France

Jolyon Howorth There are several major difficulties in deconstructing the relationship between French and European security policy. The first, and most obvious, is that ‘European policy’, in so far as it exists, has tended to be primarily French in conception and impulsion (see Chapter 1, p. 12). This is as true of security policy as of any other field of policy and it has been the case virtually since 1944 (Howorth 1996a). However, and this is the second difficulty, pressure from Paris in favour of the creation of some sort of European Defence and Security Identity (EDSI), sustained and imperative though it has tended to be, has not always been complemented by any actual Europeanisation of French defence policy and planning. There is a related problem, to which I shall return, of defining what might be meant by the ‘Europeanisation’ of a nation such as France’s ‘national’ defence policy. A third problem is the discrepancy between discourse and reality. An uninformed observer called upon to read the major documents, texts and speeches emanating over the last few years from the command centres of French defence planning-whether the seat of the presidency at the Elysée Palace, the office of the Prime Minister at the Hotel Matignon or the ministry of defence on the rue Saint Dominique-might be forgiven for believing that French and European defence policy were nearly identical.1 France tends to treat defence and security policy as if she were acting for the whole of Europe. Paris has a long tradition of calling the shots on the continent and a combination of French resource inputs, military and industrial capacity and grandiose security ambitions puts France in a class of its own. But therein lies another problem. Despite the rhetoric, France’s defence thinking on certain key issues (nuclear policy, alliance policy, resourcing, industrial policy and conscription) has often been visibly out of step with the majority of its European partners. Paradoxically, this appeared at first to change quite rapidly in 1995 with the advent of the neo-Gaullist President Jacques Chirac. His defence reforms of February 1996, which amount, as we shall see, to a veritable revolution, are explicitly and repeatedly justified and presented as a response to the urgent need for ‘Europeanisation’.