ABSTRACT
From the ‘strange affair’ of the 2002 elections (Cole 2002) to the calling of a 2005 referendum to ratify Europe’s new constitution, Jacques Chirac’s quinquennat has been as troubled by France’s difficult relations with Europe as was his first term (1995–2002). Griggs’s claim (2004, p. 134) that President Chirac entered the 2002 presidential elections with ‘virtually no record to defend’ initially appears hard to uphold in the case of European affairs. During Chirac’s first septennat, the French successfully adopted the euro; the President overhauled French military strategy to facilitate progress towards a common European security and defence policy on the basis of a rapprochement with NATO; and the Gaullist right appeared reconciled to the changing face of national sovereignty in the twenty-first century, following the example of Chirac’s apparent ‘conversion’ (Gribinski 1997, p. 66) to a post-Gaullist conception of European integration and its federal-like finalité.
