The French Way (23 page)

The United States was anxious that NATO, without the Soviet threat, would inevitably wither away—as the French expected. But the Bush administration was determined to stay in Europe: the president stated forcefully that the United States would remain “a European
power.”
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This Atlanticist vision, a formula to which the British also subscribed, assumed, according to one U.S. diplomat, that American power was necessary “to balance continuing, if diminishing, Soviet military preponderance, serve as a counterweight to a newly powerful Germany, and lend a general stability” to Europe as the Warsaw Pact disintegrated and the Soviets withdrew.
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According to one insider, “No idea was more strongly and deeply held in the upper levels of the [Bush] administration than the core conviction that the American presence was indispensable to European stability and therefore to vital American interests.”
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Or as National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft put it to one French official, Jacques Attali, American aims were to prevent Europeans from returning to the old ways that had led to two wars and to combat isolationist forces at home that would bring an American withdrawal.
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What Scowcroft did not admit was that the United States also wanted in principle to continue to have a say in European politics: it was determined that the United States and NATO would remain the pivot of European affairs and not be confined narrowly to providing security.

Washington and Paris were pulling in opposite directions over NATO's role in post-Cold War Europe. Where the Americans sought to expand its functions, extend it eastward, and heighten its multinational character, the French thought the alliance would begin to shed responsibilities and that the Americans would, sooner or later, disengage. For the Americans a united Germany should be firmly situated within the Atlantic Alliance; for the French it should also be embedded in the EC. It is no surprise that once negotiations began over institutional reform, the Americans found the French were “always the most problematic.”
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In December 1989 Secretary of State James Baker spoke boldly about a new Atlantic Alliance that would be more political in nature, negotiate relations with the democracies emerging in Eastern Europe, and operate outside the Euro-Atlantic zone. Paris interpreted the proposal as a way to maintain American preeminence in the alliance and Europe while expanding its scope. The Mitterrand administration expressed its reservations about Baker's scheme and pursued its own project of rein
forcing the French/German tandem within the EC, and channeling the process through the CSCE and a new pan-European confederation. The Americans were annoyed.

Such annoyance remained out of sight at first. When Presidents Bush and Mitterrand met at Saint-Martin in the Antilles in December, the former insisted on Germany remaining in NATO and the latter recommended moving slowly lest events destabilize Gorbachev. Mitterrand did not press his projects, like holding a CSCE summit. The French public assumed all was well when they were treated on television to images of the two presidents in shirtsleeves walking together on the beach.

In early 1990 political leaders and diplomats including the Soviets and the Germans, both West and East, moved ahead toward resolving the questions surrounding a united Germany. Margaret Thatcher could not conceal her misgivings and continued to issue warnings about going too fast. Mitterrand was deeply engaged in the process, but to American officials he appeared aloof, talking abstractly about a unified Europe regaining
its place in the world. They chided him, unfairly, for thinking about “distant horizons, not the compelling issues of the moment.”
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Figure 5. The European leader that George H. W. Bush most respected. Presidents George H. W. Bush and Francois Mitterrand at the Elysee, January 1993. Courtesy George H. W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum.

Personally, Bush and Mitterrand remained on good terms, though the latter confided to Gorbachev that Bush “has a very big drawback—he lacks original thinking altogether.”
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In contrast, Secretary of State James Baker and his French counterpart Roland Dumas were often testy with one another. Before the Key Largo Summit in April 1990 the American president wrote Mitterrand about the “critical importance” of Franco-American relations to European stability and conveyed his esteem for his colleague: “There is no European leader today whom I respect more than you.”
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Yet Bush cautioned, “I am convinced that the United States must remain profoundly engaged in Europe and in the midst of the Atlantic Alliance….If one leaves NATO only a narrow military function, its importance and the support it receives from western public opinion are certain to diminish as the Soviet military threat eases,” thus undermining America's commitment to Europe. He posited that the French president should accept a “strengthened political role” for the United States. One overly cynical adviser to Mitterrand interpreted Bush's letter as “the threat is clear: either the entire reorganization of Europe goes through NATO or the United States stops supporting Europe. Certainly Bush is fixated by the [European] Community. He doesn't support it; like his predecessors he wants [the United States] to be in a weak Europe.”
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When the two presidents met at Key Largo, Florida they avoided any skirmishes and relations remained genial. Mitterrand tried to dispel any suspicion that France wanted to exclude the United States from Europe while Bush denied charges, which had appeared in the press, that he had any intention of trying to force France into rejoining the integrated command. But he did state, “The support of the American public for our presence in Europe would collapse if the U.S. did not appear involved in European affairs. Thus it is advisable to extend the role of NATO giving it a greater political role.”
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Mitterrand simply responded that it would be wise for the alliance to stay within its traditional
geographic scope and function, that of defense. Despite the friendly atmosphere of this Florida summit, these tensions were bound to surface.

The Bush White House, instead of curtailing its role on the continent, was busy in the spring of 1990 reshaping the Atlantic Alliance to fit the newly emerging European order. In particular, it had to find some way to overcome Gorbachev's resistance to incorporating a united Germany into the alliance. In an attempt to placate the Soviets by proving that NATO was no longer a threat to them and that the Cold War was over, Secretary Baker proposed renouncing the seemingly aggressive doctrines of “flexible response” and “forward defense,” substituting the concept of “last resort” for nuclear weapons—that they would only be used in the hypothetical case that the West was losing a conventional war. He also advocated recasting NATO as a political organization and opening diplomatic contacts between the alliance and former members of the Warsaw Pact. There was, in addition, a proposal to reinforce the integrated command by adding multinational units like a new rapid reaction force. In response Mitterrand politely gave his approval to reinforcing the defensive character of the alliance, but reiterated France would remain outside the integrated command and was not bound by the new “last resort” doctrine. From the French perspective, he explained, for dissuasion to be effective it had to be “early”
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, meaning the purpose of the force de frappe was to prevent war, not to win one. At a special NATO summit meeting in London in July 1990 the Bush administration literally forced its new conception of the Atlantic Alliance on its partners.

In London the strains among the allies over the effects of German reunification on NATO became visible. Margaret Thatcher raised objections, as did Mitterrand, to the doctrine of “last resort,” and he also took exception to “politicizing” the alliance. His chief military adviser had reported earlier that it was probably necessary to modify the image of the alliance in order to appease the Soviets, but the American proposals served to tighten the integrated command structure and
reinforce their privileges at the expense of the Europeans. Nevertheless the adviser recommended against openly opposing the London resolutions because the Europeans were going to replace the Americans who were sure to disengage militarily.
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Defense minister Jean-Pierre Chevenement was more brutal, denouncing the agreement as an underhand way to strengthen “the integrated command and American leadership.”
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In the eyes of one French diplomat, the Americans at London demonstrated their “barely concealed indifference” to French views.
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At the closing press conference Mitterrand indirectly expressed his displeasure with the Americans and their high-handed ways by announcing that France would withdraw its military from Germany after unification.

For its part the State Department expressed irritation with the French for placing obstacles in their path toward maintaining U.S. leadership; these officials, in turn, disparaged French statesmanship as “erratic” and born out of a “sense of frustration.”
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They were, nevertheless, confident that the French would come around. Once again, trying to redirect the superpower by playing up to it and muting differences failed.

In fact, the French were fully engaged in the process of reunification. They were central, for example, in mediating German and Polish differences over boundaries and helping persuade Gorbachev to allow a united Germany to remain in NATO. French diplomats, however, were less successful in making the thirty-five-nation CSCE serve as the forum for dealing with Germany's—and Europe's—future. Gorbachev spoke warmly of the organization as “a common European home” and several newly liberated Eastern European nations looked to the institution as an alternative to the Warsaw Pact. French diplomats envisaged a grand conference staged in Paris in 1990 that would preside over the reunification of Germany and the birth of post-Cold War Europe; it would also invigorate the CSCE as an alternative to NATO as a security forum. But the White House and the Kohl government kept the German question off the CSCE's agenda out of fear of losing
momentum with extended deliberations in this large body. When the conference did meet in November, events had outrun it. The terms of German reunification had already been negotiated, robbing Paris of its moment of glory; the conference did little more than preside over a treaty on the reduction of conventional forces in Europe.

During the summer of 1990 the basic terms of reunification were negotiated between East and West Germany and ratified by the four wartime Allies. If the French did not get their way with framing much of the new order, at least they made certain that Germany remained anchored in the EC. From the outset Mitterrand had made his cooperation in the unification process dependent on keeping a united Germany committed to the EC and in particular to have it sign on to the EMU. The monetary union was elaborated in subsequent negotiations, and figured as part of the Maastricht Treaty drafted at the end of 1991. Mitterrand's major achievement was preserving rapport with the West Germans and winning Kohl to the principle of advancing the construction of Europe.
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From the French perspective, one last option for redesigning the new Europe was a proposal for a new continent-wide confederation—a project first vetted at the end of 1989. Mitterrand and his foreign minister Roland Dumas, who were the strongest advocates of a confederation among French policy makers, saw the scheme as a way of bringing the two parts of Europe together as well as lending support to reform in the Soviet Union. They also thought the newly freed countries of Eastern Europe were not ready for membership in the EC; the pan-European grouping was a way to mollify them and delay admission. Within the proposed confederation, which included the USSR but not the United States, Europeans both east and west could confer on political issues and cooperate in fields like economic development and the environment. In the end only Mitterrand and Gorbachev gave the project serious backing. The supposed principal beneficiaries of the scheme, the former Soviet satellites in Eastern Europe, refused the kind offer from Paris. Led by the Czechs, who were to host the inaugural
session of the confederation in Prague in June 1991, several of the East Europeans saw the plan as a subterfuge to keep them from joining the EC. They wanted to turn west, not east, and were not pleased with the presence of the Soviets. They preferred quick admission to the EC and NATO over the French scheme. Mitterrand harmed his own cause by mentioning the word
decades
as waiting time for East Europeans to enter the community because of their rundown economies. Germany was not enthusiastic either. In general, Europeans, other than the French, wanted to be close to NATO, especially since the summer putsch against Gorbachev in Moscow suggested chaos and violence to the east. The United States let it be known that it refused to be “used by the Europeans for security and held apart from other domains.”
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The Anglo-Americans lobbied to disrupt the project, prompting Mitterrand to complain about Washington pressuring the Czechs. Before the conference met in Prague, the pan-European confederation was dead.