28/3/2008
Is This What The President Of Europe Will Be Doing?

M. Sarkozy must have known that the seed of his call for a new ‘entente amicale,’ a closer Franco-British partnership at the heart of Europe, was likely to fall on stony ground. Nevertheless, his robust speech to the British Parliament defined the role a European President might play. The French leader has done himself no harm should he throw his own hat into the ring in years to come, writes Peter Sain ley Berry.

‘C’est magnfique, mais ce n’est pas la guerre!’ (It may be superb, but it isn’t war!) Marshall Bosquet remarked about the Charge of the British Light Brigade at the battle of Balaclava in 1854.  Military ineptitude then sent a small brigade of cavalry to attack multiple batteries of Russian guns, with predictable consequences.

The incident descended easily into legend. ‘Into the Valley of Death rode the Six Hundred,’ wrote Tennyson, while in the hands of the Irish playwright, Bernard Shaw, the episode became the satirical comedy - ‘Arms and the Man.’  Although the cavalry charge succeeds (because the enemy guns fortuitously have no cartridges) the cavalry commander receives no plaudits. ‘I won the battle the wrong way,’ he moans, ‘while our generals were losing it the right way.’

The Crimean war, of which Balaclava formed part, was incidentally the first major conflict in which Britain and France had been allies after eight previous centuries of internecine strife, something to which generals on both sides of the Channel found it hard to adjust. Indeed, it might be said that we are still adjusting to it.  France’s President, Nicolas Sarkozy, on a state visit to Britain this week, was still saying on the radio that he hoped that Britons would come to trust France.

This seems a forlorn hope.  Two hundred years after Napoleon, many Britons still distrust the French with a vehemence that borders on the pathological.  To admit to liking France, her culture, language and people - as opposed to a source of cheap property - is not something undertaken lightly, even in the hallowed portals of Westminster. 

As President Sarkozy addressed the British Houses of Parliament on Wednesday, it was noticeable how many ears were muffled by headphones, presumably lest the contagion of the French language should pierce our leaders’ monoglot brains.

On the French side, this neighbourly suspicion is reciprocated, albeit at one remove.  The hostility is to a soul-less Anglo-Saxon world that, like Oscar Wilde’s cynic, knows the price of everything but the value of nothing.  The inhabitants, on the other hand, they treat with a respect that I always find remarkable.

From time to time statesmen on both sides of the Channel try gallantly to bridge this political and cultural chasm; to put, as it were, the pieces of the Plantagenet jigsaw back together. Winston Churchill is far out front in these stakes.  Indeed, he almost succeeded in 1940 in bringing about a Franco-British Union.

Now it is the turn of Mr Sarkozy.  He has not yet acquired Churchillian status. In fact he is almost as unpopular as Churchill was in his pre-glory days. He was not actually proposing a Franco-British Union, but amid great panache and rhetorical flourish, he suggested a Franco-British partnership in which the two ancient foes would stand back to back against the world. ‘When Britain and France speak with one voice,’ he said, ‘who will dare not listen,’ or words to that effect.

The core of his argument was that a refreshed Franco-British entente  (promoted in the process from ‘cordiale’ to ‘amicale’) would create an unstoppable force both inside Europe and on the world stage. Europe might be driven by the Franco-German motor but it needed a Franco-British wheel to steer it.

With its theatricality, an effect compounded by the gilded gothic decor of the House of Lords, the speech seemed at times a one-man cavalry charge of its own - this time into the sensitivities and suspicions of the greater part of his audience. Yet it was also a remarkable gesture of friendship.  It is impossible to think of a British statesman proposing a similar ‘friendly understanding’ to the French Parliament.

There will not be a close Franco-British partnership in Europe, of course, even though the two countries may progress some key matters including nuclear technology, defence and immigration.  The Channel is far broader than the Rhine.  Despite Sarkozy’s assertion that what unites us is greater than what divides us - Iraq, Turkey, labour markets, agricultural trade, European integration, relations with the USA - cannot lightly be put aside however amicale the spirit.

Sakozy must have known, therefore, that his proposals would be shot down by the cannons of sceptic public opinion and the machine guns of the popular press. The real question, therefore, is not so much on the substance, but why he chose to make so bold a speech?
 
For beneath the carapace of flattery, laid on with a trowel - the gift of British democracy; the indomitable spirits of the English, Scottish, Welsh, and Irish youth that had left their bones in France; the vibrancy of our entrepreneurial spirit; our determination to stand by France in 1940; the liberation - it was a bold, hard-hitting speech with a core of observations about the limitations of today’s nation state to act alone. The Middle East, Tibet, Darfur, Human Rights, Climate Change, Development, Globalisation - these global issues could only be addressed together.

It was also unashamedly a speech that underlined the importance of the European Union, not just in contributing to the resolution of global problems, but, more locally, to immigration, defence, energy, institutional reform. Shorn of its trappings it was the speech that successive British Prime Ministers from Mrs Thatcher to Gordon Brown should have been prepared to give many times before, instead of pretending that they had chosen the European path by accident rather than design.

Yet in having the raw courage to beard the lion in its Parliamentary den and to deliver a powerful message about how Europe needed Britain’s rather more full-hearted co-operation, Sarkozy was perhaps trying to do something more.

In a few months time the European Council will appoint its first President, someone who, no doubt, will be invited to Parliaments in the member states and indeed across the world, to deliver a powerful, European message.

France will shortly hold the European Presidency; Sarkozy himself will be kingmaker to this appointment.  Indeed at some future point, he may advance himself for the Presidential role.  Was he saying, in the Westminster Parliament, this is how I see a future European President projecting the values of the Union? And - as now over Tibet - being prepared to take a lead?

We shall see. Whatever, he has done himself no harm at all in the European Presidential stakes of 2014.