1. See de Gaulle's War Memoirs, vol. 3, ch. 2, "Status" (New York: Simon and Shuster, 1959). The French title "Le rang"--rank--better conveys de Gaulle's meaning.
2. Ibid., 760-763.
3. A superior new transcription of years of de Gaulle's closed-door and personal conversations, based on notes taken by a Gaullist spokeman and minister has just been published: Alain Peyrefitte, C'Etait De Gaulle (Paris: Editions de Fallois-Fayard, 1994). The book is especially good on foreign policy and security affairs. The author is usually able to give two or three versions of every major de Gaulle policy, in which the same explanation is put different ways. This volume goes up through spring 1963. A second volume is scheduled.
4. It is also possible to argue that early action might have produced, or will produce, worse results, embroiling NATO powers in a quagmire.
5. Ronald Tiersky, "Mitterrand's Legacies," Foreign Affairs 74 (1), January-February 1995, 112-21.
6. For an analysis of cohabitation in institutional and political terms, see Ronald Tiersky, France in the New Europe: Changing Yet Steadfast (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1994), chs. 3-5. It could be argued that former prime minister Eduoard Balladur was just as responsible as Mitterrand for avoiding crises 1993-95. But, besides Chirac's open challenges to presidential prerogatives in 1986, the fact remains that the president is the one who must accept the relinquishing of most power and prerogatives.
7. President Mitterrand's May 5, 1994, speech at the Elysee is the best single summary of his views on nuclear weapons and deterrence doctrine. Available from the Elysee Press Service.
8. Ronald Tiersky, "European Security and European Integration: The New Nexus," CES Conference of Europeanists, March 1990; "European Security, European Integration and American Interests in the Post-Cold War Era," unpublished SCDC/NDU paper, September 1990; and "Thinking Like the French: France and America's Future as a European Power," unpublished NDU paper, August 1992.
9. William Drodziak, International Herald Tribune, October 31, 1994, 1.
10. Ibid. Skeptics would point out that the EU South is richer than the East, and that it has been getting much EU regional and structural fund aid already for 25 years. Conservative and market-oriented economists add that reduction of transfers might well make these nations stronger in the long run, by squeezing off dependency and eliminating EC subsidy of counterproductive economic policies. Another result could be to strengthen the EU by eliminating a source of interregional contention.
11. Explaining Norway's no vote in the referendum on joining the EU, Geir Lundestad, the director of the Norwegian Nobel Institute and professor of international history at the University of Oslo, wrote as follows: "Our history is an . . . important factor. Norway is a young nation. 'Union' is a dirty word, conjuring up 500 years of unequal union with Denmark and Sweden. On the Continent, on the other hand, it is an honorable word used in connection with efforts for integration, large and small. It is important that Norway did not become independent until 1905 and that nationalism was strengthened rather than weakened during World War II . . . Finland and most of the East European countries are even younger than Norway, but in their cases nationalism and enthusiasm for the Union go hand in hand. With the demise of the Soviet Union and the weakening of Russia, they can finally make their own choices. EU membership is a matter of defending themselves against a possible new Russian threat" (emphasis added). In the International Herald Tribune, December 14, 1994. The point is simple and clear: Integration in the EU equals national security because EU states could not countenance military. force used against any member state, whether that state is a member of a corresponding military alliance or not.
12. See the substantial policy article by Alain Juppé, "Repenser l'Europe," Le Monde, November 18, 1994, 1.
13. The December 1994 Essen EU summit adopted a less-than-rigid timetable for membership of the eastern European countries. Though the six countries involved all have free-trade agreements with the EU, excluded from them are agriculture and other "sensitive sectors," which, so argue the east Europeans, rules out nearly all their competitive products. "They give us free trade in super computers and satellites but shut us out from everything we could make a profit on," said one former Polish official. "It is no surprise that our deficit with the EU keeps on growing." Daily Telegraph, November 25, 1994, 15.
14. Alain Juppé, "Repenser l'Europe," Le Monde, November 18, 1994, 8.
15. See Samuel Huntington, "The Clash of Civilizations?" Foreign Affairs 72(3)(Summer 1993): 22-49, and the great debate it set off.
16. Peyrefitte, 116.
17. Livre Blanc Sur la Defense 1994 (Paris: Editions U.G.E. 10/18, 1994), 89.
18. Ibid, 90.
19. Ibid., 91.
20. Ibid., 92.
21. Ibid., 94-5.
22. Ibid., 109-19.
23. Ibid., 111-12.
24. Lucien Poirier, La Crise des Fondements (Paris: Economica, 1994), 5-6. Poirier was a leading voice in creating Gaullist nuclear strategy. in the 1960s. In addition to his own books, he translated Liddell Hart into French, Histoire Mondiale de la Strategie (Paris: Plon, 1962).
25. A French defense joke has it that, given governments run by Saddam, Gadhafi etc., la dissuasion du faible au fort has become la dissuasion du faible au fou (deterrence of the crazy by the weak).
26. See also Pascal Boniface, Contre le Revisionnisme Nucleaire (Paris: Editions Ellipses, 1994).
27. Poirier, 38.
28. Poirier, 39.
29. William Pfaff, International Herald Tribune, November 28, 1994, 4.
30. Jacques Isnard, "Logique de force en Irak," Le Monde, October 12, 1994, 1,3.
31. The United States quickly dispatched 40,000 troops, 33 warships and nearly 600 aircraft to the Gulf, in spite of the significant operation which was underway in Haiti. The British were the first of the allies to put troops on the ground in Kuweit. Close to 1,000 British troops, led by commandos of the Royal Marines, got to Saudi Arabia on October 12, while two British warships moved in close to the Kuwaiti coastline. The French nearly as quickly said they would contribute a military contingent "if necessary."
32. William Safire, International Herald Tribune, October 11, 1994, 6.
33. Charles Krauthammer, International Herald Tribune, October 15-16, 1994, 10.
34. The Economist, October 15, 1994, 62. But, in reply it could be said that Safire and Krauthammer were making the point that the United States can act despite such factors.
35. See the report and the summary article by Jacques Isnard in Le Monde, November 1, 1994, 11.
36. See Le Monde, December 17, 1994, 15.
37. On October 1, 1964, a squadron of four Mirage IV planes was, by presidential command, ordered to a practice nuclear alert status for the first time. The French nuclear air force includes, in addition to some still active Mirage IV planes, the ground-based nuclear missles set into the Albion Plateau site in Provence. Mitterrand recently settled an argument, for the time being, over whether the land-based missiles ought to be kept, given their vulnerability and expense. Land-based missiles were, he said, a factor tying the French people emotionally, through the symbolism of national territory, to national defense.
38. These include Jacques Baumel, the neo-Gaullist National Assembly defense specialist; Jean-Louis Gergorin, former head of the French policy planning staff and since a highly-placed executive at Matra; and even the Socialist former interior minister Pierre Joxe. See Pascal Boniface, Contre Le Revisionnisme Nucleaire, 49-52ff.
39. This repeat innovative short-course for France's 189 ambassadors was Alain Juppé's idea, the first having been held in 1993.
40. Libération, September 2, 1994, 2.
41. In mid-December 1994, however, the British government announced a decision to order 25 U.S. C-130J Hercules military transport, because they are scheduled to be ready in 1996, whereas the Future Large Aircraft will take a decade and cost nearly twice as much as the $37.5 million American plan. Trade Secretary Michael Heseltine and British Aerospace had lobbied the government for the European plane, with the argument that buying from American-owned Lockheed would damage the United Kingdom's aerospace industry (British Aerospace is the U.K. participant in the European project), as well as the future British participation in European projects. (International Herald Tribune, December 18, 1994, 2.) The optimistic French view of this development is that the British simply required some new planes rapidly, but this neither means that the U.K. is stepping out of the European program, nor that it won't buy the European plane when it is ready. The total British requirement will be four to five times the size of this first purchase.
42. This section is based on Bruno Tertrais, L'Arme Nucléaire Après la Guerre Froide, 214-17.
43. Another possible example cited of future peacekeeping is a potential conflict between Hungary and Romania over Romania's treatment of its large Hungarian minority. An OSCE intervention could include diplomatic mediation and counsel on protection of minorities, as well as peacekeepers and monitors to control cease-fire arrangements.
44. Upgrading the CSCE is part of a two-track NATO approach in revamping security arangements in Europe. On the other track, the study referred to above will outline for the eastern European states what they will need to do to join NATO. Thus in a year's time, NATO is to formally tell prospective member countries what their militaries have to do to be ready to integrate with the NATO structure, and what it will cost.
45. William Pfaff, "A New Colonialism? Europe Must Go Back into Africa," Foreign Affiars, 74(1), January/February 1995, 6.
46. Le Monde, January 11, 1995, 17.
47. Haiti is a non-African but still another pertinent example where French influence is in reflux. The French government, despite its secular linguistic and cultural ties, basically left the Haitian dilemma of military rule of the Raul Cedras government, and the associated human suffering and chaos up to the United States. When American forces returned President Jean-Bertrand Aristide to office in mid-October 1994, it launched a wholesale influence of Haitian life by American culture. This gave a sudden acceleration to a process that was at least 15 years old. One U.S. official told a newspaperman: "September 19 was a death knell for French influence in this country. They basically ceded the territory to us, and now they are steamed about it." (International Herald Tribune, December 31, 1994, 1.) Today there are perhaps 1 million Haitians living in the United States as compared with about 40,000 in France. Travel, especially to Miami and New York, and university study also has become directed much more to the United States than to France. Of course the United States occupied Haiti from 1915 to 1934, without changing the culture very much. But so much else has changed since the time before WWI--in French and American patterns, in international conditions--that past precedent holds much less power than it once did.
48. Le Monde, January 11, 1995, 11.
49. On this point an interested reader can also see Ronald Tiersky, "Mitterrand's Legacies," Foreign Affairs 74 (1), January-February 1995. A recent extensive study of the long-term legacy of Gaullism in security affairs is Philip H. Gordon, A Certain Idea of France: French Security Policy and the Gaullist Legacy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). The issue is also studied in Gregory Flynn, ed., The New France in the New Europe (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1995), especially the analysis by Frédéric Bozo, "France and Security in the New Europe: Between the Gaullist Legacy and the Search for a New Model," 213-32.