by Philip Short
The first task, dictated by the political calendar, was to try to break the logjam in Europe, where a dispute over Britain’s budget contribution was blocking progress on everything else. On January 1 1984, France took over for six months the rotating EEC presidency.
Mitterrand, like Pompidou before him, had initially hoped to engineer a balance between Britain and West Germany which would allow France to advance its European agenda by playing off one against the other. To that end he had gone out of his way to cultivate Margaret Thatcher. In the first months he was in office, to the dismay of most of the French Left, he had remained silent, in public at least, about the deaths of ten Irish Republican hunger strikers near Belfast. The following year France was the first Western country to declare unconditional support for Britain in the Falklands conflict, a position all the more striking in view of Mitterrand’s recent championing of the rights of developing nations at Cancun.
In the latter case it was not just a matter of showing that the French, in times of trouble, were Britain’s most reliable allies, in contrast to the embarrassed hesitations of the Reagan administration, which, mindful of its ties with the military dictatorships of Latin America, tried unsuccessfully to broker a compromise with Argentina before reluctantly agreeing to back the British position. It was a way to put down a marker. France, too, had a confetti of empire scattered around the globe. What Argentina was attempting in the Falklands, others might do to French possessions like Mayotte or Réunion, in the Indian Ocean, or Clipperton Island in the Pacific off the coast of Mexico. Would-be predators needed to know that, were that to happen, France would react as Britain had done.
The morning after the invasion, Mitterrand telephoned Thatcher to assure her of his support. His call was totally unexpected. ‘I shall never forget,’ she said later, ‘that quick, timely and energetic gesture.’ Like other EEC nations, France refused to break diplomatic relations with Buenos Aires or to take a position on the islands’ sovereignty. But short of that the French President did everything in his power to help. At Thatcher’s request, he delayed a shipment of Exocet air-to-sea missiles to Peru lest they find their way to the Argentinians and, after an Exocet had disabled a British destroyer, HMS Sheffield, he ordered that the British be given details of the missiles’ radar guidance codes. A French squadron of Super Etendards, an aircraft then in service with the Argentine air force, was flown to RAF Wyton near Cambridge to enable British pilots to familiarise themselves with the plane’s characteristics.
At a personal level Mitterrand and Thatcher were an odd couple. She was single-minded and obdurate, with no place in her vocabulary for ambiguity, nuance or compromise. He was in every way the opposite. Yet they managed to strike up a rapport. Attali thought it was because Mitterrand was intrigued by her as a woman, not just as a fellow leader. Anne Lauvergeon, who was later his deputy Chief of Staff, offered a different perspective: ‘He was one of the few in Europe who treated her as an equal. She appreciated that.’
Thatcher spoke passable French, but with a strong accent which made Mitterrand say: ‘If you close your eyes, you could think she’s Jane Birkin.’fn1 Not to be outdone, he would trot out his few words of English, which had not noticeably progressed since his homestays as a thirteen-year-old in Kent.
He respected her. She liked him. ‘She has the eyes of Caligula,’ he mused on the way back from one visit to London, ‘and the mouth of Marilyn Monroe.’1
From the outset Thatcher made clear that there were two major problems she wanted resolved. The first was to put a cap on the Common Agricultural Policy, which guaranteed farmers minimum prices for their produce and absorbed 75 per cent of the EEC budget. It mainly benefited France and, to a lesser extent, Italy and West Germany, while Britain got little back because it had too few farmers to profit from it. Moreover the guarantees were leading to massive overproduction. ‘It’s a matter of common sense,’ she told Mitterrand the first time they met. ‘It’s not rational to spend a growing part of the community budget on surpluses that cost more and more.’
The second problem, she argued, was that Britain, as a net contributor, was paying more than its fair share. To correct that, she wanted a permanent rebate. The issue was not new. But nor was it as simple as she liked to make out. One of the reasons Britain regarded its contribution as excessive was that, for historical reasons, much of its trade was with countries outside Europe. Accordingly the customs duties it levied on non-EEC goods, which it forwarded to Brussels, were larger than those of its partners. Thatcher insisted that these payments were part of Britain’s contribution. None of the other member states counted them that way. In 1980, the year after her election, she had obtained a provisional two-year rebate, which was subsequently extended, amounting to almost two-thirds of the British payment.2 But a permanent settlement had eluded her.
In January 1984, Mitterrand received Thatcher in Paris.
To his dismay she insisted on reopening the negotiation from scratch, rather than building on the provisional accord reached three and a half years earlier. The reason soon became clear. In 1983, she had accepted a much lower payment, only 750 million euros, compared to 1.175 billion in 1980.3 But the difference, some 400 million, had been more than made up for by overpayments from Brussels, made in the previous three years, which she now refused to return.
At the next EEC summit, held under Mitterrand’s chairmanship in March 1984, Britain was offered a rebate of one billion euros a year, guaranteed for five years. Thatcher refused. Would she accept, she was asked, if the figure was raised to 1.1 billion? Again she refused. The minimum she would accept was 1.3 billion.
It was one refusal too many. Britain’s partners lost patience. Mitterrand wondered aloud whether the British should have a place in the Community at all.4 He was not alone. Kohl had asked Thatcher: ‘Margaret, how do you think Churchill and Adenauer would behave if they were in our place?’ She was unmoved. This was the period, one official recalled, when ‘the only time she said “yes” was when she was asked, “Are you against it?”’
Two months later, Mitterrand and Kohl met in Paris to plot their strategy. Mitterrand wanted to limit the rebate to one billion. Kohl thought they would have to offer 1.1 billion:
KOHL: [Thatcher] understands that she will have to give way, but she doesn’t want to admit it. She has talked too much about it in parliament . . . She’s terribly afraid that if she does [accept a lower figure] it will be seen as an admission that she got it wrong.
MITTERRAND: Maybe . . . We’ll have to find a way to dress it up, to create an appearance [of success for her]. [But] 1.1 billion is too much. The problem with her is that she always takes a compromise proposal as a new starting point . . . She thinks she’s at Trafalgar. In [March] she behaved like a child who wanted two spoonfuls of jam on her bread and was told she couldn’t have them.
KOHL: What a waste of energy on this British problem! Together we have to find a way to prevent it continuing.5
At the end of May, the ‘Ten’ reconvened in the former royal palace at Fontainebleau, where in 1814 Napoleon had been forced to abdicate by a coalition of his European opponents, a year before his final defeat by Britain and Prussia at Waterloo.
This time, Mitterrand felt, the shoe was on the other foot. In great secrecy, Roland Dumas, whom Mitterrand had appointed Minister of European Affairs, and his German counterpart, Hans-Dietrich Genscher, had worked out a plan under which, if Thatcher continued to refuse a settlement, the other nine would continue to operate the Common Agricultural Policy and other key EEC programmes without her.6 The idea was to sideline the Community institutions in Brussels by creating a web of intergovernmental agreements from which Britain would be excluded. It would then find itself a member of an EEC which had been reduced to an empty shell. Whether countries like Denmark, Ireland and the Netherlands would in practice have gone along with such a radical solution is uncertain. But it offered a theoretical alternative if she dug in her heels.
Thatcher had stated pu
blicly that she wanted a rebate of 1.2 billion euros that year, 1.25 billion in 1985, and 90 per cent of what she called the ‘excess’ in Britain’s payments thereafter. Over dinner, on the opening day, Mitterrand offered one billion for the first two years and 60 per cent thereafter.
Foreign Secretary Geoffrey Howe described their respective negotiating tactics: ‘my approach is rather like a police line – it’s flexible, when the crowd pushes in one place the line gives way a bit, elsewhere it moves forward, but it never breaks. The Prime Minister builds a brick wall. It resists. The disadvantage is that if her position becomes untenable, she ends up having to knock it down.’7
That was what happened. Next morning Mitterrand made his final offer: one billion euros for two years, then 65 per cent. After lunch, she had a private meeting with Kohl, who confirmed West Germany’s support for the French position. Then Mitterrand, also privately, told her the offer was ‘to take or to leave’. Attali wrote afterwards that she ‘cracked like glass, on the verge of tears. She just wanted to get it over with . . . An astonishing sight!’ At the plenary session that afternoon, Britain’s partners agreed to make it 66 per cent, rather than 65. It was significantly less than she had turned down in March but it enabled her to claim that she had achieved a two-thirds reduction.
Mitterrand kept his word. The deal was dressed up as a British success and the Iron Lady was able to return to London in triumph.8 But a few days later he told Henry Kissinger: ‘She only speaks in figures. She has a strong personality, but not much in the way of long-term views [and] she’s not used to meeting resistance . . . She won’t always find herself facing the Argentinians or the Labour Party.’
The importance of Fontainebleau, however, lay elsewhere.
After almost a decade in which the European Community had marked time, haggling over milk quotas, the wine lake, the butter mountain and fishing rights, the resolution of the dispute over the British rebate opened the way to progress on a host of other issues.
The summit agreed to increase the Community’s budget by raising the levy on Value Added Tax from one to 1.4 per cent. It approved the entry of Spain and Portugal, which had been hanging fire since 1977. The first serious measures were taken to rationalise spending on agriculture. More important for the long term, two working groups were created, one of which laid the foundations for the Single European Act, signed in February 1986, paving the way for European Union, while the other produced proposals to make Europe more relevant to its citizens. Between them they would lead, within two years, to improvements in the single market; the lifting of internal border controls under the Schengen Agreement; enhanced political cooperation; the Erasmus programme for exchanges among European universities; a larger role for the European Parliament; and a uniform European passport.
The floodgates had opened. Despite difficult economic conditions in almost all the member states, they had come to a collective recognition that they would do better together than each one by itself. It was the start of a period of political and economic change on a scale not seen in Europe since the end of the Second World War.
The Fontainebleau summit succeeded because of the entente between Mitterrand and Helmut Kohl. It was their decision over breakfast in the Hôtel de l’Aigle Noir, an eighteenth-century hostelry opposite the palace grounds, to rebuff Margaret Thatcher’s efforts to obtain a rebate in excess of 65 per cent that had made agreement possible. Mitterrand had established his bona fides in the eyes of the West German Chancellor with his speech to the Bundestag, eighteen months before, backing Kohl’s decision to install Euromissiles on German soil. But their understanding had begun earlier. Three days after Kohl’s election, in October 1982, he had flown to Paris to assure Mitterrand of the importance he attached to the Franco-German relationship. Part of their conversation had been about the war. Kohl had been 15 in 1945, Mitterrand, 28. Both were from a generation whose commitment to Europe was founded on memories of carnage. At one point, Kohl had told him:
I would like to talk to you very openly, as a younger man to someone older whom he trusts. You are a man steeped in history and literature. I am too . . . I want to tell you something. My grandfather had a son who died in the War of ’14 . . . My father named his elder son after [him]. That son died in turn in the war in ’45. My own son has the same name as my [dead] brother. He’s now starting his military service. He knows very well the meaning of freedom. We want to meet the challenge which consists of having both freedom and peace.9
It was a language Mitterrand understood. But until Fontainebleau he had worried that Kohl might switch his support to Britain, with which he had a common interest because West Germany was also a net contributor to the Community budget. That had not happened.
Helmut Kohl was a massive bear of a man, a bon vivant, bluff, hearty and expansive, with unusual political acumen. He would become the longest-serving German Chancellor since Bismarck and perhaps the most underrated Western statesman of the twentieth century. Mitterrand, introverted and ambivalent, was not an obvious soulmate. Yet they found unexpected common interests, including the philosophy of religion. Jean-Louis Bianco, who had taken over from Bérégovoy as Elysée Secretary-General, remembered listening to them for hours ‘discussing the relationship between pietism and quietism’. For the next decade they formed a political partnership closer and more enduring than that of Thatcher and Reagan. Only once in their time together would Kohl strike out on his own, leaving Mitterrand off balance, and that in circumstances so particular that the Frenchman acknowledged privately he might have done the same. Both felt passionately about the future of Europe. Kohl saw himself playing the same role with Mitterrand as Adenauer, his political mentor, had earlier played with de Gaulle.
Three months after Fontainebleau, in September 1984 at Verdun, where 700,000 French and German soldiers had died in 1916, they created a poignant symbol of that shared desire for peace. Standing bareheaded at the ossuary at Douaumont, in the battlefield where Kohl’s uncle had died in the First War and Mitterrand had been taken prisoner in the Second, they linked hands in the driving rain while a military band played the German and French anthems.10 In both countries, the image remained embedded in people’s minds. It signified a final turning of the page, consigning to the history books the last echoes of the fratricidal conflicts which had ravaged the heartland of Europe three times in seventy years. Other steps followed, including the creation in 1987 of a Franco-German army brigade, first bruited at the time of the ill-fated European Defence Community Treaty, thirty years earlier. But nothing would match the emotional impact of the image of the two leaders, standing silently, hand in hand, before a coffin draped with the French and German flags.
While in Europe French policy accumulated successes, at home Mitterrand was struggling. On top of the austerity programme, which was grimly continuing, he had been confronted by what in America would be called ‘culture wars’.
Among the ‘110 Propositions’ were three dealing with socio-cultural issues. The first two went through without difficulty. The administration of justice was brought into line with the rest of Europe through the abolition of special courts and the death penalty; and a vast programme of devolution was initiated to reduce the centralised power of the State, which had been both a strength and a weakness of the French system since the seventeenth century.
When Mitterrand had been Mayor of Château-Chinon and President of the Conseil Général (Provincial Council) of the Nièvre, he had experienced at first hand the meddling of the préfets, the government commissioners, who always insisted on having the last word. As President he considered at one point doing away with them altogether but in the end contented himself with a massive transfer of power and resources from Paris to the local and provincial authorities, the first such shift since the Revolution, two centuries before.11 It turned out to be a mixed blessing. The dead hand of the State gave way to the cronyism and corruption of local politics. But it brought new energy and flexibility to what had been a sclerotic syst
em. In the same vein the state monopoly in broadcasting was relaxed. In 1982, well after the rest of Western Europe, the government authorised private radio stations, followed two years later by commercial television.fn2
But Mitterrand’s third campaign promise was an altogether different matter.
Proposition 90 envisaged the creation of ‘a grand, unified, secular, public service of national education’, a seemingly harmless formulation masking an issue which was political dynamite. The proposition had been worded with great care: the change, it said, would be negotiated ‘without [imposing] a monopoly’ and existing contracts for private schools would be respected. It was more conciliatory than the Common Programme drawn up by the Socialists and Communists nine years earlier, which had declared bluntly: ‘private schools . . . will, as a general rule, be nationalised’. Nonetheless, the juxtaposition of the three words, ‘unified’, ‘secular’ and ‘public’ was enough to reopen one of the oldest and deepest wounds in French politics.
Mitterrand had been aware of the danger. As a young MP in 1951, he had seen the quarrel over public subsidies for private education so poison relations between the Socialists and the Christian Democrats that it not only brought down the government but made any future coalition between them impossible. But there was no way to avoid it. Bringing the mainly Roman Catholic private schools into a unified State education system was the key demand of the French teachers’ unions, and since the 800,000 or so public school teachers were a core component of the Socialist Party’s support, they could not be ignored.
Like the argument over gun laws in America, the ‘schools quarrel’ in France is incomprehensible to foreigners. Both are rooted in history. Both are inherently irrational.
Until 1789, all education in France was in the hands of the Church. That ended with the Revolution, which proclaimed an inalienable right to free public education for all. Twenty years later Napoleon published a law stating that no school might be established in France unless authorised by the State. Gradually, however, the Church clawed back its prerogatives. A fissure developed in French society between those who supported Church schools, offering a religious education, and those who backed the Revolution and a secular state school system. In the 1950s and ’60s right-wing governments passed a series of laws reaffirming the Church’s educational role. By 1981, when Mitterrand came to power, the left-wing parties, which saw themselves as the Revolution’s heirs, were looking for revenge.