Chapter 1
Bloody and devastating conflict in former Yugoslavia has already demonstrated that, contrary to understandable if naive optimism at the Cold War's end, the way forward will not be simple or easy. It has been shown that cruelty and human suffering on a mass scale--military and civilian deaths, organized rape as a tool of war, widespread hunger, deliberate creation of civilian war refugees, the ferocity of "ethnic cleansing"--are still possible in Europe. Even if the Bosnian wars have remained localized, Sarajevo was only a few hundred kilometers from the December 1994 Budapest Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) meeting of 53 states. This seemed reassuringly far away to some delegations, frighteningly near to others.
Nevertheless, although European military dangers still must be taken seriously, the post-Cold War Zeitgeist is neither Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) nor some "back to the future" scenario of continually multiplying conventional wars, such as led to World War I. The problems of organizing post-Cold War Europe into a stable and reliable security framework are neither as simple as the initial optimists believed nor as intractable as the pessimists naturally assume. The objective situation is, in any case, that a restructured, reliable post-Cold War European security system remains to be built. More mass suffering, and even national disasters, could occur if the dangers to peace and negotiated settlement of conflicts in the new, whole Europe are not dealt with successfully.
What the French do in these matters is important. France is a key actor in European security. It is a substantial, independent nuclear power. Because of its multifaceted special relationship with Germany, as well as its growing dealings in defense matters with Britain, France is today at the center of European political ties and peacekeeping enteprises, as well as part of the plans for a European Union (EU) Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP). France's agreement is also vital to NATO's post-Cold War evolution, which includes the determination of the relationships between the United States and Europe; between NATO and the Western European Union (WEU); between NATO and the WEU, and the "Partnership for Peace" states; and among NATO, the OSCE, and the United Nations.
France will play, as it has for four decades, a complex role in Atlantic security structures, and therefore in American security interests in Europe. France will likewise play a crucial role in any purely European organization of European security, whether in cooperation with the United States in relation to NATO, or in the context of U.S. disengagement from Europe.
In contrast to four decades of European security configurations when negotiations occurred against a backdrop of American security protection, post-Cold War plans must be worked out in radically different circumstances. At the very least, American security leadership can, for better or worse, no longer be taken for granted by western Europeans, nor, as Clinton administration policy has indicated, will future American governments necessarily want to lead in European security matters, even if U.S. leadership is solicited by the Europeans. This is one implication of the Clinton administration's agreement that NATO's logistical, communications, and other equipment might be used in out-of-area military operations by the WEU, without U.S. participation, according to the "separable but not separate" doctrine.
France's role and weight in European security obviously cannot be understood without considering the influence of other states' interests and policies. This is to say only that looking at any particular state's policy through its own lens tends to magnify the importance of that country. What one has, therefore, is an intellectual problem requiring a sense of analytical and conceptual balance, so that a study of French policy, for example, doesn't become by definition francophile or francophobic.
American security policy, furthermore, exhibits a venerable tradition of distrusting France in security matters. The French may be seen as cynical, tricky, or pompously self-important and unjustifiably nationalistic. To take a celebrated example, this pessimistic American view of France was put forward by Harry Hopkins, FDR's emissary in discussions with General de Gaulle just prior to Yalta, from which the Free French leader was to be excluded. In de Gaulle's War Memoirs, which must be the classic account of this incident,1 Hopkins observes that the French had let down their allies in the 1930s, became defeatist and appeasement-oriented, the result of which was Vichy. How, Hopkins asked de Gaulle, could Americans, in "the stupefying disappointment we suffered when we saw France collapse and surrender in the disaster of 1940," be expected any longer to have confidence in the French? De Gaulle replied that he, better than any other Frenchman, of course understood American disappointment with previous French military and defense policy which he himself had denounced with so little success in the 1930s. But now, despite the success of the Resistance and of de Gaulle's leadership, the French had reason to believe that the Americans, who "after all took three years to get into the First World War and two years for the second war." "The French," he told Hopkins, "have the impression that you no longer consider the greatness of France necessary to the world and to yourself." 2
The French have reciprocated U.S. distrust, and de Gaulle wrote the books on the subject.3 Power is power, and geopolitical inequalities will plague even such strong historical ties as the French-American relationship. France's national situation is, as always since World War I, the problem of maximizing its security, its influence, and diplomatic room to maneuver, in a geopolitical position of inferiority relative both to principal allies and potential adversaries. French-American disagreements are, in general, as intrinsic as European-American clashes, and a sense of perspective about conflicts of interest is a pre-condition for gauging basic commonalities of value and purpose.
At the same time, a geopolitical sensitivity guards against the naivete that tends to be inherent in idealist and moralist foreign policy traditions. National interest is justifiably paramount in any state's security policy. Security and defense are, naturally, the first priority of any state. Properly understood, this fact is both a cause of war and yet paradoxically a possibility for peace. The French, in their insistence on the primacy of the nation and the nation-state, are sometimes frustrating for American policy, but the French desire to "exist" is a healthy factor in the international system as a whole, one which, among other things, serves to keep Americans awake to the fact that American perceptions and interests are not necessarily those of the world.
In terms of policy, the French are finding, like Americans, Germans and other allies, that indications of what needs to be done in post-Cold War Europe are complex, leading off in more than one direction. For example, in terms of institutions and European security architecture, how should NATO be constituted and its mission defined in the post-Soviet, post-Cold War world of European security? Who should be full members and who should be only "partners," to use the new term,? Would NATO's security mission be served best by expansion or by remaining with the traditional membership, augmented by Partnership for Peace relationships with former adversary countries?
What should the European Union be asked to do for European security in the coming period? Should the EU have its own frank and free-standing defense and security institutions--the "European pillar" of NATO finally realized--or should the Western European Union and the projected EU's Common Foreign and Security Policy be kept subject to NATO, in order to keep the U.S. present and deeply implicated in European security problems, from the point of view of European and French interests?
In terms of contingency plans, perhaps the lesson learned from the wars in former Yugoslavia is that it is better to intervene early, or, if possible, preventively. Or maybe it is best to let warring groups wear themselves down before attempting peacemaking, because, as Bosnia has shown once again, when enemies want war, want to kill rather than to negotiate, outsiders will find it very difficult, not to say risky, to end the violence or even to foster a durable armistice.
But dealing with ambiguous situations with an array of self-contradictory means and ends is nothing new in European security. Even during the Cold War, when the designation of dangers and adversary was clearest, strategic options always had to be evaluated and tradeoffs calculated.
As has been pointed out numerous times, today the Soviet Union's disappearance, a great gain in the Cold War's end, is itself the source of post-Cold War confusion. The new French military doctrine, in theorizing "the lack of a designated adversary," shows how the USSR's disappearance is a solution and simultaneously a new problem for European security.
But this paradox, resulting from the containment strategy's success, is no reason to "miss the Cold War," in John J. Mearsheimer's overused term. It is hard to see that such a claim is more than a dangerous intellectual game. The Cold War was a struggle well worth fighting and funding. Governments and their militaries ought to be facing the new security problems with the resolve that comes from knowing that the Cold War job, despite all problems and crises, was carried through successfully.
Basic issues in the European security dilemma can be formulated easily enough. Will the Atlantic alliance and the NATO military structure evolve adequately to deal with post-Cold War security problems in Europe, or are the bonds in NATO fraying irrevocably, with the integrated command structure fated either to disappear or to evolve into uselessness and irrelevance? Against this background, should the development of a "European defense identity" and a European Union "common foreign and security policy" be hastened or slowed, the one or the other for precisely the same reasons?
With regard to France, some key questions arise:
The French are not, or not as often as American policymakers may think, cynical obstructionists searching for "prestige," for "grandeur" or simply trying to have it both ways. On specific European security issues French policy may still play the gadfly or the heroic resister, but overall--from the Cuban Missle crisis to the Euromissile crisis to Desert Storm--the French have shown themselves to be dependable partners who, in turn, see themselves as very often frustrated or confused by American policies or by shifts in American policies. One of de Gaulle's legacies in French political life is to have inspired a high sense of French responsibility for security matters. François Mitterrand, as shown in this paper, has certainly been the most gaullien of de Gaulle's successors.
Harsh European-American disagreements about what to do regarding the Bosnian wars mesmerized public European security discussions in the second half of 1994. However, it would be a serious mistake to allow allied frustrations in dealing with the human and military problems in Bosnian to monopolize, not to say deform, new thinking about European security at a critical time.
Nevertheless, the December Budapest CSCE meeting ended up a diplomatic disaster because of Bosnia when the Russian Government would not allow any resolutions (which required unanimity) stipulating that Serbia was the aggressor. Even a passionate plea by German chancellor Helmut Kohl for the primacy of humanitarian assistance did not convince the Bosnian Muslim President Alija Izetbegovic to allow a unanimous resolution for a cease-fire and food and medical aid to his people, because it did not stipulate that the Serbs were the aggressors against his internationally recognized state.
Had the Bosnian dispute not taken up such a large place in debates at the CSCE (now the OSCE), the portentous disagreement between Russia and the Western allies about NATO's plans to expand into eastern Europe, in effect to the Russian border, would have appeared even more central. For example, this is an issue that threatens to stir the pot in Russia's tense domestic politics, and OSCE participants understood that the potential renewal of a nationalist, aggressive Russia is the single most dangerous security threat facing Europe in the next decade and after.
Despite this, the Bosnian tragedy and the dramas regarding Russia's democratic development are not all there is on the French plate regarding European security matters. In a positive sense, there has been movement in French policy toward long-term European Union security evolution, as well as a much-noticed French-American rapprochement both bilaterally and to some extent also within NATO. These are part of trends running deeper than circumstantial disagreements, as President Jacques Chirac reaffirmed in the first days after taking office in May 1995; they make up an important part of the evolving post-Cold War European security regime.
Possibly, hard though it may be to imagine today, EU inaction in Bosnia may turn out to be a moral-practical vaccination of the big European powers against the temptation to duck early action and preventive peacekeeping in future conflicts. The terrible human costs of inaction have been demonstrated, and in various European capitals there has been much talk about the future of preventive diplomacy, as opposed to peacekeeping after a conflict has flared.4 As Machiavelli said, a war not fought is often only a war postponed, and the maladies of "renationalization" and the aversion of rich and safe societies to cataclysms of "far-off peoples of whom we know little" need not be inevitable.
There are two parts to the issue of evaluating François Mitterrand's legacy in French security policy:
The 1993-95 conservative Edouard Balladur government was the second period of "cohabitation" in the Fifth Republic. In 1986-88, the conservative prime minister was, of course, Jacques Chirac. The political and institutional effects of cohabitation on foreign and security policy are an important subject in this analysis, bearing on what is consensus policy and what is subject to partisan debate in France's role in establishing the structures of post-Cold War Europe. It is worth noting, if only in passing, that President Mitterrand has made a constitutional success of cohabitation, whereas commentators had for years argued that such power-sharing by left and right in national office would end in crisis.6
President Mitterrand, to illustrate the French dance in NATO, finally permitted French participation in NATO discussions of specific peacekeeping operations, allowing defense minister François Léotard to attend a Military Committee meeting in Seville. At the last minute, however, he stopped Chief of Staff Admiral Jacques Lanxard from attending a regular planning session of the same committee. The difference was a distinction between a particular mission France had accepted and regular alliance planning. Overall, Mitterrand showed a skillful, typically gaullien calibration of French behavior in NATO: solidarity in critical circumstances combined with principled detachment from the integrated command, even if the behavior and results may only have seemed quirky, or "French," to France's partners.
Will this policy will change under President Chirac? There is little evidence that the French would find reason to rejoin the NATO integrated command outright. On the other hand, there is a widely shared opinion in the French security community that general closer cooperation with NATO would be useful, without giving up France's position and leverage from the exterior. Even if not decisive, this separate status is a useful arrow in the French diplomatic quiver.
The second area in which Mitterrand put his own stamp on French security policy was in the nuclear arena.7 Mitterrand was a deterrence purist, resisting any deviance from a doctrine of absolute deterrence--meaning a modernized nuclear arsenal combined with a total refusal to envisage (at least publicly) what to do if deterrence failed.
French deterrence policy during the Mitterrand years continued to be a version of the Gaullist strategy of massive retaliation. The French, at the level of doctrine at least, separated their own nuclear policy from NATO's and especially from the U.S. doctrine of flexible response. In the logic of French doctrine, flexible response made all war in Europe, nuclear and conventional both, more likely. Mitterrand was not John Foster Dulles, however, and it is an open question whether the French pure deterrence doctrine could have existed absent the covering umbrella of American extended deterrence. Pure deterrence was not only the most efficient or effective deterrence strategy for a second-rank nuclear power such as France, it also expressed an intransigent refusal to be dictated to by larger powers, so the rejection of flexible response was another gaullien stance.
The new post-Cold War French military strategy, outlined in the Balladur government's 1994 White Paper on defense, reflects striking changes (few of which have as yet been put into full effect) in both France's nuclear and conventional force doctines. French nuclear doctrine has to take into account the lack of a designated adversary, and conventional force doctrine must recognize that the post-Cold War French military requires a doctrine of engagement as opposed to its essential Cold War role of acting as a tripwire for engagement of the force de frappe (nuclear deterrent force). Two questions arise about Mitterrand's legacy in these matters:
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