13 December 2012

ECFR/Klau: Three French conundrums - The voters, the president and the country

Understanding these three great paradoxes should be the first task for Europeans keen to engage the French on EU reform. The second lies in a realistic appraisal of France's complex and fractured political landscape today.

Three great paradoxes shape France's European policy today. The first arises from the policy preferences of the French people. The second derives from their Constitution. The third follows from the surprising perception the French elite has of the nature of the country itself. Together, they make France a difficult read for fellow Europeans at a time when this nation of northern beer and southern wine, of democratic radicalism and monarchical splendour, of Jean Monnet and Charles de Gaulle, is the actor whose willingness to conclude a big bargain with Germany could again be a pivot of European history.

The first paradox results from the added preferences of 43 million French voters. The French, having very nearly junked the Maastricht Treaty launching monetary union in a referendum in 1992, stepped up their resistance and sank the EU's Constitutional Treaty in 2005. Yet while public opposition against the Maastricht Treaty was led by British-style “souverainistes” rejecting further European integration as such, the heated debate in 2005 saw a far more differentiated opposition emerge.

A second great French paradox on Europe flows from the Constitution and more specifically from the written and unwritten powers wielded by the president. "This is a place where the raising of a presidential eyebrow has more significance than any ministerial speech”, a German ambassador in Paris told the author. To an extent that never fails to astound foreign observers, the French president can run most European and foreign policy essentially as he pleases. The one major constitutional exception, the cohabitation scenario whereby the president has to govern with a hostile political majority in the Assemblée Nationale and where the prime minister doubles as his chief political adversary, has become much less likely to occur since the cutting of the presidential term from seven to five years. “Please understand that I am much less powerful than you”, Germany’s chancellor Angela Merkel once told the former President Sarkozy, pointing to the numerous centres of executive, legislative, and judicial authority that constantly challenge and sometimes curtail her ability to act

People, President, country: of these three major paradoxes the third is the most fundamental. It is a taboo topic for French policy-makers and the hardest for foreigners to understand. On the face of it, hardly a country seems more cohesive than France; no other European democracy grants its state such imperial authority. While Madrid grapples with Catalonian separatism and London warily watches Scotland, no French border province shows signs of hankering for a future outside France.

Like all other French political actors, Hollande is convinced that no treaty reform could be agreed in Europe today that would survive a popular vote in France as long as the eurozone crisis continues and unemployment is on the rise. With defeat in a new referendum potentially disastrous for Europe and himself, the President for now has indefinitely postponed any EU reform capable of triggering IT.

Instead, Hollande advocates a course of “integration solidaire”, arguing for a gradual process of deeper political, economic and social integration where new forms of supranational solidarity (such as eurobonds) are agreed first, with institutional change following. Details remain hazy, but it is clear that in terms of method, the gradualist “integration solidaire” clashes diametrically with the German consensus (precipitated by the constitutional Karlsruhe court) according to which major institutional reform must come first to create a sufficiently democratic framework for future new policy instruments.

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