is wholly in the right. The demands of the ten new EU members threatened the continued flow of half the EU budget to French and German farmers. This was precisely why last year the EU heads of state agreed to the urgent reform of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), to be completed by 2004. M Chirac had to move fast. He secretly cut a deal with the German Chancellor, Gerhard Schröder. This was designed to ensure that existing subsidies keep pouring into French agriculture until 2006, and then increase by 1 per cent a year until 2013. This all but negates reform.

It is hard to imagine a more tawdry plot even in recent European diplomacy. As Mr Blair pointed out, it denied a signed and sealed commitment to reform the CAP and negotiate access to Europe’s markets for Third World imports. In addition, poor farmers in the ten candidate countries will be left with miserly pickings, while Germany and France gulp down new draughts of cash. M Chirac’s reaction to charges of self-interest was to ask Britain to give up its £2 billion rebate.

There may be reasons for ending the rebate. Featherbedding French farmers is not one of them.

Mr Blair had no option but to agree to this deal because the hapless Danes, Dutch and others dare not oppose France in cahoots with Germany. The age of Napoleon and Bismarck is alive and well in Europe.

Mr Blair cannot trust M Chirac again. French farmers produce more than half of Europe’s mostly unwanted food. France obeys European laws and regulations when it chooses and balks at any reform that does not yield domestic advantage. For the French to claim to be “good Europeans” is a joke. Europe is expected to be a good Frenchman.

It has never been so hard to plot a path through the European jungle. Those who saw “Europe” as a noble venture in pursuit of freer trade now find its protectionism and lurches towards political integration too much to stomach. M Chirac has sabotaged farm reform and with it any hope of reordering the EU budget. He and Herr Schröder clearly have no time for collaboration with other states. The imminent collapse of the Stability Pact, underpinning the euro, must pause that bold venture. Even its cheerleader, The Economist, ominously declared this week that the pact should be disregarded, though “this would make a mockery of the whole thing”. To that is the great euro reduced.

Europhiliacs believe that all would be well if only Europe were run under a federal constitution, with a president and central legislature. The basis for this was set out on Monday by M Chirac’s elderly predecessor, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, whose constitutional Convention plan is stiff with waffle about democracy and the rule of law. Hearing him on Monday night, I have no doubt what he wants. It is a state, with citizens and a government, more protectionism, more centralism and a common foreign policy. If every British statesman dreams of Empire, every French one dreams of Napoleon.

These are the fantasies of the postwar generation. Yet common sense must agree with the recent call of the Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, for a more stable framework in which to regulate European commerce. Even the sceptic cannot sidestep the challenge of the Giscard Convention. The lurches towards “ever closer union” can be stopped only by treaty, and that implies some new framework of regulation. The Convention text suggests protection for national and local autonomy. It restricts the role of EU institutions. It even allows for secession by reluctant nations. Those seeking a Europe of “sovereign states” surely have an interest in discussing it.

Mr Blair has an opportunity. France, Germany and Italy are worse led today than they have been for a quarter century. Two leaders, M Chirac and Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi, face possible jail sentences when they leave office. Herr Schröder’s position is weakened by his narrow vote and his gauche indecision. Spain’s José María Aznar is not seeking another term. Only Mr Blair is a constant.

He must position himself with care. Europe’s internal and external relations have always been dictated by political geography. Britain is never going to be part of a Paris-Berlin axis and is lucky to have been outside it over the past decade. When the Stability Pact breaks down, there will be high deficits and raging inflation. Britain wants no part of that. When America goes to war, Europe will be in collective uproar. Mr Blair will want no part of that either.

Britain has always been semidetached from Europe because that is its geography. Somehow Mr Blair must recognise that geography and history are causes, not effects, of politics. The bond with America, so infuriating to the French, is embedded in British consciousness. It is crucial to European security. Government autonomy is also what British people want. They distrust Brussels as an agency of their domestic rule.

A British Prime Minister is compelled eventually to act on this basis. Leaders as diverse as Margaret Thatcher, John Major and Mr Blair himself have all passed through Euro-purgatory to end in the same position. Whatever the dispute, they find themselves isolated, trapped, infuriated and usually in the right.

Despite his “heart of Europe” rhetoric, Mr Blair is outside the European pale. He knows that “ever greater union” is rubbish. He knows that nobody, especially a Briton, can act Napoleon to the myriad interests and cultures of Europe. The parallel with the United States of America, trumpeted yesterday by M Giscard, is historically illiterate and dangerous. Try 1776 on Europe, and the next thing you will get is the American Civil War. America was a melting-pot. Europe is not.

For a British Prime Minister, this position is ambivalent and uncomfortable. But every one of Mr Blair’s predecessors has occupied it. It is more than sensible. It is inevitable.

-- Anonymous, October 29, 2002