Mitterrand 

Legacy and the Future 

of French Security 

, Policy 

Ronald Tiersky 
JFQ: Joint Force Quarterly is a professional military 

journal published under the auspices of the Chairman, 

Joint Chiefs of Staff, by the Institute for National 

Strategic Studies, National Defense University, to 

promote understanding of the integrated employment of 

land, sea, air, space, and special operations forces. 

JFQ focuses on joint doctrine, coalition warfare, 

contingency planning, operations conducted by the 

unified commands, and joint force development. 

The journal is a forum for examining joint and 

combined warfare and exchanging ideas of importance 

to all services. JFQ appeals to a wide audience across 

the defense community with an interest in the nature 

and history of joint warfighting. 

TO ORDER A SUBSCRIPTION, cite Joint Force 

Quarterly (JFQ) and send your check for $21.00 

($26.25 foreign), or provide your VISA or MasterCard 

number and expiration date, to Superintendent of 

Documents, P.O. Box 371954, Pittsburgh, PA 15220- 

7954. You may also place orders by FAX: (202) 512- 

2233. 
FRENCH SECURITY POLICY 

RONALD TIERSKY 

McNair Paper 43 

August 1995 

INSTITUTE FOR NATIONAL STRATEGIC STUDIES 

NATIONAL DEFENSE UNIVERSITY 

Washington, DC 
[] Director & Publisher: Dr. Hans A. Bilmendijk 

Publications Directorate & NDU Press 

Fort Lesley J. McNair, Washington, DC 20319-6000 

[] Phone: (202) 475-1913 [] Facsimile: (202) 475-1012 

[] Director & Managing Editor: Dr. Frederick T. Kiley 

[] Vice Director & General Editor: Major Thomas W. Krise, USAF 

[] Chief, Editorial & Pubffcations Branch: Mr. George C. Maerz 

[] Senior Editor: Ms. Mary A. Sommerville 

[] Editor: Mr. Jonathan W. Pierce 

[] Editor for this issue: Ms. Mary A. Sommerville 

[] Editorial Assistant: Ms. Cherie R. Preville 

[] Distribution Manager: Mrs. Myrna Myers 

[] Secretary: Mrs. Laura Hall 

From time to time, INSS publishes McNair Papers to provoke thought and 

inform discussion on issues of U.S. national security in the post-Cold War 

era. These monographs present current topics related to national security 

strategy and policy, defense resource management, international affairs, 

civil-military relations, military technology, and joint, combined, and 

coalition operations. 

Opinions, conclusions, and reconmlendations, expressed or implied, are those of 

the authors. They do ,rot necessarily reflect the views of the National Defense 

University, the Department of Defense, or any other U.S. Government agency. 

Cleared for public release; distribution unlimited. 

Portions of this publication may be quoted or reprinted without further 

permission, with credit to thelnstitute for NmionalStrafegic Studies, 

Washington, DC. A courtesy copy of reviews and tearsheets would be 

appreciated. 

For sale by the U.S. Government Printing Office 

Superintendent of [)ocuments, Mail Stop: SSOP, Washington, DC 20402-9328 

ISSN 1071-7552 
The Security Concern of Muslim Fundamentalism .. 22 

The Crise des Fondements: Gaullism, National 

Interest, and European Security ............. 24 

Bosnia, France, and European Security ......... 29 

3. SOME FRENCH MILITARY TRENDS ........... 31 

Force Development: The 1995-2000 Military Plan .. 31 

Mitterrand's Nuclear Legacy .................. 36 

The Nuclear Test Moratorium .................. 38 

4. INSTITUTIONAL DEVELOPMENTS ............. 41 

The Balladur Cohabitation Government .......... 41 

A French-British Defense Axis? ................ 44 

Developing the OSCE ....................... 48 

An Inter-African Peacekeeping Force? ........... 50 

5. AFTER MI'I-I'ERRAND ....................... 55 

NOTES ..................................... 59 

APPENDIX: Selected 1994 White Paper Maps ....... 65 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR ......................... 67 

iii 
• 

BACKGROUND 

FRANCE AND POST-COLD WAR EUROPEAN 

SECURITY 

The French are trying to move with the times in post-Cold War 

European security developments. In spite of President Franqois 

Mitterrand's own hesitations and ambivalences in the transition 

from Cold War to post-Cold War European frameworks, the French 

are an active source of proposals, diplomacy, and military 

engagement in peacekeeping. 

Bloody and devastating conflict in former Yugoslavia has 

already demonstrated that, contrary to understandable if naive 

optimism at the Cold War's end, the way forward will not be simple 

or easy. It has been shown that cruelty and human suffering on a 

mass scale--military and civilian deaths, organized rape as a tool 

of war, widespread hunger, deliberate creation of civilian war 

refugees, the ferocity of "ethnic cleansing'--are still possible in 

Europe. Even if the Bosnian wars have remained localized, 

Sarajevo was only a few hundred kilometers from the December 

1994 Budapest Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe 

(CSCE) meeting of 53 states. This seemed reassuringly far away to 

some delegations, frighteningly near to others. 

Nevertheless, although European military dangers still must be 

taken seriously, the post-Cold War Zeitgeist is neither Mutual 

Assured Destruction (MAD) nor some "back to the future" scenario 

of continually multiplying conventitmal wars, such as led to World 
remains to be built. More mass suffering, and even national 

disasters, could occur if tile dangers to peace and negotiated 

settlement of conflicts in the new, whole Europe are not dealt with 

successfully. 

What the French do in these matters is important. France is a 

key actor in European security. It is a substantial, independent 

nuclear power. Because of its multifaceted special relationship with 

Germany, as well as its growing dealings in defense matters with 

Britain, France is today at file center of European political ties and 

peacekeeping enteprises, as well as part of the plans for a European 

Union (EU) Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP). France's 

agreement is also vital to NATO's post-Cold War evolution, which 

includes the determination of the relationships between the United 

States and Europe; between NATO and the Western European 

Union (WEU); between NATO and the WEU, and the "Partnership 

for Peace" states; and among NATO, the OSCE, and the United 

Nations. 

France will play, as it has for four decades, a complex role in 

Atlantic security structures, and therefore in American security 

interests in Europe. France will likewise play a crucial role in any 

purely European organization of European security, whether in 

cooperation with the United States in relation to NATO, or in the 

context of U.S. disengagement from Europe. 

In contrast to four decades of European security configurations 

when negotiations occurred against a backdrop of American 

security protection, post-Cold War plans must be worked out in 

radically different circumstances. At file very least, American 

security leadership can, for better or worse, no longer be taken for 

granted by western Europeans, nor, as Clinton administration policy 

has indicated, will future American governments necessarily want 

to lead in European security matters, even if U.S. leadership is 

solicited by the Europeans. Tlfis is one implication of the Clinton 

administration's agreement that NATO's logistical, communications, 

and other equipment might be used in out-of-area military 
particular state's policy through its own lens tends to magnify the 

importance of that country. What one has, therefore, is an 

intellectual problem requiring a sense of analytical and conceptual 

balance, so that a study of French policy, for example, doesn't 

become by definition francophile or francophobic. 

American security policy, furthermore, exhibits a venerable 

tradition of distrusting France in security matters. The French may 

be seen as cynical, tricky, or pompously self-important and 

unjustifiably nationalistic. To take a celebrated example, this 

pessimistic American view of France was put forward by Harry 

Hopkins, FDR's emissary in discussions with General de Gaulle just 

prior to Yalta, from which the Free French leader was to be 

excluded. In de Gaulle's War Memoirs, which must be the classic 

account of this incident, 1 Hopkins observes that the French had let 

down their allies in the 1930s, became defeatist and appeasementoriented, the result of which was Vichy. How, Hopkins asked de 

Gaulle, could Americans, in "the stupefying disappointment we 

suffered when we saw France collapse and surrender in the disaster 

of 1940," be expected any longer to have confidence in the French? 

De Gaulle replied that he, better than any other Frenchman, of 

course understood American disappointment with previous French 

military and defense policy which he himself had denounced with 

so little success in the 1930s. But now, despite the success of the 

Resistance and of de Gaulle's leadership, the French had reason to 

believe that the Americans, who "after all took three years to get 

into the First World War and two years for the second war." "The 

French," he told Hopkins, "have the impression that you no longer 

consider the greatness of France necessary to the world and to 

yourselL ''2 

The French have reciprocated U.S. distrust, and de Gaulle wrote 

the books on the subject. 3 Power is power, and geopolitical 

inequalities will plague even such strong historical ties as the 

French-American relationslfip. France's national situation is, as 

always since World War I, the problem of maximizing its security, 

its influence, and diplomatic room to maneuver, in a geopolitical 
At file same time, a geopolitical sensitivity guards against the 

naivete that tends to be inherent in idealist and moralist foreign 

policy traditions. National interest is justifiably paramount in any 

state's security policy. Security and defense are, naturally, the first 

priority of any state. Properly understood, this fact is both a cause 

of war and yet paradoxically a possibility for peace. The French, in 

their insistence on tile primacy of the nation and the nation-state, 

are sometimes frustrating for American policy, but the French 

desire to "exist" is a healthy factor in the international system as a 

whole, one which, among other things, serves to keep Americans 

awake to the fact that American perceptions and interests are not 

necessarily tho~ of the world. 

In terms of policy, file French are finding, like Americans, 

Germans and other allies, that indications of what needs to be done 

in post-Cold War Europe are complex, leading off in more than one 

direction. For example, in terms of institutions and European 

security architecture, how should NATO be constituted and its 

mission defined in the post-Soviet, post-Cold War world of 

European security? Who should be full members and who should 

be only "partners," to use tile new term,? Would NATO's security 

mission be served best by expansion or by remaining with the 

traditional membership, augmented by Partnership for Peace 

relationships with former adversary countries? 

What should the European Union be asked to do for European 

security in the coming period? Should the EU have its own frank 

and free-standing defense and security institutions--the "European 

pillar" of NATO finally realized--or should tile Western European 

Union and the projected EU's Conullon Foreign and Security Policy 

be kept subject to NATO, in order to keep the U.S. present and 

deeply implicated in Europemi security problems, from the point of 

view of European and French interests? 

I11 terms of contingency plans, perhaps tile lesson learned from 

the wars in former Yugoslavia is that it is better to intervene early, 

or, if possible, preventively. Or maybe it is best to let warring 

groups wear themselves down before attempting peacemaking, 
contradictory means and ends is nothing new in European security. 

Even during the Cold War, when the designation of dangers and 

adversary was clearest, strategic options always had to be evaluated 

and tradeoffs calculated. 

As has been pointed out numerous times, today the Soviet 

Union's disappearance, a great gain in the Cold War's end, is itself 

the source of post-Cold War confusion. The new French military 

doctrine, in theorizing "the lack of a designated adversary," shows 

how the USSR's disappearance is a solution and simultaneously a 

new problem for European security. 

But this paradox, resulting from the containment strategy's 

success, is no reason to "miss the Cold War," in John J. 

Mearsheimer's overused term. It is hard to see that such a claim is 

more than a dangerous intellectual game. The Cold War was a 

struggle well worth fighting and funding. Governments and their 

militaries ought to be facing the new security problems with the 

resolve that comes from knowing that the Cold War job, despite all 

problems and crises, was carried through successfully. 

Basic issues in the European security dilemma can be 

formulated easily enough. Will the Atlantic alliance and tile NATO 

military structure evolve adequately to deal with post-Cold War 

security problems in Europe, or are the bonds in NATO fraying 

irrevocably, with the integrated command structure fated either to 

disappear or to evolve into uselessness and irrelevance'? Against 

this background, should the development of a "European defense 

identity" and a European Union "common foreign and security 

policy" be hastened or slowed, the one or the other for precisely the 

same reasons? 

With regard to France, some key questions arise: 

• What kind of a coalition partner will the French be in the 

future? 

• Will France, given the tortuous history of its NATO 

participation, be an even more reluctant partner, or on the 

contrary more open and accommodating'? 
• Where are French soldiers likely to show up---the southern 

Balkans, sub-Saharan Africa, in Arab Middle Eastern or Noah 

African countries--and what will be their missions? 

The French,whether their particular policies are successful or 

not, are on many scores are the most active European state in 

working to adapt to the new situation. The French are not changing, 

however, in how they perceive their geopolitical situation and the 

international context. They want to exist in the strategic framework 

and influence major decisions, while recognizing American 

predominance, along with the other big powers. French foreign 

policy, as one high Elysee official put it to this writer, is not built 

per se on resentment of American geopolitical strength. Overall 

American predominance and leadership, is, for the French, an 

accepted given. But American policy must respect French policies 

and French goals, or naturally there will be friction. 

The French are not, or not as often as American poiicymakers 

may think, cynical obstructionists searching for "prestige," for 

"grandeur" or simply trying to have it both ways. On specific 

European security issues French policy may still play the gadfly or 

the heroic resister, but overall--from the Cuban Missle crisis to the 

Euromissile crisis to Desert Storm--the French have shown 

themselves to be dependable parUiers who, in turn, see themselves 

as very often frustrated or confused by American policies or by 

shifts in American policies. One of de Gaulle's legacies in French 

political life is to have inspired a high sense of French 

responsibility for security matters. Frant;ois Mitterrand, as shown 

in this paper, has certainly been the most gaullien of de Gaulle's 

successors. 

Harsh European-American disagreements about what to do 

regarding the Bosnian wars mesmerized public European security 

discussions in the second half of 1994. However, it would be a 

serious mistake to allow allied frustrations in dealing with the 

human and military problems in Bosnian to monopolize, not to say 

deform, new thinking about European security at a critical time. 
of humanitarian assistance did not convince the Bosnian Muslim 

President Alija Izetbegovic to allow a unanimous resolution for a 

cease-fire and food and medical aid to his people, because it did not 

stipulate that the Serbs were the aggressors against his 

internationally recognized mate. 

Had the Bosnian dispute not taken up such a large place in 

debates at the CSCE (now the OSCE), the portentous disagreement 

between Russia and the Western allies about NATO's plans to 

expand into eastern Europe, in effect to the Russian border, would 

have appeared even more central. For example, this is an issue that 

threatens to stir the pot in Russia's tense domestic politics, and 

OSCE participants understood that the potential renewal of a 

nationalist, aggressive Russia is the single most dangerous security 

threat facing Europe in the next decade and after. 

Despite this, the Bosnian tragedy and the dramas regarding 

Russia's democratic development are not all there is on the French 

plate regarding European security matters. In a positive sense, there 

has been movement in French policy toward long-term European 

Union security evolution, as well as a much-noticed FrenchAmerican rapprochement both bilaterally and to some extent also 

within NATO. These are part of trends running deeper than 

circumstantial disagreements, as President Jacques Chirac 

reaffirmed in the first days after taking office in May 1995; they 

make up an important part of the evolving post-Cold War European 

security regime. 

Possibly, hard though it may be to imagine today, EU inaction 

in Bosnia may turn out to be a moral-practical vaccination of the 

big European powers against the temptation to duck early action 

and preventive peacekeeping in future conflicts. The terrible human 

costs of inaction have been demonstrated, and in various European 

capitals there has been much talk about the future of preventive 

diplomacy, as opposed to peacekeeping after a conflict has flared. 4 

As Machiavelli said, a war not fought is often only a war postponed, 

and the mal~ies of"renationalization" and the aversion of rich and 
President Francois Mitterrand was the living link between France's 

Cold War and post-Cold War security policy. Generally speaking, 

Mitterrand's leadership in foreign and security policy was 

impressiveJ His masterful security policy peformance during his 

first term (1981-88), gave way to much criticized hesitations and 

uncertainties during the transition from Cold War to post-Cold War 

problems Yet overall, Mitterrand's legacies in foreign and security 

policy are a source of some confidence to the new President Chirac. 

There are two parts to the issue of evaluating Francois 

Mitterrand's legacy in French security policy: 

• The heritage of 14 years of French policy. Not everything 

was Mitterrand's responsibility, and, given France's interests, 

much of what he did would have been done, better or worse, by 

any French president. 

• What aspects of the legacy are particularly Mitterrand's 

work? Did Mitterrand's own views, for example, prolong 

certain policies that otherwise would likely have been changed? 

Will certain of his policies, controversial or inadequate, be 

rapidly changed after his departure from office? Are there 

notable Mitterrand policies likely to characterize French 

security policy for a long time? 

Heritage 

The Fifth Republic's "elected monarch" is normally in full charge 

of foreign and defense policy. Even in periods of "cohabitation," 

when a president must live with an opposing parliamentary majority 

and thus prime minister, he has the most influence in the high 

politics of security policy. 

The 1993-95 conservative Edouard Balladur government was 

the second period of"cohabitation" in the Fifth Republic. In 1986- 

88, the conservative prime minister was, of course, Jacques Chirac. 

The political and institutional effects of cohabitation on foreign and 

security policy are an important subject in this analysis, bearing on 

what is consensus policy and what is subject to partisan debate in 

France's role in establishing the structures of post-Cold War 
Mitterrand's Own 

The second aspect of the Mitterrand legacy is those areas in which 

he left a personal imprint on French policy. The first area is 

NATO, where Mitterrand was particularly gaullien, combining an 

intransigent watchfulness regarding the principle of national 

independence of decision with a large pragmatism, especially in 

times of crisis. De Gaulle's behavior in the Cuban Missle crisis, his 

immediate and complete solidarity with JFK and American policy, 

is the classic example here. In Mitterrand's case, his strong policy 

during the Euromissile crisis, evident above all in his 1983 

Btmdestag speech, showed him in full support of the Alliance when 

circumstances were critical. Later, in the Gulf War, Mitterrand's 

policy was similar: a complete engagement in the fight, including 

putting French troops under American command, but only after 

French diplomacy had tried unnervingly until the very last minute 

to short-circuit a war against Iraq through "lone ranger" diplomacy. 

Along with these moments of alliance solidarity, the expression 

of France's most basic international commitments, President 

Mitterrand maintained a tight personal vigilance over French 

disengagement from the integrated nfilitary command, doing so 

against a growing, though still minority, opinion in the defense 

community that France should move closer to the integrated 

command structure. For example, Balladur several times gave 

indications of favoring a further French rapprochement with NATO. 

Nevertheless, there is no strong belief that France should rejoin the 

integrated command. The gains from doing so, primarily military 

cooperation and technical knowledge, would be outweighed, if not 

in the minds of the military then in high government circles, by 

political losses: France's special diplomatic status, political 

influence, and world prestige. 

President Mitterrand, to illustrate the French dance in NATO, 

finally permitted French participation in NATO discussions of 

specific peacekeeping operations, allowing defense minister 

Francois Ltotard to attend a Military Committee meeting in Seville. 

At the last minute, however, he stopped Chief of Staff Admiral 
circumstances combined with principled detachment from the 

integrated command, even if the behavior and results may only have 

seemed quirky, or "French," to France's parmers. 

Will this policy will change under President Chirac? There is 

little evidence that the French would find reason to rejoin the 

NATO integrated command outright. On the other hand, there is a 

widely shared opinion in the French security community that 

general closer cooperation with NATO would be useful, without 

giving up France's position and leverage from the exterior. Even if 

not decisive, this separate status is a useful arrow in the French 

diplomatic quiver. 

The second area in which Mitterrand put his own stamp on 

French security policy was in the nuclear arena. 7 Mitterrand was a 

deterrence purist, resisting any deviance from a doctrine of absolute 

deterrence--meaning a modernized nuclear arsenal combined with 

a total refusal to envisage (at least publicly) what to do if deterrence 

failed. 

French deterrence policy during the Mitterrand years continued 

to be a version of the Gaullist strategy of massive retaliation. The 

French, at the level of doctrine at least, separated their own nuclear 

policy from NATO's and especially from the U.S. doctrine of 

flexible response. In the logic of French doctrine, flexible response 

made all war in Europe, nuclear and conventional both, more likely. 

Mitterrand was not Jolm Foster Dulles, however, and it is an open 

question whether the French pure deterrence doctrine could have 

existed absent the covering umbrella of American extended 

deterrence. Pure deterrence was not only the most efficient or 

effective deterrence strategy for a second-rank nuclear power such 

as France, it also expressed an intransigent refusal to be dictated to 

by larger powers, so the rejection of flexible response was another 

gaullien stance. 

The new post-Cold War French military strategy, outlined in 

the Balladur government's 1994 White Paper on defense, reflects 

striking changes (few of which have as yet been put into full effect) 

in both France's nuclear and conventional force doctines. French 
questions arise about Mitterrand's legacy in these matters: 

• Will the French nuclear force be maintained at previous 

levels (this includes the issue of a possible Europeanization of 

national nuclear strategy)? 

• What is the future of Mitterrand's nuclear moratorium? 
THE NEW NEXUS OF SECURITY AND 

INTEGRATION 

In previous studies, a tentative conceptualization of the change from 

Cold War to post-Cold War security issues was offered. During the 

Cold War period, "security" and "integration" divided European 

countries neatly into blocs; within each bloc, security and 

integration basically overlapped. In post-Cold War Europe, 

however, there is a new nexus of security and integration, beyond 

Yalta and beyond Cold War frameworks. In earlier papers, this new 

nexus could be described only in abstract terms; today it is taking 

practical form on the ground. ~ 

One great issue today will be the consequences of European 

Union enlargement: first file incorporation of Austria, Sweden, and 

Finland as of January l, 1995, and later, perhaps within l0 years, 

three eastern "Visegrad" states--the Czech Republic, Poland and 

Hungary. Five years after the Berlin Wall was breached, Europe 

remains economically divided between East and West, even as the 

political-military barriers have dropped. 

Without a doubt, such a geographic enlargement of 

membership and such a shift in the EU's center of gravity, imply 

serious strategic consequences for file European Union, not merely 

economic but geopolitical. From the French point of view the risk 

in enlargemcnt is fllat the French-Gernaan axis will weaken and that 

France will find itself in some ways cut off from its special German 

partner, isolated with the southern and western countries it has to an 

extent represented or embodied in European negotiations--Spain, 

Italy and Portugal. Were this to come to pass, it would be 

dangerous to global European security and bad for Germany itself, 

which needs a strong French partner. ~ 

The French now well understand there is no question of not 

going ahead with a massive EU expansion, perhaps to 20 or 25 or 

13 
In October 1994, President Mitterrand, in his last bilateral 

meeting with Spanish Prime Minister Felipe Gonzalez, emphasized 

that these problems of cohesion in the wake of enlargement were 

real and had to be addressed. A new European Union effort had to 

be made to provide additional economic aid for the southern and 

mediterranean EU countries of Spain, Portugal, Italy, Greece; the 

disadvantageous impact of EU enlargement on Spain and other lessdeveloped southern and western countries is a genuine new issue 

requiring attention if the EU is to avoid a geographical and 

geopolitical tilt toward becoming the Germanic zone that France, as 

much as any other member state, does not want. Manuel Marin, a 

Spaniard now in charge of the EU development aid programs, even 

quantified Mediterranean claims: "The east received [last year] five 

times as much [EU] aid, altliough the south supplies much of 

Europe's oil and gas and has sent many more immigrants to work. 

•.. It's time to re-establish the balance. ''l° 

In addition, these southern Mediterranean states cammt help but 

consider as a kind of"security" issue the economic backwardness 

and poverty of the North African Muslim countries, meaning the 

mass miwation, now and later, that threatens economic and social 

equilibrium in several European Union countries. From the time of 

his 1981 Cancun speech, Mitterrand argued that the best European 

security policy regarding the prospect of mass in-migration from 

African countries would be to promote local economic 

development, because development would provide the reasons for 

potential immigrants to stay home. If it worked this would be a 

plausible economic and political analysis and a good rationale for 

generous aid from the richer countries to foster local production and 

markets. Thus far, however, it has not been implemented wide 

enough to make a difference in the level of discomfort and danger 

to the southern EU countries. 

The EL/Commission has just conjured up a proposal for a new 

EU-African "Economic and Security Pact," which would begin by 

doubling aid to North Africa, with $7 billion total asked for over a 

5-year period. Another aspect of this pact is to include the North 
Council meeting in Essen, Germany, which wound up the 6-month 

German presidency of file EU Council, with France to take over for 

the first 6 months of 1995. 

German leaders and elites are not eager about this 

Mediterranean-African aspect of the free-trade zone project 

because, as usual, they would have to finance a significant part of 

Community aid and development funds, and also because their 

priority for the next period will continue to be the east, meaning 

their own new eastern German states in addition to the eastern 

European and former Soviet countries undergoing critical 

transitions. Against the French emphasis on aid to the EU's southwest areas and to North Africa, the German perception is that the 

main European security issue, as was seen at the CSCE Budapest 

meeting in December, ought to be attention to the East, in order to 

prevent any renewal of east-west divisions and tensions if an 

economic wall were to replace the Berlin Wall. Like the French, 

German leaders describe Germany's new eastern policy as a 

cultural-historical duty, and that the eastern economies are, in 

addition, more adaptable and hopeful than the economies of 

Portugal, Southem Italy, and North Africa. For the Germans it is an 

historic opportunity to be seized, a chance to encourage political 

democracy and market economies, in addition to a particularly 

German historical duty of solidarity with peoples who have suffered 

so much from German aggression. 

In any case, what is clear is that French thinking about security 

is moving out beyond strictly military questions of nuclear 

deterrence and political-military alliance. The post-Cold War 

situation has moved security thinking in all the major states beyond 

a single-minded focus on deterrence into a larger, more complex 

geopolitical-geoeconomic framework. At the same time the French 

well realize that France is not the only player and that the country 

needs economic partners as well as defense and diplomatic allies. 

The French-German tandem remains a double priority for France: 

French economic prosperity depends on the German parmer, and 

French political-diplomatic-security clout depends on Germany's 
integration are, in the post-Cold War era, no longer such distinct 

subjects as they were during four decades of Cold War. They now 

overlap to a considerable extent. In addition, security and 

integration have both become Eurowide in their frame of 

intellectual reference, even if the EU and NATO are not yet 

Eurowide institutions. All this is represented in the widespread 

rhetoric of avoiding a new division of Europe. 

Conceptually, now more than ever it makes sense to understand 

European security and European integration as two parts of a single 

issue, partially separate and based on different premises, but also 

partially overlapping and based on common premises. On the one 

hand, integration--membership in file European Union-- is in itself 

a major security guarantee and even a sufficient security guarantee 

for almost any cotmtry. 11 Conversely, military security, in the form 

of NATO membership (and perhaps in the future "Parmership for 

Peace" membership) implies at least a semiplausible casc for 

membership in the EU. This is shown in the wide geographical 

dispersion of countries asking for EU membership--that is, for 

some kind of integration with file western countries as well as some 

kind of security. (That full membership will be difficult or 

impossible for many countries is demonstrated by the current 

situation of NATO-member Turkey, which is being denied EU 

entry. A simple flee-trade area with the EEC is being offered these 

comatries as a consolation option.) In any case, if deepening of the 

EU continues, the European Union must be increasingly 

conceptualized as a new kind of international community with two 

main characteristics: integration (economic, political) and security 

(political-military). 

How successfully did Mitterrand's policies deal with the 

transition from Cold War to post-Cold War Europe? The French 

president did not foresee communism's total collapse and the 

astonishingly sudden end of divided Europe. He was one of 

European govermnent's most sophisticated and knowledgeable 

political leaders, yet his decades of experience had been confined 

to the Cold War European system. He hadn't expected that German 
Kohl and the Bush-Baker-Scowcroft team). In the end, however, 

his historical prejudices and errors of judgment did not become 

disastrous mistakes, because France was not at the center of events. 

Once Helmut Kohl decided to go full speed ahead, France was not 

in a position to alter German unification, let alone the fate of the 

Soviet Union. Geography and the lack of deep pockets made 

France a second-level player in deciding the end of Europe's 

division in practical terms. Mitterrand's hesitations did endanger 

German confidence in French policy, but the future of FrenchGerman relations encompasses much more than this, and Helmut 

Kohl has seemed much inclined to stress file positive with his 

French partner. 

Franqois Mitterrand's European policy from 1981 to 1995 set 

certain parameters for the future in French politics and is a 

consequential legacy Jacques Chirac will have to deal with. It is 

highly unlikely, Chirac's anti-Maastricht electoral rhetoric to the 

contrary, that he could pursue a radically different European policy 

anyway. Public opinion in the center, where he has to govern, 

would be against it. Plus his first meeting with a foreign leader was 

with Helmut Kohl, which served to indicate Chirac's intentions. 

Mitterrand inherited a substantial European legacy and a few 

large new European commitments from Val6ry Giscard d'Estaing, 

file most important being the European Monetary System (EMS) 

organized by Giscard and Helmut Schmidt in 1977. The 1970s 

recessions made Giscard's term a time of Europessimism and 

Euroskepticism, however. Mitterrand's presidency was, by contrast, 

a watershed. After file Mitterrand era, no politician who hopes to be 

president of France can be frankly against Europe. The questions 

are now "what kind of" Europe and "how much" Europe, not 

"whether" Europe. 

New prime minister Alain Jupp6 said recently, "A lot will 

happen based on die place France will take in Europe, and Europe 

in the world. ''12 The endgame of file Uruguay Round negotiations, 

in which French policy won out on agriculture and on the "cultural 

exception," had much to do with French diplomacy rallying its 
than the Community. Recently, however, file French have 

enunciated a continentwide European idea; Mitterrand called it a 

"confederation." It is indeed a vision of a "Big Europe," but it is a 

slratified concept: a Europe of concentric circles, as Balladur put it, 

with "variable geometry" and variable degrees of membership and 

responsibility, with a "hard core" (France, Germany and Benelux), 

and anchoring all, file "Franco-German tandem" as the core of the 

core. This vision of a single "Big Europe," even if stratified and 

emphasizing the EU, signals France's willingness to make 

concessions in order to avoid a second Yalta, this time an economic 

division of Europe. 

Within this broad view, the French priority is to emphasize the 

smaller Europe, at least some of whose governments are serious 

about creating a single currency and a common foreign and security 

policy, the two essential goals of the Maastricht Treaty. Thus, 

despite sharing file German view that a Big Europe is inevitable, 

French policy in practical terms has been less enthusiastic about 

how quickly to accept new members into file EU. 

The affluent Nordic countries pose only relatively modest 

problems in their new membership, but to admit a big agricultural 

country such as Poland quickly into the EU would mean either 

fundamenlal changes in the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) 

which still benefits French farmers heavily and is still an important 

factor in French presidential election politics, or it would mean the 

CAP's bankruptcy and the collapse of EU budgetary negotiations. 

If, on the other hand, the next enlargement can be put off for 5 or 10 

years, tile French farmers' bloc, about one million mainly small 

farmers, is forecast to decline demographically by half, given the 

rate at which small farmers are being forced out of business. Time 

can thus ease the conflicts of interest and principle in the next 

rounds of negotiation. What is not possible in practical terms today 

may change within a foreseeable future, though Eastern Europe's 

advocates argue that the delay would be too much for the potential 

new members themselves. 13 
Yalta, which would set up a rich and powerful western European 

Community fending off insecure, struggling democracies in the 

east. Expansion is also necessary, the French concluded, if only 

because France's principal partners in the EU want it, albeit for 

different reasons or with different calculations. German hopes are 

quite different from Brilish calculations about the consequences of 

expansion on the Union. But, as Alain Jupp6 said, tile EU "could 

not simply keep saying no forever." 

In any case, European Union expansion cannot include Russia 

as a full member. Geographically this would take the EU's border 

to Vladivostok, making a mockery of the idea of Europe as a 

geographical and historical-cultural entity. Further, because 

Russian economics and politics cam~ot meet EU standards--the 

acquis communautaire--all the Union's established policies and 

bargains would be threatened or ruined by the need to prop up such 

a gigantic exception. 

Even the idea of la grande Europe is not meant to encompass 

the entire Eurasian continent, including all of Asiatic Russia and the 

former Soviet republics. And this doesn't even mention the other 

potential large EU expansion issue--the Muslin countries of the 

Maghreb and Mashrek southern Mediterranean--which raises the 

problems not only of geography and level of development, but also 

of religion and culture. 

The Copenhagen European Council drew up a list of 10 

countries that might become members "after the Nordic enlargement: 

the six countries of central and eastern Europe, the three Baltic 

states, and Slovenia. To this list, Cyprus and Malta need to be 

added, and, sooner or later, the issue of the Balkan countries will 

need to be faced. 

As far as "architecture" goes, foreign minister Jupp6 and prime 

minister Balladur drew a distinction between member states and 

"parlner" states. The latter category includes Russia and the former 

Soviet republics, as well as the southern Mediterranean countries. 

Among the member states themselves, a second distinction is 

made. The acquis communautaire includes the customs union, the 
resembles a "hard core," those countries that participate in the 

maximum of EU common arrangements. The hard core should not 

be seen as an exclusive club, yet its criteria will tend to keep its 

membership low. For example, the EMU treaty, as stated in the 

treaty agreement itself, won't have all the member states in the 

single currency system, at least to start with. And in terms of 

security policy, tile WEU today doesn't comprise all the EU member 

states, nor does the Eurocorps, even in concept. 

Accepting varying degrees of participation---expressed as 

concentric circles or as a variable geometry Europe or as a Europe 

at "two speeds" or more--has become a premise of French policy. 

In French debate, the image of concentric circles has been opposed 

to the Christian Demoncratic Union (CDU) idea of a hard core. But 

Mitterrand said, plausibly, that the basic idea is the same or close, 

and during tile campaign Chirac said that CDU committee chairman 

Karl Lamers found his views on Europe quite acceptable. The 

opposition of concentric circles and a hard core is not tile way the 

issues are posed in reality. The question is whether or not the 

principle (or fact) is accepted that there are, aald will be, differences 

in degrees of participation in the EU. One of Chancellor Kohl's 

favorite maxims expresses tile same thought: In EU development, 

the caboose can't be allowed to lead the train. 

Thus during Mitterrand's two terms, a center-right, center-left 

French policy consensus on European integration emerged. 

Whatever tile image used to express it, and whoever was stating it, 

the European Union is a blend of elements, a collection of 

intergovernmental, confederal and federal aspects within a larger 

pan-European mix of organizations of the EU aJ~d associated states, 

and includes economic, political, and security aspects. 

The extreme right, tile Communisk';, and a few fringe electoral 

groupings, including part of the ecologists, are outside the 

consensus, but there is broad center-right center-left agreement on 

a pragmatic, nondogmatic general view, and on the idea that 

doctrinal debates ought to be avoided so long as practical progress 

remains possible. The consensus is bipartisan because it unites the 
The European Union has little chance of ever becoming a superstate, notwithstanding whatever federal aspects it may ultimately 

have. French policy has never taken up the idealistic federalist idea 

that the Commission should become the Union's government, with 

the European Parliament and tile Council of Ministers (the latter as 

a sort of European Bundesrat) sharing the tasks of democratic and 

parliamentary control of this government. The European nationstates will survive, and EU policymaking will remain centered in 

tile Council rather than tile Commission. The European Union will 

continue to be a hybrid instilutional framework. 

Given this conception of the institutions, how should the EU 

function? Above all else, file French want to maintain the European 

Council in a superior position in decisionmaking. Federalism, the 

transfer of authority to the Conmaission or to the Parliamenl, should 

be kept within limits shaped by file Council, in policies on what 

classes of decisions will be made by a qualified majority voting and 

which will continue to require unanimity. This focus on the 

Council differentiates French from German policy. The Germans 

have sought more powers for file Commission and the Parliament. 

Indeed, each EU government tends to propose its own political 

system as the model for European integration. In French-German 

terms, this is a still centralized and executive-dominated French 

system, as contrasted with the genuinely federal German system, in 

which the Chancellor must consult regularly and seriously with 

other power centers. 

France, along with other states, wants qualified majority voting 

weights to be revised for the process of admitting new member 

states, to avoid ad hoc majorities blocking action. It also wants a 

larger role and a longer term for the Council presidency, to 

emphasize the large states' weight and to provide a stronger EU 

presence in international relations. Mitterrand seemed genuinely in 

favor of a Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP), because 

the EU loses influence to the extent it meets its foreign panners 

with 15 different voices. France, of course, will try to take the 

leading diplomatic role in the CFSP. 
subordination to the European Council is made clearer. A uniform 

electoral system is one reform that would add to the Parliament's 

standing, and a reform of its decisionmaking procedures, which the 

Maastricht treaty's complicated procedures made more rather than 

less chaotic, is in order. Another project is to give national 

parliaments a role in file democratic control of file Commission and 

other EU institutions. The British and Danish laws are examples of 

national parliamentary review of EU laws, as is the new initial 

review power of French parliamentary scrutiny. 

In sum, one of Mitterrand's European legacies is a series of 

French proposals for refining EU political and administrative 

institutions in the intergovernmental conference set to begin at the 

end of 1996. The facts of "variable geometry" and "concentric 

circles of commitment" are, like it or not, the model for the future. 

At the same time, the inner circle, the "hard core," should not be 

thought of as closed, if other member states can meet the 

requirements. 

As Jacques Chirac indicated in the first few days of his 

presidency, French-German joint initiatives and prior consultations 

and agreement on all major decisions remain the French method in 

EU politics. The 1996 conference should be more than a mere 

touchup of Maastricht's inadequacies. It has to be a sort of 

"refounding" in which French-German agreements will be the 

central basis for negofiationJ a 

THE SECURITY CONCERN OF MUSLIM 

FUNDAMENTALISM 

For France and other NATO govenunents, tile end of the Cold War 

has brought about a crise des fondements (crisis of fundamental 

principles), an evident irrelevance of Cold War French security 

doctrine and strategy. The most important military redefinitions 

involve what used to be East-West relations in Europe, but another 

revision of security perspectives is occuring in French reactions to 

militant Islamic fundamentalism-- whether in the form of hostile 
a part, albeit minor, of tile French security policy debate. Yet even 

if the Islamic fundamentalist danger were to become a major 

security priority for western European countries, the question 

remains whether this would be a defense/military problem or a more 

general cultural and geopolitical clash, a conflict that may be very 

real without ever being fought militarily. 15 For France itself, on the 

other hand, there can be clear danger to civilians in certain Muslim 

countries--Algeria is tile obvious example at file present time--as 

well as a danger of terrorist acts in Paris and other French cities. 

In addition, threats to reliable oil supplies, in conjunction with 

Islamic fundamentalism, could become a military/security issue 

once again. This might take the form of fundamentalist threats to 

fragile, oil-rich Muslim regimes such as Saudi Arabia and the 

United Arab Emirates. Saddam Hussein's secular militaristic 

regime manipulates a population in which orthodox Islam and 

Islamic fundamentalism remain capable of being inflamed. Its 

recent mobilization of military force near the border with Kuwait 

shows that, however weakened, it still has ambitions for an imperial 

role in the region. 

Military plans for allied cooperation in operations such as the 

Gulf War are still not satisfactory. In tile Gulf war the French, 

according to a Defense Ministry official, "were simply 

improvising." French military thinking lacked contingency plans 

for the kind of coalition thrown together by American leadership. 

George Bush's success in getting so many different 

governments into the multilateral force derived from several 

sources--the national interest of states, a sense of obligation, 

personal relations and others. In file French case, Mitterrand's 

policy was gaullien, that is, independent diplomatic action as long 

as possible (viz. the controversial French diplomatic efforts at the 

United Nations), but when engagement is made, it is unstinting. 

Today, debates about European security affect EU internal 

negotiations on enlargement as well as on other subjects. Certain 

French attitudes are not shared by German views of what the EU's 

security priorities ought to be, and this split is complicated by 
The (Rome) treaty constitutes a pennament and definitive engagement 

of the six states, whereas NATO is a circumstantial organism, born 

from the Soviet threat and fated to disappear one day, when the threat 

will have disappeared itself, t6 

So the terms of NATO's post-Cold War predicament--adaptation or 

disappearance--are not new. 

THE CRISE DES FONDEMENTS: GAULLISM, 

NATIONAL INTEREST, AND EUROPEAN 

SECURITY 

Put together by the Balladur conservative government, the 1994 

French White Paper on Defense begins its "Defense Strategy" 

chapter with: 

France today has no designated adversary. Her strategy remains 

essentially defensive. Refusal of war and of conventional and nuclear 

battle, which are the foundation of deterrence doctrine, will continue 

to guide strategy. This remains one of the bases of the indispensable 

national consensus in defense affairs.~7 

As with nearly all the European Union countries, post-Cold War 

French security is no longer a matter of preventing attacks on the 

national territory, even if strategic defense debate must continue to 

analyze the hypotheses that this could change again. With regard 

to NATO member countries, both the so-called "liberal peace" 

among democratic states and the negative peace based on the 

balance of power among heterogenous states are relevant. 

In French Cold War security strategy, the doctrinal use of 

conventional military forces was part of, and totally subordinated 

to, the strategy of nuclear deterrence. The fate of French 

conventional forces in the so-called "nuclear deterrence maneuver" 

was summed up, in a lethal quip, as "sacrifice of the First Army." 

The First Army's purpose in Germany was, in other words, to serve 
However, pure deterrence thinking created the presumption that 

none of this would ever happen. 

In post-Cold War military thinking, conventional forces are 

liberated from their "sacrificial" role in Cold War strategy. The 

assigned military task of conventional forces today is intervening 

somewhere abroad, earlier or later, to prevent or stop conflicts that 

conceivably could threaten the metropole. In this definition of 

security risks, conventional forces become the central element in 

French military plamling for foreseeable security dangers, albeit 

against the background of the permanent overall guarantee of 

nuclear deterrence. 

The French nuclear force, whose specific military use is now 

impossible to state, will without a doubt be maintained, but subject 

to constant budgetary pressures. At least in principle, this should 

increase technological cooperation with British nuclear capabilities 

and the likelihood of a European deterrence doctrine for French and 

British nuclear forces, which would, however, still remain under 

national command. 

French strategy today thus must envisage "much more diverse 

scenarios than in the past .... Above all, a different balance is 

emerging between deterrence and engagement in our force 

nfissions, which changc~s, in part, the role of conventional forces. ''18 

The reformed French strategy eschews two possible extremes: 

either "a strategy built exclusively on making a sanctuary of the 

national territory" or "an option oriented exclusively toward 

missions involving peacekeeping and maintenance of international 

order...Only a balanced model, guaranteeing (French) independence 

and permitting our participation in international stability" will 

fulfill the requirements of the post-Cold War era. 1Q 

French military missions, rather than preparing for the potential 

Cold War "major clash," must be constructed in terms of 

"prevention and management of long crises, of variable intensities 

•.. most often occuring at a considerable distance from the national 

territory .... And in the great majority of cases," this means the 

engagement of French military forces "in concert with partners or 
nuclear deterrence will guarantee that conventional forces won't be 

outflanked. The role that conventional forces played during the 

Cold War is thus now played by nuclear forces. There is no break 

in strategy, but an evolution in the respective roles of nuclear and 

conventional means as a function of different scenarios, zl 

The Balladur government's White Paper gives six scenarios of 

possible French military deployments in post-Cold War conditions: 

• A regional conflict not affecting France's vital interests 

• A regional conflict threatening French vital interests 

• An attack on the national territory outside metropolitan 

France 

• The need to implement bilateral defense agreements 

• Operations of peacekeeping and the guarantee of 

international law 

• Resurgence of a major threat to western Europe. :2 

The major innovation in this framework, as far as military 

political culture is concerned, is scenario 2. Already today this 

scenario is conceivable, the White Paper says, on the European 

continent itself, referring presumably to the potential for a European 

crisis that would indirectly involve Russia. But it could also apply, 

in the longer term, to the Mediterranean, as well as to the Near and 

Middle East. In such a situation the French response is to be 

multinational, within the Atlantic alliance, the WEU, or, in the 

future, the European Union. French nuclear deterrence could 

conceivably come into play to accompany the engagement of 

French conventional forces. In any case, says the White Paper, 

"The possession of nuclear weapons gives France a special place in 

any coalition, whatever the level of its participation. ''23 

So the new scenarios in French defense strategy are not the 

security dilemmas of the homeland directly threatened with nuclear 

war, but a more broadly based European collective security, 

founded on some nfix of preventive diplomacy, peacekeeping, 

peacemaking and other security tools, including nuclear deterrence. 

This new idea of military security is one important reason why the 

often-derided plan for an EU Common Foreign and Security Policy 
burden of European defense initiatives on a strictly national 

defense: 

One of the characteristics of the gaullien genius is to begin from what 

was blindingly self-evident to the Capetien kings just as it is for the 

Republic: There is no authentic policy and, by deduction, no military 

strategy, other than for a people sure of its uniqueness, who, against 

all vicissitudes, affirms its will to preserve its being and continuity.. 

.. The Government's decision.., to publish a defense white paper to 

replace that of 1972 officially recognized the historical break (of the 

Cold War's end) and its consequence, the crisis of basic (strategic) 

premises. The document's title confirms what I had forecast: The 

1994 White Paper on Defense, is no longer, as in 1972, on national 

defense. The castration of the title is significant. 24 

The national defense problem for the French in tile post-Cold War 

era is to find the right balance between a politically and financially 

desirable Europeanization of security and a fundamental 

maintenance of national responsibility for national defense, 

including civilian support and legitimacy. 

In what Poirier calls the "second nuclear age," French nuclear 

weapons are more than ever of political rather than deterrence 

significance. Nuclear weapons still serve the purpose of making a 

sanctuary of national territory, but the old concept of dissuasion du 

faible aufort (deterrence of the stronger by the weaker power) has 

become irrelevant for some indeterminate period. 25 

Faced with this "crisis of basic security premises," French 

defense planners must develop a credible doctrine and strategy for 

what Poirier calls a "transition period" characterized by "a posture 

of strategic waiting:" an attitude of readiness with no clearly 

defined adversary. 

In particular, French defense thinking must into take account 

the devaluation of nuclear weapons as military factors--France's 

main Cold War defense asset--in the post-Cold War era. 26 If 

French nuclear weapons were not warfighting instruments but rather 

the means of deterrence, if nuclear weapons existed not to make war 
the end of the Cold War and the collapse of communism. The 1992 

START II agreement fixes a ceiling on warheads of between 3,000 

and 3,500. There is no military reason not to prefer the lower 

number to die higher, mid no obvious reason not to go even lower; 

some responsible experts have publicly suggested numbers as low 

as 300-1,000 for further disarmament. 

What would be the lowest reasonable size of the U.S. or 

Russian arsenal? Whatever the lowest safe number of warheads 

could be in sheer military temls, it cannot be as low as it would be 

without the existence of sizable nuclear arsenals among the other 

publicly acknowledged nuclear powers: France, Britain, and China. 

No Americ,-m or Russi,'m Government would reduce nuclear forces 

so near to die levels of the second-rank nuclear countries that U.S.- 

Russian nuclear dominance is put into question. This does not 

exclude a widened nuclear disarmament negotiation in the future, 

in which all the nuclear powers, secondary powers included, would 

reduce simultaneously. But there is surely a limit, even if it cannot 

be precisely specified, below which nuclear stockpiles won't be 

allowed to go. Such speculation must also take into account the 

eventual development of other sorts of weapons which will put 

nuclear weapons themselves into a different perspective. So for the 

French, the main role of its nuclear force in the foreseeable future 

will be not as a military deterrence but as a weapon of political 

status, whose desirability is attested by die very tendency to nuclear 

proliferation ik~el f. 17 

However, even heavyweight gaullien defense thinkers such as 

Lucien Poirier add that France must not turn its successful policy of 

natio~vdl nuclear independence mid refusal of nuclear disarmament 

into "an eternal refusal" of nuclear alliance with other states as part 

of the larger process of European integration. "If the conditions 

came together for giving up definitively the status of autonomous 

nuclear power--meaning the definition of a European identity, thus 

of permanent cormnon interests--France could agree to integrate its 

nuclear forces in a system of collective defense.., not a simple 

"no" but a "'yes if. ''zs 
far of all strategies for peacemaking has allowed each government, 

France included, to continue to believe its own ideas are the best, or 

at least no worse than those of any other government. 

European-American differences, besides intensifying ineffectiveness, indirectly raised the question of an independent European 

defense and security policy. It is a matter of European desires for 

the military capacity to act independently of the United States in 

European problems, and also of European recognition of a 

developing American mood--neoisolationist or unilateralist--to 

avoid being dragged, by NATO obligations, into commitments 

neither the American people, the President, nor the Congress wants 

to take on. 

When the Iraqi army unexpectedly mobilized again on the 

Kuwaiti border in 1994, one American editorialist wrote about 

transatlantic diasagreements: 

The U.S. cannot conduct one policy through NATO and the West 

Europeans conduct anod~er, so if the Europeans want their own policy 

they need the military means to carry it out. NATO has command, 

staff, forces and operating systems in place. The WEU has nothing or 

next to nothing. The encounter in recent days with a divided NATO 

has shaken up people who in the past ignored the WEU. 29 

The U.S.-European gap has been widened also when there is a 

Russian-Western European convergence of views, in opposition to 

American positions. The Europeans and Russians have opposed 

lifting file embargo and arming the Bosnian Muslims, and they have 

argued that, since lraq has complied significantly with U.N. 

resolutions, sanctions against it should be lifted. 

The transatlantic policy dilemmas of expanding NATO were 

brought out even in the process of choosing a successor to Manfred 

Woerner, who died in August 1994, as NATO's secretary general. 

The leading candidacy, that of Willy Claes, Belgian foreign 

minister and a Flemish socialist, raised basic questions about the 

direction of the alliance: Was he sufficiently Atlantlcist for those 
transformation of NATO that expansion would entail. The 

"Partnership for Peace" idea was, at the moment, as much a way to 

buy time as it was a real commitment to expansion (as the history 

of the PFP proposal as a compromise within the American 

Government makes clear). The much clearer U.S. signal in favor of 

expansion at the CSCE December 1994 meeting is still just a signal 

and not a fact. For one thing, the significance of Russian objections, 

raised forcefully then and later by Boris Yeltsin, needs still to be 

decoded. A "cold peace," in Yeltsin's ominous term, is not 

necessarily inevitable. Mitterrand was reluctmlt to move quickly to 

NATO expansion, although not against it in principle. Two factors 

work against French support for rapid expansion of NATO. First, 

the French want to mollify Russian sensibilities; even a Russia not 

entirely stabilized might be helpful to French policy. Second, 

membership in the European Union tor the eastern European states 

may be less disruptive, to the Russians and internationally, than 

would NATO's expansion. Linking the eastern European states to 

an EU Common Foreign and Security Policy would suit tile French 

hope of putting European development before Atlantic relations. 

As for allied difficulties in dealing with the war in Bosnia itself, 

the Chirac government in its first few weeks raised the level of 

French engagement and rhetoric and also of French casualties on 

the ground. The new French leadership thus arrived with 

intensified determination to deal with Bosnia's agonies, but no one 

can predict whether events will favor or frustrate the French desire 

to invigorate attempts to stop tile fighting there. 
FRENCH FORCE DEVELOPMENT: 

THE 1995-2000 MILITARY PLAN 

Comparatively speaking, French military forces have been the least 

reduced of any major EU country in the post-Cold War period, and 

only France among the NATO members increased defense spending 

in 1994. These facts fit with the French intention to be the 

European Union's leading military actor, with the diplomatic 

leverage this confers. However, the Chirac government's plans to 

make the fight against unemployment top priority and to increase 

social spending may make it impossible to continue this level of 

defense spending. 

In the 1995-2000 5-year plan, drafted by the Balladur 

government, the French military is to focus on acquiring two new 

categories of equipment. The first is the construction of a large 

transport aircraft, the creation of a significant national airlift 

capacity for troop and equipment projection. The second is aerial 

reconnaissance capabilities. 

In the Gulf War, the French, to their intense dissatisfaction, had 

to rely completely on American logistics, on American transport 

planes, and on American aerial reconnaissance. By contrast, during 

the Cold War, not to have such equipment not only saved money, 

it had the further geopolitical advantage of keeping the United 

States engaged. NATO, given tile programmed European 

insufficiencies, couldn't function without American equipment, and 

the French once again had to rely on American troop transporters 

for the Rwanda intervention--but now this glaring inability to 

implement national policy is less acceptable. In the "Second 

Nuclear Age," when conventional forces have recovered a 

warfighting justification in French military doctrine, it makes 

31 
mobilization on the Kuwaiti border showed once again the French 

and European lack of aerial reconnaissance capabilities. Le Monde 

headlined an article "The Logic of Force in Iraq: While Baghdad 

and Washington Continue on a War Footing, the Europeans Have 

No Choice but to Follow Along with file U.S." The article reflected 

the irritation of certain government and military officials; for 

example, Balladur's defense minister Franqois Lrotard said that 

France and the Europeans generally had no independent means to 

"verify, let alone contest" American information about the military 

situation on the Iraqi-Kuwaiti border. French authorities were 

obliged to accept at face value the information Americans gave 

them, culled by U.S. satellites and spy planes: 

The lack of national, if not European, means of permanent observation 

in the region obliges the French to depend on American sources, as 

well as on their use--perhaps self-interested and perhaps 

exaggerated---by Bill Clinton, as he attempts to improve the credibility 

of his administration at the midpoint of his presidential termJ ° 

The British were instantly at America's side in countering 

Saddam's mobilization, and file French only slightly less so. 3~ 

Saddam's move was especially reckless, given that the Gulf war 

allies of 1990 were at that very moment debating in the Security 

Council over lifting the embargo on lraq (France and Britain in 

favor, the U.S. against). 

The French had only 15 officers in the U.N. control mission on 

the ground in Kuwait, with no long-range espionage equipment. 

This left the French military blind and deaf in the crisis, without 

reconnaissance of their own to inform policy makers in Paris. The 

same French and European deficiency had been evident in the Gulf 

crisis of 1990-91; in the meantime, little had been done to give the 

French military what it asked for. The all-weather optical 

reconnaissance satellites Helios 2 and the radar espionage Osiris 

system, which France is proposing to build with European partners, 
lack the means to do so. Nonetheless, despite a tendency to think 

that President Clinton had electoral motives to inflame the crisis, 

the French unambiguously blamed Saddam Hussein for 

precipitating the test of nerves on the Kuwaiti border, as when the 

Iraqi leader menacingly vowed "decisive" action if the U.N. 

Security Council did not act by its October 1994 meeting to show 

Iraq the beginning of the end of the international trade and arms 

embargo against it. 

When Le Monde commented that Saddam's reckless action 

"provided the Americans with the occasion to extend their influence 

in the Gulf region," several American editorialists replied. William 

Satire, for example, wrote: 

Saddam will have support in the Security Council. Russian 

intelligence chief Yevgeny Primakov is Saddam's longtime ally; 

Russia will support the lifting of sanctions, if only to make possible 

the repayment of $6 billion owed Moscow by Iraq. Foreign Minister 

Alain Jupp6 is salivating at the prospect of France resuming business 

with its best oil source... France or Russia care little that Saddam 

continues to try to strangle Iraq's Kurdish minority and starve its 

Shiites, or will surely circumvent arms inspections at tile first 

opportunity. What does cause them to hesitate is Saddam's continued 

claims of ownership of Kuwait .... By creating a threat, Saddarn 

makes possible his grand concession: If we will let bygones be 

bygones, he will not make war. Paris may even extract 'recognition' 

of Kuwait and claim a diplomatic triumph, deserving of instant trade 

relations. 32 

Charles Krauthammer made an even blunter analysis of French 

motives and reliability: 

Unfortunately, the administration appears to be abandoning this idea 

(of a no-tank zone in Iraq along the border with Kuwait) because of 

Security Council opposition. In particular, France is opposed. So 

what? The United States bore the brunt of the Gtdf War. It will bear 

the brunt of any future war .... The French don't like it? They should 

be told, in the most delicate diplomatic language, to stuff it. (That's 
The Russians, not coalition parmers in a military sense but crucial to 

the allies' success in the Gulf war. are now much less inclined to accept 

American hegemony in sensitive regions such as the Middle East. 

France---until Mr. Hussein's recent performance--had begun to 

oppose America's policy of keeping a full range of economic sanctions 

against Iraq...Even Britain's old intimacy with the United States has 

been imperiled by differences over Bosnia and to a lesser degree, over 

Northern Ireland. 34 

Despite indications that the French military may be quite active 

in various kinds of missions in the post-Cold War period, the 

Balladur govemment announced military budget cuts that, contrary 

to its own defense White Paper, will affect the French air force most 

of all. A 1994 National Assembly defense committee report on the 

draft military budget for 1995 emphasized the degree to which the 

air force will be reduced. Signed by Olivier Darrason, a center-right 

deputy from the Bouches-du-Rhone, the report puts together several 

telling facts. 35 

In terms of military installations, the report observes that since 

1984 15 air bases have been closed. Downsizing could well 

continue with a pending proposal to eliminate "one or several big 

air hub centers." In terms of training, the report notes that 

beginning in 1995 the air force will have to reduce by 3 percent the 

total number of its flying hours. Whereas the U.S. Air Force 

average is approximately 250 flying hours per year per pilot, and 

the United Kingdom's is 220 hours, French air training will sink 

further below their current annual average of 180 flying hours per 

pilot. This lack is all the more worrisome, says the report, given the 

upsurge of international crises calling for air power-combat and 

transport units--first of all in multilateral operations. In Bosnia, for 

example, the French share of air operations is second only to the 

United States. In 1993o foreign nlissions made up about 17 percent 

of the French air force's activity, requiring 20 percent of the air 

force's active pilots, really about 40 percent given leaves and other 

requirements. 
Darrason argues that downsizing and budget cuts will inevitably 

damage air force efficiency, just when it has become the service 

called on to respond rapidly at great distances. 

Cuts in the budget for equipment will also have a serious effect 

on the air force. The defense White Paper speaks of a French air 

force of approximately 400 combat aircraft, whereas Germany, the 

United Kingdom, and even Taiwan now have 620, 590, and 480 

respectively, while France currently has 415. The report further 

asserts that if beginning in 1998 the air force is supposed to order 

only 16 Rafale fighter planes per year, the result will be "an air 

force of 320 planes." It would be necessary to order 20 Rafale 

planes per year beginning in 1997 to hold the goal of 400 planes on 

active duty. Furthermore, at tile end of the decade the air force will 

face the problem of trying to finance two large weapons systems, 

the Rafale and the large transport plane to replace the Transall by 

the year 2003. The two budgets, about Fr. 200 billion for the Rafale 

program and Ft. 345 billion for the transport plane, will presumably 

end up in competition with each other for financing. The report 

concludes that the government must simply increase the air force 

budget, proposing the goal of the same rate of budget growth as for 

the French Army. 

At the same time, following up on other White Paper 

commitments, in mid-December 1994 feasibility studies were 

started on three new long-range, precision-guided missile programs. 

The first two are an anti-infrastructure (e.g., anti-airfield) Apache 

missile, to be built by the Matra-Defense group, and a supersonic 

antiship missile (the ANNG, a successor to the Exoce0 that 

Aerospatiale will construct. The two companies are supposed to 

work in tandem on the projects, and other European industrial 

groups may be invited to participate. Additionally, in January 1995 

a decision was taken to launch a French cruise missile program, 

akin to the American Tomahawk system. 

In making these projects public, Defense Minister LEotard 

commented that they were the first significant implementation of 

the 1994 White Paper's new strategy statement: the emphasis shifts 
problems of choosing French weapons systems, and financing them, 

will be among the early major policy decisions. 

MITTERRAND'S NUCLEAR LEGACY 

Classic French nuclear deterrence strategy has been rendered 

pointless by the disappearance of file plausible military enemy, the 

USSR. A wide consensus remains on the value of deterrence, which 

President Chirac quickly and officially reaffirmed. The 

development of a new post-Cold War French strategic outlook will 

take time, requiring the remolding of military and public opinion. 

President Mitterrand's deterrence doctrine, the commitment to 

pure deterrence, had not varied at all when he left office. The sole 

purpose of French nuclear weapons is defensive, to ensure the 

survival of the national territory and France's vital interests. No 

doubt Mitterrand's private thinking evolved considerably, especially 

in envisaging a European doctrine for the French and British 

nuclear forces, but to have put into question French nuclear 

doctrines would have been quite destabilizing. 

The Gaullist nuclear doctrine of making France a "sanctuary" 

prohibited any broader view of nuclear deterrence, in particular any 

idea of a European deterrent or even the extension of French nuclear 

protection to German territory. However, in Giscard d'Estaing's 

presidency and through tile two Mitterrand terms, unofficial and 

semiofficial statements made clear that France's vital interests begin 

not at the French border or even at the Rhine, but furlher east. Given 

the Soviet military strategy of a rush to the Channel, the nuclear 

protection of Germany would be vital to the protection of France. 

In discussions leading up to file Maastricht Treaty's call for a 

Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP), President Mitterrand 

publicly suggested (file first time any French president had gone so 

far) that France's nuclear deterrent could be reconceived as part of 

a European deterrent. His words indicated he had already made the 

adjustment in his own mind, that what was unthinkable in Gaullist 

orthodoxy has gradually become conceivable, not least because a 
the Maastricht Treaty has pushed this particular issue into the 

background, but it will rise again. 

In October 1994, French Chief of Staff Admiral Lanxade 

publicly echoed Mitterrand's recent trial balloon statements. At a 

ceremony marking the 30th anniversary of the first (practice) 

nuclear alert by Mirage IV planes, 37 Lanxade talked of a European 

defense based on the extension of national deterrence doctrine and 

strategy to the European level. This would be desirable militarily, 

he said, but a maturation process is necessary in public and military 

opinion, because a European deterrent would require "a qualitative 

leap" in the nature of political decisionmaking in the European 

Union. Practical negotiations might be premature at this point, he 

added, but the theoretical sharing out of risks and responsibilities 

raised by "the joint possession of nuclear weapons" might be 

discussed now. Preliminary French-British talks have indeed 

already begun on the possibility of harmonizing nuclear submarine 

patrols. 

Financing the French nuclear force will be an increasing 

problem in the coming years. With no "designated adversary," a 

smaller force de frappe could become a political priority. On the 

other hand, making a success of the CFSP--i.e., French-British 

nuclear cooperation and nuclear cooperation with the United States 

as well--means the French nuclear force will survive the peace. 

A second deterrence debate is the question of whether French 

nuclear weapons could have a role in meeting potential dangers 

from the "south"----using warfighting nuclear weapons as a deterrent 

against rogue states. Practically, this would mean retention of 

French tactical nuclear weapons (Hadts) and the development of a 

range of new precision, battlefield nuclear weapons. 

Several respected defense specialists have in the past few years 

called for such a change. 38 The division of opinion on this matter 

is not left-right, but ratl~er within all of the major political parties. 

Pascal Boniface, an academic specialist and consultant on defense 

issues, argues passionately against any warfighting doctrine of 

nuclear weapons use, and also against any French development of 
THE NUCLEAR TEST MORATORIUM 

President Mitterrand announced in April 1992 that France would 

begin a formal moratorium on further nuclear tests. His May 1994 

Elysde speech gave a wide-ranging account of his calculations, 

including how far he hoped file moratorium would go. 

He said first, the standing French nuclear arsenal, comprising 

about 500 warheads, had reached a level of sufficiency. The force 

de frappe, especially its submarine component, had unquestionable 

credibility and strike force. Second, by launching a moratorium 

France would take a leadership position in nuclear politics, playing 

the sort of world role to which French policy traditionally had 

aspired. Third, resisting further nuclear proliferation had become 

an urgent matter again (North Korea, Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, and 

India). Facing up to this dilemma required two successful 

diplomatic negotiations: extending and expanding the 

nonproliferation treaty and, in 1996, reaffirming the ban on nuclear 

testing in an agreement that would be universal and verifiable. If 

the world's acknowledged nuclear powers unilaterally moved to 

stop testing, said Mitterrand, their credibility would rise in asking 

nonnuclear states to remain so. 

While in the opposition Mitterrand had for years opposed 

nuclear weapons and the force de frappe; gradually during the 

1970s he changed his views. Through deft use of deterrencefriendly Socialist leadership colleagues such as Charles Hernu, later 

Mitterrand's first minister of defense and one of his tutors on 

security issues, he was able to bring the internally divided and 

defense-inexperienced new "Epinay" Socialist party, refounded in 

1971, to endorse both nuclear weapons and deterrence strategy. 

The position of pure deterrence Mitterrand adopted was, 

however, an endorsement of nuclear defense he could makc while 

asserting that he was not abandoning his previous convictions 

against any warfighting strategy or actual use. (And file pure 

deterrence strategy was made more feasible by the overarching 
political effect among Socialist activists who had always been 

uncomfortable with the Socialist party's change of policy. 

Unlike certain socialist leaders of the past, Mitterrand himself 

had never been a pacifist. As a young soldier, he had fought, been 

wounded, and been taken prisoner. Pierre Ptan's recent bestselling 

book, Une Jeunesse Francaise: Francois Mitterrand, 1934-1947 

(Paris: Fayard, 1994), showed in much detail that the escaped 

prisoner and future president had a controversial passage &s a minor 

Vichy bureaucrat in 1942-43, before embarking on a significant and 

dangerous career in the Resistance. In fall 1944, General de Gaulle 

appointed him, at the age of 26 and his Vichy service 

notwithstanding, to be one of 15 Resistance leaders in charge of 

organizing the so-called "government of the secretaries general" to 

establish Free French administrative structures. In 1956, as a 

Fourth Republic interior minister faced with Algerian attacks on 

French colonies, Mitterrand replied notoriously to those who 

wanted negotiations with revolutionary forces, "The only 

negotiation is war." 

In the May 1994 speech, Mitterrand stressed that he had made 

the decision on the moratorium alone, to underline the president's 

sole responsibility in nuclear matters. Guarding the credibility of 

French nuclear deterrence was a baseline of any French president's 

constitutional duty. Decisions to follow France in adopting a 

moratorium were announced by the Russian, American, and British 

governments. Mitterrand, whose had first amaounced a moratorium 

only for the remainder of 1992, then declared that France would not 

resume nuclear testing so long as no other power did. China broke 

the 5-power moratorium with a test in June 1994. 

Mitterrand's Elyste speech argued that, contrary to speculation 

that his successor would be obliged by military considerations and 

political pressures to order a new round of testing, this would not 

happen tbr two reasons: because France could not afford to be seen 

as the government reviving preparations for nuclear war, and 

because it would "offend all the countries who don't have nuclear 

arsenals." One obvious qualification for a permanent French halt 
perfect simulation techniques, but the president replied instead with 

a presidential directive to find ways to develop simulation 

techniques without any more actual tests. This, like the 

moratorium, was Mitterrand's way of leaving behind a political and 

technological challenge in nuclear matters. 

The successful outcome in May 1995 of negotiations for an 

indefinite extension of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) 

creates added pressure on file new Chirac government not to resume 

underground testing. Some nonnuclear governments dragged out 

accepting NPT extension as a way to lobby for simultaneous 

commitments from the nuclear powers on the test ban treaty 

renegotiation scheduled for 1996. 

According to internal government documents in the Elysde 

archives, French military and scientific advisors told the 

Mitterrand-Balladur cohabitation government that another year or 

two without testing is tolerable without harming French nuclear 

capability. The Balladur government might have tried to renew 

testing after its arrival in 1993, but in the cohabitation political 

situation Balladur did not push the constitutionally delicate issue of 

whether the prime minister or the president would have the final 

word on nuclear testing. It was one of the few disagreements on an 

important issue between the prime minister and Mitterrand. 

President Chirac thus arrives in office already faced with a decision 

on whether to authorize new tests at the Mururoa site, perhaps a 

series of 10 tests that could be finished early enough, say by May 

1996, so as not to complicate renegotiation of tile test ban treaty. 
THE BALLADUR "COHABITATION" 

GOVERNMENT 

A second political cohabitation of left and right in the French 

government, which resulted from the 1993 elections, raised 

questions not only about President Mitterrand's moratorium on 

nuclear testing but also about decisionmaking in security policy 

generally speaking. The conservative parliamentary victory in 1993 

was overwhelming. Political conflicts could have escalated to the 

point of raising constitutional issues. 

This would not be a French version of American "gridlock,'" 

given the differences between the hybrid presidential/parliamentary 

French system and the pure presidential American system. An 

understanding of French security policy, today and in the future, 

requires some knowledge of institutional/constitutional 

development at the summit of the executive branch. 

The Mitterrand-Balladur cohabitation brought the question of 

constitutional authority in foreign and security policy to the fore in 

August-September 1994, on the occasion of a general meeting of 

French ambassadors in Paris, a sort of short course to review 

governmental policies with French emissaries. 3~ Before France's 

ample ambassadorial corps, first President Mitterrand, then Foreign 

Minister Alain Jupp6, then Prime Minister Balladur defined French 

foreign policy. 

In terms of substance, the three leaders, loyal to the spirit of 

cohabitation, gave basically identical versions of French policy. 

The essential point of controversy was Prime Minister Balladur's 

seeming claim to a larger role in foreign policy overall, including 

defense and security policy, than was customary in cohabitation 

rhetoric. Balladur tried to legitimize the idea that French foreign 

policy was a "shared domain" between president and prime 

41 
[The realm of] foreign affairs, part of the numerous functions of my 

job, is among the most important and the most clearly defined by the 

constitution .... I intend to preserve very exactly the various divisions 

of the tasks of the executive, because this [division of powers] is a 

safeguard for the Republic and for democracy. 

Balladur had earlier put the matter differently, saying that "the 

government, in agreement with the president of the Republic, has 

conducted France's foreign relations. ''4° An outsider unfamiliar 

with cohabitation's ambiguous constitutional rules might not 

perceive much drama here, but in the first cohabitation between 

Mitterrand and the Chirac government of 1986-88, the president's 

usual control of current foreign policy, as opposed to strategic 

decisions on defense and security affairs, had been quickly dragged 

by Chirac under the prime minister's aegis. Mitterrand during the 

first cohabitation retained authority, one could say, just where new 

policies least often arise, though in this sense he was still in charge 

of national defense, NATO affairs, European integration principles, 

and G-7 business. But otherwise, Jacques Chirac was suddenly 

running the day-to-day decisions of French foreign policy, 

excepting an inevitable gray area in between current and long-term 

matters, where he and the president either had to agree or decide to 

avoid a decision. The threat of policy deadlock, with its 

background menace of constitutional crisis, hung over the first 

months of the Mitterrand-Chirac cohabitation (as it (lid not in the 

Mitterrand-Balladur relationship). 

Balladur, with his strong majority in parliament, dealt 

scrupulously with President Mitterrand, and their personal and 

political relationships were businesslike if not genuinely cordial. 

Unlike Chirac's initial enthusiasm in 1986 for confrontation with 

Mitterrand, hoping to benefit politically from taking the initiative 

clearly and quickly out of the president's hands, Balladur's style let 

a new, more pluralistic configuration develop at the top of the 

French Government's decisionmaking process. There were several 
negotiators had decided to give the French a few victories to make 

the overall accord possible. Otherwise, the French, as well as 

several other govemments who semiclandestinely supported French 

positions, threatened to block the entire agreement. 

Mitterrand at one point seemed to think that Balladur was 

taking unearned credit for Operation Turquoise, the French 

humanitarian intervention in Rwanda in the summer of 1994. 

Originally, Balladur, along with Defense Minister Francois L6otard, 

had in fact been skeptical, while Mitterrand, following the strong 

lead of Foreign Minister Alain Jupp6, prevailed in the discussions. 

Why were three speeches necessary at the ambassador's meeting 

rather than a single main speech by tile president? The fact that 

there were three speeches was as important as the content. The 

conservatives wanted the facts of cohabitation to be acknowledged. 

The show of cohesion, with a few disagreements, such as the 

moratorium on nuclear testing, reaffirmed France's constitutional 

order and the capacity of a cohabitation government to organize 

France's defense and foreign relations. 

The two cohabitations were thus very different. In 1986-88, 

personality and policy clashes produced the lowest common policy 

denominator. In 1993-95, the highest common denominator often 

prevailed instead. "Cohabitation," for all its ungainliness, thus 

tums out to be a flexible ~t of rules, rather than a recipe for headon collision. Lines of authority and influence shift regularly 

without con~tutional crisis, and government ministers can emerge 

with new power and authority. In the usual configuration of 

security policy, the lead is taken by the duo of president and prime 

minister, with the president clearly in the driver's seat. In 

Mitterrand's 1986-88 cohabitation with Jacques Chirac there was a 

foreign policy triangle with the Mitterrand/Chirac battle deciding 

everything, and Jean-Bernard Raimond, a civil servant serving as 

foreign minister, merely carrying out instructions. 

Conversely, in 1993-95 the situation was a three-way (and 

more) game of foreign policy. Above all, the very active and 
resolved that France had to act alone, when no other government 

would get involved. Jupp6 also knew that President Mitterrand had 

more than one reason to endorse a French intervention. One was 

France's history of relations with Rwandan governments, not to say 

French responsibility for the deadly current situation because of its 

arming and financing of the Hutu-led government. A second reason 

was Mitterrand's personal political relationships with Rwandan 

leaders and a record of involvement of his two sons in dealings 

there, the object of widespread rumors. Once the foreign minister 

and the president were in sync, Prime Minister Balladur had to go 

along. Francois L6otard was also reluctant about the Rwanda 

mission, but the defense minister doesn't decide foreign policy 

against the foreign minister, especially when the president's 

inclination is weighing in the balance as well. 

An important question for the next phase is who, the president 

or the prime minister and the government, will have tile last word, 

and in what subjects, in deciding France's policies regarding the 

1996 intergovenmaental European Union conference, which will 

update the Maastricht Treaty. Constitutionally, is the organization 

of the EU a matter solely of high presidential authority? Or. as is 

plausible, are EU decisions, which are neither totally foreign nor 

domestic policy, a grey area of shared presidential and prime 

ministerial competence? Since the recent presidential elections 

produced a conservative president who, with the existing 

conservative majority, reestablishes the heretofore usual Fifth 

Republic system, the answer seems clear. Nevertheless, President 

Chirac is likely to take into account Prime Minister Jupp6's views 

and, through Jupp6, the cabinet's. 

A FRENCH-BRITISH DEFENSE AXIS? 

The French-British military connection is growing in significance. 

This might be thought a natural continuation of the logic of 

European integration, but it is so only to the extent that the U.K. 
NATO. The British seem, for example, willing to take the 

Eurocorps more seriously, when as little as 6 months ago this was 

not the case; participation in European military cooperation has 

developed or accelerated in all three branches of the U.K. armed 

forces. 

The first French-British military cooperation involved 

coordinated nuclear submarine patrols of NATO territory in 1993. 

It was also the simplest cooperation to mount and the most 

symbolically important, since nuclear missile submarines are the 

most invulnerable and potent element of nuclear deterrence. One 

might see this as the beginning of a long-range plan for a European 

doctrine for French and British nuclear forces, as discussed above. 

With regard to army cooperation, in September 1994, France 

and the United Kingdom signed their first bilateral agreements 

linking army forces with foreign mission goals, which involved 

the French Rapid Action Force (FAR) and the British Field Army. 

The latter is made up of about 157,000 troops, consisting of all the 

land-based units in England capable of being deployed abroad. The 

FAR consists of about 45,000 troops in four divisions. The 

agreement implies exchanges of units, joint training, and joint 

exercises. The "twinning" (jumelage) charter was signed in 

Tidworth, England, by General Philippe Morillon, commander of 

the FAR, and General Richard Swinburn, commander of the British 

Field Army. Morillon was the main instigator, building on the 

considerable French-British cooperation fostered when be was in 

comrnand of die Blue Helmet U.N. troops in Bosnia in 1992-93. 

The need for multilateral crisis forces is patent. In March 1995, one 

of the first joint working experiences involved simulated military 

exercises on maps, which will necessitate debate of military 

doctrine and tactics. 

In late November 1994, it was announced that France and 

Britain would create a joint air command. Meeting in Chartres, 

President Mitterrand and Prime Minister John Major said the point 

was really to consolidate existing agreeinents rather than to make 

some new institutional leap forward. Both leaders were at pains to 
with the German CDU-CSU parliamentary study on EU structure 

indicated that France could be a British ally opposing excessive 

federalism in the Union. 

The agreement established a French-British EuroAir Group, 

with about a dozen officers to plan joint rapid response 

peacekeeping and humanitarian air operations. Successful FrenchBritish experience in Bosnia, at the organizational level if not in 

actual peacekeeping, had been a stimulus to this undertaking. The 

group, with a French general at the head, will be based in High 

Wycombe, England. The site, the location of a NATO air 

command, is a further French gesture toward the British. John 

Major stressed that Britain's greater commitment to European 

defense should not be seen as contrary to NATO, which, in the 

usual language, "must remain the bedrock of Western security 

structures." Mitterrand commented that creating the joint air 

command showed that pragmatic progress was possible even when 

principles were still debated, which reflects his longstanding 

s~'ategy on European integration as a whole. The two governments 

also agreed on a joint initiative to train and provide logistical 

support for a proposed African peacekeeping force that the 

Organization of African Unity (OAU) has agreed to establish, albeit 

without enthusiasm. 

Finally, a working group was set up to study possible British 

participation in producing a European long-range military transport 

aircraft, the Future Large Aircraft, on which France is already 

working with four other EU countries---Germany, Italy, Spain, and 

Portugal. For the French, a British decision to join this Airbus 

consortium project and eventually to buy the plane when ready in 

the early 21st century would be a key test of U.K. future 

commitment to a serious European defense as provided for in the 

Maastricht Treaty. 'u 

As for the basis of French-British cooperation in nuclear and 

strategic defense, in the year 2000 the two states will together field 

an operational force of between 500 mad 1,000 warheads at any 

given moment. 42 Given their quantity and quality, and given the 
innovations: 

• The concept of an effective French-British deterrent for 

Europe must be taken more seriously. 

• The minimal deterrence French and British strategies-- 

"sufficiency" as opposed to a reduced form of MAD---is 

increasingly more a political choice rather than the result of 

teclmical or financial incapacities. 

As for tile possible points of French-British nuclear 

cooperation, Tertrais points to several. The first is coordination of 

the zones and schedules of submarine patrols, which would be 

especially important if the number of European nuclear submarines 

on patrol at any given time were reduced to three (for example, if 

Britain no longer maintained the policy of having one submarine at 

sea at any given moment). Second would be limited cooperation in 

nuclear targeting, to assure maximum coverage while allowing 

central targets to be foreseen by both forces. A third area of 

cooperation would involve penetration of strategic defenses, 

especially the use of MIRVing and the sharing of information and 

intelligence systems. Other venues might be permanent submarine 

visits and/or stationing on the partner's territory. 

Overall, British policymakers seem gradually to be letting go 

of the increasingly illusory special British-American relationship in 

defense and security matters. The government of John Major has 

had to recognize that American policy no longer takes so much care 

about consulting with Britain (which was simply ignored in several 

recent American decisions) and that the Clinton administration has 

stepped back from substantial and costly new involvements in postCold War European security problems. 

On the other hand, the Clinton administration has, as opposed 

to Bush-Baker European policy, been compatible with post-Cold 

War French thinking: relaunch of momentum for an independent 

European security structure, combined with continued if reduced 

U.S. engagement on the continent. By the same dialectical logic, 

the Clinton administration security policy has been a positive 

influence in the emergence of a French-British axis undergirding a 
Sleeping institutions, if allowed to repose long enough, either die 

or, sometimes, are given new life. The Western European Union is 

one good example. Its past Secretary, General Alfred Cahan, 

became expert in coy regret over the WEU's sudden reactivation in 

the late 1980s, protesting that he "had expected to spend a few more 

quiet years organizing pleasant conferences, before sliding easily 

into a gentleman's retirement." Now, as the WEU was taken up by 

the Maastricht Treaty negotiations, he was obliged back into serious 

business! 

The dormancy of the much yotmger CSCE (now the OSCE) was 

never so total as that of the WEU in the 1960s and 1970s, and it 

lasted only a few years, as opposed to the WEU's four decades of 

slumber. The OSCE's hope of invigoration is to become an 

umbrella organization for pan-European security, not a military 

alliance with an effective decisionmaking process but an 

overarching forum for security negotiations and peacekeeping. The 

OSCE's virtue is that it ranges from Vancouver to Vladivostok, 

containing the North American NATO countries as well as Russia, 

plus the former Soviet bloc cotmtries of eastern Europe and Russia's 

"near abroad" former Soviet republics. The OSCE's defect is, of 

course, precisely the consequence of its virtue--inclusiveness. 

With 53 members and a decisionmaking rule of unanimity, anything 

the organization does will be only the lowest common denominator 

of agreement. 

In terms of conflict resolution and peacekeeping, the December 

1994 52-nation meeting in Budapest was the occasion to sign an 

agreement aimed at building a stronger organization specializing in 

preventive diplomacy, conflict resolution, and peacekeeping. 

The primacy of NATO's role in guaranteeing security for 

westem Europe is to be understood as in no way affected by the soft 

emphasis on OSCE. It is a question of how to deal with problems 

outside the NATO area. OSCE activation has been supported, at 

least with lip service, by the United States and NATO allies. Since 

it already includes NATO members and the former Soviet bloc 

countries, it can debate without raising difficult questions of new 
Atlantic alliance. One of the points about which Presidents Clinton, 

Mitterrand and other NATO leaders, were clear at the December 

1994 meeting was precisely that no outside country, namely Russia, 

would decide who is and is not going to be a member of NATO. 

The new security function of an activated OSCE is to avert or 

dampen quickly future conflicts in eastern Europe and the former 

Soviet republics, Bosnia being the obvious example. The OSCE 

would play a larger role in mediating conflicts, protecting embattled 

minorities and providing peacekeepers to work in areas like 

Georgia, Chechenya, and Nagorno-Karabakh. The December 

meeting's one practical decision was in fact to mount an OSCE 

operation in Nagorno-Karabakh. 43 

American officials said that upgrading the OSCE's role should 

make NATO expansion less politically controversial by signaling 

to Russia that the NATO allies mean to include them in future 

European security arrangments. In the OSCE, Russia is, with the 

United States, a dominant power, and thus to emphasize the OSCE 

is to demonstrate, believably or not, that western plans for postCold War European security arrangements are not anti-Russian. 

The OSCE's inclusiveness also means that increasing its importance 

would involve no new dividing line in Europe. And obviously a 

stronger OSCE is intended not only to reassure Russia, but also to 

constrain its ambitions by creating a European-based security forum 

to which Russia, as a consequence of membership, would be 

accountable. True, Russia (and every member country) has a veto 

in OSCE, but voting is not the most important aspect of 

participation. 

At the December OSCE meeting, the Russians, though they had 

been briefed on the plans for NATO expansion, were surprised by 

the U.S. timetable--that a study of practical requirements for 

expansion should be ready within a year. It seems that France, as 

well as Germany and Britain, were also caught unawares by 

American insistence on moving ahead so quickly with expansion. 

Dislike of having one's hand forced was responsible for the hard 

talk from President Yeltsin and for Foreign Minister Kozyrev's 
of the Cold War. ~4 

The major Western European powers (France, Britain, and 

especially Germany) hoped to mollify Russian sensibilities by 

stressing that "intensive partnership" with Russia and Ukraine 

would accompany NATO expansion, avoiding what Yeltsin at the 

meeting called the risk of creating "new poles of opposition." 

President Mitterrand, Chancellor Kohl, and Prime Minister John 

Major all were at pains to emphasize that no one wants to see any 

new fault lines drawn in the European landscape. 

One mitigating factor is that NATO's expansion is mixed up 

with EU expansion, which Russian policy finds less difficult to 

accept. Russian interests can benefit from economic growth and 

direct aid generated by EU expansion, whereas NATO's expansion 

involves power and reputation, which seems much closer to a zerosum game, another defeat for Russia. 

AN INTER-AFRICAN PEACEKEEPING 

FORCE.'? 

An example of French desires to reduce France's burdens by 

multilateralizing responsibilities is a November 1994 proposal, at 

President Mitterrand's last French-African summit, for an interAfrican peacekeeping force. Although not likely to be realized 

soon, the idea is to combine units from participating African states 

into a force that will have legitimacy for action over a wide area of 

the continent, with logistical support from France and perhaps also 

Britain. Because many African regimes do not want to have to deal 

with such an institution, a peacekeeping force will be difficult to put 

together, and even more difficult to sustain politically and 

militarily. Response from African participants at the Biarritz 

conference was thin. 

However this may be, the proposal in itself re-emphasizes how 

French security thinking is moving toward multilateralism, burdensharing and cost limitation, not only in European security but also 

in Ixaditional French African responsibilities. 
finding themselves alone in any such future crisis. 

But France could not avoid taking a lead. The enterprise went 

remarkably well for the French, in the sense that initial international 

suspicion of neocolonialism, and the Tutsi accusation that the 

French were out to protect their former Hutu proteges, were quickly 

muted. Not least important, there were few French casualties and 

the operation in Rwanda was widely agreed to be a success, which 

earned the French some moral credit. It was clearly humanitarian 

and it required only a small contingent, soon withdrawn in favor of 

U.N. forces. But the long-run French responsibility in the HutuTutsi slaughter, and in the future of Rwanda as a whole, remains a 

somber issue. 

In fact, nowhere has the conflict between progressive-sounding 

rhetoric and reason of state in President Mitterrand's foreign policy 

been more apparent than in Africa. Mitterrand arrived in office with 

a Socialist and tiers-mondiste (Third-World orientation) record of 

calling for an end to France's neocolonial relationships with Frenchspeaking African states. Particularly detestable was the heritage of 

Gaullist-Giscardist dealings with African dictators. 

One of Mitterrand's first international sallies as president was 

the Cancun conference on Third World development (October 

1981). He gave a grand speech, calling for more and less selfinterested aid from the North. By creating new markets and trading 

partners, prosperity in Third World economies would be good for 

the developed countries also. Incentives would increase for 

potential immigrants to stay home, and customers for Northern 

exports would have more money to spend. At least theoretically, 

Mitterrand's Cancun declaration was an astute combination of 

economics and morality. 

However, a year or two into Mitterrand's first term, his refusal 

of traditional French ways of doing business in Africa had to be 

relaxed. His first minister for cooperation, Jean-Pierre Cot, 

resigned in protest, moving on to a prominent position in the 

Socialist European Parliament group. Another sign of Mitterrand's 

turnabout was a nepotistic appointment, a few years later, of his 
name was certainly not irrelevant. 

In the end, Franqois Mitterrand's African policy was one of his 

main personal commitments and his main downfall in international 

affairs. It is possible, nevertheless, still to defend French action in 

Africa, if only as the best that could be made of a bad business. In 

William Pfaffs judgment, 

It is true that in some respects Europe has never left Africa. France's 

presence in Western and Central Africa still evokes hostility from 

American and British commentators and many non-Francophone 

Africans, and there undoubtedly is much to criticize in a policy whose 

ruling principle has been stability above all else. However, the overall 

judgment must also be that French Africa for more than three decades 

has been the Africa that worked, the place where life for ordinary 

Africans has been markedly better than where the old colonial powers, 

as one commentator put it, "absconded with no forwarding address." 

France today is probably the only European country that might, if 

invited, consider a major commitment to the rehabilitation of a former 

colony. It would be better if the European Union as an institution, 

which insists it wants an international role for "Europe," would 

collectively assume such responsibilities in cooperation with Africans 

in an effort to arrest the continent's decline. 4s 

The 50 percent devaluation of the Central African Franc (CAF) 

carried out in Jmmary 1994 indicates that even here, in the national 

"back yard," a French retreat is underway. A hard decision 

accepted by the 13 African Francophone governments, it has 

provoked a new beginning of economic growth, about 5 percent on 

average, after several years of negative growth. 46 The financial 

amputation was extremely painful. No longer willing to finance its 

role of neocolonialist patron, the French state, by devaluing the 

CAF, slashed its subsidy of African government budgets, hitting 

both state subsidy of consumption and all aspects of government 

spending. On the one hand, Francophone African living standards 

were suddenly cut drastically, mainly of the less well off and the 

poor, because the price of daily purchases had depended on an 
have fostered criticism of the lag in French African policy in the 

1980s. Devaluation of the CAF should have occurred in the middle 

of the 1980s, when the collapse of raw materials prices stopped 

growth. France has a heavy responsibility in this costly delay, 

because while France was encouraging economic austerity in the 

zone (as in France itself), French policy simultaneously signalled 

the contrary by continuing vast subsidies to African government 

budgets and by paying their World Bank debts. This safeguarded 

the position of French business in the various francophone 

countries, but it also underpinned dictatorial governments. 

The IMF and the World Bank finally censured this lack of 

political courage in French policy when it made devaluation of the 

CAF a condition for new aid. The Balladur government, with 

Mitterrand's approval, accepted the IMF-World Bank condition; the 

result was very hard on African consumers. Francophone African 

govemments, however, saw total aid jump from 6 billion francs in 

1993 to 17 billion in 1994, to which significant debt rescheduling 

was added. Nevertheless, the francophone African economic 

situation remains tenuous, to say the least, and putting the franc 

zone economically and financially on a stable footing will be a 

long-term process. And, above all, as Le Monde editorialized, "So 

long as [the francophone states] are characterized by weak 

government, development will remain delicate. '~8 

At the Franco-African Biarritz summit, President Mitterrand 

was asked to sum up the results of his African policies over 14 

years. Mitterrand replied, with evasive precision, "I am not leaving 

office with the sentiment of a failure in Africa." This meant, he 

said, that "the job of African development is so huge, so long term, 

and with such obstacles, that no single government or country is 

re~onsible." There was no failure, in other words, because the goal 

was never success. It was a skillful, unsatisfying response, leaving 

room only for discussion of specific cases. Mitterrand, on the most 

dramatic issue, repeated his denial of French responsibility in the 

Hutu-organized massacres of Tutsi tribesmen in Rwanda. Yet he 

sounded less categorical than previously, as if he wanted to 

For France in the Mitterrand era, 1960sstyle Gaullist policies of 

maximum feasible national independence and autonomy were 

impossible. Gaullist thinking of a 1960s style became increasingly 

counterproductive to the main goal of Gaullist policy: serving the 

national interest. 

In the Mitterrand years it became clear that to follow de 

Gaulle's example, rightly understood, means not to be "Gaullist" in 

the anachronistic sense of sticking, whatever the consequences, to 

the policies of the 1960s. To be inspired by de Gaulle is to be 

gaullien, which means, along with a high national ambition, 

precisely not to be bound to outworn schemas and shibboleths. De 

Gaulle's Gaullism was, as Stanley Hoffmann long ago defined it, 

"an attitude, not a policy." 

Franqois Mitterrand, on this distinction, has been the most 

gaullien of France's leaders since de Gaulle. 49 His European policy 

derived from a genuine "great ambition" for France, in which 

European integration and security are parts of an overall design. 

This does not necessarily mean any particular structure but an 

overarching intuition of how best to achieve France's national 

interests. In other words, circumstances have changed so as to 

make a much more integrated "Europe" necessary to the French 

national interest than was the case in the 1960s. To recognize and 

draw the proper conclusions from this fact, this is gaullien insight 

that neo-Gaullists of today--Jacques Chirac or others----may or may 

not have. 

This does not mean that virtually any successful policy for 

France would be gaullien. Misguided policies may be "successful" 

in the sense of working but producing bad consequences. Much of 

Mitterrand's "socialist" economic experiment of 1981-82 could, for 

example, be put in this category. What is at issue in the distinction 

is the difference between the statesman and the mere politician, 

between, on the one hand, a genuine vision of France's higher 

55 
a quarter-century after de Gaulle, can understand more easily than 

in the past that French foreign policy attitudes are the result of 

France's particular position in international relations, combined 

with the national ambition to matter, to exist in the international 

system. 

Mitterrand's gaullien insight was that deeper forms of European 

integration, contrasted with de Gaulle's concentration on 

intergovernmental cooperation and on alliances as diplomatic 

elevators, could magnify French means, and thus reduce the gap 

between means and ends, even as the process changes the ends 

themselves. 

Given German economic and financial power in post-Cold War 

Europe, only a French-German tandem can lead in terms of both 

ambition and constancy. This is why the gaullien menlality is 

ruffled when an American president singles out Germany as the 

U.S. "partner in leadership." Germany, in the French calculation, 

cannot be the first power in Europe except in partnership with 

France, which will be thereby also the first power. 

Mitterrand's legacy is, in short, to have taken French 

geopolitical thinking a necessary step beyond de Gaulle's legacy. 

De Gaulle might well have approved, for, as he said, everything 

depends on "the circumstances," and these have changed. 

Nevertheless, the French often still seem unsure of themselves, 

sometimes including even Mitterrand himself. There is still, even 

after Mitterrand, a question about French self-confidence, about 

how strong France can be, how much of a player French policy 

wants to be internationally, and how large an ambition the country's 

political, economic and cultural elites want to cultivate. And in this 

regard, de Gaulle's memory is a factor of permanent stimulus and 

intimidation in French politics. Francois Mitterrand's heritage is 

not only success and failure, but also a demonstration that a 

gaullien policy attitude still is possible. 

"La dissuasion, c'est le president, donc moi" (Deterrence is the 

president, thus me). This famous Mitterrand phrase, in all its 

gaullien sense of responsibility, or arrogance, symbolized French 

and personal conversations, based on notes taken by a Ganllist spokeman 

and minister has just been published: Alain Peyrefitte, C'Etait De Gaulle 

(Paris: Editions de Fallois-Fayard. 1994). The book is especially good on 

foreign policy and security affairs. The author is usually able to give two 

or three versions of every major de Gaulle policy, in which tile same 

explanation is put different ways. This volume goes up through spring 

1963. A second volume is scheduled. 

4. It is also possible to argue that early action might have produced, 

or will produce, worse results, embroiling NATO powers in a quagmire. 

5. Ronald Tiersky, "Mitterrand's Legacies," Foreign Affairs 74 (1), 

January-February 1995, 112-21. 

6. For an analysis of cohabitation in institutional and political terms, 

see Ronald Tiersky. France in the New Europe: Changing Yet Steadfast 

(Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1994),chs. 3-5. It could be argued that former 

prime minister Eduoard Balladur was just as responsible as Mitterrand for 

avoiding crises 1993-95. But, besides Chirac's open challenges to 

presidential prerogatives in 1986, the fact remains that the president is the 

one who must accept the relinquishing of most power and prerogatives. 

7. President Mitterrand's May 5, 1994, speech at the Elysee is 

the best single summary of his views on nuclear weapons and 

deterrence doctrine. Available from the Elysee Press Service. 

8. Ronald Tiersky, "'European Security and European Integration: 

The New Nexus," CES Conference of Europeanists, March 1990; 

"European Security, European Integration and American Interests in the 

Post-Cold War Era," unpublished SCDC/NDU paper, September 1990; 

and "Thinking Like the French: France and America's Future as a 

European Power," unpublished NDU paper, August 1992. 

9. William Drodziak, International Herald Tribune, October 31, 

1994, 1. 

10. Ibid. Skeptics would point out that the EU South is richer than the 

East, and that it has been getting much EU regional and structural fund aid 

already for 25 years. Conservative and market-oriented economists add 

that reduction of transfers might well make these nations stronger in the 

long run, by squeezing off dependency and eliminating EC subsidy of 

counterproductive economic policies. Another result could be to 

strengthen the EU by eliminating a source of interregional contention. 

59 
honorable word used in connection with efforts for integration, large and 

small. It is important that Norway did not become independent until 1905 

and that nationalism was strengthened rather than weakened during World 

War II ... Finland and most of the East European countries are even 

yotmger than Norway, but in their cases nationalism and enthusiasm for the 

Union go hand in hand. With the demise of the Soviet Union and the 

weakening of Russia, they can finally make their own choices. EU 

membership is a matter of defending themselves against a possible new 

Russian threat" (emphasis added). In tile Intemationai Herald Tribune, 

December 14, 1994. The point is simple and clear: Integration in the EU 

equals national security because EU states could not countenance military. 

force used against any member state, whether that state is a member of a 

corresponding military alliance or not. 

12. See the substantial policy article by Alaiu Juppd, "Repenser 

rEurope,'LeMonde, November 18, 1994, 1. 

13. The December 1994 Essen EU summit adopted a less-than-rigid 

timetable for membership of the eastern Ettropean countries. Though the 

six countries involved all have free-trade agreements with tile EU, excluded 

from them are agriculture and other "sensitive sectors," which, so argue the 

east Europeans, rules out nearly all their competitive products. "They give 

us free trade in super computers and satellites but shut us out from 

everything we could make a profit on," said one former Polish official. "It 

is no surprise that our deficit with the El,/ keeps on growing." Daily 

Telegraph, November 25, 1994, 15. 

14. Alain Juppd, "Repenser l'Europe," Le Monde. November 18, 

1994, 8. 

15. See Samuel Huntington, "The Clash of Civilizations?" Foreign 

Affairs 72(3)(Summer 1993): 22-49, and the great debate it set off. 

16. Peyrefitte, 116. 

17. Livre Blanc Sur la Defense 1994 (Paris: Editions U.G.E. 10/18, 

1994), 89. 

18. lbid, 90. 

19. Ibid., 91. 

20. Ibid., 92. 

21. Ibid., 94-5. 

60 
, g(, )

25. A French defense joke has it that, given governments run by 

Saddam, Gadhafi etc., la dissuasion du faible au fort has become la 

dissuasion dufaible aufou (deterrence of the crazy by the weak). 

26. See also Pascal Boniface, Contre le Revisionnisme Nucleaire 

(Paris: Editions Ellipses, 1994). 

27. Poirier, 38. 

28. Poirier, 39. 

29. William Pfaff, International Herald Tribune, November 28, 1994, 

4. 

30. Jacques Isnard, "Logique de force en Irak," Le Monde, October 

12, 1994, 1,3. 

31. The United States quickly dispatched 40,000 troops, 33 warships 

and nearly 600 aircraft to the Gulf, in spite of the significant operation 

which was underway in Haiti. The British were the first of the allies to put 

troops on the ground in Kuweit. Close to 1,000 British troops, led by 

commandos of the Royal Marines, got to Saudi Arabia on October 12, 

while two British warships moved in close to the Kuwaiti coastline. The 

French nearly as quickly said they would contribute a military contingent 

"if necessary." 

32. William Satire, International Herald Tribune, October 1 l, 1994, 

6. 

33. Charles Krauthammer, International Herald Tribune, October 15- 

16, 1994, 10. 

34. The Economist, October 15, 1994, 62. But, in reply it could be 

said that Satire and Krauthammer were making the point that the United 

States can act despi~e such factors. 

35. See the report and the summary article by Jacques Isnard in Le 

Monde, November 1, 1994, 11. 

36. See Le Monde, December 17, 1994, 15. 

37. On October 1, 1964, a squadron of four Mirage IV planes was, by 

presidential command, ordered to a practice nuclear alert status for the first 

time. The French nuclear air force includes, in addition to some still active 

Mirage IV planes, the ground-based nuclear missies set into the Albion 

Plateau site in Provence. Mitterrand recently settled an argument, for the 

time being, over whether the land-based missiles ought to be kept, given 

61 
py pg gyp; 

and even the Socialist former interior minister Pierre Joxe. See Pascal 

Boniface, Contre Le Revisionnisme Nucleaire, 49-52ff. 

39. 1"his repeat innovative short-course for France's 189 ambassadors 

was Alain Juppr's idea, the first having been held in 1993. 

40. Libdration, September 2, 1994, 2. 

41. In mid-December 1994, however, the British government 

announced a decision to order 25 U.S. C- 130J Hercules military transport, 

because they are scheduled to be ready in 1996, whereas the Future Large 

Aircraft will take a decade and cost nearly twice as much as the $37.5 

million American plan. Trade Secretary Michael Heseltine and British 

Aerospace had lobbied the government for the European plane, with the 

argument that buying from American-owned Lockheed would damage the 

United Kingdom's aerospace industry (British Aerospace is the U.K. 

participant in the European project), as well as the future British 

participation in European projects. (International Herald Tribune, 

December 18, 1994, 2.) The optimistic French view of this development 

is that the British simply required some new planes rapidly, but this neither 

means that the U.K. is stepping out of the European program, nor that it 

won't buy the European plane when it is ready. The total British 

requirement will be four to five times the size of this first purchase. 

42. This section is based on Bnmo Tertrais, L'Arme Nucldaire Aprds 

la Guerre Froide, 214-17. 

43. Another possible example cited of future peacekeeping is a 

potential conflict between Hungary and Romania over Romania's treatment 

of its large Hungarian minority. An OSCE intervention could include 

diplomatic mediation and counsel on protection of minorities, as well as 

peacekeepers and monitors to control cease-fire arrangements. 

44. Upgrading the CSCE is part of a two-track NATO approach in 

revamping security arangements in Europe. On the other track, the study 

referred to above will outline for the eastern European states what they will 

need to do to join NATO. Thus in a year's time, NATO is to formally tell 

prospective member countries what their militaries have to do to be ready 

to integrate with the NATO structure, and what it will cost. 

45. William Pfaff, "A New Colonialism? Europe Must Go Back into 

Africa," Foreign Affiars, 74(1 ), January/February 1995, 6. 

62 
p 

President Jean-Bertrand Aristide to office in mid-October 1994, it launched 

a wholesale influence of Haitian life by American culture. This gave a 

sudden acceleration to a process that was at least 15 years old. One U.S. 

offici,'d told a newspaperman: "September 19 was a death knell for French 

influence in this country. They basically ceded the territory to us, and now 

they are steamed about it." (International Herald Tribune, December 31, 

1994, 1.) Today there are perhaps 1 million Haitians living in the United 

States as compared with about 40,000 in France. Travel, especially to 

Miami and New York, and mfiversity study also has become directed much 

more to the United States than to France. Of course the United States 

occupied Haiti from 1915 to 1934, without changing the culture very 

much. But so much else has changed since the time before WWI--in 

French and American patterns, in international conditions--that past 

precedent holds much less power than it once did. 

48. LeMonde, January 11, 1995, 11. 

49. On this point an interested reader can also see Ronald Tiersky, 

"Mitterrand's Legacies," Foreign Affairs 74 (1), January-February 1995. 

A recent extensive study of the long-term legacy of Gaullism in security 

affairs is Philip H. Gordon, A Certain Idea of France: French Security 

Policy and the Gaullist Legacy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 

1993). The issue is also studied in Gregory Flynn, ed., The New France 

in the New Europe (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1995), especially the 

analysis by Fr~d6ric Bozo, "France and Security in the New Europe: 

Between the Gaullist Legacy mad the Search for a New Model," 213-32. 

63 
65 

Spp

politics, European integration and security, comparative politics and 

international relations, and problems of war and peace. 

Dr. Tiersky, who received his Ph.D. from Columbia University, 

is the authors of several books and articles, the latest of which are 

France and the New Europe: Changing Yet Steadfast (1994) and 

"Mitterrand's Legacies," Foreign Affairs (Jan-Feb 1995). 

67 
million troops, was about to take command of Allied ground forces in 

Europe under Eisenhower, when he was killed in combat in Normandy, 25 

July 1944. 

The following is a complete listing of published McNair Papers. For 

information on availabili~ of specific titles, contact the Distribution 

Manager, Publications Directorate & NDU Press, Fort Lesley J. McNair, 

Washington, DC 20319-6000 (telephone: commercial 202/475-1913; DSN 

335-1913). 

1. Joseph P. Lorenz, Egypt and the New Arab Coalition, February 1989. 

2. Jolm E. Endicott, Grand Strategy and the Pacific Region, May 1989. 

3. Eugene V. Rostow, President, Prime Minister, or Constitutional 

Monarch?, October 1989. 

4. Howard G. DeWolf, SDI and Arms Control, November 1989. 

5. Martin C. Libicki, What Makes Industries Strategic, November 1989. 

6. Melvin A. Goodman, Gorbachev and Soviet Poli~ in the Third World, 

February 1990. 

7. John Van Oudenaren, "The Tradition of Change in Sovie! Foreign 

Policy," and Francis Conte, "Two Schools of Soviet Diplomacy," in 

Understanding Soviet Foreign Policy, April 1990. 

8. Max G. Manwaring and Court Prisk, A Strategic View oflnsurgencies: 

Insights from El Salvador, May 1990. 

9. Steven R. Linke, Managhzg Crises in Defense Industry: The PEPCON 

and Avtex Cases, June 1990. 

10. Christine M. Helms, Arabism and Islam: Stateless Nations and 

Nationless States, September 1990. 

11. Ralph A. Cossa, lran: Soviet Interests, US Cotuzerns, July 1990. 

12. Ewan Jtanieson, Friend or Ally? A Question for New Zealand, May 

1991. 

13. Richard J. Dunn 11I, From Gettysburg to the Gulf and B~. ond: Coping 

with Revolutionary Technological Change in Land Warfare, March 1992. 

14. Ted Greenwood, U.S. and NATO Force Structure and Military 

Operations in the Mediterranean, June 1993. 

15. Oscar W. Clyatt, Jr., Bulgaria's Quest for Security After the Cold War, 

February 1993. 

16. WiUiam C. Bodie, Moscow's "Near Abroad": Security Policy in PostSoviet Europe, June 1993. 
20. William T. Jolmsen and Thomas Durell-Young; Jeffrey Sitnon; 

Daniel N. Nelson; William C. Bodie, and James McCarthy, European 

Security Toward the Year 2000. August 1993. 

21. Edwin R. Carlisle, ed., Developh~g Battlefield Technologies in the 

1990s, August 1993. 

22. Patrick Clawson, How Has Saddam Hussein Survived? Economic 

Sanctions, 1990-93, August 1993. 

23. Jeffrey Simon, Czechoslovakia's "Velvet Divorce," Visegrad Cohesion, 

and European Fault Lines, October 1993. 

24. Eugene V. Rostow, The Future of Palestine, November 1993. 

25. William H. Lewis, John Mackinlay, John G. Ruggie, and Sir Brian 

Urquhart, Peacekeeping: The Way Ahead? November 1993. 

26. Edward Marks and William Lewis, Triage for Failing States, January 

1994. 

27. Gregory D. Foster, In Search of a Post-Cold War Security Structure, 

February 1994. 

28. Martin C. Libicki, The Mesh and the Net: Speculations on Armed 

Conflict in a Time of Free Silicon, March 1994. 

29. Patrick Clawson, ed., Iran's Strategic Intentions and Capabilities, 

April 1994. 

30. James W. Morrison, Vladimir Zhirinovskiy: An Assessment of a 

Russian Ultra-Nationalist, April 1994. 

31. Patrick M. Cronin and Michael J. Green, Redefining the U.S.-Japan 

Alliance: Tokyo's National Defense Program, November 1994. 

32. Scott W. Conrad, Moving the Force: Desert Storm and Beyond, 

December 1994. 

33. John N. Petrie, American Neutrality in the 20th Century: The 

Impossible Dream, January 1995. 

34. James H. Brusstar and Ellen Jones, The Russian Military's Role in 

Politics, January 1995. 

35. S. Nelson Drew, NATO from Berlin to Bosnia: Trans-Atlantic Security 

in Transition, January 1995. 

36. Karl W. Eikenberry, Explaining and Influencing Chinese Arms 

Transfers, February 1995. 

37. William W. Mendel and David G. Bradford, interagency Cooperation: 

A Regional Model for Overseas Operations, March 1995. 

38. Robbia Laird, French Security Policy in Transition: Dynamics of 

Continuity and Change, March 1995. 

39. Jeffrey Simon, Central European Civil-Mifftary Relations and NATO 
42. John Jaworsky, Ukraine: Stability arm Instability, August 1995. 
A popular Government, 

without popular information or the means 

of acquiring it, 

is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy; 

or perhaps both. 

Knowledge will forever govern ignorance; 

And a people who mean to be their own 

Governors, 

must arm themselves with the power 

which knowledge gives. 

JAMES MADISON to W. T. BARRY 

August 4, 1822