Alphen,
Netherlands. 11 August. It seems apt in this year of all years, the
bicentennial of the Battle of Waterloo, to quote Charles Maurice de
Talleyrand-Perigord. Talleyrand was one-time French royalist, one-time Napoleon’s
foreign minister, one-time French ambassador to London and perhaps the most
skilled and cynical diplomat at the 1815 Congress of Vienna. Talleyrand famously
said that one is, “….never as far away from the target, as when you do not know
where you’re going”. Were he around
today he would probably have said the same about Europe in a world awash with
dangerous change. Critically, whatever the mutual irritations and at times
contempt London and Paris feel for each other the two old Powers must uphold together
Realist strategic principles of power and influence.
It will not be
easy. Indeed, all the ingredients exist for one of those tetchy and difficult
periods in Franco-British relations which come along as regularly as the Bateaux Mouches on the summer Seine. The
Calais migrant crisis has once again opened up various fissures and the
hackneyed clichés of mistrust into which the relationship still has a
propensity to tumble. Such tensions are exacerbated by the contrasting politics
of the two countries. Britain is led by
a Conservative administration committed (or so it claims) to austerity. France
is led by a Socialist administration committed to precisely the opposite. Worse, Francois Hollande and David Cameron
simply do not like each other. Consequently, the last Franco-British ‘summit’
was reduced to a rather forced photo op in an Oxfordshire pub – the inebriate discussing
indifferently the irrelevant?
Furthermore, on
the face of it at least London and Paris take very different views about the
future direction of the EU. President
Hollande is pushing Germany hard to introduce Eurobonds and with them the mutualisation
of Eurozone debt. Such a step would necessarily drive deeper Eurozone
integration and with the further marginalisation of Britain within the EU. With
a Brexit vote just around a corner France seems to show no signs of yielding to
any of Cameron’s calls for EU reform. Worse, at least some of Hollandes’
closest allies seem to actively welcome the prospect of a British EU exit, even
though it is hard to see how such a departure is in France’s best strategic
interest. Indeed, even if Britain does depart an unreformed EU somehow the strategic
partnership with France will need to be protected from the inevitable political
fall-out.
There are some
limited grounds for optimism. Behind all the Euro-speak power still courses
through the veins of the European body politic in much the same way Talleyrand
would have understood and indeed made use of. For all France’s pretentions to
want ‘ever closer political union’ the French people have no great desire to
see French distinctiveness subsumed by some all-subsuming European
super-state. Moreover, whilst
contemporary Germany sees itself (and by and large acts) as a community
champion Berlin’s economic power now dwarfs that of France. Consequently, the
original idea of the Single Currency as a framework within which to embed and
thus constrain a re-united Germany has failed from a French policy perspective. Even Berlin sees the Franco-British strategic
relationship as an essential counterweight to its own power and thus crucial to
a legitimate European political balance.
Specifically, the
need to underpin ‘European’ influence with hard, credible twenty-first century
military power remains the strongest imperative for London and Paris to
maintain a close strategic relationship. France dresses up such initiatives as
the Common Joint Expeditionary Force (CJEF) as a vital step on the road to what
General de Gaulle once called the “third force”. Britain inevitably sees such
initiatives as a vital component in a stronger US-friendly European pillar of
NATO. Whatever the political packaging the pressing strategic need for
Europeans to engage more effectively in major, complex crisis prevention and
management is undoubted. And, such
influence will only happen with Britain and France together at the core of much-needed
European strategic renovation. That was the goal of the 1998 St Malo
Declaration and the 2010 Franco-British Security and Defence Treaty but due to ‘distractions’
has not happened.
Talleyrand once said
that the “…art of statesmanship was to foresee the inevitable and to expedite
its occurrence”. If those charged with
power in both London and Paris properly understand the scale of change underway
and agree where they need to go they will also recognise that for all the
differences of style and emphasis Britain and France will and must remain strategic
partners. Ironically, this is something Talleyrand himself believed.
Therefore, it
falls to London and Paris to act together to drive forward a distinctly
European big picture understanding of the nature and scale of the momentous
change that is underway. Indeed, with illiberal
power challenging liberal power in many domains Britain and France must act as
the strategic conscience of Europe. Fail and all the current focus with the internal
structure of the EU will soon come to seem like misplaced and irrelevant
self-obsession.
Britain and France
somehow have to hang together for if not they will each hang separately and the
rest of Europe with them. To paraphrase
Talleyrand; strategy is far too serious a business to be left to the
politicians but it is to the politicians that strategy is ultimately left.
Julian
Lindley-French
