The annual G-7 economic summits have been justly described as photo
opportunities in which anything except economics may be discussed.
The Halifax Summit of June 1995 was no exception, the sherpas having
gotten their masters to agree on the economic communiqué even before
they arrived at the mountain. But a singular photo-op at Halifax
captured something new: the collective leadership of the West crowded
about a tall commanding figure reading a message on the Bosnian
crisis. That figure was not President Clinton. He stood respectfully
behind the man enthusiastically holding center stage--the new French
president, Jacques Chirac.

It was a Gaullist dream come true. A timid Germany, a less-than-timid
Britain, a faltering Japan, and a seriously distressed Italy were
joined by a weak Russia. Above all, there was Bill Clinton, the
American "domestic" president, hobbled by a hostile Congress and an
erratic foreign policy. Chirac seized his opportunity, and
international leadership spoke with a French accent for the first
time since de Gaulle himself departed the scene nearly thirty years
before.

The hugely popular newly-elected president of the world's
fourth-largest economy, Jacques Chirac was also the leader of the
Gaullist party. Six months before, as mayor of Paris, he had been
considered a long shot to win France's highest office. Savoring his
unexpected triumph, he began even before the summit with a piece of
Gaullist haughtiness, defying world opinion by scheduling a round of
French nuclear tests. Now, using the Halifax meeting as a launch pad,
he promptly disconcerted the Russians, the Americans, and the British
by declaring a new policy in Bosnia: get tough or get out. He wanted
to avoid a Munich, he said. As for the leadership of the West, he
told a reporter, there was no such leadership.

Before June was over, Chirac had also ridden roughshod over
prevailing niceties at a European Union summit in Cannes, criticizing
the Greek prime minister over the Balkans and the "lax" Dutch drug
policy while conducting brisk meetings as host-chairman. He also
sought to create a group of "wise men" to study the risks of currency
fluctuation and trade conflict between countries joining the proposed
European Monetary Union (EMU) and those remaining outside, both
groups containing countries in commercial competition with France.
Chirac proposed as chairman for such a group a former French
president and current coalition ally, Mr. Valéry Giscard d'Éstaing.

Meanwhile, the French president was breaking taboos at home. He
acknowledged French complicity in the deportation of Jews to the
slaughter in World War II, an admission his predecessor had
stubbornly resisted. Chirac thus became the first postwar French
leader to accept the shameful truth that too many Frenchmen had been
not just defeatists but collaborators in their defeat.

All of these dramatic activities brought mixed results. By early
October the Croatian offensive against the Serbs and a burst of
American diplomatic activity had overshadowed the French role. The EU
proved resistant to French plans, too; bruised by Chirac's
highhandedness, the smaller member countries led a successful charge
to deny him his wise man's group, thereby irritating the host who had
irritated them. Chirac himself seemed surprised by the hostile
international reaction to his nuclear plans. Last and certainly not
least, he was coming under growing criticism at home for a domestic
policy that was noticeably less decisive and energetic than either
his foreign policy or his pre-election promises. In particular, he
was being held hostage to his campaign pledge to reduce France's high
level of unemployment.

Despite these setbacks, Chirac's boldness in seeking to fill the
vacuum of Western leadership created by the inadequacies of the
Clinton administration has been impressive. The French challenge--Le
Défi Français--came as a surprise on both sides of the Atlantic.
France's European allies had grown rather bored with the prickly mix
of self-interest and Gaullist gloire represented by Mitterrand, and
had come to relegate the French to a subsidiary role. Washington, too,
dismissed France as a secondary power and focused its attention on a
reunited Germany. Chirac's seizing of the initiative has thus served
to remind his allies of France's importance. But the question
remains: Is Chirac's attempt at vaulting France once more into
international leadership sustainable? Or is he doomed to be simply a
flash in the pan, someone who will soon subside into a mildly
annoying irrelevance?

Under the Gaullist constitution, the French president exercises
virtually unfettered control over foreign policy; the British prime
minister, the German chancellor and the American president are mere
committee chairmen by comparison. And until Chirac, that power was
exercised by de Gaulle's successors on behalf of "Gaullism," a
broadly popular set of principles to the French, but principles that
most of France's allies, and especially the United States, only
vaguely understood and tended to regard as presumptuous.

Chirac and his policies can only be understood in the framework of
Gaullism and its four key elements: (1) retention of an independent
nuclear arsenal as essential to French independence and global
influence; (2) diplomatic domination of an economically more powerful
Germany; (3) suspicion of NATO as an instrument of American power and
a determination to stay distanced from it; and (4) assertion of the
nation, and nationalism, as the true and reliable lodestar of
international politics. These elements together sustained de Gaulle's
vision of France as the leader of Europe--a Europe of nations, not
supranational institutions--that would maneuver between the
Anglo-Saxon powers and the Russians.

All of these principles have been challenged drastically by the end
of the Cold War. In the first six months of a seven-year term,
Jacques Chirac has already begun to lead in new directions, modifying
policy--and Gaullist traditions--in some cases (but not all), and
hinting at more change to come. But Chirac faces some daunting
dilemmas. If, how, and when he resolves them will affect not only
vital French interests but also the security of Europe and the future
of the Atlantic Alliance.

The Nuclear Dilemma

As the Cold War ended, the small and costly French force de frappe (5
submarines with 80 missiles; 18 IRBMs; and about 225 nuclear-capable
aircraft) seemed to appreciate in value. Theoretically, at least, the
massive reduction of the superpowers' nuclear arsenals required by
start i and start ii made the French nuclear deterrent more
formidable; it had meant little in the 1970s and 1980s as the United
States and the Soviet Union fielded ever larger numbers of warheads.
Even more significantly, the French nuclear force might now be joined
to the already existing "Eurocorps", consisting of French and German
contingents, to create a real European defense community.

These ambitions, however, collided with another reality. The Gulf War
exposed serious weaknesses in French conventional forces. Under
French law, conscripts cannot be used abroad and the professional
French contingent sent to the Gulf was small and under-equipped. Four
years after the event, Defense Minister Charles Millon was still
reminding the readers of Le Monde (June 30, 1995) of "the
difficulties we encountered during the Gulf War", and stressing the
need for a new professionalism emphasizing space technology,
intelligence, firepower, readiness, and mobility--all characteristic
of the Pentagon's best efforts in Operation Desert Storm. (It was
only in July of this year that the French managed to launch their own
spy satellite--not up to U.S. standards, but to the French preferable
to relying on the United States.) France's emphasis on self-reliance
and its long absence from NATO's integrated military organization
(though never as complete as the Gaullists pretended) had hurt the
country's military capability. Clearly, more money must be spent if
French nuclear and conventional forces are to be improved. But there
is no money. The French government's deficit is too high, and the
impending European Monetary Union requires it to be lowered
considerably. Chirac will therefore be hard put to sustain even the
current defense budget of about $37 billion per year (in francs
virtually the same as 1993).

These facts about the overall condition of the French military cast
new light on the nuclear test controversy. France could have chosen,
as Britain has done, to rely for its warhead design on American
models; the British are also dependent on U.S. computer simulations
to keep their arsenal reliable. But such simulations derive
ultimately from testing patterns. In the absence of an agreement with
the United States, Chirac chose the old Gaullist route, breaking
Mitterrand's three-year-old testing moratorium.

Even before the first test in early September this brisk decision
proved to be a huge gaffe. Major trading partners in Asia threatened
economic retaliation; French goods were boycotted. The timing of the
first test, coming just after the fiftieth anniversary of Hiroshima,
made things worse. Some of France's European allies expressed
displeasure. But worst of all, Chirac's policy of ignoring
international opinion was not very popular in France itself, where
past displays of Gaullist disdain for foreign opinion had usually
rallied the public around the government position.

Chirac's nuclear tests also had an effect in Washington. The Pentagon
had recommended a curtailed series of low-level American tests, and
Clinton characteristically could not decide what to do. As protests
enveloped the French in early August, he suddenly announced his
support for a complete test ban. That leaves France alone among the
Western nuclear powers to argue the case for a testing program--at
least through the current planned series--on no better ground than to
retain its scientific independence of the Americans.

France also faces a decision on its regular forces: national service
versus a professional army. Bosnia and Rwanda have taught the French
government that its "rapid reaction" force is too small and
ill-equipped to provide the flexibility to deal effectively with such
crises. The Foreign Legion only fields 8,500, and the entire Rapid
Reaction Force 42,500. French forces are scattered about the
globe--excluding the Eurocorps in Germany, the French have roughly
40,000 deployed abroad. The French navy with two medium-sized
carriers and a total of forty-two principal surface combatants cannot
be described as overendowed. It seems inevitable that a major
investment in a professional force must come at the expense of the
"big battalion" conscript army, which still constitutes the heart of
the French military establishment, and of the French ideal of
national service.

Chirac and his advisors have sought a two-pronged solution to these
problems. Both prongs involve greater cooperation with other European
states. In September Chirac and Prime Minister Alain Juppé emphasized
the potential role of the French nuclear force as a component of
European deterrence, suggesting that France, Britain, and Germany sit
together to discuss the matter. This idea could be discounted as
merely an attempt to undercut opposition to nuclear testing. On
October 28-30, Chirac and British Prime Minister Major did meet for
such a discussion and declared their readiness to use nuclear weapons
in each other's defense, a pledge Paris had reserved previously only
for Germany. And as early as January 13, 1995, Juppé had outlined a
concept of dissuasion concertée--concerted deterrence. Chirac is
clearly giving an impetus here to a potentially radical idea: The
future of the force de frappe may depend upon it becoming such a
dissuasion concertée; that, in turn, will depend on the acceptability
of such a concept to other European governments, including that of
Germany.

A second initiative concerns the French and European arms industry.
As Defense Minister Millon has put it, "France cannot be ignored, but
in many areas it cannot act alone." This acknowledgment, of course,
is not new. What is new is that, contrary to earlier French
assertions of a common European defense objective, the French now
speak of a form of cooperation to a renewal of the Atlantic Alliance.
As early as 1992, Chirac himself advocated in Politique
Internationale that Europe and the United States should collaborate
on anti-missile defenses and stronger measures to contain
proliferation of chemical and biological weapons. Today Paris also
advocates a two-tier military system for the West: NATO when the
Americans choose to become involved; European forces, based on the
Eurocorps but able to still draw on the units committed to NATO, that
would enable the Europeans to act on their own in lesser
contingencies.

It is well known that Chirac has been more sympathetic to America and
things American than any of his predecessors. He often speaks fondly
of his American summer as a Harvard student, a soda jerk at a Howard
Johnson's, and a fork lift operator at a beer factory. And he
astonished both American observers and his own countrymen by giving a
lengthy interview on American television in English during his
October trip to New York to attend the festivities marking the
fiftieth anniversary of the United Nations. But Chirac's interest in
a strengthened Franco-American connection is neither whimsical nor
sentimental. It is guided by strategic logic.

It is still not clear yet whether any of this is workable, but it
surely presages a closer relationship between France and the alliance
than anything de Gaulle would have tolerated. Behind the classic
Gaullism of the nuclear tests, then, seem to lurk several
post-Gaullist initiatives intended to bring about greater French
military cooperation with its neighbors, and with the United States.

Whose Europe?

It is all well and good for French leaders to assert, as Prime
Minister Juppé did on May 23 to the National Assembly, that "France
can and must assert its vocation as a world power [applause]", but
French foreign policy is rooted in Western Europe. The Franco-German
partnership that produced the European Common Market and now the
European Union is the foundation of French security. General de
Gaulle, while consciously loosening the bonds with the United States,
tightened them with Germany, and his successors have done the same.
The European Union has thus grown up as an economic directorate
driven primarily by Germany, but with a political superstructure
dominated by France.

This careful formula, with its ritual summit meetings and emotional
overtures of reconciled enemies, was shaken to its core by German
unification. Paris was as surprised as any other Western capital by
East Germany's rapid decline and the sudden dismantling of the Berlin
Wall on November 10, 1989. Surprise gave way to consternation when it
became clear that the two Germanys were becoming one. Thanks to Lady
Thatcher's memoirs (among other sources), we know now that after
Mitterrand's surprise visit to Moscow in early December 1989 he
shared her fears about the speed and scope of German unification. In
all of this there was an echo of the historic Franco-Russian and
Anglo-French alliances that were intended to constrain Germany before
World War I.

At a joint press conference with German Chancellor Helmut Kohl on
November 3, only a week before the Berlin Wall fell, Mitterrand had
declared, "Reunification poses so many problems that I shall make up
my mind as the events occur." Despite his expressions of concern to
Thatcher and Gorbachev, when Mitterrand "made up" his mind he decided
not to oppose a unification that in any case he could not prevent.
Instead he pressed Kohl for compensatory assurances that Germany
would support a further "deepening" of the European Community. But
even in this he proved variable, as he floated a proposal for an
all-European political structure that seemed to suggest the
dissolution of NATO and the Warsaw Pact alliances, without addressing
the critical issue of whether East Germany would survive. Such a
proposal might have been attractive to a Soviet leader with more time
at his disposal, but Gorbachev was not in that position. Faced with
the choice of using Soviet troops to uphold East Germany by force or
selling the wasting asset at the highest price, he decided to sell.
Using the two-plus-four mechanism provided by the Americans to
negotiate the terms, he eventually dealt directly with Kohl in July
of 1990. For some fifteen billion deutschmarks, a new treaty of
friendship, and various military arrangements that still allowed full
German membership in NATO, Gorbachev sold Stalin's forward position
in Europe that had been bought forty-five years earlier by the blood
of the Red Army. His subsequent bid to create a "special
relationship" with the new Germany created unease in NATO but turned
out to be so much wind when the Soviet Union itself disappeared in
1991.

The French had proved quite marginal to these astounding events.
Mitterrand had flirted and flitted with several different ideas,
never quite settling on any one for very long. Bonn got the
impression that France quietly agreed with Britain that unification
was not desirable except that Mitterrand took greater pains than
Thatcher to disguise it. But neither affected the outcome. The French
were now partners to a much larger, unified Germany, and they had not
proved helpful in the birthing process.

A long introspection then ensued in Paris. Could France continue to
"lead" the Germans politically? Would the European Union now become,
as some British Conservatives loudly claimed, a vehicle for German
domination of Europe? The Maastricht Treaty, heavily promoted by
Mitterrand as the key act to secure a united Western Europe with
Germany finally "integrated" into it, soon took on a different cast.
European Monetary Union now meant an iron linkage of the French
economy to that of Germany. As the cost of German unification led to
a tight money policy by the Bundesbank, the French economy suffered
under higher interest rates. Paris devalued the franc but held the
linkage. The country was then caught in a halfway house as its other
main competitors, particularly Britain, floated free of the European
Monetary System to avoid the German-generated constraints. These
"competitive devaluations"--the so-called multi-speed European
monetary system--were to be the main target of Chirac's abortive
"wise men's group" at the Cannes summit of June 1995.

At the Valencia Summit, near September's end, however, the EU finance
ministers reaffirmed that Germany, not France, would determine the
course on the EMU. By adopting strict criteria as specified by the
Maastricht Treaty, Italy was clearly excluded from among the early
participants. And while Chirac has proclaimed the French commitment
to join the EMU by the 1997 target date to be a "point of honor" this
will require serious cuts in public spending to meet the targets.
Prime Minister Juppé's initial budget notably failed to tackle the
problem of public employee salaries and benefits. His finance
minister, Alain Madelin, resigned in August over this issue, saying
later to the Washington Post, "There are two Frances--one the
merchant France that is subject to the laws of competition and of
excellence, and a Sleeping Beauty France that is administered and
lives in a cocoon."

In October, alarmed by falling polls and rising financial
uncertainty, Chirac spoke out for more serious deficit reduction,
even austerity. Then Juppé suddenly reorganized his government in
early November to take better aim at "debts and deficits." Results,
of course, remain to be seen.

Chirac has thus inherited some nasty choices. France must be bound to
Germany economically, but will Germany continue to be as bound to
France politically? Kohl's action in pushing his allies to recognize
Slovenia and Croatia in 1991 was a bad augury, but the resulting
disaster has discouraged further German initiatives. Late in his
presidency, Mitterrand dispensed with Gaullist strictures about
Anglo-Saxon powers and began to turn to the British as an essential
element for maintaining a proper balance in the European Union.
Ironically, too, John Major's Britain is a bit of a Gaullist case
itself, picking and choosing those parts of the EU that it likes
while remaining uncommitted about the rest.

Ultimately, Chirac knows that a U.K.-French combination has neither
successful precedent nor a real prospect of "outweighing" an
assertive Germany. For now Kohl and his generation are preoccupied
with unification and reluctant to assert German diplomatic
leadership, leaving Paris some room for initiative. But the future
shape of the EU requires a hard strategic decision on Chirac's part.
He fears a German-led Europe; he cannot have a French-led Europe for
much longer; and a "European Europe" requires more players.

Russia, NATO, and the Americans

Adding more "players" to Europe in order to safeguard French security
brings to the fore the most serious conceptual problem facing Chirac.
De Gaulle wished to make France the leader of a third "bloc" that
could operate successfully between the Americans and the Russians.
The French leader's tactics were intended to loosen the hold of both
superpowers, leaving a European "center" gravitating toward French
leadership.

The demise of the Soviet Union and the rebirth of a united Germany
have dealt a fatal blow to this conception. Chirac inherited thirty
years of French policy headed in the wrong direction, a legacy that
consistently irritated the Americans and weakened NATO. The danger
now is not excessive American influence over Europe but the potential
for German dominance.

As Mitterrand indicated in 1989-90, the old French impulse to combine
with Russia in order to contain Germany is far from dead. But are the
post-Soviet Russians capable of playing such a game? The answer seems
to be: Not yet. France, like other observers of Russia, sees a
country still sorting out a new identity, its politics and society
contorted in the act of change. The Moscow of today cannot be
regarded as a strong interlocutor on pan-European security problems.

Already two years ago Pierre Lellouche, then counselor to Chirac as
mayor of Paris, had reached a Cartesian conclusion. Writing in
Foreign Affairs (Spring 1993), Lellouche deduced that, by process of
elimination, a France in search of security could find it best in a
new partnership with Washington. The trouble was that both countries
faced "an arduous redefinition" offering "potential for friction."
Lellouche argued that the big challenges--instability in both the
former Soviet Union and the Islamic world--needed American
leadership. He summed up his arguments thus:

"Once again Europe is characterized by a pivotal and strong Germany,
a backward and unstable Russia, and a large number of small weak
states. And again, France and Great Britain are incapable by
themselves of balancing German power or checking Russian instability,
let alone restructuring the entire European order around a
Franco-British axis. . . . It is crucial for Europe's future to do
everything possible to consolidate the continent's only poles of
stability: the EC and the alliance with the United States."

Lellouche therefore argued for an "urgent" political negotiation
between France and America that would take advantage of their
converging interests.

Lellouche's call fell on deaf ears in both Paris and Washington.
Mitterrand was not inclined to take advice, and his practiced
aloofness now concealed seriously deteriorating health. His last two
years as president resembled a secular deathbed confession, with the
press serving as priest and the French public as the final judge.
Mitterrand's disclosures of dalliances personal (an illegitimate
daughter) and political (service to Vichy) distracted attention from
a paralyzed foreign policy.

As for Washington, neither President Clinton nor his foreign policy
team were inclined or equipped to think in strategic terms. Clinton
wished to be as much a domestic president as Bush had been a foreign
policy president. To the extent that it has taken place--which is not
very much--the "arduous redefinition" of America's post-Cold War
foreign policy has been driven more by events than concepts, by
crises rather than initiatives.

To judge from the comments of both Chirac and his foreign minister
following their initial encounters with American leaders last summer
in Washington and Halifax, they found the United States weak and
divided. The administration sounded internationalist, but the
president reminded the French that the American Congress had a say.
When Chirac argued to Bob Dole and Newt Gingrich that the United
States should help to fund the Rapid Reaction Force for Bosnia, he
found himself subjected to moral objections on the embargo and
complaints that Clinton had failed to consult congressional leaders
on the scheme. All of this could only have reinforced the Gaullist
sneer that the Americans were unreliable after all, and the fear that
the United States would simply diminish its presence in Europe until,
through that very process, it became clear that Washington no longer
had vital commitments. For Chirac and for France this would be a
disaster.

The French president has clearly impressed even a distracted Clinton
administration as a "comer." It is rumored that soon he will be given
that rarest of accolades, a state visit--something recently denied
the president of the People's Republic of China. A new alliance
between the United States and France is urgent for Paris. In its
absence the Germans will continue to be the key American ally in
Europe and increasingly dominant within the continent. For the
moment, however, Chirac lacks a strategic partner in Washington.

The Nation-State and Nationalism

The fourth and final aspect of the Gaullist legacy that has been
shaken by events is the emphasis on nationalism as the foundation of
the state system. Today, nationalism in Europe looks more like the
potential destroyer of the European order than its foundation. Other
countries have joined the French in denouncing the barbarities in the
Bosnian war. Mounting anti-semitism and racial hatred elsewhere in
Europe, held in check during the Cold War, are further evidence that
nationalism rather than supranationalism remains the dominant
ideology of the "new" Europe. Despite its commitment to the noble
vision of the European Union and its espousal of "the universal right
of man", France itself is not immune to virulent strains of
nationalism.

A tide of immigration, especially from Algeria, has stirred in some
Frenchmen the very fanaticism they deride in others. Jean Marie Le
Pen enjoys 15 to 20 percent of the vote and has made gains not only
in regions heavily affected by immigration but in ones fearing its
future impact. Every aspect of French life, from education to
business to politics, has been influenced by the dread that France
will come--or already has come--to harbor a large minority who will
never be "French"--and this at a time when unemployment is at 12
percent. (More than five million Muslims now live in France, and more
than a million of them are from Algeria.) So it is that, nearly four
decades after the French withdrew from North Africa, the Algerian
problem still confounds French life. Immigration policy is now bound
up with French fears about Islamic fundamentalism sweeping North
Africa, and terrorism disrupting their own lives. Paris has
struggled, so far in vain, to stabilize the situation in Algeria,
vacillating between policies of supporting Algerian military
repression and encouraging an all-party compromise.

The struggle to sustain a benevolent French nationalism has in turn
begun to influence France's otherwise scandal-ridden and moribund
African policy. Described in Libération (July 19, 1995) by an unnamed
presidential aide as a "splendid mess," the use of French development
funds (and occasionally troops) to sustain a corrupt and unstable set
of tyrants in Africa shook the Mitterrand government to its roots.
Mitterrand's idea of a proper ruler in Africa seems to have been a
French-educated, neo-socialist "reformer"; he disdained the King of
Morocco and others of a supposedly ancien régime. Scandal and the
immigration problem have led Chirac to a different approach. When he
visited Africa this past summer, he made a point of going to Morocco
first, the better to boost the safe Islam of King Hassan against the
extremists in Algeria.

The French have also begun to connect the diseased nationalism of the
Balkans and the African-Algerian troubles into a kind of world view.
Europe (and France) are threatened--so say Juppé and Millon--by the
collapse of states both in the north and in the south, the one a
consequence of the Soviet demise, the other a result of the
fundamentalist assault. The French therefore argue that neither the
European Union nor NATO can afford to focus exclusively on Central or
Eastern Europe; there must also be a "Southern Policy" to strengthen
that flank. This, of course, reopens a constant theme in the
evolution of the EU itself and indeed within some of its members,
especially Italy: Is the EU to be dominated by a northern Europe or a
southern one? France, given its location and historic ties across the
Mediterranean--and also its discomfort with a reunited Germany--is
now arguing for a larger southern dimension. And while de Gaulle's
African empire was related in part to domestic needs (the Algerian
French repatriates), Chirac's "southern strategy" reflects an even
more acute sense of domestic vulnerability.

Thus for the French, the "redefinition" brought on by the end of the
Cold War encompasses the very identity of French nationalism. Chirac
faces the formidable task of containing an incipient hysteria that
finds expression in racialist definitions of the nation and claims
that Arab immigrants and Muslim fanatics are bringing about a true
struggle of "civilizations" within France itself--a battle that may
soon be waged not in the salons but in the streets of Marseilles,
Nice, and Paris.

The Bosnian Theater

Upon taking office Chirac attempted to deal with France's accumulated
foreign policy problems in rapid order. His decision on nuclear
tests, his summit performances in both Halifax and Cannes, and his
trip to Africa were maneuvers intended to relieve immediate pressure
points while hinting at greater changes to come. Among those points