Confessing Evangelical

Contrary the impression that this post may have given, I do in fact have a great love for France and for its language, food, culture, landscape, food etc, and would happily spend every holiday there if given the chance (though we're not going this year, due in part to the logistics of taking a baby abroad).

I was reminded of this last night, watching the documentary A Sunday in Hell, described, accurately, on the BBC Four website as "one of the best cycling films ever made ... [a] vivid and gruelling look at the 1976 Paris-Roubaix single-day bike race". The Paris-Roubaix is otherwise known as "the Hell of the North": 166 miles, much of it along the dreaded pavés, the crude cobbled country tracks that are still to be found in parts of northern France. It was a fascinating film, and also the first time I'd ever seen footage of Eddie Merckx in action. Merckx is still generally regarded as the greatest cyclist of all time (Lance Armstrong notwithstanding), though in fact he failed to win on this particular occasion.

So, unlike some members of the Lutheran Blogosphere I could mention :-), I have a lot of time for France. I even have a grudging admiration for (if not agreement with) its foreign policy, as does even a notorious neo-con warmonger like Mark Steyn. To mark Bastille Day last month, Steyn re-posted his article Surrender Monkeys (you'll need to scroll to the bottom of the page), in which he criticises the "cheese-eating surrender monkey" jibe as being an overly simplistic description of French foreign policy:

There are many idiotic incoherent leaders in the world, but Jacques Chirac is not among them. Say what you like about M. le President - call him irresponsible, call him unreliable, throw in shifty, devious, corrupt, and almost absurdly conceited. But he’s not stupid. The issue for the French is very straightforward: What’s in it for us?

...What’s not in it for France is that America should emerge with its present pre-eminence even more enhanced. France is in the business of la gloire de la republique, and since 1992 the main obstacle to that has been the post-Soviet unipolar geopolitical settlement. They are not temperamentally suited to being anyone’s sidekick: If Tony Blair wants to play Athens to America’s Rome, or Tonto to Bush’s Lone Ranger, or Sandy the dog to Dubya’s Little Orphan Annie, fine. The French aren’t interested in any awards for Best Supporting Actor. This isn’t quite the same as being a bunch of spineless appeasers...

What distinguishes French foreign policy is not la capitulation des singes qui mangent le fromage, but a steely-eyed self-interest, unhampered by concerns over what lesser nations might consider "hypocrisy":

Just before the Iraq war, there was a spot of bother in Ivory Coast. We can skip the details - President Wossname represents the southern Wotchamacallit tribe and they’re unpopular with natives in the northern province of Hoogivsadam. Something like that. But next thing you know, French troops have locked down the entire joint and forced both parties into a deeply unpopular peace deal that suits the Quai d’Orsay but nobody else. All of this while the UN is hunkered down in a month-long debate on whether to approve Article IV Sub-section 7.3 (d) of Hans Blix’s Baghdad hotel bill. Ivory Coast is nominally a sovereign state. The French have no more right to treat it as a colony than the British have to treat Iraq as a colony. But they do. And they don’t care what you think about it.

That's even before we consider the Rainbow Warrior, or French testing of nuclear weapons despite furious worldwide opposition. And it's easy to see what would happen if Osama went for the Big One:

Let’s say the Islamists had long-range WMDs. If they nuked Montpelier (Vermont), M. Chirac would insist that Bush needed to get a strong Security Council resolution before responding. If they nuked Montpellier (France), Iraq [shurely Iran, Mark?] would be a crater by lunchtime.

In short, France's strategic aim since the Second World War - and especially since 1989 - has been to neutralise American power by making it as difficult as possible for the US to exercise that power effectively:

You can’t beat the Americans on the battlefield, but you can tie them down limb by limb in the UN and other supranational bodies ... And, on this terrain, Paris figures, Americans always lose. Either they win but get no credit, as in Afghanistan. Or they win a temporary constrained victory to be subverted by subsequent French machinations, as in the first Gulf War. Through it all France is admirably upfront in its unilateralism: It reserves the right to treat French Africa as its colonies, Middle Eastern dictators as its clients, the European Union as a Greater France and the UN as a kind of global condom to prevent the spread of Americanization. All this it does shamelessly and relatively effectively. It’s time the rest of us were so clear-sighted.