French and British Resentments
From DARS1E G 1LLIE PARIS rr HE irritation and anger in London at French goings-on seem to be yielding to self-question- ing about where and when things went wrong.
One worth-while approach is to stop attributing everything to the President of the French Republic and for the moment even to fOrget May 13, 1958, when schoolboys were allowed to capture the Government—general in Algeria. Consider for a moment instead France's position in the Western Alliance since the war, and her relations to Western Europe. Bring in the Fifth Republic and its peculiarities later. The liberated Europe of fifteen years ago consisted of ruined States crouching more or less submissively at the feet of a major and a minor archangeLtalking English to each other. France was the first to receive nominal promotion to archangelic rank, but with- out wings and with a-!different language on her lips. The original minor archangel seemed, with time, to moult and diminished more and more to human rank while mantaining a certain habit of archangelic converse.
The French position is, of course, full of con- tradictions. While one aspect of policy has been the 'construction of Europe,' another has been the restoration of a consciousness of national great- ness, a determination either to cling to her over- seas empire or to transform it into an organic federation, very different from the British com- monwealth of independent united nations. There has been a sharp conflict between the supra- national conception of Europe, under which France's African connections would be a sort of dowry brought by her to the enlarged European family, and the national conception proclaimed by President de Gaulle and M. Debra.
But though M. Debra proclaimed last January that the future lay with an Europe des patries, a - Europe of nations, not with a supranational European Union, the Fifth Republic has not attempted to go back on the Common Market. On the face of it a 'Europe of Nations' might be worked better in a free-trade zone with OEEC as its supreme organic expression. But that is not the path President de Gaulle has chosen. Partly, no doubt, because the Common Market was signed and already a deep commitment of com- mercial policy expressed by dozens of agreements between the firms concerned, many of them originally opposed to the Common Market, but anxious now that they have worked out plans on the new assumption to see it applied in practice much more quickly than was originally proposed. The Minister of Finance in M. Debra's govern- ment is, after all, the conservative M. Pinay, who had much to do with the early stages of the Common Market Treaty, concluded and signed fifteen months after M. Pinay had left office, by the Socialist M. Pineau. There are aspects of French policy running through changes of govern- ment and even of republic which infuriated spec- tators of her changes underestimate.
But if the European community idea has acquired sufficient -force to remain a constant, it is not only through economic causes, though these causes once set in motion are mighty. It is be- cause Europeans are instinctively in rebellion against the view that the alternative to Russian leadership is English-speaking leadership, that the European idea is strong, especially in France. Once the British decided not to join Europe, they moved at once into the front line of polemic : 'Are you or are you not Europeans? Do you take yourselves for archangels?' is the underlying retort of Frenchmen to British arguments about the wickedness of a Common Market that would give better treatment to members than to non-mem- bers, or to the explosions of indignation because President de Gaulle continued to take in October the same view of a summit meeting centred on Berlin that he did in March.
The French, and in particular President de Gaulle, have memories of a summit meeting at which they were not present—Yalta. It set the seal on an arrangement by which half Europe should pass under Soviet domination without being asked its opinion. Set against this background any British assumption that France has no right to an opinion of her own and should accept any arrangement that the two English-speaking powers and the Russians approve is particularly damaging.
But this underlying tendency to European con- solidation in French policy is quite evidently very hard to harmonise with another, that of national resurgence as conceived by the President—and also as conceived by the army, which are not necessarily the same thing. On the one hand there has been the rapprochement between President de Gaulle and Chancellor Adenauer, on the other the steady withdrawal of France from the en- tanglements of NATO integration, capped last week by a speech to the staff college fragmentarily reported by startled newspapers.
In interpreting President de Gaulle's attitude on this issue, his view of the place of national defence in national life must be taken into account. This attitude includes a smarting sense of personal responsibility for having contributed to split the army in 1940. He certainly cannot conceive of a healthy form of national consciousness which does not include a sense of personal responsibility for national defence, and respect for those whose life is devoted to it. In the President's scheme of things the professional soldier must accept the servitudes as well as the greatness of his position, that is to say, disciplined submission to the govern- ment and abstention from politics. It is too rarely noted that no soldiers hold high political appoint- ments in the Fifth Republic as they often did in the Fourth and Third. The President himself is truely a civilian dignitary with a military handle to his name. He has made it clear that he considers military insubordination under the Fourth Repub- lic was due to the failure of governments to shoulder their responsibilities. But his own re- appearance at the head of the State has not ended the problem, and at every turn of policy, especially Algerian policy, one feels that the Presi- dent is trying to manceuvre the army back into its proper place, with the result that it is often the policy itself that is being distorted.
Even when allowance has been made for the particular audience addressed (and also for the fact that only fragments of the speech have been published) it was a disturbing utterance. But it may perhaps serve as a useful warning that resentment at French policy which will not ever accept the consequences of . its Europeanism may end in promoting aspects of it which would give graver causes for anxiety.
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