The Intoxication of being alone against the world
Pascal Bruckner
Translation by Douglas
French original: "L'ivresse du seul contre tous"
(Pascal Bruckner, Le Monde, 2004/01/28)The crisis between France and America that the Iraq war began is not close to abatement. Fostered in various quarters at the highest levels, it is beginning to look like a genuine break-up, despite a few mutual gestures of appeasement.
Still, if this cleavage is to become permanent it won't have the same consequences for both partners. A year ago, Paris did not simply work for peace - a perfectly defensible position in itself as no one has found any weapons of mass destruction yet — Paris worked above all against America. The promise president Chirac made to use his veto whatever the circumstances, the dismissal of Tony Blair, who was at one point tempted to extricate himself from the conflict, the tour of parlors in Africa and elsewhere in the aim of instigating the largest possible riot of votes at the UN demonstrated genuine activism against an ally. When we might have abstained, we strove body and soul to stab our ally in the back.
Long ago, court intellectuals, sovereigntists or former-leftists who provided the ministry of Foreign Affairs and the presidential palace with official doctrines, foresaw this break-up, which was also desired by the far right. Indeed, scarcely a month or a week goes by that some specialist, former minister or journalist doesn't castigate the "hyper-power" and its supposed imminent decline. Under these circumstances, we shouldn't be surprised that
the highest authorities speak to us of America both in the way that les Guignols de l'info [a satirical current events puppet-show] ridicule the "World Company" [a name given to CNN] and. like the communists Jacques Duclos or Georges Marchais during the Cold War. Attacking the United States day and night, remaining subservient to them by virtue of the hatred one devotes to them, is an odd way to rid oneself of them!To our chagrin, we are very much alone in our rebellion against the Yankee Empire. There still exists a majority of countries in Europe for whom the radical break with Washington is not self evident (especially when we are waiting for America's economy to restart our own) and for whom allegiance to Moscow remains problematic.
Even our confederates in the peace camp, Germany and Russia, are not trustworthy and do not wish to burn the bridges to Washington to please the little Gallic rooster.
France takes itself for Europe when she is only France and when a majority of our neighbors mistrust us, exasperated by our vanity, our conceit. They aren't taken in by our rebellion against the United States. They know that this is motivated less by divergent views than by the similarity of our attitudes. France hates America because it resembles her too much and shares her faults: the same arrogance, the same pretenses, the same mix of moralism and cynicism only without the means of force.
We chastise Spain, guilty of having turned its back on us during the Gulf war, in the matter of the Perpignan-Barcelona high-speed train. We fustigate England and roast Poland. We pull Italy's ear. In sum, we behave with our European partners like a schoolmarm, keeper of the Supreme Good.
Whence this politics of resentment, masked beneath a respect for law and which, for the defense of freedom and democracy, substitutes that of identity, posed as a supreme value.
France's "no" to war has been interpreted as a movement of rebellion against the diktats of the White House. In fact, it is a rebellion against any form of limit on power, including communal ones. It was as if, in breaking its transatlantic ties, France also unburdened itself by a sort of chain reaction of its obligations to Europe. It is contravening Brussels' regulations, trampling on the treaties it has signed and, like George Bush's administration,
demanding that others obey the laws that it has itself flouted.This too is a strange way of shoring up this European counter-power that we rightly wish to oppose to American hegemony. The problem is that contemporary France, this nation of shareholders who take themselves for heroes, has no ambition greater than itself (save confiscating the European project for her own benefit). Isolated in its splendid (in)sufficiency, obsessed with its lost grandeur, France has the contradictory wish to make history without getting its hands dirty, to enjoy the double status of disinterested spectator and lesson-giver for all.
America acts, perhaps badly, but at least it does something and sometimes gets results while France gesticulates, vituperates to hide its profound inertia. What awaits us if we continue down this path is a growing provincialism coupled with a shaggy lyricism: gilded and bloating.
The worst turn the United States could do us would not be to punish us but to shun us. The intoxication of being alone against the world is bad counsel, especially when it comes, as is the case today, with a serious internal crisis.
Our dearer interest requires us to remain associated with the nations to which we are close and with which we share a basis of common values and memories. This would also imply adopting a more subtle attitude to Washington than that dictated by mimetic rivalry and jealousy, even if cloaked in the rhetoric of "multi-lateralism." A conflicted partnership is better than a sterile isolation. America and Europe can do without France. Is the reverse also true?
Pascal Bruckner is an author.
ARTICLE PUBLISHED IN THE 29.01.04 EDITION
[Posted 2004/01/30]
Copyright © Watch 2001-2006.
Copyrights of quoted materials belong to their respective owners.
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