Mitterrand

by Philip Short

  France would not participate in the negotiations on Pershing and cruise missile deployments, he told Schmidt, because it was not a member of NATO’s military command and in any case it would do nothing which might compromise the independence of its own nuclear deterrent. But the deployments were vital, both to restore the balance of terror and, more importantly, to re-couple the United States to Europe. NATO’s ‘flexible strategy’, Mitterrand told his visitor, was nonsensical. If there were nuclear war – an eventuality which he thought unlikely – it would be total war. There would be no time for graduated escalation. The Soviet Union must understand that if it used its SS-20s, the United States would respond with Pershings. If Pershings were launched against targets on Russian soil, the Soviet Union would retaliate with submarine-launched nuclear missiles off the US coast, which would take the same time to reach US cities – about six to eight minutes – as the Pershings would take to hit Russian cities. The result would be mutual annihilation. It followed that once the Pershings were deployed, both sides would be forced to recognise that the use not only of strategic missiles but also of intermediate forces was ruled out and at that point meaningful disarmament could begin.

  Schmidt was won over. Here was a left-wing French President, with Communists in his government, being far more clear-headed than any of his predecessors, even his good friend, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing.

  The understanding between France and West Germany which was sealed that afternoon would prove crucial for East–West relations and for Europe throughout the decade that followed. But before it could start to bear fruit, the Americans put a wrench in the works.

  In November 1981, Ronald Reagan proposed that both the US and Russia should renounce all intermediate-range nuclear forces in the European theatre – not only SS-20s, but American Pershings and cruise missiles too. Mitterrand and Schmidt were blind-sided. ‘Option Zero’, as Reagan called it, would ensure that Europe and the US remained decoupled. Reagan’s nuclear planners were well aware of that. A nuclear war confined to the European theatre which the United States might survive unscathed had its attractions for Washington. But the Kremlin, then headed by the ailing Leonid Brezhnev and later, after his death in November 1982, by Yuri Andropov, former head of the KGB, failed to see that for a transitory gain – temporary superiority in medium-range nuclear weapons – it was passing up an opportunity to remove the entire European theatre from US nuclear protection.

  The stand-off lasted a year before Reagan was forced to acknowledge that ‘Option Zero’ was not going to work and the ‘dual track strategy’ resumed.

  By then the Russians had become convinced that the growing strength of the pacifist movement in the West, with its slogan, ‘Better Red than Dead’, would make the deployment of Pershings impossible. Opposition to ‘Euromissiles’, as they were called, was strongest in West Germany, where that autumn Schmidt’s Social Democrats had been replaced by a Christian-Democrat-led coalition headed by Helmut Kohl. It was becoming urgent for Mitterrand to lay out the French position and, if possible, to do so in such a way as to change the terms of the European debate.

  The occasion came the following January, when he travelled to Bonn to address the West German parliament on the 20th anniversary of the Franco-German Friendship Treaty.

  As was often the case when Mitterrand was planning a major speech, he left the drafting to the last possible minute. On January 19 1983, a Wednesday, the day before he was due to speak, he summoned the Defence and Foreign Ministers and a group of close aides to tell them that the text they had prepared was ‘tragically useless’ and they had better try again. The next version was little better. At 11 p.m. he summoned them for a third time and, after several hours of discussion, left them to work through the night on a new version. The following morning Mitterrand rewrote it himself for a fourth time in the plane. While he held talks with Kohl, his secretary prepared a clean copy on a typewriter with a German keyboard, which gave rise to some original spellings. But still he was not satisfied. Ten minutes before he was to appear, he closeted himself in an office to make further revisions.

  West German officials, who had expected a text for translation hours if not days before, were tearing their hair out. How was it possible for the French to be so disorganised?

  The speech turned out to be worth waiting for.

  A simple idea governs French thinking: war must remain impossible and those who are tempted by it must be deterred. [It is] our conviction that nuclear weapons, as the instrument of deterrence, are, whether one likes it or not, the guarantee of peace from the moment that there is a balance of forces . . . The maintenance of this balance requires that no region of Europe be left defenceless against nuclear weapons directed specifically against it. Anyone who gambles on ‘decoupling’ the European and American continents would, in our view, be calling into question . . . the maintenance of peace. I think – and I say – that this ‘decoupling’ is a danger in itself, . . . a danger which weighs particularly on those European countries which do not possess nuclear arms.11

  Decades later, it is difficult to appreciate the impact of those few sentences. Mitterrand’s argument was that the pacifists, by seeking to leave Europe defenceless, were inviting a new war in which non-nuclear powers like West Germany would find themselves in the front line. Later that year he would encapsulate the thought in an aphorism: ‘Pacifism . . . is in the West; the missiles are in the East’.12

  The speech was a game-changer.

  The Russians were furious. Kohl was delighted – as well he might be: Mitterrand’s backing comforted the Christian Democrats in their support of deployment and helped Kohl to victory in the parliamentary elections which were held two months later. The Americans, after drawing a deep breath, applauded.13 Henry Kissinger telephoned to say he had found the speech ‘quite remarkable’. Reagan, declaring that Mitterrand’s remarks were ‘of inestimable value’, thanked him for ‘strengthening the Alliance at a time when the European countries have to admit their . . . anxiety before the pressure of public opinion’. After the Farewell episode, it was the final proof of French loyalty. Mitterrand had already made unpublicised decisions to grant French port facilities to US nuclear submarines and to ease overflight restrictions for NATO aircraft. Now his support for the deployment of Pershings in West Germany left even the most hawkish members of the administration with no reason to question the French leader’s foreign policy stance. Kissinger would later describe him as ‘a very good ally, the best of all the French presidents’, while Reagan was on record as having said, in an aside which would not have gone down well had it come to the ears of Margaret Thatcher, ‘You know, François, there’s probably more common ground in foreign policy between the US and France than between the US and any other country.’ That might be true of nuclear arms, but in other areas it would be sorely tested in the first years of Mitterrand’s time in office.

  Partly from ideological considerations, partly for reasons of national pride, France and the USA were often at loggerheads. Latin America was a prime example. Washington supported right-wing oligarchies in countries like El Salvador, arguing that they were the best defence against the inroads of communism; France supported the oligarchies’ opponents, arguing that US backing for Latin American dictatorships was giving communism its chance. It was a dialogue of the deaf. ‘Reagan will end up proving to the American public that he was right,’ Mitterrand grumbled. ‘His policies reinforce hard-line revolutionaries [who] have no choice but to take the Soviet side. It’s a vicious circle, and one for which the USA bears a great responsibility.’

  Mitterrand set out his position at the North–South Conference at Cancun, in Mexico, in October 1981, pleading for increased aid, better terms of trade and debt relief for the poorest countries.

  Non-assistance to a people in danger is not yet an offence under international law, but it is a moral and political fault that has already cost too many deaths and too much suffering . . . for us to continue to commit it . . . Fran
ce says no to the despair which pushes towards violence those deprived of any other way to make themselves heard. It says no to the attitude which tramples underfoot public freedoms only to outlaw afterwards those who take up arms to defend those freedoms.

  To all freedom fighters, France extends a message of hope . . . Homage to the humiliated, to the émigrés, to those exiled from their own land, who wish to live and to live free! Homage to those who are gagged, who are persecuted, who are tortured, who wish to live and to live free! Homage to those who have been detained, who have disappeared, who have been assassinated, who wished to live and to live free! Homage to the priests who have been ill-treated, the trades unionists who have been imprisoned, the unemployed who sell their blood to survive, the Indians hunted down in their forests, the workers without rights, the peasants without land, those who resist without arms and who want to live and to live free! To all these, France says: Courage! Freedom will triumph.14

  It was a fine left-wing diatribe in favour of social justice, but not calculated to endear him to a right-wing Republican administration, least of all in America’s backyard where many of the regimes he denounced were on life-support from the CIA. To no one’s surprise, the Cancun conference achieved nothing.

  Economic policy was another apple of discord.

  The Americans eventually learnt not to keep asking French officials to explain ‘the difference between your economic policy and that of a communist country’, as Reagan’s sherpa, Richard Allen (soon to become US National Security Adviser) and the President’s economic adviser, Ed Meese, had at the Ottawa G7 summit in July. But the Republicans’ ‘supply side economics’ had no place for Mitterrand’s ideas about state ownership of the means of production, reducing social inequalities and promoting consumer-led growth. Nor did Washington wish to understand that Europe’s economic interests might be different from those of the United States. The Europeans were willing to stand firm against Soviet nuclear threats but they were not willing to forgo Soviet bloc trade.

  At Ottawa there had been preliminary skirmishes. Reagan called for a strengthening of COCOM, the Western coordinating committee charged with restricting exports of sensitive technology to Soviet bloc countries and China. Mitterrand retorted: ‘We are not going to start a blockade, as Napoleon did [against nineteenth-century Russia]. It never works. Why create food shortages in countries which are already starving?’ That was a jibe at the hypocrisy of the American position. America’s main export to the USSR was grain, which was unaffected by COCOM restrictions. Europe exported machinery. At a time when global growth was being strangled by high US interest rates, which Washington insisted were needed to fight inflation, the Europeans were not about to make additional sacrifices for a policy which, even if justified, would ratchet up to unacceptable levels the economic and social strains to which their own countries were subjected.

  The result was a stalemate. Reagan refused to lower interest rates. The Europeans refused to restrict East–West trade.

  In December 1981, after the Polish leader, General Jaruzelski, declared martial law and placed under house arrest the leaders of the free trade union, Solidarno´s̗c, who had demanded political reforms, the US President tried again. Washington imposed stiff economic sanctions and asked the Europeans to cancel plans to help build a huge new pipeline from Siberia to provide natural gas for European industry. To back up this ‘request’, a senior US official was despatched to Europe to warn the three countries concerned – France, West Germany and Italy – that if the pipeline project went ahead, the US Navy might not continue to assure protection of their oil supplies from the Gulf.

  It was exactly the wrong approach. Mitterrand was still fuming over his first encounter with America’s economic ‘hegemonism’ at Ottawa – its ‘crude way’, as he put it, ‘of summoning its allies with a whistle when in fact it is serving its own national interests’. Now Washington was threatening France directly if it did not toe the American line. The French response was not long in coming. A month later, Paris and Moscow signed an agreement whereby not only would French companies participate in the pipeline’s construction but France would buy 8 billion cubic metres of Russian gas annually for twenty-five years. West Germany and Italy followed suit.

  Reagan wrote twice to ‘François’ expressing ‘deep concern’.

  At the next G7 summit in Versailles, in June 1982, France and West Germany fended off a fresh US offensive to try to restrict export credits to the Soviet bloc. Two weeks later Reagan announced an embargo on the export of machinery for the gas pipeline by European subsidiaries of American firms.

  This time Mitterrand made it known that if the embargo were enforced, France would boycott future G7 meetings. ‘I have no intention,’ he told the Cabinet, ‘of becoming the Americans’ buffoon.’ It was left to George Shultz, who succeeded Haig as Secretary of State, to find a way out of the mess. But the face-saving solution that he came up with, after months of negotiation, opened another can of worms. On the morning of November 13, the Elysée received a draft of a radio address which Reagan was to make that afternoon, announcing that the embargo would be replaced by a binding system of consultation under which the Allies pledged ‘not to engage in trade arrangements which contribute to the . . . strategic advantage of the USSR or serve to preferentially aid [its] economy’.

  Mitterrand exploded. ‘It’s intolerable and unacceptable,’ he said. ‘If we go down this road it means accepting that France is no longer independent.’

  In a statement, which the President himself drafted, the French Foreign Ministry announced that, contrary to what Reagan had said in his broadcast, France was not party to such an agreement and did not consider itself bound by it. Mitterrand told the Cabinet afterwards: ‘By taking France out of the NATO military command, [de Gaulle] refused military integration [under US leadership]. I refuse economic integration.’

  The following weekend he wrote to Reagan: ‘[Our Alliance] should draw its strength from our diversity. It is in respecting the national character of each State . . . that we will promote the growth in each of our countries of a common will for defence.’

  It was not about East–West trade. It was about national independence. In the French view – not just that of Mitterrand, but of all shades of French political opinion – the United States was seeking to transform the G7 into a political directorate under American leadership to order the affairs of the non-communist world. In the process, the interests of its allies were trampled underfoot. Mitterrand’s diplomatic adviser, Hubert Védrine, who would later become French Foreign Minister, summed it up. When the Americans want something, he said, ‘they’re terrifying, they behave like door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesmen’, and when they decide to act, ‘they care as little about the effects their actions have on us as we would care about the fallout our policies might have on Luxembourg’.

  The nub of the problem was power.

  That had been brought home to Mitterrand at a meeting with Reagan earlier that year. The Americans were up in arms because France had accorded recognition to the Farabundo Marti resistance movement in El Salvador – then a prey to death squads organised by the US-backed military dictatorship – and had supplied modest quantities of arms to the left-wing government in Nicaragua. ‘We cannot tolerate the slightest presence of Marxism south of the Rio Grande,’ Reagan had told him. ‘We are afraid that it will be contagious and Mexico will be infected by communism.’ Mitterrand was struck by the symmetry. The Monroe Doctrine was the mirror image of the Brezhnev doctrine: no communism south of the Rio Grande, no capitalism east of the Elbe.

  France might no longer have the substance of power but it insisted on the semblance. By the spring of 1983, after Mitterrand’s speech in Bonn and the expulsion of Soviet diplomats in April, the Americans were starting to take that on board.

  There was a last, ugly spasm of rancour at Williamsburg, in Virginia, when the G7 met in May. Once again, Reagan was determined to twist his allies’ arms to present a comm
on front against the Soviet Union, proposing that NATO be expanded by some form of association with Japan and that the G7 give public backing to his now moribund ‘Option Zero’ proposal. Mitterrand rejected both. He was completely isolated. None of the others wanted to go to war in order to defend Japan – which was the implication of the US position – but neither Margaret Thatcher, who faced elections a week later, nor Helmut Kohl, engaged in a battle of wills with Moscow over Euromissile deployment, was ready to risk a rupture with Washington over what, in the end, were merely words on paper. During the closing session on security, Reagan lost his temper at Mitterrand’s intransigence, at one point slamming down his fist with such force that his dossiers flew to the other end of the table. Eventually a compromise was reached. The final declaration made no mention either of NATO expansion or of ‘Option Zero’, but Mitterrand was forced to accept a clause asserting that the security of the group’s members was ‘indivisible and must be approached on a global basis’. It was anodyne enough, but Mitterrand thought it brought the G7 an unacceptable step closer to becoming a global alliance.