Winds of Change.NET: The French Don't Keep Their Deals

July 9, 2003

The French Don't Keep Their Deals

by Trent Telenko at July 9, 2003 1:00 PM

David Ignatius wrote a column over the July 4th weekend that I just saw here on the latest diplomatic feud between America and France.

From the column:

"The latest skirmishes have centered on the United States' efforts to exempt its soldiers from the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court, a body whose authority the United States rejects. Washington and Paris have been making these waivers a test of loyalty -- widening the European-American divide at a time when reasonable people should be working to reduce it.

Some background: After deciding to pull out of the International Criminal Court last year, the Bush administration began demanding that other countries sign bilateral agreements promising that they wouldn't extradite to the court Americans charged with war crimes. This strikes me as a wrongheaded U.S. position, but it has been met with an equally wrongheaded French response.
When Romania agreed to U.S. requests for a waiver, for example, France reportedly reacted by warning the Romanians that they could be jeopardizing future membership in the European Union. The French are said to have issued a similar warning to at least one Baltic state that hopes to join the EU.

These heavy-handed French tactics are similar to Paris's pressure last spring to dissuade Eastern European countries from supporting U.S. policy in Iraq. The French warned then that pro-American actions were a sign of disloyalty to Europe.

U.S. diplomats claim the French also backtracked on their pledge to exempt from ICC prosecution U.S. troops involved in U.N. peacekeeping missions. The French had signaled they would support an automatic rollover of this exemption when it was drafted last year. But when it came up for renewal in the Security Council last month, the French abstained.

What's particularly galling, say U.S. officials, is that the French negotiated for themselves a seven-year waiver from prosecution by the ICC -- which a French friend tells me makes them the only country to have such blanket immunity.

Ignatius reccommends that America cut France in on part of the "soils" of Iraq and consider letting in the E.U.'s "Soft Power" for the peacekeeping mission in Iraq.

What crap.

Point in fact multi-national "soft power" NGOs like the E.U. and the U.N. have become America's enemy by being the paymaster of terrorism everywhere. Ignatius does not want to admit this because of the implications for them as America prosecutes the War on Terrorism. Wartime US foreign policy will only tolerate multi-national NGOs as long as they were more useful than the trouble they cause. Funding Hamas (E.U.) and Palestinian (U.N.) terrorists is a certain way to get on the American "To Do" list.

The French have decided to take this a step farther by making the U.N. nothing but a useless, broken tool as far as American foreign policy is concerned. And they are using the E.U. in the same manner to split Eastern Europe away from the USA.

Worse, they cannot be trusted to keep their word when it is clearly in their interests to do so. The French have gone Palestinian on anything to do with America. Or perhaps it is more accurate to say their politics have gone Arab-Algerian with Chirac as the head of Greater Algeria.

There is no common ground possible between France and America while Chirac leads France. There will be even less in the future as the American public reacts to French betrayal. The latter has already cut French exports to the USA 20% in three months and is resulting in French exchange student programs being left without American sponsors.

American business men are saying that they cannot cut big deals with French companies because they cannot sell them to their boards. They cannot answer the board's question of "Why should we chance the French government breaking the deal for political grandstanding?" In so many words, the French government is being reclassified as a 3rd World government by American senior business management.

It is also a hell of a thing to listen to radio in the gym, like I did last night, and hear commercials ragging on the French being used by Jack-in-the-Box to sell hamburgers. American pop culture has identified the France as the enemy. Nothing and no one is going to be able to alter that perception by the time Chirac is out of power.

Ignatius ends his column with this :

"America clearly needs help in postwar Iraq. The Europeans must recognize that if they continue to stand on the sidelines, savoring America's predicament, they will ultimately find the consequences of an Iraqi failure almost as painful as will the United States."

Bah!

What America really needs in Post-War Iraq is Presidential leadership that will increase our ground troop numbers. Not road shows to Africa that includes consideration for sending over committed American troops on a pointless feel good mission to Liberia. There are real enemies to hunt down and kill.

We don't need the Europeans in Iraq and they cannot help us even if they wanted too. If the French are so incompetent at peacekeeping that they need the USA to bail them out in East Africa. Just how much real use could they be in Iraq, assuming they didn't go over to Saddam's side the way they went over to the Serb side in Bosnia?

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Comments

#1 from Gabriel Gonzalez at 1:14 pm on Jul 10, 2003

The French do not share the same sense of obligation. It's probably related to being a "low trust" culture, to use Fukuyama's terminology. It is meaningless to compare France's signature on the ICC Treaty or the Kyoto Accords with the U.S. failure to enter into those agreements. Apples and oranges.

If the French run into problems on either, they will simply disregard their commitments. It's more for show than anything else.

The different mentality goes quite a way towards explaining, by the way, why the French could casually disregard their NATO commitments towards Turkey in February (to score political points) and then be genuinely surprised that anyone might object. The lack of trust also relates, I think, to the French I-owe-you-nothing attitude towards their liberation by the U.S. and allied forces during World War II. If present international obligations aren't worth much, how much can historical ones be worth?

#2 from Advanced Calculus at 2:38 pm on Jul 10, 2003

The real reason has nothing to do with trust. France as a monarchy, Napoleonic empire and republic has always operated its foreign policy on the basis of "interests". Hey, the French monarchy helped you Americans in your War of Independence even though it was an absolute monarchy and the Americans wanted a republic. In the seventeenth century, they also were on the Protestant side in the Thirty Years' War between Catholics and Protestants, while continuing to persecute the Protestants in France.

We know how the French have continued to operate that way even more recently: Iraq, France's dealings with NATO and the US.

#3 from David Foster at 8:26 pm on Jul 10, 2003

Gabriel...interesting hypothesis about the "low-trust society" factor...but what is the reason for thinking that France is such a society? Aren't low-trust societies usually marked by a high degree of bribery and corruption? Such things seem largely absent in France--at least domestically (foreign business being another matter). Low-trust societies are also usually marked by extreme nepotism and business based on personal relationships; France seems to be more of a test-driven meritocracy.

#4 from Robin Roberts at 12:16 am on Jul 11, 2003

David, google the French trial on criminal charges of bribery against Elf officials.

#5 from Allison at 2:36 am on Jul 11, 2003

Its interesting to think about possible explanations for the way that France behaves. However, getting down to brass tacks, I don't really care why France does what it does. Actions have consequences. I hope France is about to find that out. If only my husband would let me put up the yard sign "First Iraq, then France"! I think that says it all.

#6 from Gabriel Gonzalez at 8:32 am on Jul 12, 2003

David et al

I wouldn't necessarily want to pigeon-hole France into the low-trust category, but I do think it's a good starting point for reflection, to the extent anyone still cares (Allison's comment). There is actually quite a bit of domestic corruption in France (Chirac's problems with public funds, Elf trial, etc.), but France admittedly is not Mexico or Brazil. It is not a third world country either. More than outright corruption, there is a sort of mid level rule bending in which having the right contacts and lighter forms of palm greasing get you promoted, assigned to the public sector job you want, get you a public subsidized apartment, get rid of traffic tickets, etc. It reminds me of the gaming the system mentality that was prevalent in the Soviet Union.

As for meritocracy, there is a formal system that is largely merit based and works to some extent. There is also a very clubby system of educated elites (the ENA, etc.) and class-based distinctions that are equally important. Your chances in life are far more dependent on being from a "bonne famille" than ability. You have the meritocratic Grandes Ecoles, but then it ends up that half of the entering class actually went to kindergarten together in the same area of the posh 16th arrondissement and all their parents know each other. You also note that, in contrast to, say, the UK or the US, in company structures, the shareholders, the board members, the CEO, even the outside auditors and the company's legal counsel all know each other and are not independently selected based on merit. It's the same group from the high class kindergarten. (This is in part why it is difficult to analyse racism in France, since it overlaps with classism.)

My purely empirical observation is that the French play life as a sort of cynical game, in which you can't rely on the (anonymous) other. When important personal interests are at stake, the French will hang you out to dry, even use you, regardless of supposed commitments. It is precisely the social and economic limitations on individual initiative and the lack of "trust" (in this limited sense) that leads to a collectivist bureacracy that protects people from each other and ensures their individual entitlements. The State then acts as protector, arbiter and becomes an object of worship to which a lot of social functions are delegated. This gets to the point that the people even rely, trust, and defer to the State to defend national interests in the international arena through a similar highly cynical interests-based logic that is widely accepted. If you placed the French behind a Rawlsian veil of ignorance, I think it likely that, given their assumptions about human nature and the rules of social systems, they would likely cede a lot of individual freedom in favor of collective protection.

I heard about Chirac's deal with Mladic on French radio. It probably won't even make the evening news here, and who cares? Compare the Bush lied about uranium sales obsession.

Gabriel Gonzalez
Paris, France