One great issue today will be the consequences of European Union enlargement: first the incorporation of Austria, Sweden, and Finland as of January 1, 1995, and later, perhaps within 10 years, three eastern "Visegrad" states--the Czech Republic, Poland and Hungary. Five years after the Berlin Wall was breached, Europe remains economically divided between East and West, even as the political-military barriers have dropped.
Without a doubt, such a geographic enlargement of membership and such a shift in the EU's center of gravity, imply serious strategic consequences for the European Union, not merely economic but geopolitical. From the French point of view the risk in enlargement is that the French-German axis will weaken and that France will find itself in some ways cut off from its special German partner, isolated with the southern and western countries it has to an extent represented or embodied in European negotiations--Spain, Italy and Portugal. Were this to come to pass, it would be dangerous to global European security and bad for Germany itself, which needs a strong French partner. 9
The French now well understand there is no question of not going ahead with a massive EU expansion, perhaps to 20 or 25 or even more member states. But French arguments anchor the position that centrifugal forces, created by the welcome destruction of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of Communist regimes, need to be countered, lest the EU end up unravelled, totally unbalanced, and with a resentful western and southern wing.
In October 1994, President Mitterrand, in his last bilateral meeting with Spanish Prime Minister Felipe Gonzalez, emphasized that these problems of cohesion in the wake of enlargement were real and had to be addressed. A new European Union effort had to be made to provide additional economic aid for the southern and mediterranean EU countries of Spain, Portugal, Italy, Greece; the disadvantageous impact of EU enlargement on Spain and other less-developed southern and western countries is a genuine new issue requiring attention if the EU is to avoid a geographical and geopolitical tilt toward becoming the Germanic zone that France, as much as any other member state, does not want. Manuel Marin, a Spaniard now in charge of the EU development aid programs, even quantified Mediterranean claims: "The east received [last year] five times as much [EU] aid, although the south supplies much of Europe's oil and gas and has sent many more immigrants to work. . . . It's time to re-establish the balance." 10
In addition, these southern Mediterranean states cannot help but consider as a kind of "security" issue the economic backwardness and poverty of the North African Muslim countries, meaning the mass migration, now and later, that threatens economic and social equilibrium in several European Union countries. From the time of his 1981 Cancun speech, Mitterrand argued that the best European security policy regarding the prospect of mass in-migration from African countries would be to promote local economic development, because development would provide the reasons for potential immigrants to stay home. If it worked this would be a plausible economic and political analysis and a good rationale for generous aid from the richer countries to foster local production and markets. Thus far, however, it has not been implemented wide enough to make a difference in the level of discomfort and danger to the southern EU countries.
The EU Commission has just conjured up a proposal for a new EU-African "Economic and Security Pact," which would begin by doubling aid to North Africa, with $7 billion total asked for over a 5-year period. Another aspect of this pact is to include the North African countries in the world's largest free-trade zone, based on the EU but including the CIS countries (and now Norway) by the year 2010. As many as 40 countries could be members, making a free-trading population of perhaps 800 million.
This plan was discussed at the December 1994 European Council meeting in Essen, Germany, which wound up the 6-month German presidency of the EU Council, with France to take over for the first 6 months of 1995.
German leaders and elites are not eager about this Mediterranean-African aspect of the free-trade zone project because, as usual, they would have to finance a significant part of Community aid and development funds, and also because their priority for the next period will continue to be the east, meaning their own new eastern German states in addition to the eastern European and former Soviet countries undergoing critical transitions. Against the French emphasis on aid to the EU's south-west areas and to North Africa, the German perception is that the main European security issue, as was seen at the CSCE Budapest meeting in December, ought to be attention to the East, in order to prevent any renewal of east-west divisions and tensions if an economic wall were to replace the Berlin Wall. Like the French, German leaders describe Germany's new eastern policy as a cultural-historical duty, and that the eastern economies are, in addition, more adaptable and hopeful than the economies of Portugal, Southern Italy, and North Africa. For the Germans it is an historic opportunity to be seized, a chance to encourage political democracy and market economies, in addition to a particularly German historical duty of solidarity with peoples who have suffered so much from German aggression.
In any case, what is clear is that French thinking about security is moving out beyond strictly military questions of nuclear deterrence and political-military alliance. The post-Cold War situation has moved security thinking in all the major states beyond a single-minded focus on deterrence into a larger, more complex geopolitical-geoeconomic framework. At the same time the French well realize that France is not the only player and that the country needs economic partners as well as defense and diplomatic allies. The French-German tandem remains a double priority for France: French economic prosperity depends on the German partner, and French political-diplomatic-security clout depends on Germany's continued French priority. To the extent that each genuinely continues to depend on the other, the Franco-German symbiosis forged in the crucible of Cold War is one of the new crucial geopolitical facts of life.
In reality and conceptually, European security and European integration are, in the post-Cold War era, no longer such distinct subjects as they were during four decades of Cold War. They now overlap to a considerable extent. In addition, security and integration have both become Eurowide in their frame of intellectual reference, even if the EU and NATO are not yet Eurowide institutions. All this is represented in the widespread rhetoric of avoiding a new division of Europe.
Conceptually, now more than ever it makes sense to understand European security and European integration as two parts of a single issue, partially separate and based on different premises, but also partially overlapping and based on common premises. On the one hand, integration--membership in the European Union-- is in itself a major security guarantee and even a sufficient security guarantee for almost any country.11 Conversely, military security, in the form of NATO membership (and perhaps in the future "Partnership for Peace" membership) implies at least a semiplausible case for membership in the EU. This is shown in the wide geographical dispersion of countries asking for EU membership--that is, for some kind of integration with the western countries as well as some kind of security. (That full membership will be difficult or impossible for many countries is demonstrated by the current situation of NATO-member Turkey, which is being denied EU entry. A simple free-trade area with the EEC is being offered these countries as a consolation option.) In any case, if deepening of the EU continues, the European Union must be increasingly conceptualized as a new kind of international community with two main characteristics: integration (economic, political) and security (political-military).
How successfully did Mitterrand's policies deal with the transition from Cold War to post-Cold War Europe? The French president did not foresee communism's total collapse and the astonishingly sudden end of divided Europe. He was one of European government's most sophisticated and knowledgeable political leaders, yet his decades of experience had been confined to the Cold War European system. He hadn't expected that German unification might occur in his lifetime, let alone while he was in office.
His much-criticized uncertainties and political hesitations about German unification and the Soviet Union's collapse were therefore understandable, though a few other leaders did better (Chancellor Kohl and the Bush-Baker-Scowcroft team). In the end, however, his historical prejudices and errors of judgment did not become disastrous mistakes, because France was not at the center of events. Once Helmut Kohl decided to go full speed ahead, France was not in a position to alter German unification, let alone the fate of the Soviet Union. Geography and the lack of deep pockets made France a second-level player in deciding the end of Europe's division in practical terms. Mitterrand's hesitations did endanger German confidence in French policy, but the future of French-German relations encompasses much more than this, and Helmut Kohl has seemed much inclined to stress the positive with his French partner.
François Mitterrand's European policy from 1981 to 1995 set certain parameters for the future in French politics and is a consequential legacy Jacques Chirac will have to deal with. It is highly unlikely, Chirac's anti-Maastricht electoral rhetoric to the contrary, that he could pursue a radically different European policy anyway. Public opinion in the center, where he has to govern, would be against it. Plus his first meeting with a foreign leader was with Helmut Kohl, which served to indicate Chirac's intentions.
Mitterrand inherited a substantial European legacy and a few large new European commitments from Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, the most important being the European Monetary System (EMS) organized by Giscard and Helmut Schmidt in 1977. The 1970s recessions made Giscard's term a time of Europessimism and Euroskepticism, however. Mitterrand's presidency was, by contrast, a watershed. After the Mitterrand era, no politician who hopes to be president of France can be frankly against Europe. The questions are now "what kind of" Europe and "how much" Europe, not "whether" Europe.
New prime minister Alain Juppé said recently, "A lot will happen based on the place France will take in Europe, and Europe in the world."12 The endgame of the Uruguay Round negotiations, in which French policy won out on agriculture and on the "cultural exception," had much to do with French diplomacy rallying its European Union partners. Force of conviction and power of persuasion--Juppé himself is probably the strongest example--counted a lot.
The end of Europe's division found the French lagging behind the Germans in thinking positively in terms of a "Europe" larger than the Community. Recently, however, the French have enunciated a continentwide European idea; Mitterrand called it a "confederation." It is indeed a vision of a "Big Europe," but it is a stratified concept: a Europe of concentric circles, as Balladur put it, with "variable geometry" and variable degrees of membership and responsibility, with a "hard core" (France, Germany and Benelux), and anchoring all, the "Franco-German tandem" as the core of the core. This vision of a single "Big Europe," even if stratified and emphasizing the EU, signals France's willingness to make concessions in order to avoid a second Yalta, this time an economic division of Europe.
Within this broad view, the French priority is to emphasize the smaller Europe, at least some of whose governments are serious about creating a single currency and a common foreign and security policy, the two essential goals of the Maastricht Treaty. Thus, despite sharing the German view that a Big Europe is inevitable, French policy in practical terms has been less enthusiastic about how quickly to accept new members into the EU.
The affluent Nordic countries pose only relatively modest problems in their new membership, but to admit a big agricultural country such as Poland quickly into the EU would mean either fundamental changes in the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) which still benefits French farmers heavily and is still an important factor in French presidential election politics, or it would mean the CAP's bankruptcy and the collapse of EU budgetary negotiations. If, on the other hand, the next enlargement can be put off for 5 or 10 years, the French farmers' bloc, about one million mainly small farmers, is forecast to decline demographically by half, given the rate at which small farmers are being forced out of business. Time can thus ease the conflicts of interest and principle in the next rounds of negotiation. What is not possible in practical terms today may change within a foreseeable future, though Eastern Europe's advocates argue that the delay would be too much for the potential new members themselves.13
Mitterrand came to believe that full, if gradual, EU expansion is necessary, because any version of a "Little Europe," advanced, affluent, and isolationist, would eventually prove a sure road to European-scale political disaster. A durable post-Cold War European equilibrium could not, he said, be built on such a second Yalta, which would set up a rich and powerful western European Community fending off insecure, struggling democracies in the east. Expansion is also necessary, the French concluded, if only because France's principal partners in the EU want it, albeit for different reasons or with different calculations. German hopes are quite different from British calculations about the consequences of expansion on the Union. But, as Alain Juppé said, the EU "could not simply keep saying no forever."
In any case, European Union expansion cannot include Russia as a full member. Geographically this would take the EU's border to Vladivostok, making a mockery of the idea of Europe as a geographical and historical-cultural entity. Further, because Russian economics and politics cannot meet EU standards--the acquis communautaire--all the Union's established policies and bargains would be threatened or ruined by the need to prop up such a gigantic exception.
Even the idea of la grande Europe is not meant to encompass the entire Eurasian continent, including all of Asiatic Russia and the former Soviet republics. And this doesn't even mention the other potential large EU expansion issue--the Muslin countries of the Maghreb and Mashrek southern Mediterranean--which raises the problems not only of geography and level of development, but also of religion and culture.
The Copenhagen European Council drew up a list of 10 countries that might become members after the Nordic enlargement: the six countries of central and eastern Europe, the three Baltic states, and Slovenia. To this list, Cyprus and Malta need to be added, and, sooner or later, the issue of the Balkan countries will need to be faced.
As far as "architecture" goes, foreign minister Juppé and prime minister Balladur drew a distinction between member states and "partner" states. The latter category includes Russia and the former Soviet republics, as well as the southern Mediterranean countries.
Among the member states themselves, a second distinction is made. The acquis communautaire includes the customs union, the single market, common monetary policies, and political cooperation. Much more than a simple free-trade zone, it is a network of pooled sovereignty and solidarity, evolving a shared identity in dealings with the rest of the world. Among the member states, an inner concentric circle (in fact, a third distinction) resembles a "hard core," those countries that participate in the maximum of EU common arrangements. The hard core should not be seen as an exclusive club, yet its criteria will tend to keep its membership low. For example, the EMU treaty, as stated in the treaty agreement itself, won't have all the member states in the single currency system, at least to start with. And in terms of security policy, the WEU today doesn't comprise all the EU member states, nor does the Eurocorps, even in concept.
Accepting varying degrees of participation--expressed as concentric circles or as a variable geometry Europe or as a Europe at "two speeds" or more--has become a premise of French policy. In French debate, the image of concentric circles has been opposed to the Christian Demoncratic Union (CDU) idea of a hard core. But Mitterrand said, plausibly, that the basic idea is the same or close, and during the campaign Chirac said that CDU committee chairman Karl Lamers found his views on Europe quite acceptable. The opposition of concentric circles and a hard core is not the way the issues are posed in reality. The question is whether or not the principle (or fact) is accepted that there are, and will be, differences in degrees of participation in the EU. One of Chancellor Kohl's favorite maxims expresses the same thought: In EU development, the caboose can't be allowed to lead the train.
Thus during Mitterrand's two terms, a center-right, center-left French policy consensus on European integration emerged. Whatever the image used to express it, and whoever was stating it, the European Union is a blend of elements, a collection of intergovernmental, confederal and federal aspects within a larger pan-European mix of organizations of the EU and associated states, and includes economic, political, and security aspects.
The extreme right, the Communists, and a few fringe electoral groupings, including part of the ecologists, are outside the consensus, but there is broad center-right center-left agreement on a pragmatic, nondogmatic general view, and on the idea that doctrinal debates ought to be avoided so long as practical progress remains possible. The consensus is bipartisan because it unites the moderate left with the moderate right--the Socialists, the UDF and a significant part of the neo-Gaullists. Certain RPR neo-Gaullists (the best known is Philippe Séguin) propose an alternative policy, less integrationist, more social and populist, less committed to the "strong franc" policy, but their appeal is limited.
The European Union has little chance of ever becoming a super-state, notwithstanding whatever federal aspects it may ultimately have. French policy has never taken up the idealistic federalist idea that the Commission should become the Union's government, with the European Parliament and the Council of Ministers (the latter as a sort of European Bundesrat) sharing the tasks of democratic and parliamentary control of this government. The European nation-states will survive, and EU policymaking will remain centered in the Council rather than the Commission. The European Union will continue to be a hybrid institutional framework.
Given this conception of the institutions, how should the EU function? Above all else, the French want to maintain the European Council in a superior position in decisionmaking. Federalism, the transfer of authority to the Commission or to the Parliament, should be kept within limits shaped by the Council, in policies on what classes of decisions will be made by a qualified majority voting and which will continue to require unanimity. This focus on the Council differentiates French from German policy. The Germans have sought more powers for the Commission and the Parliament. Indeed, each EU government tends to propose its own political system as the model for European integration. In French-German terms, this is a still centralized and executive-dominated French system, as contrasted with the genuinely federal German system, in which the Chancellor must consult regularly and seriously with other power centers.
France, along with other states, wants qualified majority voting weights to be revised for the process of admitting new member states, to avoid ad hoc majorities blocking action. It also wants a larger role and a longer term for the Council presidency, to emphasize the large states' weight and to provide a stronger EU presence in international relations. Mitterrand seemed genuinely in favor of a Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP), because the EU loses influence to the extent it meets its foreign partners with 15 different voices. France, of course, will try to take the leading diplomatic role in the CFSP.
The EU Commission is likely to see a reduction of the exceptional authority it had during the Delors era, but the European Parliament is likely to be given additional if still limited legislative authority. The French want to maintain its capacity of initiative in proposing legislation and directives so long as its legal and political subordination to the European Council is made clearer. A uniform electoral system is one reform that would add to the Parliament's standing, and a reform of its decisionmaking procedures, which the Maastricht treaty's complicated procedures made more rather than less chaotic, is in order. Another project is to give national parliaments a role in the democratic control of the Commission and other EU institutions. The British and Danish laws are examples of national parliamentary review of EU laws, as is the new initial review power of French parliamentary scrutiny.
In sum, one of Mitterrand's European legacies is a series of French proposals for refining EU political and administrative institutions in the intergovernmental conference set to begin at the end of 1996. The facts of "variable geometry" and "concentric circles of commitment" are, like it or not, the model for the future. At the same time, the inner circle, the "hard core," should not be thought of as closed, if other member states can meet the requirements.
As Jacques Chirac indicated in the first few days of his presidency, French-German joint initiatives and prior consultations and agreement on all major decisions remain the French method in EU politics. The 1996 conference should be more than a mere touchup of Maastricht's inadequacies. It has to be a sort of "refounding" in which French-German agreements will be the central basis for negotiation.14
How or whether Islamic fundamentalist threats translate into specific French military security policies remains to be seen. Nevertheless, the shift of attention from the East to the South is now a part, albeit minor, of the French security policy debate. Yet even if the Islamic fundamentalist danger were to become a major security priority for western European countries, the question remains whether this would be a defense/military problem or a more general cultural and geopolitical clash, a conflict that may be very real without ever being fought militarily.15 For France itself, on the other hand, there can be clear danger to civilians in certain Muslim countries--Algeria is the obvious example at the present time--as well as a danger of terrorist acts in Paris and other French cities.
In addition, threats to reliable oil supplies, in conjunction with Islamic fundamentalism, could become a military/security issue once again. This might take the form of fundamentalist threats to fragile, oil-rich Muslim regimes such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Saddam Hussein's secular militaristic regime manipulates a population in which orthodox Islam and Islamic fundamentalism remain capable of being inflamed. Its recent mobilization of military force near the border with Kuwait shows that, however weakened, it still has ambitions for an imperial role in the region.
Military plans for allied cooperation in operations such as the Gulf War are still not satisfactory. In the Gulf war the French, according to a Defense Ministry official, "were simply improvising." French military thinking lacked contingency plans for the kind of coalition thrown together by American leadership.
George Bush's success in getting so many different governments into the multilateral force derived from several sources--the national interest of states, a sense of obligation, personal relations and others. In the French case, Mitterrand's policy was gaullien, that is, independent diplomatic action as long as possible (viz. the controversial French diplomatic efforts at the United Nations), but when engagement is made, it is unstinting.
Today, debates about European security affect EU internal negotiations on enlargement as well as on other subjects. Certain French attitudes are not shared by German views of what the EU's security priorities ought to be, and this split is complicated by disagreements between France and Germany, in the EU and NATO, over how to deal with the Bosnian wars.
Could NATO dissolve, or be redefined into irrelevance? De Gaulle once compared the European Community and NATO:
The (Rome) treaty constitutes a permament and definitive engagement of the six states, whereas NATO is a circumstantial organism, born from the Soviet threat and fated to disappear one day, when the threat will have disappeared itself.16
So the terms of NATO's post-Cold War predicament--adaptation or disappearance--are not new.
Put together by the Balladur conservative government, the 1994 French White Paper on Defense begins its "Defense Strategy" chapter with:
France today has no designated adversary. Her strategy remains essentially defensive. Refusal of war and of conventional and nuclear battle, which are the foundation of deterrence doctrine, will continue to guide strategy. This remains one of the bases of the indispensable national consensus in defense affairs.17
As with nearly all the European Union countries, post-Cold War French security is no longer a matter of preventing attacks on the national territory, even if strategic defense debate must continue to analyze the hypotheses that this could change again. With regard to NATO member countries, both the so-called "liberal peace" among democratic states and the negative peace based on the balance of power among heterogenous states are relevant.
In French Cold War security strategy, the doctrinal use of conventional military forces was part of, and totally subordinated to, the strategy of nuclear deterrence. The fate of French conventional forces in the so-called "nuclear deterrence maneuver" was summed up, in a lethal quip, as "sacrifice of the First Army." The First Army's purpose in Germany was, in other words, to serve as a hostage whose destruction would "manifest the enemy's intentions." If the outgunned First Army were ever attacked and destroyed by an invading Soviet force, this would be taken to mean that the Soviets were heading for French territory. The First Army's sacrifice was a tripwire, the justification to begin nuclear retaliation. However, pure deterrence thinking created the presumption that none of this would ever happen.
In post-Cold War military thinking, conventional forces are liberated from their "sacrificial" role in Cold War strategy. The assigned military task of conventional forces today is intervening somewhere abroad, earlier or later, to prevent or stop conflicts that conceivably could threaten the metropole. In this definition of security risks, conventional forces become the central element in French military planning for foreseeable security dangers, albeit against the background of the permanent overall guarantee of nuclear deterrence.
The French nuclear force, whose specific military use is now impossible to state, will without a doubt be maintained, but subject to constant budgetary pressures. At least in principle, this should increase technological cooperation with British nuclear capabilities and the likelihood of a European deterrence doctrine for French and British nuclear forces, which would, however, still remain under national command.
French strategy today thus must envisage "much more diverse scenarios than in the past. . . . Above all, a different balance is emerging between deterrence and engagement in our force missions, which changes, in part, the role of conventional forces."18 The reformed French strategy eschews two possible extremes: either "a strategy built exclusively on making a sanctuary of the national territory" or "an option oriented exclusively toward missions involving peacekeeping and maintenance of international order...Only a balanced model, guaranteeing (French) independence and permitting our participation in international stability" will fulfill the requirements of the post-Cold War era.19
French military missions, rather than preparing for the potential Cold War "major clash," must be constructed in terms of "prevention and management of long crises, of variable intensities . . . most often occuring at a considerable distance from the national territory. . . . And in the great majority of cases," this means the engagement of French military forces "in concert with partners or allies, in multinational coalitions."20 Altogether, "The priorities in the definition of the role of conventional arms are now inverted in relation to the 1972 White Paper definition, because of the geostrategic changes. . . . Conventional means are called on now in certain cases to play a strategic role themselves." At the most, nuclear deterrence will guarantee that conventional forces won't be outflanked. The role that conventional forces played during the Cold War is thus now played by nuclear forces. There is no break in strategy, but an evolution in the respective roles of nuclear and conventional means as a function of different scenarios. 21
The Balladur government's White Paper gives six scenarios of possible French military deployments in post-Cold War conditions:
So the new scenarios in French defense strategy are not the security dilemmas of the homeland directly threatened with nuclear war, but a more broadly based European collective security, founded on some mix of preventive diplomacy, peacekeeping, peacemaking and other security tools, including nuclear deterrence. This new idea of military security is one important reason why the often-derided plan for an EU Common Foreign and Security Policy is unlikely simply to be dropped, whether or not NATO remains France's and Europe's primary security system.
The well-known French strategist General Lucien Poirier, in a recent book, La Crise des Fondements ("The Crisis of Basic Security Premises") gives a weighty Gaullist view of the increasing burden of European defense initiatives on a strictly national defense:
One of the characteristics of the gaullien genius is to begin from what was blindingly self-evident to the Capetien kings just as it is for the Republic: There is no authentic policy and, by deduction, no military strategy, other than for a people sure of its uniqueness, who, against all vicissitudes, affirms its will to preserve its being and continuity. . . . The Government's decision . . . to publish a defense white paper to replace that of 1972 officially recognized the historical break (of the Cold War's end) and its consequence, the crisis of basic (strategic) premises. The document's title confirms what I had forecast: The 1994 White Paper on Defense, is no longer, as in 1972, on national defense. The castration of the title is significant. 24
The national defense problem for the French in the post-Cold War era is to find the right balance between a politically and financially desirable Europeanization of security and a fundamental maintenance of national responsibility for national defense, including civilian support and legitimacy.
In what Poirier calls the "second nuclear age," French nuclear weapons are more than ever of political rather than deterrence significance. Nuclear weapons still serve the purpose of making a sanctuary of national territory, but the old concept of dissuasion du faible au fort (deterrence of the stronger by the weaker power) has become irrelevant for some indeterminate period.25
Faced with this "crisis of basic security premises," French defense planners must develop a credible doctrine and strategy for what Poirier calls a "transition period" characterized by "a posture of strategic waiting:" an attitude of readiness with no clearly defined adversary.
In particular, French defense thinking must into take account the devaluation of nuclear weapons as military factors--France's main Cold War defense asset--in the post-Cold War era.26 If French nuclear weapons were not warfighting instruments but rather the means of deterrence, if nuclear weapons existed not to make war but to prevent war, then the disappearance of a designated enemy creates a dilemma of nuclear justification, and the need to recreate credible premises for maintaining a significant nuclear arsenal.
The reduction of stockpiles of nuclear weapons in the treaties between the United States and the USSR-CIS states is one result of the end of the Cold War and the collapse of communism. The 1992 START II agreement fixes a ceiling on warheads of between 3,000 and 3,500. There is no military reason not to prefer the lower number to the higher, and no obvious reason not to go even lower; some responsible experts have publicly suggested numbers as low as 300-1,000 for further disarmament.
What would be the lowest reasonable size of the U.S. or Russian arsenal? Whatever the lowest safe number of warheads could be in sheer military terms, it cannot be as low as it would be without the existence of sizable nuclear arsenals among the other publicly acknowledged nuclear powers: France, Britain, and China. No American or Russian Government would reduce nuclear forces so near to the levels of the second-rank nuclear countries that U.S.-Russian nuclear dominance is put into question. This does not exclude a widened nuclear disarmament negotiation in the future, in which all the nuclear powers, secondary powers included, would reduce simultaneously. But there is surely a limit, even if it cannot be precisely specified, below which nuclear stockpiles won't be allowed to go. Such speculation must also take into account the eventual development of other sorts of weapons which will put nuclear weapons themselves into a different perspective. So for the French, the main role of its nuclear force in the foreseeable future will be not as a military deterrence but as a weapon of political status, whose desirability is attested by the very tendency to nuclear proliferation itself.27
However, even heavyweight gaullien defense thinkers such as Lucien Poirier add that France must not turn its successful policy of national nuclear independence and refusal of nuclear disarmament into "an eternal refusal" of nuclear alliance with other states as part of the larger process of European integration. "If the conditions came together for giving up definitively the status of autonomous nuclear power--meaning the definition of a European identity, thus of permanent common interests--France could agree to integrate its nuclear forces in a system of collective defense . . . not a simple "no" but a "yes if." 28
European-American differences, besides intensifying ineffec-tiveness, indirectly raised the question of an independent European defense and security policy. It is a matter of European desires for the military capacity to act independently of the United States in European problems, and also of European recognition of a developing American mood--neoisolationist or unilateralist--to avoid being dragged, by NATO obligations, into commitments neither the American people, the President, nor the Congress wants to take on.
When the Iraqi army unexpectedly mobilized again on the Kuwaiti border in 1994, one American editorialist wrote about transatlantic diasagreements:
The U.S. cannot conduct one policy through NATO and the West Europeans conduct another, so if the Europeans want their own policy they need the military means to carry it out. NATO has command, staff, forces and operating systems in place. The WEU has nothing or next to nothing. The encounter in recent days with a divided NATO has shaken up people who in the past ignored the WEU. 29
The U.S.-European gap has been widened also when there is a Russian-Western European convergence of views, in opposition to American positions. The Europeans and Russians have opposed lifting the embargo and arming the Bosnian Muslims, and they have argued that, since Iraq has complied significantly with U.N. resolutions, sanctions against it should be lifted.
The transatlantic policy dilemmas of expanding NATO were brought out even in the process of choosing a successor to Manfred Woerner, who died in August 1994, as NATO's secretary general. The leading candidacy, that of Willy Claes, Belgian foreign minister and a Flemish socialist, raised basic questions about the direction of the alliance: Was he sufficiently Atlanticist for those who want the United States to stay active in European security? Was he sufficiently expansion minded or, for others, sufficiently against expansion?
Part of the problem at the time was that the main player, the United States, had not yet made a clear commitment to the transformation of NATO that expansion would entail. The "Partnership for Peace" idea was, at the moment, as much a way to buy time as it was a real commitment to expansion (as the history of the PFP proposal as a compromise within the American Government makes clear). The much clearer U.S. signal in favor of expansion at the CSCE December 1994 meeting is still just a signal and not a fact. For one thing, the significance of Russian objections, raised forcefully then and later by Boris Yeltsin, needs still to be decoded. A "cold peace," in Yeltsin's ominous term, is not necessarily inevitable. Mitterrand was reluctant to move quickly to NATO expansion, although not against it in principle. Two factors work against French support for rapid expansion of NATO. First, the French want to mollify Russian sensibilities; even a Russia not entirely stabilized might be helpful to French policy. Second, membership in the European Union for the eastern European states may be less disruptive, to the Russians and internationally, than would NATO's expansion. Linking the eastern European states to an EU Common Foreign and Security Policy would suit the French hope of putting European development before Atlantic relations.
As for allied difficulties in dealing with the war in Bosnia itself, the Chirac government in its first few weeks raised the level of French engagement and rhetoric and also of French casualties on the ground. The new French leadership thus arrived with intensified determination to deal with Bosnia's agonies, but no one can predict whether events will favor or frustrate the French desire to invigorate attempts to stop the fighting there.
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