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Friday 5 September 2008

Take France seriously

The importance of being serious about France

The new French ambassador is a figure of significance

Nothing could be further from the truth. The state continues to incarnate the will, identity and ambition of the nation. The nation and its state has the sovereign power to take life by sending its soldiers to die. It takes our money through taxes. It decides the rules by which we express our sexuality, get help when ill, and whether a young woman can ‘manifest her religion’ (to quote the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights) by wearing the Muslim veil at school as well as in the street — permitted by the British state but forbidden by French law. The nation and its state decides if abortion is illegal, as in Poland and Ireland, and what speed we can drive our cars — limited in France and Britain but without any controls on the autobahnen of Germany.

So what the British and French nations do via their states is of the highest importance for their citizens and for their mutual relationship. An ambassador has the high duty to represent the authority and power of the state and the nation in a foreign country. Despite the EU, despite the hundreds of thousands of French in Britain and British in France, the two countries are foreign to each other. Gordon Brown has no French. President Sarkozy has little English. Good ambassadors in Paris and London can be mutual interpreters so that the two states, as represented by their respective chiefs, can understand each other.

Being an ambassador of France in London will be to live with the eternal curse of the essential Anglo-French question: do we like each other? Can we work together? One view is that of the 19th-century British foreign secretary George Canning, who said that French governments ‘have but two rules of action; to thwart us whenever they know our object, and when they know it not, to imagine one for us, and set about to thwarting that’.

Contrast this with the view of Duff Cooper, the close friend and ally of Winston Churchill who resigned as Britain’s minister of war in 1938 rather than share the dishonour of Chamberlain and Daladier over Munich. In 1944, Cooper was sent by Churchill to be ambassador in Paris. Cooper hoped, he wrote later, ‘for closer relations between the two countries [France and the United Kingdom], with integration as the final aim, and that the solidarity of this north-west corner of France might become the nucleus of a great international combine, larger and more powerful than the Soviet Union or the United States’.

Alas, there are too many in London who believe that France exists only to thwart Britain. And Paris throngs with those in high places for whom les Anglo-Saxons are the eternal foe. The European Union cannot substitute itself — even if this were desirable — for the desire and will of its great member states to co-operate. That requires national leadership.

More articles from: Denis MacShane | this section

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