The Third Man Jean Lecanuet was the surprise success of
the French presidential election campaign. coming from nowhere to take enough votes from the General to force him into a second ballot. Now, as head of a new party, the Centre Democrate, formed to fight the crucial 1967 parliamentary elections, he writes in this week's SPECTATOR.
In his article Lecanuet underlines, once again, his basic quarrel with the General; his insistence on a genuinely federal Europe rather than the Gaullist concept of a Europe of nation-states. But at the present time I would urge British Europeans to pay more attention to the points of agreement between Lecanuet and de Gaulle than to their differences. For like the General, Lecanuet makes it perfectly plain that his objec- tive is a nuclear Europe, free from the danger of American hegemony, able to use its indepen- dence of the United States to negotiate with Russia and play a genuinely independent role in the world.
This is no more anti-American than America's desire to be independent of Britain is anti- British. But it is a far cry from the Establishment myth that the Anglo-American special relation- ship and Britain-in-Europe can be comfortably combined under some vague Atlanticist umbrella, and that only de Gaulle stands in the way. The sooner this myth is exploded the better. We shall not get into Europe until it is.
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