The concept of "the national interest" is omnipresent in contemporary
discussions of foreign affairs--in the speeches of presidents and
senators, in the scribblings of editorialists, as well as in the
speculations of academic specialists. The influence of this idea is
one of the lasting legacies of the so-called "realist" school of
international relations, whose luminaries included the political
scientist Hans Morgenthau and the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr.

The American proponents of realism were publicists as well as
scholars, and they engaged in a polemic against the notion that U.S.
foreign policy ought to engage in crusades on behalf of such
allegedly abstract causes as democracy, human rights, and
anti-communism. Its proponents were "Burkeans" who tried,
paradoxically enough, to wish away the reality of Jacobinism and its
ideological pedigree. As Raymond Aron suggested, the American
realists transformed historically specific periods in European
statecraft when a "moderate Machiavellianism" had prevailed--the
period between the wars of religion and the French Revolution, and
again the century between the Congress of Vienna and the First World
War--into a normative account of the permanently valid requirements
of statecraft. Theirs was a conservative, nostalgic, and even
reactionary lament against the unleashing of societal passions in an
age of ideology and mass democracy.

What gave realism much of its allure was its claim to the authority
then accorded social science. Some historically-minded realists such
as Henry Kissinger occasionally concede the historically specific
character of their realist prescriptions, but most lament the
stubborn persistence of American "exceptionalism." This is somehow
taken as evidence of the immaturity of the American people and of the
utopian imagination of the American political class. Most realists
fail fully to appreciate that American exceptionalism is another name
for the universalism that is inseparable from American statecraft
because it is integral to America's founding principles, and
therefore to its very self-definition as a nation.

This is not the occasion to examine the nature of American
exceptionalism or its role in the articulation of a distinctively
American foreign policy. But it is useful to contrast the
universalism of America's principles with the European state that
best embodies universalist claims or pretensions: France,
simultaneously the "eldest daughter of the Church" and the originator
of what Burke called the "catechism of the rights of man."

The realists are undoubtedly right that American exceptionalism leads
some Americans to reject the ways of the world. In their view, the
United States is too good to muddy itself in the rough and tumble of
international political life. In contrast, French universalism does
not preclude the French from pursuing their interests, and they are
unapologetic about the "Machiavellian" requirements of statecraft.
(Witness, as one striking example, the cool response of French public
opinion to the complicity of their intelligence services, and almost
certainly of President François Mitterrand himself, in the bombing of
Greenpeace's Rainbow Warrior in a New Zealand harbor in 1985.) And
many on both the Left and Right, socialists and Gaullists alike,
continue to believe that France has a distinctive "mission" to
perform on behalf of liberty, even if France's relative rank in the
world has declined in this century. In this sense, the French remain
historically and politically-minded in a Europe that is increasingly
depoliticized. (Whether this is just a fading ember from the fire lit
by General Charles de Gaulle two generations ago is an interesting
question.)

This French sensibility, simultaneously universalist and
Machiavellian, is distinct from the idea of realism shaped and
codified by American academic specialists. American realists despise
all ideological pretensions--"power politics", and not the
cultivation of glory or the defense or promotion of national ideals,
are at the center of their political universe. They ignore the
manifold and contentious ends of foreign affairs and reduce thinking
about the national interest to a question of means: their realistic
statesmen are concerned with the calculation of forces and the
shifting requirements of the balance of power. American neo-realists,
such as Kenneth Waltz, have scientized this already sharply reductive
focus: their world is stripped of nations as well as ideologies,
history as well as popular passions. International relations instead
becomes a chess-like game that is played in almost complete
independence from the messy contingencies of domestic politics. Such
theories dominate the teaching of international relations in the
United States, where, in contrast and as Tocqueville tells us, public
opinion is the sovereign and uncontested ruler of public life and,
willy-nilly, of foreign policy itself.

Not so in France. French thinking about foreign policy and the
French understanding of the "national interest" have not been reduced
to such desiccated formulae. Perhaps the best way to show this,
avoiding the overly summary and abstract, is to highlight the thought
of Charles de Gaulle, the French statesman and political thinker who
has most deeply reflected on the meaning of France and its role in
the modern world. De Gaulle, with his penetrating recognition of the
persistence of national identity, reminds American realists of the
necessity and even the nobility of reflection on the independence,
rank, and grandeur of political communities. In addition to de
Gaulle, a range of important French thinkers from Tocqueville to Aron
have shared questions with de Gaulle but have not always provided the
same answers. These men have much to suggest about the prospects for
self-government and national sovereignty, presupposed and championed
by de Gaulle, in a Europe increasingly committed to a supra-national
project of civil and commercial association that is lacking in
authoritative political direction.

The Politics of Grandeur

If Americans think at all about France today, they do so through the
lens of an unexamined prejudice. It is widely held that, of all
European states, France has least resigned itself to its diminished
place in the world, that France alone maintains a somewhat ridiculous
and certainly irrational concern for its rank, even after ceasing to
be a world power of any consequence. We Americans cannot resist being
a bit condescending toward France and its greatest statesman, de
Gaulle. While admired, he is often dismissed as the noble if
irrelevant architect of France's anachronistic and annoying
posturings. Putting all prejudices aside, let us try to articulate
the politics of grandeur, as de Gaulle himself understood it. De
Gaulle is commonly perceived as both a Machiavellian realist and a
starry-eyed romantic. Perhaps this common opinion, in its confusion,
provides the best starting point for a presentation of the Gaullist
politics of grandeur.

De Gaulle undoubtedly shared certain first principles with the
realist school. These include the recognition that the nation-state,
as the contemporary embodiment of the political community, is the
central unit of international life and the indispensable instrument
of statecraft. De Gaulle also shared with realists an untroubled
acceptance of the role that duplicity and flexibility inevitably play
in diplomatic conduct, as well as a keen appreciation of the balance
of power as the means by which order and a measure of sociality are
maintained amid the competitive interplay of sovereign states.

De Gaulle had a broad and deep, perhaps an obsessive, historical
memory: he quaintly called East Germany "Prussia" and "Saxony", and
he feared the reunification and revival of a centralized "Reich",
even a democratic and Western-oriented one. He wisely and nobly
promoted France's reconciliation with Konrad Adenauer's Germany, but
he did not look forward to a united Germany in any form. Despite
initial misgivings and hesitations, he supported the Atlantic Pact of
1949, partly out of anti-totalitarian conviction but mainly because he
feared that the European balance of power was shifting dangerously in
favor of a Soviet imperium. His rhetoric combined and oscillated
between a genuine appreciation of the new ideological dimensions of
politics in the twentieth century and a dogmatic insistence that what
was really at stake in the Cold War was the age-old and unchanging
question of the European balance of power. He clearly recognized the
totalitarian character of the Soviet-style regimes but was not
convinced that the totalitarian or ideological character of the
Soviet Union fundamentally affected its pursuit of imperial
domination. This partisan of "eternal France" finally only saw
"eternal Russians" at work in the machinations of communism and the
movements of the Red Army.

This helps explain why de Gaulle supported an Atlantic Pact in 1949
but did not hesitate to undermine the ideological solidarity of the
Alliance after 1965. He unwisely took for granted that his countrymen
would continue to recognize the totalitarian character of the Soviet
regime and therefore would accept the necessity of Western solidarity
(as de Gaulle himself did, to his credit, during the Cuban Missile
Crisis of 1962). This neglect of ideology sometimes led to
significant missteps on de Gaulle's part. He wildly overestimated the
"national" and "liberal" character of certain post-Stalinist regimes
such as Gomulka's--or even Ceausescu's. He presupposed an American
commitment to the rump of liberal Europe, even as he pursued detente
with the East and railed against American "hegemony."

On the basis of all this, one is tempted to conclude that de Gaulle
was a realist in the worst sense of the term, sharing the realist
school's "unrealistic" neglect of the ideological dimensions of
statecraft in our century. But the truth is a good deal more complex.

To begin with, in his pre-war writings de Gaulle showed a detailed
awareness of the historical specificity of the non-ideological
statecraft of the old regime. In his 1938 work France and Her Army,
de Gaulle expressed his admiration for the ancien régime, the
classical period of modern history par excellence. The statecraft of
the old regime reflected a healthy balance between the requirements
of self-affirmation and those of measure or moderation. It was a
pre-ideological politics and policy of "circumstances" that eschewed
abstractions and reflected a taste for the empirical, for concrete
facts, for the requirements of state. The European system of the
balance of power established a self-regulating and self-limiting
order of nations that rejected "furious ambitions" and "inexpiable
hatreds."

De Gaulle recognized that the classical period of French and European
statecraft came to an end with the ideological wars inaugurated by
the French Revolution. He appreciated that the mechanism of the
balance of power, which continues to be of permanent validity for
political life, is not always or necessarily accompanied by the
measured sensibility of the old regime, which aimed for "a just
proportion between the end pursued and the forces of the state", and
which self-consciously aimed to avoid great national or ideological
passions. Nevertheless, de Gaulle still believed that religious and
ideological sectarianism "poison[s] the relations between nations and
menace[s] the order of the world."

So de Gaulle did not neglect the ideological dimensions of modern
politics, he decried it. His position is best understood as
anti-ideological; his description of the contemporary world is
fundamentally prescriptive in character. As a "domestic" statesman,
he wished to heal and transcend France's sectarian and ideological
quarrels, to overcome the long-standing division between "the Old
Regime and the Revolution", between partisans of monarchical and
republican France. He also worked for a transformed European order
where great and free and ancient nations would coexist within a
common European framework of shared principles and restrained
enmities. He saw an intimation of that future order in the
renaissance of national sentiment in Central Europe evident in the
Polish and Hungarian uprisings of 1956.

In retrospect, it is clear that he overstated the continuities
between older national forms and contemporary ideological states. He
exaggerated the permanence of such provincial entities as "Prussia"
and "Saxony" and he seemed to take for granted the solidity and
permanence of the nation-state itself. However, unless we recognize
the prescriptive character of de Gaulle's account of the forces that
move the modern world, unless we see that his relative de-emphasis of
ideological considerations reflects a profoundly anti-ideological
mindset and is itself an element of his statesmanship aiming to bring
such a world somewhat closer, we will misunderstand and underestimate
him.

The Need for a Mission

Like the statesmen of the old regime, de Gaulle had a decidedly
concrete cast of mind. But whatever the real or superficial
resemblances between his thought and the American realists, he never
transformed the order of nations into a lifeless "system" unconnected
to the hopes, beliefs, and passions of real citizens and statesmen.

De Gaulle's "romantic" faith in the greatness and rank of France had
purposes beyond the emotional. This concern with the rank of France
is clear enough: France had suffered a near mortal wound in 1940. De
Gaulle did everything within his power to counter the feelings of
self-disgust brought on by the debacle of May-June 1940 and the
ensuing armistice. France must "aim high", he insisted, proudly
guarding its rank and reputation, and protecting every mark of
sovereignty, if it were truly to recover its independence and
self-respect. But de Gaulle was no narrow or quixotic nationalist. He
recognized that France's identity was tied to its integration within
two larger "wholes" that are, in part, defined by France even as they
define it. I mean "Europe" and "civilization." (I shall turn to de
Gaulle's vision of a "Europe of nations" a little later.)

De Gaulle capaciously shared the universalist self-understandings of
both sides of the French ideological divide. He often spoke of
France's universal mission, as when in his Memoirs of Hope he
characteristically maintained that "from time immemorial, it had been
in [France's] nature to accomplish 'les gestes de Dieu', to
disseminate freedom of thought, to be a champion of humanity."

Because he aimed to rally the French beyond and above ideological
divisions, de Gaulle could not simply identify the "mission" of
France with the cause of Christendom, or the historic achievements of
the Old Regime, or the Rights of Man and the legacy of the
Revolution. His ecumenical "mystique" of France, republican to be
sure but not excluding the old France from memory or glory, had room
for each of the defining moments of French "greatness." Following the
poet-philosopher Charles Péguy, de Gaulle believed that "eternal
France" could embody a mystique that counteracted the rampant
individualism integral to self-absorbed modern societies. The
politics of grandeur aimed at moderating the enervating effects of
liberal individualism. In doing so, it drew upon all of the mystiques
of the French past in order to inspire the self-transcendence
necessary for the maintenance of civic life under conditions of
modern liberty.

In a manner reminiscent of Tocqueville, de Gaulle feared the
enervation of modern individuals resulting from a private and
apolitical understanding of human liberty. We sometimes forget that
the sober Tocqueville, although a friend of democracy, advocated a
quasi-Gaullist foreign policy to correct what he saw as the
inevitable softening of mores and weakening of public spirit inherent
in democratic life. Like the post-presidential Richard Nixon (who
appealed to the thought and example of both men in his final books),
Tocqueville and de Gaulle were convinced that a democratic nation
must have a mission "beyond peace." In a letter to John Stuart Mill,
dated March 8, 1841 (that, incidentally, soured their friendship and
cooled Mill's admiration for him), Tocqueville explained why he did
not side with the "peace party" advocating easy accommodation between
France and Britain during the Anglo-French crisis of 1840:

I do not have to tell you, my dear Mill, that the greatest malady
that threatens a people organized as we are is the gradual softening
of mores, the abasement of the mind, the mediocrity of tastes; that
is where the great dangers of the future lie. One cannot let a nation
that is democratically constituted like ours and in which the natural
vices of the race unfortunately coincide with the natural vices of
the social state, one cannot let this nation take up easily the habit
of sacrificing what it believes to be its grandeur to its repose,
great matters to petty ones; it is not healthy to allow such a nation
to believe that its place in the world is smaller, that it is fallen
from the level on which its ancestors had put it, but that it must
console itself by making railroads and by making prosper in the bosom
of this peace, under whatever condition this peace is obtained, the
well-being of each private individual. It is necessary that those who
march at the head of such a nation should always keep a proud
attitude, if they do not wish to allow the level of national mores to
fall very low.

Tocqueville, by supporting a proud and semi-imperial foreign policy
in order to affect the soft, humanitarian, materialistic, and
apolitical impulses of democratic peoples, believed that all
manifestations of greatness in modern times must be highlighted and
encouraged--as long as they did not undermine democratic equality and
liberty. De Gaulle's politics of grandeur entailed a similar
correction or mitigation of the spirit and mores of democracy,
without rejecting its justice or necessity.

De Gaulle's politics of grandeur, therefore, was not an anachronistic
or nostalgic effort to revitalize a half-forgotten aristocratic
treasure. It was, instead, a self-conscious effort to deal with the
problem of democracy, particularly as that problem formulated itself
in a modern France, which in his lifetime was still torn by the great
struggles between Left and Right engendered by the cataclysm of the
French Revolution.

For de Gaulle as well as Tocqueville, France was something infinitely
more dignified than an abstract, self-interested unit in a
competitive game for the maximization of power and prestige. France
was an eminent representative of a liberal and Christian civilization
threatened in our century by the standardization and mechanization of
society. This collectivism had reached its fullest expression in
national socialist and communist totalitarianism, to be sure, but it
was also far advanced in liberal Europe. De Gaulle was struck by this
paradox: an unchecked individualism inexorably contributes to
collectivist politics and movements. A qualified politics of
grandeur--eschewing Napoleonic fantasies and imperialist
illusions--would fortify the prospects for liberty at home by
strengthening the wider political context within which it unfolds.

De Gaulle never concealed the largely instrumental and rhetorical
character of his politics of grandeur. In his Memoirs of Hope, he
frankly reported explaining to Adenauer how the politics of grandeur,
in fact, reflects the weakness and not the strength of the French
nation:

"More than anything else, political independence commensurate with my
country's position and aims was essential to its survival in the
future. 'The French people', I told him, 'had for centuries grown
accustomed to think of their country as a mastodon of Europe. It was
this sense of their greatness and the responsibilities it entailed
that preserved their unity, although by nature, ever since the time
of the Gauls, they have been inclined to divisions and airy
illusions. Now once again circumstances--by which I mean France's
salvation at the end of the war, her strong institutions, and the
profound upheaval which the world is undergoing--offer them the
chance of fulfilling an international mission, without which they
would lose interest in themselves and fall into disruption."

The political necessity of grandeur is also stated with clarity in
the famous first paragraph of his War Memoirs:

"All my life I had a certain idea of France. This is inspired by
sentiment as much as by reason. The emotional side of me naturally
imagines France, like the princess in the fairy stories or the
Madonna in the frescoes, as dedicated to an exalted and exceptional
destiny. Instinctively I have the feeling that Providence has created
her either for complete successes or for exemplary misfortunes. If,
in spite of this, mediocrity shows in her acts and deeds, it strikes
me as an absurd anomaly, to be imputed to the faults of Frenchmen,
not to the genius of the land. But the positive side of my mind also
assures me that France is not really herself unless in the front
rank; that only vast enterprises are capable of counterbalancing the
ferments of dispersal which are inherent in her people; that our
country, as it is, surrounded by the others, as they are, must aim
high and hold itself straight, on pain of mortal danger. In short, to
my mind, France cannot be France without greatness."

De Gaulle's France is called to greatness; it is dedicated to an
exalted and exceptional destiny. But as de Gaulle emphasizes in the
first chapter of The Army of the Future (1934), a commitment to
greatness is also a practical imperative if France is to compensate
for the military and geographical vulnerability of the French
hexagon, especially its untenable border in the northeast and the
resulting exposure of Paris. And above all, it is a moral necessity.
Without a statesmanship imbued with a passion for the greatness and
rank of France, the country is destined to be undone by its own
passionate but unsettled political temperament, and afflicted by
partisan divisions deeply rooted in its national and revolutionary
past.

De Gaulle never explicitly defined grandeur. We must infer its
meaning by unpacking the implications and context of his hortatory
rhetoric. Stanley Hoffmann is right to observe that grandeur does not
entail an ideology, because it is "not unalterably tied to any
specific policies or forms of power." The commentators agree that
grandeur implies France's continued ability to act decisively on the
world stage, to display its ambition in the drama of universal
history. Above all, it involves the self-conscious defense of the
independence, honor, and rank of the nation. However, this honorable
self-regard does not entail the primacy of foreign over domestic
policy. Gaullist grandeur cultivates an attitude of solicitude for
national unity and self-respect, not the exercise of unlimited
imperial ambitions. De Gaulle's willingness to withdraw from Algeria,
to the consternation of the partisans of a French Algeria,
illustrates that a politics of grandeur is not essentially tied to an
imperial option. The concern for rank is, first and foremost, a means
toward national flourishing and not an end in itself. It is an
indispensable precondition for sustaining the moral and political
unity of France. But at the same time, de Gaulle did not make foreign
policy merely instrumental to domestic concerns. Rather, he affirmed
the mutual dependence of unity and moderation at home and qualified
self-assertion abroad. Unity is a precondition of grandeur, but
grandeur makes possible national coherence and flourishing.

De Gaulle believed that only a politics of grandeur could unite the
French people around a mystique capable of incorporating and
transcending the great division between Left and Right opened up by
the Revolution. François Furet has argued that de Gaulle created the
first widely accepted and fully legitimate regime of
post-Revolutionary France, the first "republic of the center." I
believe that this was de Gaulle's self-conscious intention as a
national "Legislator." A merely institutional solution to France's
problems, one content to restore energy to the executive and end the
domination of parliamentary deputies, could not long sustain the
imagination or civic faith of the French people. It risked
establishing what Philippe Bénéton has called "consensus without
vision."

Democratic modernity is characterized by a relentless
depoliticization of society. The salutary triumph of commerce and
culture, what the philosophers of the eighteenth century called
"civilization" or "civil society", paradoxically risks attenuating
the civic realm where a common good is articulated through
legislative deliberation and, above all, de Gaulle believed, by the
executive's actions on behalf of the nation's place in the world.
What contemporary American conservatives wish to do by strengthening
the art of association and the vitality of local
self-government--namely to "repoliticize" apathetic and dependent
individuals--de Gaulle aimed to do principally through a politics of
grandeur. In addition, de Gaulle recognized the need for domestic
reforms in his highly centralized nation in order to accomplish this
aim. He wished to encourage greater grass-roots participation in the
management of business enterprises and proposed the "regionalization"
of the Senate.

De Gaulle's critics are undoubtedly correct that the establishment of
a strong, perhaps hyper-presidential republic in France after 1958
conflicted somewhat with his desire to reinvigorate French civil
society. His highly centralized Fifth Republic made politics
inaccessible to ordinary citizens except through the most distant
forms of representation. His emphasis on grandeur was also
substantially at odds with the commercial and utilitarian character
of modern life. But the refounding of the French state was necessary
to correct the weakness of the previous parliamentary republic in
France, to overcome its ideological divisions, and to restore
France's place in the world. Anglo-American commentators sometimes
forget that there can be no civil society without a political
instrument to forge and protect it.

Europe and the Nation

Whatever the problems with his specific solutions or recommendations,
de Gaulle was concerned above all to preserve political life, at
least in its national form. And he saw "Europe", in its dominant
transnational expression, as a threat to the preservation of a
properly political existence. But, one might retort, must one choose
between Europe and political life? Doesn't the European project, the
building of a united Europe, provide an adequate equivalent for
national self-assertion? Is not Europe capable of providing an
ennobling substitute for the older forms of political life? That is
certainly the shared faith (or illusion) of the dominant part of the
French and European political elite today. Indeed, in 1993, the
French government even went so far as to claim de Gaulle for the
cause of transnational Europe by putting up billboards and signs
announcing that Charlemagne, Napoleon, and de Gaulle would
unequivocally recommend a Oui vote in the French referendum on the
Maastricht Treaty!

De Gaulle, of course, was a "good European" and played an important
role in advancing Franco-German reconciliation and in cementing
European union after 1958. But the contemporary European political
class hesitates between the transnationalist model of Jean Monnet and
Robert Schuman, and de Gaulle's confederal model of European unity.
Everywhere we are told that "Europe" is inevitable despite the fact
that the relationship of the emerging Europe to the "sovereign"
nation-states remains almost wholly unclarified. Pierre Manent has
forcefully highlighted this contradiction:

"After the Second World War the European idea and its accompanying
institutions facilitated the reconstruction on solid foundations of
the European nation-state, while also making plausible, imaginable,
and even desirable the withering away of this political form. But
does 'Europe' today signify the depoliticization of the life of
peoples, that is, the increasingly methodical reduction of their
collective existence to the activities of civil society and the
mechanism of civilization? Or does it instead entail the construction
of a new political body, the body of a great, enormous Nation? The
construction of Europe has made progress only because of this
ambiguity and thus has taken on--as the vector of these two
contradictory projects--its character as an imperious, indefinite and
opaque movement. Yet this at first rather fortunate ambiguity has
become paralyzing and soon risks becoming fatal. The sleepwalker's
assurance with which 'Europe' pursues its indefinite extension is the
result of its refusal to think about itself comprehensively, that is,
to define itself politically."

Charles de Gaulle did not share this paralyzing ambivalence. He had a
clear vision of a Europe of nations. After returning to power in
1958, he affirmed his government's support for the Treaty of Rome and
for the process of greater European integration and cooperation. His
government was most immediately concerned with rectifying a series of
practical economic difficulties, from the maintenance of external
tariffs that aimed to differentiate sharply those within the
community from those without, to the establishment of an agricultural
policy whose immediate goal was to protect French agriculture from
the effects of foreign competition.

But de Gaulle's main aims were eminently political in character. He
wished to give the new community a specific political identity and to
separate it from the larger Atlantic community under American
direction or domination. For de Gaulle the arguments of free-market
economists in favor of the abundant economic advantages of free trade
were essentially irrelevant. His goal was to prevent France from
becoming an instrument of a larger movement of global standardization
and depoliticization, whatever the strictly economic rationality
accompanying that process. He would not allow Britain to enter the
Community because Britain's "special relationship" with the United
States and continuing ties with its dominions and Commonwealth
prevented it from giving itself wholeheartedly to Europe as a
cohesive political configuration. Despite the needlessly provocative
rhetoric justifying his vetoes of British membership in the
Community, one should recognize that, as subsequent events have
tended t

Essay Types: Essay