IRENE FINEL-HONIGMAN
INSTITUTE FOR THE STUDY OF EUROPE
SCHOOL OF INTERNATIONAL AND PUBLIC AFFAIRS
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY
In 1993 in the aftermath of
Maastricht, the late Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski presented “Red, White,
Blue”, a French-Polish film trilogy which deciphered the feelings of loss,
mobility, deception and creativity that this new Europe would bring to the East.
In Blue, Juliette Binoche plays a recently widowed musician, instrumental in
creating a new work entitled Song of Reunification while all around her the
threads of her own unified existence have totally unraveled. As she uncovers
the deceptions in her past, she slowly begins to accept the overwhelming
challenges and redefinition of a new identity. In
2004 as 10 new countries officially become members of the European Union the
themes of loss, isolation, identity and renewal are again at the forefront. The
question: What is a European? (A.S. Byatt, New York Times, October 13,
2002) and its corollary what is Europe remains just as confusing as a decade
ago.
Jacques Attali in 1994 wrote
Europe(s)
explaining thus his plural title:
“It is neither one continent, nor one culture, nor one people, nor one
history” therefore claiming that its identity can only be conjugated in the
plural. Identity in a region of twenty five nations with a population of 450
million people, without one common language, bound together by institutions,
laws and regulations is one of the most complex and nebulous of concepts, often
eliciting subjective responses yet demanding objective criteria. For the
purposes of this analysis on France and its present crisis within Europe, I will
use the following set of criteria: culture, history, institutions, symbols and
language. The process of melding into a federal, multinational identity is the
most difficult in countries or institutions where these elements are the most
deeply ingrained. Therefore France, more than other European nations, with the
exception of the UK, tries to preserve psychological sovereignty, while
maintaining a position of power/prestige within the melding process of a larger,
more fragmented and for the first time in EU history, less and less franco-centric
regional entity.
France has a long history of
being pro-European, but only if and when France was perceived as the center of
influence. At the Congres de la Paix in 1849 and in 1855 Victor Hugo wrote and
spoke of one Europe: “ No more armies, no more borders, one continental
currency, all freedoms and Paris, capital of this Europe, seat of a National
Assembly elected by universal suffrage”. De Gaulle was pro-European, but his
interpretation of a Europe of nations meant that France would take the lead in
creating European identity and its institutions. For De Gaulle there were only
three “international identities: Russia, France and America.” (Peyrefitte,
C’etait De Gaulle)
As Paul Kennedy in The Rise and Fall of Great Powers wrote in
1987: “Yet France always had an impact upon affairs, far greater than might be
expected from a country with a mere 4% of world GDP…it may have been due to
sheer national-cultural assertiveness.”
The oldest intact nation in continental Europe, since the reign of Charlemagne
France has personified and codified the notion of “patrie” and of “la douce
France”. Cultural iconography since the twelfth century would include
literature, art, a more “civilized” way of life and discourse imposed on the
rest of the Continent.
Paraphrasing Thomas Mann’s
apocryphal phrase of a German Europe or a European Germany in France’s case, the
atavistic fear and hope is not of raw power, but of influence, a persuasive
force which has consistently shaped its place within Europe since the inception
of the European Union in the European Coal and Steel Community of 1951. Monnet,
Schuman, De Gaulle, Valery Giscard’Estaing, Mitterand, Delors spoke for Europe
in the name of France. The political motor to Germany’s economic motor, France
and Germany forged a symbiotic relationship which carried Europe from the EEC to
the Euro. Long before history and world opinion could allow Germany to have a
voice in the political discourse, France functioned as initiator, lightening
rod, mentor and political will. De Gaulle- Adenauer, Giscard and Helmut Schmidt
and Mitterand and Kohl genuinely liked each other personally and needed each
other politically. Despite proclamations to the contrary, the lukewarm
relationship between Chirac and Schroder, coupled with the dilution of mutual
need and obligation has changed this partnership into more form than content.
Hubert Vedrine, former Minister of Foreign Affairs, interviewed by Dominique
Moisi in France in the Age of Globalization explains the French –EU
relationship: “Europe gets stronger without France getting weaker”, but he also
states that “France is the only country, along with the United States that sees
itself bearing a universal message”.
Institutionally France set
the tone and the rules for national unification throughout the XIXth century.
Imposing Napoleonic structures, laws, curriculum and democratization of civil
society across Europe, serving as model for Italian unification in 1866 and
German unification in 1870, the rhetoric and ideals of the French Revolution
were reiterated by the socialists of 1848, the nationalist liberation movements
in Poland, Greece, Serbia. By 1865, France, under Napoleon III was the only
nation strong enough economically to challenge the might of the Sterling and the
Bank of England. Napoleon III set up the Latin Monetary Union, pegging most
continental currencies to the French franc. But in the new Europe of 2004,
members face a hodgepodge of requirements, regulations and institutions coming
out of Brussels. The name of the body of rules and regulations, acquis
communautaire is still French but France no longer sets out the rules. The
bureaucracy of Brussels, vast, lumbering, yet oddly effective is truly
multinational and supranational. When Giscard d’Estaing was named President of
the Constitutional Convention, he assumed and it was perceived that France would
again be at the helm of the next stage of unification, but the results have been
messy proving that French will political no longer suffices to impose itself on
25 nations.
Recognition, allegiance and emotional resonance to specific symbols also define
identity. France is actually quite relaxed, as its culture with a capital C is
its inbred symbol. Marianne, the Marseillaise and even the French franc are no
longer essential to national identification. Unlike Germany, where the currency
became the first symbol of post war reconstruction and acceptability in the
world community, therefore the loss of the DeutscheMark was far more traumatic,
France like Belgium or Italy responded pragmatically to the changeover to the
euro. By 2004, a strong euro in defiance to the dollar proves that the value
rather than the name of the currency mattered.
But now we have to attack the hard issues: history and language. EU enlargement, celebrated on May 1, transforming the former Communist workers holiday into a symbol of unification and Westernization, carries a vast burden of history as each nation must now find common historical and cultural ground, facing past traumas in the light of new crisis. On April 25, 2004 French television, Antenne 2 aired a program about an French lycee outside of Paris which organized a trip to the concentration camps in Poland , forcing its students to face with horrified awareness the real consequences of racism, anti-Semitism and repression. History continues to haunt Europe. The Iraqi conflict, the ongoing crisis in the Middle East, fear of terrorism since September 11, heightened by the Madrid bombing, increased incidents of anti-Semitism and the urgency of dealing with the growing Muslim population (nearly 8 million in France) has re-invigorated the debate on integration, assimilation and xenophobia.
Since WWII French left wing
intellectuals, led by Sartre and the existentialists in the 1950s and 1960s set
the political litmus tests for Europe. Now as in the case of Regis Debray,
political identities and allegiances are not merely in flux, but appear to have
lost their anchor. Regis Debray, poster boy for pro-Marxist political
philosophy, apologist of Castro in the 1970s, communication and media advisor
(coining the phrase medialogues) under Mitterand in the 1980s, became fervent
admirer of DeGaulle and Chirac apologist in the 1990s, now part of the Stasi
commission on secularism issues and recently send to Haiti as
mediator-philosopher. Is this just one intellectual’s blatant opportunism or is
this symptomatic of a generation of public intellectual’s loss of focus and
clear beliefs? Regis Debray in recent interviews claims that his new found
adherence to Chirac and Gaullism is in line with French history from Francois I
to Henri IV to De Gaulle, a French raison d’etat in a polycentric world which
seems to reconcile his contempt for “ homo economicus” ( code word for
americanization) with pro-Gaullist nostalgia for the glory of France.
But the problem is that Chirac who at first offered strong, balanced leadership
now offers only grand standing rhetoric with very little moral validation.
Vacillating and defensive toward both the TransAtlantic alliance and the new
member countries of the European Union, his vision has become Gaullism “lite”.
There is a profound crisis in France triggered by non French led nor French instigated EU enlargement (despite the Chirac rhetoric in Nice 2000), the breakdown in US-EU dialogue in 2003-2004, the crisis in the Middle East and the weakening of the Franco-German partnership within Europe. In the wake of the Iraqi crisis there is a tendency to define being French or German as not being American, as if European identity was to be explained in relation to a negative reaction to the United States. But this is a short term response, neither a solution nor a resolution to what being European means.
Slowly some public intellectuals are beginning to refute Chirac’s domestic policies and stance on Iraq. Bernard Levy, Bernard Kouchner, Andre Kaspi, Andre Glucksmann, Pascal Bruckner have expressed concern about the rising tide of religious intolerance and anti-Semitism as far more dangerous than re-asserting French prestige. Pascal Bruckner, speaking of French and German attitudes, was quoted in the Financial Times on February 15, 2004: “Anti-Americanism can only be very ambivalent… where American culture sets the tone…. Our great problem as Europeans is that we want to exit from history. Sometime after 1989, we developed the belief that barbarism could be refuted intellectually”. In fact, after losses in the regional elections in 2004, Chirac’s new cabinet with Michel Barnier replacing Dominique de Villepin as Foreign Minister was a clear sign that the French government is no longer trying to provoke Washington.
The simple and simplistic
response has been to refute all American influences and policies, to see all
evil emanating from outside. This response which has occurred throughout French
history, from John Law to German-Jewish influences after the Franco-Prussian
War. However a reversion to cultural insularity in times of crisis has been the
stronghold of the right. Anti-EU, anti-globalization, anti- euro, anti-Arab and
anti- Jewish factions characterize the Front National, but since 2001, the
problem is far more widespread as anti-Americanism has spread from right to left
and permeated the intellectual elite. Professor Andre Kaspi, expert on American
politics at the Sorbonne wrote: “Cultural americanization has destabilized
French society: the French no longer really know who they are and this provokes
for some a reaction of paradoxical rejection. Those who claim they dislike the
U.S. are the very it who consume American movies and eat at McDonalds” (France-Amerique,
February 20, 2004).
Despite the vehement rhetoric against the present Bush administration,
the validity of the Trans-Atlantic alliance, dependency of the US military force
and lack of cohesive EU responses has been at issue since Europe show of
ineptitude and internal strife in Bosnia and Kosovo.
Since 1989 it has been harder
for Western powers to locate and define clear allies and enemies. Economic and
political allies and adversaries are no longer necessarily the same, the lines
of demarcation between similar ideologies and similar policies is blurred and in
transition. After 1992 in France the distinctions between the left and right
began to shift, as extreme groups at both ends of the political spectrum felt
threatened by European unification. The left feared economic marginalization,
the right feared loss of French core values and identities. The quest for
scapegoats reached its climax in the French elections of 2002, which brought
LePen and the Front National within reach of real political power. Extremist
factions across Europe could rally around a broad agenda of ant-EU, anti-euro,
anti-immigration, anti-Islamic, anti-Semitic positions. Tragically the Iraqi
conflict and the US-EU tensions has further exacerbated atavistic fears and
reactions.
As in each period of serious political and economic crisis France becomes
nostalgic. Eugene Weber wrote concerning French fetishistic referencing Gaullist
ancestry:
“ ‘Nos ancetres’ may be fading away, but in France, the dead live longer than in
other places” ( My France, Politics, Culture, Myth, 1991). This nostalgia
translates into mythologizing and mythifying the past, seeking to justify
France’s civilizing mission, and to claim that true Frenchness cannot be tainted
by foreigners, nor foreign influence and money. Le Pen’ rhetoric derives in a
straight line from Barres, Bourget, to virulent anti-Semitism of Drumont’s La
France Juive to Maurras’ Action Francaise through Vichy and Laval.
On the left the quest for maintaining French identity was more culturally
oriented, but deeply immersed in anti-economic, anti- mercantile rhetoric as in
Mitterand’s statement during the GATT negotiation in 1993: “Nos cultures ne sont
pas a negocier” (Interview, Antenne 2, October 1993).
Since the eighteenth century, France has had to straddle the divide between
Catholicism and rationalism, caught between Pascal and Descartes, desirous of
strong, paternalistic leadership with precise perimeters, order under which
creative chaos could flourish. France has a long illustrious history of
revolutions, but in reality the French like the theory far more than the
actuality of revolution. George Sand, Hugo, Flaubert, even Thiers, great
proponents of the ideals of the left in 1848, were outraged by the actual
takeover of the Paris Commune of 1871 and accepted the brutal repression and
return to law and order. Braudel in Identite de la France (1986) wrote
that France has always welcomed a blend of cultures, but not a loss of specific
identity. France could accept assimilation, but throughout its history, this has
been a one way street: the other, (the foreigner, the expatriate, the refuge)
was assimilated into French culture, curriculum and language. Cortazar, Milan
Kundera (who defines himself as Czech-French), Marquez, Ilya Ehrenbourg wrote
their works in French. American intellectuals, artists, musicians were welcomed
as they embraced French cultural norms.
Has this paradigm imploded?
For the first time since the Middle Ages, a generation of minorities, children
of refugees from France’s colonies, are now demanding to be integrated on their
own terms. A new generation of disenfranchised, militant Muslims are demanding
that they are French, but refuse the principles of secularism, cultural,
educational, bureaucratic and administrative norms. They no longer want to just
contribute to French culture, but to function within their own cultural rules
and boundaries.
France has led the charge against moving forward Turkey’s accession to European
Union membership. These reasons range from the neutral: economic (hardly
justifiable if Poland, Lithuania and Latvia are now members), political
instability, (no longer valid since the AKP and Erdogan came to power in 2002),
human right issues (although significant reforms are being undertaken under
pressure to adhere to EU norms) to the assertion that the EU is a
Judeo-Christian coalition and Turkey does not fit into the designed model. The
problem is that as long as Turkey remains marginalized and therefore defined as
outside of European identity, it will continue to dent legitimization of Islamic
minorities within Europe. A stable, prosperous and strategically vital moderate
Muslim nation in the European Union would facilitate assimilation and would
counterbalance accusations of exclusion.
In 1997 at the height of the economic boom, France wanted to meet globalization
head on. When Alain Minc wrote La mondialisation heureuse, the idea was
that France would not imitate but adapt US stylized globalization: keep its
linguistic integrity, increase entrepreneurship, accept technology and
investment. By 2002 the promise of technology and modernity had proven illusory.
The promise of high tech prosperity had given way to fear of American
acculturation and robotics as expressed in such works as Houellebecque’s
Platforme.
In 2001 when Jacques Derrida gave his acceptance speech for the Adorno prize in Frankfurt, he offered a reinterpretation of Adorno’s essay “Was is Deutsche?”. Adorno expressing his desire to return to Germany in 1949, after spending the war years in exile in the United States, did not focus on homesickness ‘ Heimweh” but on the language. Derrida elaborated on the distinction between “Vaterstadt”: European construction, institutions, economic/political causality, the rational and Muttersprach, the ‘ ur-culturel”, the semiotic, the instinctual. Language in France falls into this realm more than any other language in the EU. In part the very qualities that made French the key language made it vulnerable to American English: its precision, complexity, nuances and above all the fact English can be spoken badly while one cannot and is not allowed to mangle French. French spoken by 175 million francophones worldwide is however again perceived as elitist, evoking stereotypes of luxury and cultural specificity.
French language, the main stay of French culture, its key export since the Renaissance is no longer the dominant language. The attempt to modernize the language, with vast outlays of funds and resources by the French government in the 1980s and early 1990s had not counterbalanced the total pervasive impact of English in business, technology and diplomacy. In the name of linguistic integrity, language laws insisting on documentation and advertising only in French, official refusal to integrate American technical-technological and financial vocabulary (creating a separate semantic field with technological terms derived from greco-latin etymology instead of modifying globally recognizable Anglo-American terms.) has isolated the language. The language of diplomacy and negotiations, of the educated classes throughout the continent (Tolstoy being accused by the Slavophiles of writing large portions of War and Peace in French), had to face by 2003 that 55% of EU Commission documents and 36% of Parliament texts are first written in English.
The relationship between France and the European Union is in transition. Chirac’s offensive arrogance toward the new members decision to largely back the U.S. in the Iraqi conflict in 2003 made it clear that France no longer carries the same clout. The inability of France and Germany to maintain the Stability Pact proved that they will have a harder time imposing economic “do as I say, not as I do” set of criteria to transitioning EU economies.
Milan Kundera, perhaps the
most original and subtle interpreter of post-communist EU identity wrote a work
called: Identity in 1997. A book of terrible personal loss and sense of
loss of self it is set in a tight spatial and temporal framework, the question
is how do we recognize the other and how do we see ourselves within this
context. Identification is the simple part: “Vaterstadt” imposes its rules;
passports, legal requirements, but identity is subjective, language, hope,
visions the sense of transcendence and acceptance.
A .S. Byatt in her New York Times article “What is a European” quoted
Churchill’s 1948 speech at the Congress of Europe:
“The exiled diplomat Salvador de Madariaga said: ‘This Europe must be born. And
she will, when Spaniards say ‘our Chartres’, Englishmen ‘our Cracow’, Italians
‘our Copenhagen’, when Germans say ‘our Bruges’…. Then will Europe live. For
then it will be that the spirit that leads history will have uttered the
creative words: fiat Europe.”
This ideal of instinctual
merging of national identification, of national symbols and cultural icons is
still in the future. The irony is that the American model of melding ethnic and
culturally diverse groups is still the most effective. Achieving a sense of
Europe as a personal identity will take at least another generation, perhaps
more in France. Cross regional education, training programs, internships for
young managers and joint ventures are easing the transition for the educated,
largely urban classes but the process will be slow and often painful for the
poorer, isolated and disenfranchised members of society. Europe will have to
prove itself as a viable identity rather than impose itself in rules, laws and
media.
Only then will France achieve what Stendhal, pseudonym for Henri Beyle, author,
social commentator and diplomat wanted on his epitaph:
“Henri Beyle, Milanese. He lived, wrote, loved. This soul admired Cimarose,
Mozart, and Shakespeare”