AMERICAN FUTURE

This post selectively quotes from the French President’s address to a Joint Session of Congress. The full text of his speech is available here.

On terrorism:

Let me tell you solemnly today: France will remain engaged in Afghanistan as long as it takes, because what’s at stake in that country is the future of our values and that of the Atlantic Alliance. For me, failure is not an option. Terrorism will not win because democracies are not weak, because we are not afraid of this barbarism. America can count on France.

On Iran:

Let me say it here before all of you: The prospect of an Iran armed with nuclear weapons is unacceptable. The Iranian people is a great people. It deserves better than the increased sanctions and growing isolation to which its leaders condemn it. Iran must be convinced to choose cooperation, dialogue and openness. No one must doubt our determination.

On the Israeli-Palestinian conflict:

To the Israeli and Palestinian leaders I say this: Don’t hesitate! Risk peace! And do it now! The status quo hides even greater dangers: that of delivering Palestinian society as a whole to the extremists that contest Israel’s existence; that of playing into the hands of radical regimes that are exploiting the deadlock in the conflict to destabilize the region; that of fueling the propaganda of terrorists who want to set Islam against the West. France wants security for Israel and a State for the Palestinians.

On Lebanon:

France stands engaged alongside all the Lebanese. It will not accept attempts to subjugate the Lebanese people.

On America’s duties:

America feels it has the vocation to inspire the world. Because she is the most powerful country in the world. Because, for more than two centuries, she has striven to uphold the ideals of democracy and freedom. But this stated responsibility comes with duties, the first of which is setting an example.

Those who love this nation . . . expect America to be the first to denounce the abuses and excesses of a financial capitalism that sets too great a store on speculation. They expect her to commit fully to the establishment of the necessary rules and safeguards. The America I love is the one that encourages entrepreneurs, not speculators.

Those who admire the nation . . . expect her to be the first to promote fair exchange rates. The yuan is already everyone’s problem. The dollar cannot remain solely the problem of others. If we’re not careful, monetary disarray could morph into economic war. We would all be its victims.

Those who love the country . . . expect America to stand alongside Europe in leading the fight against global warming that threatens the destruction of our planet . . . This essential fight for the future of humanity must be all of America’s fight.

Those who have not forgotten that it was the United States that, at the end of the Second World War, raised hopes for a new world order are asking America to take the lead in the necessary reforms of the UN, the IMF, the World Bank and the G8. Our globalized world must be organized for the 21st century, not for the last century. The emerging countries we need for global equilibrium must be given their rightful place.

On the EU and NATO:

. . . I want the Europeans, in the years to come, to have the means to shoulder a growing share of their defense . . . All of our Allies, beginning with the United States, with whom we most often share the same interests and the same adversaries, have a strategic interest in a Europe that can assert itself as a strong, credible security partner.

At the same time, I want to affirm my attachment to NATO. I say it here before this Congress: The more successful we are in the establishment of a European Defense, the more France will be resolved to resume its full role in NATO.

I would like France, a founding member of our Alliance and already one of its largest contributors, to assume its full role in the effort to renew NATO’s instruments and means of action and, in this context, to allow its relations with the Alliance to evolve.

This is no time for theological quarrels but for pragmatic responses to make our security tools more effective and operational in the face of crises. The EU and NATO must march hand in hand.

On Iran, the new French president agrees with Washington, not the IAEA:

French President Nicholas Sarkozy called Wednesday for sanctions on Iran to be tightened if the country does not adhere to the West’s demands to cease its nuclear agenda. If Iran attains nuclear weapons, Sarkozy warned, a road to an arms race will be paved that could endanger Israel and southeast Europe, he said during an interview with a German magazine. Sarkozy announced that France will join the official US-led struggle against head of the IAEA’s Mohamed ElBaradei, who recommended that Iran be allowed to enrich uranium in some of its nuclear plants.

Referencing ElBaradei’s public statement that he believes it is too late to force Tehran to scrap its enrichment program as demanded by the Security Council, French Foreign Ministry spokesman Jean-Baptiste Mattei proffered these words:

We were indeed surprised by several comments from Mr. ElBaradei over the weekend. We share the gist of concerns expressed by our American partners – along with several other partners, for that matter . . . I can confirm that our permanent representative in Vienna will take part in the American initiative.

In addition, the IAEA director-general referred, in one of his public statements, to analyses from French intelligence services over the time that it would take Iran to have access to a nuclear weapon. We aren’t in the habit of releasing national intelligence analyses publicly – much less through an international organization.

Vive la France!

Next month marks the fortieth anniversary of the Six Day War, which changed the face of the Middle East. France, not the United States, was Israel’s primary arms supplier during the years preceding that conflict. In “The EU and the Arabs” I documented the sharp reversal in France’s Middle East policy than took place soon after the war ended.

Just three days after the shooting stopped, President de Gaulle instructed his foreign minister to denounce Israel before the French National Assembly and the UN General Assembly. A month later, he said that “[w]e told the Israelis not to start a conflict. Now, France does not recognize her conquests.”

By late 1967, de Gaulle’s attitude toward Israel had hardened to the point that anti-Semitic sentiments had found their way into his public pronouncements. At a November 27 press conference, he offered these thoughts:

Many people wondered, even many Jews wondered whether the establishment of that community on lands that had been acquired in more or less justifiable conditions and in the midst of Arab peoples who were profoundly hostile to it would not lead to incessant, interminable friction and conflict. Some people even feared that the Jews, hitherto dispersed, but who had remained what they had been for all time, that is to say an elite people, self-confident and dominating, might not, once it was gathered together on the site of its ancient grandeur, change into ardent, conquering ambition the very moving desire that they have felt for nineteen centuries. We saw appear a State of Israel that was warlike and determined to expand. On 22 May, the Aqaba affair, unfortunately created by Egypt, was to offer a pretext to those who were dreaming of breaking loose. Israel, having attacked, seized, in six days of combat, objectives that she wanted to attain. Now she is organizing, on the territories she has taken, an occupation that cannot but involve oppression, repression, expropriation, and there has appeared against her a resistance that she, in turn, describes as terrorism.

De Gaulle backed up his words with actions. He tightened the ban on military shipments to Israel, including the delivery of fifty Mirage V jets for which Israel had contracted and paid before the war. After January 1969, even spare parts were closed off.

The pro-Arab, anti-Israeli tilt initiated by de Gaulle became a permanent feature of French policy.

But not, perhaps, for much longer.

Sarkozy is likely to be more sympathetic to the Israelis than have been his predecessors. And with good reason:

In an interview Nicolas Sarkozy gave in 2004, he expressed an extraordinary understanding of the plight of the Jewish people for a home: “Should I remind you the visceral attachment of every Jew to Israel, as a second mother homeland? There is nothing outrageous about it. Every Jew carries within him a fear passed down through generations, and he knows that if one day he will not feel safe in his country, there will always be a place that would welcome him. And this is Israel.”

Sarkozy’s sympathy and understanding is most probably a product of his upbringing: it is well known that Sarkozy’s mother was born to the Mallah family, one of the oldest Jewish families of Salonika, Greece.

Additionally, many may be surprised to learn that his yet-to-be-revealed family history involves a true and fascinating story of leadership, heroism and survival.

[ . . . ]

In the 15th century, the Mallah family . . . escaped the Spanish Inquisition to Provence, France and moved about one hundred years later to Salonika. In Greece, several family members became prominent Zionist leaders, active in the local and national political, economic, social and cultural life. To this day many Mallahs are still active Zionists around the world.

Sarkozy’s grandfather, Aron Mallah, nicknamed Benkio, was born in 1890.

Beniko’s uncle Moshe was a well-known Rabbi and a devoted Zionist who, in 1898 published and edited El Avenir, the leading paper of the Zionist national movement in Greece at the time.

His cousin, Asher, was a Senator in the Greek Senate and in 1912 he helped guarantee the establishment of the Technion, the elite technological university in Haifa, Israel. In 1919 he was elected as the first President of the Zionist Federation of Greece and he headed the Zionist Council for several years. In the 1930s he helped Jews flee to Israel, to which he himself immigrated in 1934.

Another of Beniko’s cousins, Peppo Mallah, was a philanthropist for Jewish causes who served in the Greek Parliament, and in 1920 he was offered, but declined, the position of Greece’s Minister of Finance. After the establishment of the State of Israel he became the country’s first diplomatic envoy to Greece.

In 1917 a great fire destroyed parts of Salonika and damaged the family estate.

Many Jewish-owned properties, including the Mallah’s, were expropriated by the Greek government. Jewish population emigrated from Greece and much of the Mallah family left Salonika to France, America and Israel.

Sarkozy’s grandfather, Beniko, immigrated to France with his mother. When in France Beniko converted to Catholicism and changed his name to Benedict in order to marry a French Christian girl named Adale Bouvier.

Adale and Benedict had two daughters, Susanne and Andrae. Although Benedict integrated fully into French society, he remained close to his Jewish family, origin and culture.

Knowing he was still considered Jewish by blood, during World War II he and his family hid in Marcillac la Croisille in the Corraze region, western France.

During the Holocaust, many of the Mallahs who stayed in Salonika or moved to France were deported to concentration and extermination camps. In total, fifty-seven family members were murdered by the Nazis. Testimonies reveal that several revolted against the Nazis and one, Buena Mallah, was the subject of Nazis medical experiments in the Birkenau concentration camp.

In 1950 Benedict’s daughter, Andrae Mallah, married Pal Nagy Bosca y Sarkozy, a descendent of a Hungarian aristocratic family. The couple had three sons: Guillaume, Nicolas and Francois. The marriage failed and they divorced in 1960, so Andrae raised her three boys close to their grandfather, Benedict.

Nicolas was especially close to Benedict, who was like a father to him. In his biography Sarkozy tells he admired his grandfather, and through hours spent of listening to his stories of the Nazi occupation, the Maquis (French resistance), De Gaulle and the D-day, Benedict bequeathed to Nicolas his political convictions.

Sarkozy’s family lived in Paris until Benedict’s death in 1972, at which point they moved to Neuilly-sur-Seine to be closer to the boys’ father, Pal (who changed his name to Paul) Sarkozy. Various memoirs accounted Paul as a father who did not spend much time with the kids or help the family monetarily.

Nicolas had to sell flowers and ice cream in order to pay for his studies. However, his fascination with politics led him to become the city’s youngest mayor and to rise to the top of French and world politics. The rest is history.

I am not expecting a 180 degree turnabout in France’s Middle East policy. But I anticipate a partial reversal of de Gaulle’s tilt. Should that occur, French and American policies will converge, improving the prospects for a Middle East settlement. I have my fingers crossed.

My blogfriend John Rosenthal has penned a noteworthy post for World Politics Watch. Here it is:

Perhaps the most revealing moment on election night in France was when Nicolas Sarkozy spoke in his victory speech of the friendship binding France and the United States. The moment was not revealing on account of what Nicolas Sarkozy actually said, which—like his comments on Europe, incidentally—reflected a predictably studied balance between expressions of fidelity and criticism. This is what Nicolas Sarkozy said:

“I want to make an appeal to our American friends: to say to them that they can count on our friendship, which has been reinforced by the historical tragedies that we have confronted together. I want to say to them that France will always be at their side when they need her help. But I also want to say to them that friendship is accepting the friends can think differently about things and that a great nation like the United States has the obligation not to obstruct the struggle against global warming, but, on the country, should take the lead in this combat, since what is at stake is the fate of all humanity.”

But what was revealing was the spontaneous applause and cheering that broke out among the crowd when he uttered the words “to say to them that they can count on our friendship”: “pour leur dire qu’ils peuvent compter sur notre amitié.” You can hear and see it here. The passage on Franco-American relations is just over half way through the tape and a cursor control at the bottom of the media player allows you to skip forward [emphasis added]. Even supposing such a pledge of friendship to the United States might—with all the “appropriate” qualifications—be found, for instance, in a speech by Jacques Chirac, it would certainly not receive such an enthusiastic response from his partisans—to say nothing of the partisans of Mme. Royal. This already represents an important difference between the old regime and the incoming new one.

His unambiguous response when asked for his position on polygamy:

I respect all cultures throughout the world, but so that it is quite clear: if I am elected President of the Republic, I will not accept women being treated as inferior to men. The French Republic holds these values: respect for women, equality between men and women. Nobody has the right to hold a prisoner, even within his own family. I say it clearly, that polygamy is prohibited in the territory of the French Republic. I will fight against female genital mutilation and those who do not wish to understand that the values of the French Republic include freedom for women, the dignity of women, respect for women—they do not have any reason to be in France.

If our laws are not respected and if one does not wish to understand our values, if one does not wish to learn French, then one does not have any reason to be on French territory [emphasis added].

In the original French, from his website:

Je respecte toutes les cultures à travers le monde, mais qu’il soit bien claire : si je suis élu Président de la République, je n’accepterai pas que la femme soit traitée à l’inférieur de l’homme. La République française ce sont des valeurs : le respect de la femme, l’égalité entre un homme et une femme. Personne n’a le droit d’être prisonnier, y compris dans sa propre famille. Je le dis clairement, que la polygamie est interdite sur le territoire de la République Française. Que l’excision je la combattrai et que ceux qui ne veulent pas comprendre que les valeurs de la République française c’est la liberté de la femme, la dignité de la femme, le respect de la femme : ceux là n’ont rien à faire en France.

Si on ne respecte pas nos lois et si on ne veut pas comprendre les valeurs qui sont les nôtres, si on ne veut pas apprendre le français, alors on n’a rien à faire sur le territoire de la France.

Le Figaro is the only major Parisian daily that has an English-language website. The following are excerpts from its coverage of the election.

“Victory for Movement” (editorial)

. . . the last certainty we now have to dispose of is that France, a right-wing people, votes left. That was true for a very long time, but today the French people have chosen in keeping with their inclination: a right-wing people, they have elected into office a leader who has reconstructed and united his family of ideas and who bears with pride – which is new – the ideas of his camp. It is, moreover, because France is located on the right that the parliamentary elections have every chance of confirming next month what emerged from the ballot boxes last night.

What a defeat, what a slap in the face. In addition to the extremely low score achieved by Segolene Royal (among the worst second rounds for the left since 1965), it is actually the first time for 30 years that the opposition has failed to impose a changeover of political power, and, moreover, when up against a declining regime. And this is the third time in a row that the Socialists have stumbled in a presidential election. Having already been removed far from power for five years, here they are threatened with suffering the longest stint of opposition since the 1960s? The Socialist party has failed, and the left has broken up.

What a contrast with the glorious days of the “joint programme” and the “Broad Left.” Of its dream of a presidential majority there remains nothing but a dislocated pact reluctantly accepted by divided socialists who are looked on with suspicion by their enemy brothers of “the antiliberal left” and with mistrust by the environmentalists stripped of their originality.

Once the maelstrom has subsided, the Socialist Party will, then, have to rebuild itself. It will have to move rapidly beyond the inevitable party apparatus struggles in order to accept within its midst the confrontation of ideas from which a modernized party can emerge. A party which abandons the old-fashioned ideas which all the similar parties in Europe have abandoned: nationalizations, the 35-hour week, and the cult of public expenditure without concern for effectiveness. Perhaps even the majority of the current leaders, the children of Mitterrand, will have to give way to another generation. After all, that is indeed what happened yesterday: the children of Jacques Chirac were replaced. And Chiracism today gives way to nascent Sarkozyism.

“Great Alternation” (op-ed)

Not only is the right staying in power but it won on a direction that is more to the right than ever. The windshield wiper theory is obsolete. The nation, by qualifying Jean-Marie Le Pen for the second round and then electing Jacques Chirac, had already demonstrated its repudiation of the left in 2002. Five years later, it spectacularly confirms its rejection of a side that governed for 15 years over the last period and which hoped that its turn would come automatically.

These charts from the Wall Street Journal (subscription required) show the sorry state of the French economy:

The Times of London describes what Sarkozy has in mind for France:

Top of the agenda will be immediate tax cuts, which total €15 billion (£10.5 billion). These include a 4 per cent reduction in income tax and social charges, tax relief on mortgage interest and the abolition of death duties for all but the richest.

Mr Sarkozy wants to encourage people to work more than the statutory 35-hour week, which was imposed by the Socialists in 1999 and which he calls a disaster. He wants to strengthen purchasing power and to prime an economy that has suffered relative stagnation and high unemployment for two decades. As well as the carrot, he intends to apply a British-style stick: the benefits received by jobseekers will be reduced if they refuse two offers of work in fields for which they are qualified.

Among money-saving measures, Mr Sarkozy says that one in every two civil servants who retire from France’s bloated state administration will not be replaced. One of the potentially most explosive measures is to scrap the so-called special regimes. These are generous pensions and retirement conditions that are enjoyed by public-sector workers in the railways, Paris transport system, energy utilities and post office.

However, he will not follow the laissez-faire doctrines that were pursued in Britain and the US in the 1980s. The state will keep a firm hand on industrial policy, intervening to support French firms in key economic sectors and maintaining a large public sector. Mr Sarkozy is also heading for conflict with Europe over his schemes for imposing tariffs on imports from outside the Union.

The Times’ editorial addresses the obstacles Sarkozy faces:

Mr Sarkozy has still not quashed self-serving claims by Socialist opponents that his policies are divisive – claims that were given superficial credence by his courting of Le Pen voters, his insistence on a new French patriotism and proposals for tough new immigration controls. His first test may come within hours: if the suburbs react to his election with another eruption of violence, he will have to demonstrate a determination to enforce law and order right from the start.

He knows, however, as do most of his supporters, that the real problem in the febrile suburbs is not racism or discrimination but unemployment. The shamefully high level of joblessness among all the young, and especially those of immigrant origin, is a main factor in the alienation of many young people and the emigration of the brightest. It is here that Ms Royal fatally failed to convince the country that her policies – which amounted to yet more state intervention and protection – would ever create the jobs and flexibility France desperately needs. A priority for the new President is to push through urgent measures to get France back to work: this includes tax cuts, a law on strike reforms and other proposals that he hopes to put to an emergency session of parliament in July. France turned out in huge numbers to vote for change. President Sarkozy now has to move fast to deliver it.

In his commentary, Charles Bremner, The Times’ Paris correspondent, avers that Sarkozy’s victory “marks the opening of a new era in France, yet at the same time, it is an unusual act of continuity” and compares his election to Margaret Thatcher’s:

The French have thrown out their sitting governments or presidents in every election since 1978. For the first time since 1969, they have voted in a new President from the outgoing President’s party. Sarkozy of course sees himself as une rupture with the Gaullist administration of Jacques Chirac which he has served for most of the past five years as Interior Minister. In the same way, in 1979 Margaret Thatcher had served as a minister in the previously ruling Conservative party yet she broke with the consensus of her party. This is in many ways France’s Thatcher moment [emphasis added].

The Times’ Bronwen Maddox thinks that “it is easier to see Sarkozy having a rapid effect abroad than at home”:

It does not take much more to mend relations with Washington – particularly with an Administration in such a chastened state – than to declare a desire to do so, and to get on the plane. Ask Angela Merkel; the German Chancellor managed to insert criticism of wide flanks of US policy into her first encounter with President Bush, so grateful was he that she was not Gerhard Schröder.

In the European Union, the mere fact of having a new French President will release the paralysis over a new constitution (or whatever uncontroversial diminutive it is called). Sarkozy favours, in broad outline, the notion of a pared-down version of the ill-fated original. Given that this is all that Britain and several other countries will accept, it is likely to emerge as the compromise, despite Germany’s desire for something more ambitious. It is possible, then, that with one step, Sarkozy puts himself back in the mainstream of the next big decision in European policy.

Tim Hames of The Times believes that nothing less than the survival of the Fifth Republic is at stake:

. . . if [Sarkozy] does not succeed, more then his reputation will be damaged. “Blame the system” will once again become the watchword. The Fifth Republic will be seen as no more effective than its many discarded predecessors. It is Mr Sarkozy’s agenda or, in effect, it is a Sixth Republic. The stakes are that high and, ultimately, that simple.

Napoleon Bonaparte, whom Mr Sarkozy cites as his hero (short men stick together), noted of his leadership that: “I am sometimes a fox and sometimes a lion. The whole secret of government is knowing when to be one or the other.” The new President will have to be as cunning. He needs to reconcile this fantastically creative but intensely stubborn nation with the realities of an international economy that does not allow for 35-hour weeks or one in four of the population claiming to be a farmer and looking for a subsidy. He will have to deal with opponents for whom the riot is a strategic weapon. He has to frame a foreign policy that is more sophisticated than the “Yanks, no thanks” message of the Chirac era. I do not know whether the French have an equivalent phrase to “last chance saloon” but right now, like it or not, they are drinking (decent plonk, doubtless) in it.

In the Financial Times, Martin Arnold talks about the disarray in the Socialist Party:

Commentators predict the party could now be torn in two, along the lines of the split in the 2005 European referendum, when a large minority rebelled against the official party line and campaigned for a No vote.

”Her defeat will be extremely damaging for the left. Huge divisions will start to emerge at 8pm on Sunday,” says Eric Dupin, author of A Droite Toute, a book on the rightward shift of French voters.

Jean-Marie Colombani, director of Le Monde newspaper, says: “Globalisation is still considered a threat and diabolised as the root of all evil. The left must get out of the ideological impasse in which it has been trapped for too long.”

In its editorial, The Guardian does little to hide its disappointment. Depicting Sarkozy’s victory as a “sharp swing to the right,” it says that the French “have not voted in a man they particularly like” but have “voted in a president it feels it needs.” Royal’s defeat was, in part self-inflicted:

For most of her campaign she was gloriously alone, sniped at by an unreformed and truculent party whose jealous stars were all too eager to play the role of Brutus. It was not a question of who would be the first to put the knife in, but who would be the last . . . Hidebound by a manifesto that was not hers, Ms Royal said as little as she could. Had the centrist-leaning Socialist candidate spoken her mind, she would have split her party.

As did Royal on the eve of the election, the Guardian’s editorial warns of social unrest:

Having acquired a reputation as the man who gets things done, the president-elect will storm into action. For this 6,000 riot police around Paris are braced. All police leave in the Seine-Saint-Denis region of north-east Paris, the scene of the worst riots in 2005, has been cancelled. The only brake on the president-elect’s actions is the immediate prospect of parliamentary elections on June 10 and 17. These are likely to go the same way as the presidential election, and if they do the last hurdle will be cleared. If rioting does break out in the suburbs, the social unrest will not do anyone, least of all the immigrant communities, any good. It will only play into the hands of a president eager to earn his spurs as a tough, no-nonsense leader.

The Telegraph’s editorial begins by asserting that Sarkozy “now has an unarguable mandate for radical change.” Implementing this mandate won’t be easy:

Many Frenchmen will oppose by any means, legal or illegal, the dismantling of their precious droits acquis: the various social and employment perks they have wrung out of past governments. And France is a country where the verdict of the ballot box is often trumped by the will of the street. We can be sure that, as soon as Mr Sarkozy moves to keep his promises, there will be a spate of strikes, blockades and lock-ins.

For Mr Sarkozy, however, the risks of backing down outweigh those of bulldozing through. There is, about the French electorate, something of the spoilt child. They whine and protest and drum their heels; but, deep down, the last thing they want is to be taken at their word. They know that reforms are necessary, and that some of these will be painful. But they would lose all respect for a government that, having won at the polls, caved in to manifestations.

Mr Sarkozy is likely to be an especially awkward negotiating partner over Europe where, despite the EU constitution being defeated by a larger majority of Frenchmen than elected him, he plans to bring it back under a new name. He hinted as much in his victory speech. His uncritical support for closer integration sits oddly with his free-market domestic agenda.

An article by John Lichfield in The Independent deals with changes in the French electorate:

One of the lessons of the first round of the 2007 presidential election is that the combined left – from Socialists to Trotskyists via Communists and Greens – has shrunk to only just over one third of the electorate.

The whole spectrum of French politics has shifted to the right. Within that spectrum, Mme Royal’s score in the first round – 25.8 per cent – was historically a high figure for a Socialist. The problem was that the “rest of the left” totalled only about 10 per cent . .

As reported by the International Herald Tribune:

President-elect Nicolas Sarkozy lost no time Sunday night in signaling his determination to change his country, saying he would “break” with the ideas and habits of the past.

“The people have opted for a break,” he told thousands of cheering supporters, adding that he was determined “to rehabilitate work, authority, morality, respect and merit.”

His vow to shake up a nation of persistently high unemployment came in an acceptance speech that reached out to both Europe and the United States and made clear that Sarkozy already saw himself as a major new player on the global stage.

To Americans, he declared: “I want to tell them that France will always be by their side when they need her but that friendship is also accepting the fact that friends can think differently.”

He vowed to make the fight against climate change France’s No. 1 priority and urged a reluctant America to take the lead in this battle because “the future of humanity is at stake.”

Sarkozy’s 10-minute speech was extraordinarily substantive, addressing issues from Africa to global poverty and oppression, and seemed to signal that Sarkozy would seek to reinvigorate France as a world power.

Declaring that “tonight, France is back in Europe,” he suggested that the European Union should be a vehicle for the protection of the less privileged. “I beseech our European partners to hear the voices of people who want to be protected,” he said, pronouncing himself a convinced European.

Most startlingly, he made an immediate appeal for a new union of the Mediterranean, which he seemed to envisage as bringing together Europe and Africa. This new union, he said, “should do for the Mediterranean what the European Union did for Europe.”

This idea appeared to be an attempt to finesse criticism of Sarkozy for saying that he wants to keep Turkey out of the European Union. On this issue, the president-elect and the United States differ profoundly.

His Mediterranean proposal also amounted to an effort to reach out to the Muslims of North Africa, many of whom are the immigrants who live in the troubled suburbs of major French cities where Sarkozy is unpopular. On immigration itself, he said that France and the Africans would work together to reach agreement.

The BBC says that Royal has conceded defeat. Le Monde says Sarkozy won 53.1% of the vote.

A note in passing: Four years after strenuously objecting to invading Iraq, the French, like the Germans, have chosen the more pro-American candidate to head their government. C’est tres interresant, n’est-ce pas?

London. To understand why, read this by Simon Heffer in The Telegraph.

Other articles on tomorrow’s French election: here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

With Sarkozy’s lead widening, Royal resorts to blatant fear-mongering. Reuters quotes her:

“Choosing Nicolas Sarkozy would be a dangerous choice,” Royal told RTL radio.

“It is my responsibility today to alert people to the risk of (his) candidature with regards to the violence and brutality that would be unleashed in the country (if he won),” she said.

Pressed on whether there would be actual violence, Royal said: “I think so, I think so,” referring specifically to France’s volatile suburbs hit by widespread rioting in 2005.

I have no idea what the media reaction to her words will be, but I’m convinced Sarkozy would be branded a “fascist” had he uttered them.

Interestingly, Britain’s left-wing Guardian hasn’t had a word to say about Royal’s warning (or is it a call to take to the streets?).

Yesterday on PBS, Charlie Rose interviewed Nicolas Sarkozy, currently the Interior Minister of France and the Union pour un Mouvement Populaire (UMP) candidate for the French presidency. I’ve long thought that Rose has one of the best jobs in the world; his interview with Sarkozy is outstanding.

Click here for the interview on Google video.

The International Herald Tribune’s Roger Cohen on the statement just published by Ségolène Royal’s Socialist Party about Nicolas Sarkozy, her chief opponent in the French presidential election:

This 87-page work amounts to a relentless exercise in Sarkozy-bashing through his depiction as that incarnation of menace: a card-carrying crypto-American.

Entitled “The Worrying ‘Quiet Rupture’ of Mr. Sarkozy,” and displayed on Parti-socialiste.fr, the party’s home page, the work begins by asking: “Is France ready to vote in 2007 for an American neo-conservative carrying a French passport?”

That gets the ball rolling. The party’s core argument runs roughly as follows: America is bad, Sarkozy is its agent, ergo he is dangerous. The publication really has little more to say about Royal’s center-right rival.

One chapter is entitled “Nicolas Sarkozy or the Clone of Bush.” A memorable sentence, among many such gems, says: “Yesterday Europe was importing jeans, coke, rock ‘n’ roll and cinema from the United States. Now Nicolas Sarkozy is proposing that we import God!”

Apart from shipping God from Galveston to Dieppe and so destroying the lay French state, Sarko is accused of heading up “a sort of French subsidiary of Bush and company.” He’s said to manipulate the suffering of French Jews to partisan ends and to pander with equal unscrupulousness to the sensibilities of Catholics and Muslims.

“When one listens to Sarkozy, one would think one was listening to the evangelist George W. Bush addressing Hispanics of Catholic tradition in the last campaign,” the pamphlet opines.

Really?

The Socialist Party portrait of American society evokes a place rotten to the core, stricken by obesity and a high murder rate, driving exploited workers to the limits of endurance, imprisoning 2 percent of its population, engaged in a failed affirmative action experiment that has only “made a racial issue of all problems,” and beset by an ominous religious fervor.

The real U.S. unemployment rate, it is preposterously suggested, is not 5.1 percent, but 9 percent. America under Bush has no interest in international law because its sole international aim is “the promotion of the American empire.”

The death penalty, torture, renditions, secret prisons, short or non-existent vacations, absent or expensive health care, a Darwinian labor market and the worship of “the individualist entrepreneur” complete this happy picture of France’s ally.

“It is in this,” the Socialists conclude triumphantly, “that Nicolas Sarkozy sees the future of French society!”

From The Guardian:

Pork soup is back on the menu for homeless people in Paris after a judge ruled it could not be deemed racist. Organisers of soup kitchens linked to extreme rightwing groups overturned a ban imposed by the city authorities over fears that its handouts discriminated against Jews and Muslims.

Police had shut down food distributions by the organisation SDF (Solidarit̩ des Fran̤ais) Рthe same initials as given to the homeless group Sans Domicile Fixe Рbecause of alleged xenophobia and fears of protests. But the judge at the administrative tribunal in Paris decided that as there was no evidence the SDF had refused to serve Jews and Muslims, who do not eat pork for religious reasons, it could not be accused of discriminating against them.

In my view, this story epitomizes the sorry state of contemporary Europe. If anyone knows of anything similar to this happening in the U.S., please let me know.

Thanks to John Rosenthal of the Trans-Int Intelligencer for passing this on to his readers. The following is the front page of Le Figaro, which is among the most “conservative” of Paris’ newspapers:

Here’s what John has to say about it:

Note the large headline in the middle of the page. It reads: “The Americans attack the European Stock Exchanges”. Referring to the planned fusion between the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) and the European exchange, Euronext—here interpreted as a “seizure of control” [mainmise] of the latter by the former—the final paragraph of the accompanying text reads:

This American seizure of control is worrying. In an interview with Le Figaro, Henri Lachmann, who is writing a report on the subject for major French corporations, demands that the process of rapprochement between Euronext and the NYSE be stopped.

And note the much smaller headline just underneath the graph. It reads as follows: “Algerian Islamist Threat Against France”.

What the French worry about the most is a little strange, n’est-ce pas?

On the eve of the NATO summit meeting in Latvia, French President Chirac has called for a larger European contribution to the alliance:

The Europeans have relied on their American allies for too long. They have to shoulder their share of the burden by making a national defence effort commensurate with their ambitions for Nato and also for the EU. This is a mark of the solidarity which links the two sides of the Atlantic.

In addition, he reaffirms NATO’s importance:

Lowering our guard would be to ignore the threats of terrorism, aggressive nationalism and certain states’ desires to engage in power politics in violation of their international commitments. Now, as in the past, we need a strong, mutually supportive and adapted alliance.

From a reading of the entire article, it’s unclear whether the U.S. is included in his reference to “certain states’ desires.” The general tenor of the article suggests, however, that it isn’t. If this is an accurate interpretation, Chirac’s words suggest that the wounds of early 2003 are no longer festering and that time heals.

By the end of this week, it will hopefully be possible to make a more informed judgment.

Tomorrow marks the fiftieth anniversary of the start of the Suez Crisis, an event that altered the shape of the post-Word War II world and had more than its fair share of unintended consequences. David Fromkin has an excellent write-up on the crisis in today’s New York Times.

Fromkin’s The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East, though published in 1989, is still the best book I’ve ever read on the subject.

Thanks to reader Michael B for providing me with links to two important links to Melanie Phillip’s blog.

In the first, she provides further information on, and an interpretation of, Jack Straw’s objections to the wearing of the Islamic full-face veil in Britain:

It is in itself a commentary on how far the British have already slid into cultural servitude that asking someone politely if they wouldn’t mind removing the black shroud from their face before having a conversation should have provoked such a storm of controversy over whether or not this was an infringement of personal and religious liberty. We communicate with each other not merely through speech but by looking at the other person’s face. People expect to be able to see others as people, not depersonalised shrouds with eyes. Such concealment diminishes the sense of human community, the feeling that we share the world with other beings like us. It creates a profound sense of anomie and unease.

But more significantly – and Straw did not say this – this type of veil is itself a direct threat to liberty. Clearly, it is a matter of debate within the Islamic world whether it – or, indeed, any type of veil – is necessary to satisfy the injunction upon women to preserve their modesty. What is beyond doubt is that the blackout veil is associated with most extreme interpretation of Islam, which holds that Islamic values must supersede all other values, including those of the secular state. Wearing this veil is thus a political statement of cultural and religious hostility to the British state. Objecting to it, therefore, is not an example of intolerance or religious discrimination. Religious garb should certainly be tolerated, even if it is outlandish; what people wear is their own affair. But this veil is not their own affair. It affects the rest of us because it is inherently aggressive and intimidatory. That is why it is unacceptable.

Radical Muslims in France’s housing estates are waging an undeclared “intifada” against the police, with violent clashes injuring an average of 14 officers each day. As the interior ministry said that nearly 2,500 officers had been wounded this year, a police union declared that its members were “in a state of civil war” with Muslims in the most depressed “banlieue” estates which are heavily populated by unemployed youths of north African origin. It said the situation was so grave that it had asked the government to provide police with armoured cars to protect officers in the estates, which are becoming no-go zones.

Michel Thoomis, the secretary general of the hardline Action Police trade union, has written to Mr Sarkozy warning of an ‘intifada’ on the estates and demanding that officers be given armoured cars in the most dangerous areas. He said yesterday: ‘We are in a state of civil war, orchestrated by radical Islamists. This is not a question of urban violence any more, it is an intifada, with stones and Molotov cocktails.’

Her take on the situation:

It seems that other police officers, and other parts of French society, are even now still in a state of denial over what they are facing, insisting this is some kind of class war rather than what it really is, a religious war. They said the same thing about last year’s riots, ignoring clear signs of religious activism and incitement— along with the fact that the French government in desperation drafted Muslim Brotherhood imams into the banlieues to quell the disorder, thus giving the lie to the claim that these were merely ’secular’ disturbances, all about poverty and unemployment and other such sub-Marxist claptap. They were anything but; they were actually all about French Muslims declaring their turf to be no-go areas for the French state.

On the same day, North Korea announces plans to conduct its first nuclear test and Iran proposes to have France, through two of its state-controlled nuclear companies (Eurodif and Areva), create a consortium that would build a nuclear enrichment facility in Iran.

North Korea

Reactions to the North Korean announcement were swift:

United States— A State Department spokesman said a test would pose “an unacceptable threat to peace and stability in Asia.” UN ambassador Bolton said that the test would be “extraordinarily serious” and that he would raise the matter with the Security Council tomorrow. Unidentified American officials said that if North Korea were to conduct nuclear tests, the United States would seek Security Council sanctions through a procedure that carries the threat of military action.

Japan—Prime Minister Shinzo Abe called a test unacceptable and said that it would worsen North Korea’s position. Foreign Minister Taro Aso said that Tokyo would respond harshly to a test.

South Korea—Expressed “deep regret and concern” over the announcement and raised its security level. Yang Chang-Seok, who leads the government’s unification efforts, said the planned test “poses a grave threat to peace” and “will have a decisively negative impact” on relations between the two countries.

Iran

French government officials distanced themselves from the proposal. Foreign Ministry spokesman Jean-Baptiste Mattei said he was surprised by the idea, which he called ‘’totally new for us.’’ Georges Le Guelte, a nuclear expert at France’s Institute for International and Strategic Research, called Saeedi’s announcement ‘’a diversion tactic’’ and the international community was unlikely to agree to such a deal because the enrichment would still take place on Iranian territory.