CIAO DATE: 11/04

European France / French Europe: Deconstructing EU Identities

Irene Finel-Honigman
Institute for the Study of Europe
School of International and Public Affairs
Columbia University

Occasional Paper Series No. 55

April 26, 2004

European Union Studies Center

In 1993 in the aftermath of Maastricht, the late Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski presented “Red, White, Blue”, a French-Polish film trilogy which deciphered the feelings of loss, mobility, deception and creativity that this new Europe would bring to the East. In Blue, Juliette Binoche plays a recently widowed musician, instrumental in creating a new work entitled Song of Reunification while all around her the threads of her own unified existence have totally unraveled. As she uncovers the deceptions in her past, she slowly begins to accept the overwhelming challenges and redefinition of a new identity. In 2004 as 10 new countries officially become members of the European Union the themes of loss, isolation, identity and renewal are again at the forefront. The question: What is a European? (A.S. Byatt, New York Times, October 13, 2002) and its corollary what is Europe remains just as confusing as a decade ago. Jacques Attali in 1994 wrote Europe(s) explaining thus his plural title:

“It is neither one continent, nor one culture, nor one people, nor one history” therefore claiming that its identity can only be conjugated in the plural. Identity in a region of twenty five nations with a population of 450 million people, without one common language, bound together by institutions, laws and regulations is one of the most complex and nebulous of concepts, often eliciting subjective responses yet demanding objective criteria. For the purposes of this analysis on France and its present crisis within Europe, I will use the following set of criteria: culture, history, institutions, symbols and language. The process of melding into a federal, multinational identity is the most difficult in countries or institutions where these elements are the most deeply ingrained. Therefore France, more than other European nations, with the exception of the UK, tries to preserve psychological sovereignty, while maintaining a position of power/prestige within the melding process of a larger, more fragmented and for the first time in EU history, less and less franco-centric regional entity. France has a long history of being pro-European, but only if and when France was perceived as the center of influence. At the Congres de la Paix in 1849 and in 1855 Victor Hugo wrote and spoke of one Europe: “No more armies, no more borders, one continental currency, all freedoms and Paris, capital of this Europe, seat of a National Assembly elected by universal suffrage”. De Gaulle was pro-European, but his interpretation of a Europe of nations meant that France would take the lead in creating European identity and its institutions. For De Gaulle there were only three “international identities: Russia, France and America.” (Peyrefitte, C’etait De Gaulle)

As Paul Kennedy in The Rise and Fall of Great Powers wrote in 1987: “Yet France always had an impact upon affairs, far greater than might be expected from a country with a mere 4% of world GDP…it may have been due to sheer national-cultural assertiveness.”

The oldest intact nation in continental Europe, since the reign of Charlemagne France has personified and codified the notion of “patrie” and of “la douce France”. Cultural iconography since the twelfth century would include literature, art, a more “civilized” way of life and discourse imposed on the rest of the Continent.

Paraphrasing Thomas Mann’s apocryphal phrase of a German Europe or a European Germany in France’s case, the atavistic fear and hope is not of raw power, but of influence, a persuasive force which has consistently shaped its place within Europe since the inception of the European Union in the European Coal and Steel Community of 1951. Monnet, Schuman, De Gaulle, Valery Giscard’Estaing, Mitterand, Delors spoke for Europe in the name of France. The political motor to Germany’s economic motor, France and Germany forged a symbiotic relationship which carried Europe from the EEC to the Euro. Long before history and world opinion could allow Germany to have a voice in the political discourse, France functioned as initiator, lightening rod, mentor and political will. De Gaulle- Adenauer, Giscard and Helmut Schmidt and Mitterand and Kohl genuinely liked each other personally and needed each other politically. Despite proclamations to the contrary, the lukewarm relationship between Chirac and Schroder, coupled with the dilution of mutual need and obligation has changed this partnership into more form than content.

Hubert Vedrine, former Minister of Foreign Affairs, interviewed by Dominique Moisi in France in the Age of Globalization explains the French–EU relationship: “Europe gets stronger without France getting weaker”, but he also states that “France is the only country, along with the United States that sees itself bearing a universal message.”

Institutionally France set the tone and the rules for national unification throughout the XIXth century. Imposing Napoleonic structures, laws, curriculum and democratization of civil society across Europe, serving as model for Italian unification in 1866 and German unification in 1870, the rhetoric and ideals of the French Revolution were reiterated by the socialists of 1848, the nationalist liberation movements in Poland, Greece, Serbia. By 1865, France, under Napoleon III was the only nation strong enough economically to challenge the might of the Sterling and the Bank of England. Napoleon III set up the Latin Monetary Union, pegging most continental currencies to the French franc. But in the new Europe of 2004, members face a hodgepodge of requirements, regulations and institutions coming out of Brussels. The name of the body of rules and regulations, acquis communautaire is still French but France no longer sets out the rules. The bureaucracy of Brussels, vast, lumbering, yet oddly effective is truly multinational and supranational. When Giscard d’Estaing was named President of the Constitutional Convention, he assumed and it was perceived that France would again be at the helm of the next stage of unification, but the results have been messy proving that French will political no longer suffices to impose itself on 25 nations.

Recognition, allegiance and emotional resonance to specific symbols also define identity. France is actually quite relaxed, as its culture with a capital C is its inbred symbol. Marianne, the Marseillaise and even the French franc are no longer essential to national identification. Unlike Germany, where the currency became the first symbol of post war reconstruction and acceptability in the world community, therefore the loss of the DeutscheMark was far more traumatic, France like Belgium or Italy responded pragmatically to the changeover to the euro. By 2004, a strong euro in defiance to the dollar proves that the value rather than the name of the currency mattered.

But now we have to attack the hard issues: history and language. EU enlargement, celebrated on May 1, transforming the former Communist workers holiday into a symbol of unification and Westernization, carries a vast burden of history as each nation must now find common historical and cultural ground, facing past traumas in the light of new crisis. On April 25, 2004 French television, Antenne 2 aired a program about an French lycee outside of Paris which organized a trip to the concentration camps in Poland, forcing its students to face with horrified awareness the real consequences of racism, anti-Semitism and repression. History continues to haunt Europe. The Iraqi conflict, the ongoing crisis in the Middle East, fear of terrorism since September 11, heightened by the Madrid bombing, increased incidents of anti-Semitism and the urgency of dealing with the growing Muslim population (nearly 8 million in France) has re-invigorated the debate on integration, assimilation and xenophobia.

Since WWII French left wing intellectuals, led by Sartre and the existentialists in the 1950s and 1960s set the political litmus tests for Europe. Now as in the case of Regis Debray, political identities and allegiances are not merely in flux, but appear to have lost their anchor. Regis Debray, poster boy for pro-Marxist political philosophy, apologist of Castro in the 1970s, communication and media advisor (coining the phrase medialogues) under Mitterand in the 1980s, became fervent admirer of DeGaulle and Chirac apologist in the 1990s, now part of the Stasi commission on secularism issues and recently send to Haiti as mediator-philosopher. Is this just one intellectual’s blatant opportunism or is this symptomatic of a generation of public intellectual’s loss of focus and clear beliefs? Regis Debray in recent interviews claims that his new found adherence to Chirac and Gaullism is in line with French history from Francois I to Henri IV to De Gaulle, a French raison d’etat in a polycentric world which seems to reconcile his contempt for “homo economicus” (code word for americanization) with pro-Gaullist nostalgia for the glory of France.

But the problem is that Chirac who at first offered strong, balanced leadership now offers only grand standing rhetoric with very little moral validation. Vacillating and defensive toward both the TransAtlantic alliance and the new member countries of the European Union, his vision has become Gaullism “lite”.

There is a profound crisis in France triggered by non French led nor French instigated EU enlargement (despite the Chirac rhetoric in Nice 2000), the breakdown in US-EU dialogue in 2003-2004, the crisis in the Middle East and the weakening of the Franco-German partnership within Europe. In the wake of the Iraqi crisis there is a tendency to define being French or German as not being American, as if European identity was to be explained in relation to a negative reaction to the United States. But this is a short term response, neither a solution nor a resolution to what being European means.

Slowly some public intellectuals are beginning to refute Chirac’s domestic policies and stance on Iraq. Bernard Levy, Bernard Kouchner, Andre Kaspi, Andre Glucksmann, Pascal Bruckner have expressed concern about the rising tide of religious intolerance and anti-Semitism as far more dangerous than re-asserting French prestige. Pascal Bruckner, speaking of French and German attitudes, was quoted in the Financial Times on February 15, 2004: “Anti-Americanism can only be very ambivalent… where American culture sets the tone…. Our great problem as Europeans is that we want to exit from history. Sometime after 1989, we developed the belief that barbarism could be refuted intellectually”. In fact, after losses in the regional elections in 2004, Chirac’s new cabinet with Michel Barnier replacing Dominique de Villepin as Foreign Minister was a clear sign that the French government is no longer trying to provoke Washington.

The simple and simplistic response has been to refute all American influences and policies, to see all evil emanating from outside. This response which has occurred throughout French history, from John Law to German-Jewish influences after the Franco-Prussian War. However a reversion to cultural insularity in times of crisis has been the stronghold of the right. Anti-EU, anti-globalization, anti- euro, anti-Arab and anti–Jewish factions characterize the Front National, but since 2001, the problem is far more widespread as anti-Americanism has spread from right to left and permeated the intellectual elite. Professor Andre Kaspi, expert on American politics at the Sorbonne wrote: “Cultural americanization has destabilized French society: the French no longer really know who they are and this provokes for some a reaction of paradoxical rejection. Those who claim they dislike the U.S. are the very it who consume American movies and eat at McDonalds” (France-Amerique, February 20, 2004).

Despite the vehement rhetoric against the present Bush administration, the validity of the Trans-Atlantic alliance, dependency of the US military force and lack of cohesive EU responses has been at issue since Europe show of ineptitude and internal strife in Bosnia and Kosovo. Since 1989 it has been harder for Western powers to locate and define clear allies and enemies. Economic and political allies and adversaries are no longer necessarily the same, the lines of demarcation between similar ideologies and similar policies is blurred and in transition. After 1992 in France the distinctions between the left and right began to shift, as extreme groups at both ends of the political spectrum felt threatened by European unification. The left feared economic marginalization, the right feared loss of French core values and identities. The quest for scapegoats reached its climax in the French elections of 2002, which brought LePen and the Front National within reach of real political power. Extremist factions across Europe could rally around a broad agenda of ant-EU, anti-euro, anti-immigration, anti-Islamic, anti-Semitic positions. Tragically the Iraqi conflict and the US-EU tensions has further exacerbated atavistic fears and reactions.

As in each period of serious political and economic crisis France becomes nostalgic. Eugene Weber wrote concerning French fetishistic referencing Gaullist ancestry:

“‘Nos ancetres’ may be fading away, but in France, the dead live longer than in other places” (My France, Politics, Culture, Myth, 1991). This nostalgia translates into mythologizing and mythifying the past, seeking to justify France’s civilizing mission, and to claim that true Frenchness cannot be tainted by foreigners, nor foreign influence and money. Le Pen’ rhetoric derives in a straight line from Barres, Bourget, to virulent anti-Semitism of Drumont’s La France Juive to Maurras’ Action Francaise through Vichy and Laval.

On the left the quest for maintaining French identity was more culturally oriented, but deeply immersed in anti-economic, anti–mercantile rhetoric as in Mitterand’s statement during the GATT negotiation in 1993: “Nos cultures ne sont pas a negocier”(Interview, Antenne 2, October 1993).

Since the eighteenth century, France has had to straddle the divide between Catholicism and rationalism, caught between Pascal and Descartes, desirous of strong, paternalistic leadership with precise perimeters, order under which creative chaos could flourish. France has a long illustrious history of revolutions, but in reality the French like the theory far more than the actuality of revolution. George Sand, Hugo, Flaubert, even Thiers, great proponents of the ideals of the left in 1848, were outraged by the actual takeover of the Paris Commune of 1871 and accepted the brutal repression and return to law and order. Braudel in Identite de la France (1986) wrote that France has always welcomed a blend of cultures, but not a loss of specific identity. France could accept assimilation, but throughout its history, this has been a one way street: the other, (the foreigner, the expatriate, the refuge) was assimilated into French culture, curriculum and language. Cortazar, Milan Kundera (who defines himself as Czech-French), Marquez, Ilya Ehrenbourg wrote their works in French. American intellectuals, artists, musicians were welcomed as they embraced French cultural norms.

Has this paradigm imploded? For the first time since the Middle Ages, a generation of minorities, children of refugees from France’s colonies, are now demanding to be integrated on their own terms. A new generation of disenfranchised, militant Muslims are demanding that they are French, but refuse the principles of secularism, cultural, educational, bureaucratic and administrative norms. They no longer want to just contribute to French culture, but to function within their own cultural rules and boundaries.

France has led the charge against moving forward Turkey’s accession to European Union membership. These reasons range from the neutral: economic (hardly justifiable if Poland, Lithuania and Latvia are now members), political instability, (no longer valid since the AKP and Erdogan came to power in 2002), human right issues (although significant reforms are being undertaken under pressure to adhere to EU norms) to the assertion that the EU is a Judeo-Christian coalition and Turkey does not fit into the designed model. The problem is that as long as Turkey remains marginalized and therefore defined as outside of European identity, it will continue to dent legitimization of Islamic minorities within Europe. A stable, prosperous and strategically vital moderate Muslim nation in the European Union would facilitate assimilation and would counterbalance accusations of exclusion.

In 1997 at the height of the economic boom, France wanted to meet globalization head on. When Alain Minc wrote La mondialisation heureuse, the idea was that France would not imitate but adapt US stylized globalization: keep its linguistic integrity, increase entrepreneurship, accept technology and investment. By 2002 the promise of technology and modernity had proven illusory. The promise of high tech prosperity had given way to fear of American acculturation and robotics as expressed in such works as Houellebecque’s Platforme.

In 2001 when Jacques Derrida gave his acceptance speech for the Adorno prize in Frankfurt, he offered a reinterpretation of Adorno’s essay “Was is Deutsche?”. Adorno expressing his desire to return to Germany in 1949, after spending the war years in exile in the United States, did not focus on homesickness ‘Heimweh’ but on the language. Derrida elaborated on the distinction between “Vaterstadt”: European construction, institutions, economic/political causality, the rational and Muttersprach, the ‘ur-culturel’, the semiotic, the instinctual. Language in France falls into this realm more than any other language in the EU. In part the very qualities that made French the key language made it vulnerable to American English: its precision, complexity, nuances and above all the fact English can be spoken badly while one cannot and is not allowed to mangle French. French spoken by 175 million francophones worldwide is however again perceived as elitist, evoking stereotypes of luxury and cultural specificity.

French language, the main stay of French culture, its key export since the Renaissance is no longer the dominant language. The attempt to modernize the language, with vast outlays of funds and resources by the French government in the 1980s and early 1990s had not counterbalanced the total pervasive impact of English in business, technology and diplomacy. In the name of linguistic integrity, language laws insisting on documentation and advertising only in French, official refusal to integrate American technical-technological and financial vocabulary (creating a separate semantic field with technological terms derived from greco-latin etymology instead of modifying globally recognizable Anglo-American terms.) has isolated the language. The language of diplomacy and negotiations, of the educated classes throughout the continent (Tolstoy being accused by the Slavophiles of writing large portions of War and Peace in French), had to face by 2003 that 55% of EU Commission documents and 36% of Parliament texts are first written in English.

The relationship between France and the European Union is in transition. Chirac’s offensive arrogance toward the new members decision to largely back the U.S. in the Iraqi conflict in 2003 made it clear that France no longer carries the same clout. The inability of France and Germany to maintain the Stability Pact proved that they will have a harder time imposing economic “do as I say, not as I do” set of criteria to transitioning EU economies.

Milan Kundera, perhaps the most original and subtle interpreter of post-communist EU identity wrote a work called: Identity in 1997. A book of terrible personal loss and sense of loss of self it is set in a tight spatial and temporal framework, the question is how do we recognize the other and how do we see ourselves within this context. Identification is the simple part: “Vaterstadt” imposes its rules; passports, legal requirements, but identity is subjective, language, hope, visions the sense of transcendence and acceptance.

A .S. Byatt in her New York Times article “What is a European” quoted Churchill’s 1948 speech at the Congress of Europe: “The exiled diplomat Salvador de Madariaga said: ‘This Europe must be born. And she will, when Spaniards say ‘our Chartres’, Englishmen ‘our Cracow’, Italians ‘our Copenhagen’, when Germans say ‘our Bruges’…. Then will Europe live. For then it will be that the spirit that leads history will have uttered the creative words: fiat Europe.”

This ideal of instinctual merging of national identification, of national symbols and cultural icons is still in the future. The irony is that the American model of melding ethnic and culturally diverse groups is still the most effective. Achieving a sense of Europe as a personal identity will take at least another generation, perhaps more in France. Cross regional education, training programs, internships for young managers and joint ventures are easing the transition for the educated, largely urban classes but the process will be slow and often painful for the poorer, isolated and disenfranchised members of society. Europe will have to prove itself as a viable identity rather than impose itself in rules, laws and media.

Only then will France achieve what Stendhal, pseudonym for Henri Beyle, author, social commentator and diplomat wanted on his epitaph:

“Henri Beyle, Milanese. He lived, wrote, loved. This soul admired Cimarose, Mozart, and Shakespeare’