The French Way (18 page)

During the presidential campaign Mitterrand criticized his rival, the incumbent Giscard, for being too accommodating to the Soviets, especially for meeting Leonid Brezhnev after the Afghanistan invasion. As early as 1977 he had warned that the SS-20s would lead to decoupling the United States from Europe. NATO, in his estimation, had always rested on the dubious assumption that the United States would automatically intervene with strategic nuclear weapons in the event of Soviet aggression. Soviet intermediate-range missiles would make what was already suspect unlikely, because Washington might hesitate at crossing the strategic threshold in the event of a tactical missile strike and ground attack by Moscow. By 1979-80 Mitterrand had come to accept the need to reinforce the Atlantic Alliance because a second Cold War had emerged. But this did not mean he would propose reentering NATO's integrated military command structure, endorse an extension of NATO's reach, accept the U.S. government's “bad habit” of avoiding consultation with its allies, sacrifice France's independent nuclear deterrent, or freeze relations with Moscow. The “new Atlanticism” would, as we shall see, resemble Gaullist balancing among the superpowers rather than a break with the past. As his adviser on international affairs phrased it, Mitterrand wanted to move France closer toward the United States and NATO, toward a policy that made France an “ami, allie, pas aligne.”
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Just as Francois Mitterrand was ready to cross the Atlantic, Ronald Reagan was anxious to scrap the policy of detente because he believed
it sustained the Cold War rather than ending it. The White House was determined to pursue a far more aggressive agenda against the Soviet Union, including spending heavily on arms, competing for advantage in the Third World, and doing whatever was necessary to weaken the Soviets. There was a happy convergence, with Reagan and Mitterrand moving in the same direction.

To the surprise and joy of the Left, Mitterrand became president in May 1981; the legislative elections that followed gave the socialists and their communist allies a majority, and the new government of Pierre Mauroy included four communist ministers. Now a socialist government in Paris would have to deal with a conservative administration in Washington.

As soon as he became president Mitterrand began courting the Americans—a typical pattern for incoming French heads of state.
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He was not only eager to implement his “new Atlanticism” as a riposte to the Soviet buildup but was also anxious to head off the major free-market liberal countries, the United States and the United Kingdom (where Margaret Thatcher was then prime minister), from “marginalizing socialist France.”
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There was good reason to be anxious. The Reagan administration expected trouble with what some labeled the “socialist-communist government” in Paris. They wondered, Would it be soft on communism and hard on NATO ? U.S. Ambassador Galbraith said he couldn't stand “the word socialism” and thought of Mitterrand as “an opportunist.”
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The new president gave his first interview to the
New York Times
, telling James Reston of his “kindred feeling for the American people,” his interest in visiting the United States, his misgivings about SS-20s, and his intention not of collectivizing the French economy but simply restoring to “national ownership what belonged to the nation.”
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Reagan immediately sent Vice President George H. W. Bush to Paris out of concern about the communist ministers. Mitterrand assured Bush that he had brought them into the government in order to weaken them and that they would not affect his foreign policy or the Atlantic
Alliance. The communists, the new president told his visitor, had “introduced a totalitarian poison” that was incompatible with the humanist traditions of French socialism.
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It was a good start for Bush and Mitterrand.

Mitterrand went further in wooing the Americans. He approved what was called the “dual track” strategy—that is, accompanying arms talks with the deployment of Pershing II and cruise missiles, which President Carter had begun and Reagan had now advanced, in order to balance Soviet intermediate-range missiles. From the French perspective, however, such deployment would only be a last resort should superpower negotiations over arms control being conducted in Geneva fail. Paris refused to let Moscow acquire the power to intimidate it on security issues and to decouple the United States from Europe.
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It was at the Ottawa Summit of Industrialized Nations in July 1981 that the two presidents first met. They tried to charm one another, with Mitterrand praising Reagan for his courage in facing his attempted assassination and Reagan inviting the French president to attend the two hundredth anniversary celebration of the Battle of Yorktown in October. Mitterrand tried to win Reagan's trust by passing important information gleaned by a French intelligence “mole” in Moscow about several Soviet projects, including revelations about the extent of Soviet espionage in the United States. Stunned by the intelligence, Reagan supposedly exclaimed, “That's the biggest fish since 1945.”
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He took his French colleague aside and explained how he had distrusted the communists ever since the Kremlin had supposedly trained a priest and sent him to Hollywood to take control of the screen actors' guild. When Mitterrand expressed some skepticism, Reagan informed him that there were many people in the United States who were unidentified communist spies. Mitterrand confided to an aide that Reagan had watched the TV series
The Invaders
too often.
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The French president visited North America three times during his first year in office, including the celebrations at Yorktown. Whatever differences existed over issues like American high interest rates
or the Sandinistas in Nicaragua were papered over. Mitterrand and Reagan were bent on courting one another. Mitterrand found Reagan, as he told the German chancellor Helmut Schmidt, “a man without ideas or culture…but underneath this exterior, you will find a man who is not stupid, who has abundant good sense and who is basically kind. And what he doesn't make out with his intelligence, he grasps innately.”
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Reagan was pleased that the French seemed on board; he was now convinced that their leader was a stout anticommunist.
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In fact, Reagan admitted that when he first met Mitterrand he did not realize there was a difference between socialism and communism.
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Pierre Mauroy's government took aim at the Soviets. The Ministry of Defense under Charles Hernu broke with tradition and singled out the USSR as “the primary threat to French security.”
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Mitterrand suspended regular summit meetings with the Kremlin as long as France was subject to blackmail by the SS-20s. In the spring of 1983 the minister of the interior expelled forty-seven Soviet officials from France, most presumed to be KGB agents, accused of scientific and military espionage. Later that year the Soviets inadvertently stoked the fire by shooting down a Korean passenger airliner. But the Elysee believed that the Kremlin didn't want war, that it instead wanted to threaten war to get what it wanted—or, as Mitterrand observed, “they play checkers, not poker.”
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The socialists had to act tough in order to persuade Moscow to negotiate a de-escalation of tension. The Mitterrand-Mauroy-Hernu team raised defense spending, overhauled conventional military forces, and enhanced strategic nuclear deterrence with programs like refitting its submarine fleet with multiple warhead missiles and developing longerrange tactical nuclear weapons (such as the Hades missile).
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The most novel addition was the creation of the Force d'Action Rapide (FAR) of 50,000 well-equipped troops capable of fighting on the German front line in case of a Soviet attack.
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France appeared to be moving away from reliance on nuclear deterrence toward engaging in conventional combat with NATO. As one defense expert concluded, the fear
was no longer that the United States would draw France into an unwanted conflict as in the days of de Gaulle but that it might not honor its obligation to its European allies should the Soviets attack. And the French acknowledged openly that Europe's defense depended on the Americans. Mitterrand reiterated time and again that France wanted the United States in Europe: “I continue to believe that the worst danger for us at present, as for our neighbors in Western Europe, would be that America withdraws from the shores of our continent.”
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(“At present”—
prisentement
—of course introduces some ambiguity to this affirmation.) Foreign minister Claude Cheysson admitted that “the guarantee of European territories that do not have nuclear weapons therefore can come only from the integrated command of NATO, that is to say, in fact, the U.S.”
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Nevertheless, the Mitterrand administration insisted it alone controlled the use of its military forces, including its nuclear deterrent. Furthermore, it argued, since the force de frappe was strictly defensive, it was not comparable to the huge nuclear arsenals of the two superpowers and should not be counted in arms limitations talks like those underway in Geneva that were aimed at curbing the new Euromissiles.

France, according to one defense official, “has no more complexes with respect to the [Atlantic] Alliance We contend that there is no discrepancy at all between our resolve for independence and our desire for solidarity.”
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Contact between the French military and NATO command was closer in the mid-1980s than ever before under the Fifth Republic.
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In addition to planning for the FAR there were many forms of cooperation, including joint naval maneuvers, access to French hospitals to treat American casualties, and the use of French airspace for the refueling of U.S. bombers. Out of the public eye, American and French experts were collaborating on nuclear weapons development. The program named Apollon, which began under Presidents Carter and Giscard, was covert because the Americans did not want to appear that they were violating their own law against sharing nuclear technology and the French sought to guard their image of nuclear independence.
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Reagan's administration would exploit this secret program to coerce Mitterrand to stop aiding the Sandinistas.

In a formal, diplomatic sense, as well as in its defense posture, the Fifth Republic warmed to the Atlantic Alliance even if it continued to remain outside its military command structure and limited its participation in its policy-making organ, the North Atlantic Council. Where Giscard had downplayed alliance formalities, in 1982 Mitterrand attended meetings of the alliance. The next year, for the first time since the 1960s, France hosted the annual meeting of the North Atlantic Council.
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Mitterrand proclaimed that the Atlantic Alliance and the force de frappe were the “two pillars of our security.”
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Outside the alliance France cooperated with the United States in Lebanon, Chad, and Iraq.

Reconciliation with Washington enjoyed far more domestic support on the right than on the left. Among the political class, Jacques Chirac, head of the Rassemblement pour la Republique (RPR) before he became prime minister in 1986, backed the socialists' endorsement of the dual-track strategy and preferred even closer consultation with NATO while Giscard, the leader of the Union pour la Democratie Française (UDF), tried to prove he was a better ally of the United States than was Mitterrand.
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But there was grumbling within the Socialist Party: Lionel Jospin, the secretary-general, insisted socialists had reservations about the new Atlanticism and the party's goal remained the dissolution of both NATO and the Warsaw Pact; other spokesmen criticized the United States as a country that had never conceived of a comprehensive international design except containment.
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To be sure, the communists were not pleased with the chummy Atlanticism of their own government. They accused their socialist partners of abandoning Gaullist principles of independence and security that assumed that French forces served only the goal of national defense.
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The media, meanwhile, were sharply divided about Reagan and, implicitly, about Atlanticism. If conservative, and even some moderate, journalists praised Reagan for abandoning the illusions of detente, columnists on the left were less indulgent, stressing his failures like the retreat from
Beirut after the attacks on U.S. and French servicemen in 1983.
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At the same time Washington's policies toward Central America and the Middle East were almost universally ridiculed in the press.

The French public was not enthusiastic about either the new Atlanticism or the stationing of Euromissiles. Whereas in other West European societies “stronger U.S. leadership” in the alliance was deemed desirable, in France half of both elites and the public believed it was not. Polls indicated that as little as a third of the respondents favored American deployment, and most preferred that arms negotiation take precedence over deployment.
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Almost half opposed stationing Pershing II missiles even if the Soviets maintained their stock of SS-20s.
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At Bonn in January 1983 the French rapprochement with the United States made world headlines. In an unprecedented address to the Bundestag, the president of France lectured the legislators on the need to support Chancellor Helmut Kohl and the Christian Democrats who had endorsed the deployment of Pershing and cruise missiles. Mitterrand the socialist spoke out against the pacifist tendencies of the German Social Democrats and asked the West Germans to back the Atlantic Alliance, arguing that it was the Soviets who had wrecked the balance in Europe. Ronald Reagan wrote to thank Mitterrand for his speech: “Your Bonn speech reinforces the Alliance at the very moment when European countries are admitting their impotence, or at any rate their anxiety, in the face of public opinion. I fully share your judgment about the risks of decoupling between Europe and the United States. Your speech is an important contribution to our mutual efforts at reinforcing Western security…it is of inestimable value.”
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The analyst Philip Gordon concludes that “the Mitterrand government went further to cooperate with NATO than any French administration for more than twenty years including that of the so-called Atlanticist, Giscard d'Estaing.”
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It would be over a decade before a French president would come so close to embracing the alliance again.