by Philip Short
Europe will no longer be what we have known for half a century. [After having been] dependent on the two superpowers, she will return to her own history and geography, as one returns to one’s own home. Either the tendency to break apart, to split into small pieces, will grow stronger and we will find again the Europe of 1919 . . . Or Europe will be built. She can do it in two stages. First thanks to the Community of the Twelve, which it is absolutely essential to strengthen . . . The second stage remains to be invented, [but] I expect to see in the 1990s the birth of a European Confederation in the true sense of the term which will associate all the states in our continent in a common, permanent organisation for trade, peace and security.20
To Mitterrand, creating a confederation was a way to affirm the common European identity of the former satellite states during what he saw as a lengthy transition period when their economic backwardness would preclude them from joining the European Community.
Gorbachev approved. Kohl was noncommittal. The EEC Commission President, Jacques Delors, was enthusiastic. The Americans were furious. Not only had Mitterrand put Moscow and Washington in the same basket as the ‘two superpowers’ which had kept Europe subservient, but the United States, not being part of Europe, was excluded from the proposed new arrangement.
At a meeting at Key Largo four months later, in April 1990, Mitterrand tried to mollify Bush, assuring his host that the idea of a European Confederation was ‘for a distant future’. The idea that France was trying to exclude American influence was ‘a fairy tale . . . another stupidity’. Bush chose to take him at his word. ‘We understand that the Europeans need a space to talk among themselves,’ he conceded, ‘but at the same time we need to enlarge the role of the Alliance.’
In the end the proposal for a European Confederation turned out to be a red herring. Mitterrand’s real goal had been to prevent the precipitate enlargement of the EEC. ‘The Community already has difficulty settling its problems with just twelve members,’ he said later. ‘The danger is that with a large number . . . it will become no more than a free trade area.’ That was what the British and the Dutch had always wanted: a common market without political commitments.
The French President was determined to avoid that. He told John Major, who had succeeded Thatcher as British Prime Minister the previous winter, that he did not want to see the East European states joining the Community for at least another twenty years. It was not only for fear that they would slow the pace of integration. Mitterrand was concerned that the entry of a mass of new members from East and Central Europe – traditionally Germany’s sphere of influence – would strengthen still further German influence in a Community which it was already poised to dominate. The Confederation, in his view, would provide a halfway house, where potential new members of the EEC could wait until the Community’s institutions were stronger and their own economies were more advanced.
The East Europeans saw through that. They interpreted his proposal, correctly, not so much as a stepping stone towards entry into the EEC but as a device to delay it. None of them wished to antagonise the United States, which they regarded as their best defence against the Soviet Union. And in any case, the CSCE, of which America was a member, already existed as a pan-European organisation. Why duplicate, unless the unspoken goal was to keep the Americans out?
In the end Mitterrand had to accept the logic of their position. In November 1990, he invited the thirty-four Heads of State and government of the CSCE to Paris, where they signed a ‘Charter for a New Europe’, marking the end of the Cold War. At the French President’s urging, they also approved the creation of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development to promote the transition of the former communist states to a market economy.21 The US, which preferred such matters to be handled from Washington, was reticent. But Thatcher was enthusiastic and agreed that the bank should be based in London. The Franco-German Brigade, which Kohl and Mitterrand had agreed to set up two years earlier, became operational, providing a potential nucleus for broader measures of cooperation in European defence. The German Chancellor now proposed additional steps. To complement progress towards financial harmonisation, he said, the Community should start talks on strengthening cooperation in security and foreign policy. At first Mitterrand hesitated. France, like Britain, was jealous of its sovereignty. But the idea of closer political union as a counterweight to German reunification at a time when, throughout the former communist bloc, the old political structures were collapsing, had its attractions. In December 1990, a month after the CSCE meeting, France and Germany called for a common foreign policy and ‘a genuine policy of common security leading in time to a common defence’. These would be discussed at an intergovernmental conference to be held in parallel with the conference on monetary union. The goal, the Twelve agreed, would be to transform the Community into a European Union – a term which now appeared for the first time – by the end of 1992.22 The words ‘federal Europe’ were not pronounced, but it was a cautious step in that direction.
While Mitterrand focussed on the tectonic shifts occurring abroad, Michel Rocard got on with the business of government at home. He started well. Within weeks of taking office, he brokered an agreement between the Kanaks and the French settlers in New Caledonia, bringing peace to a territory which, two months earlier, had been on the brink of civil war. He introduced a government ‘survival allowance’ for what were called ‘the new poor’, the half-million or so families and individuals, without jobs and often without a home, who had no income of any kind. It was to be financed in part by the wealth tax, which the Socialists restored. No socialist government before had made a serious effort to aid those who, for whatever reason, had finished up on the scrapheap of society, or even, as Rocard now did, for those living on the margins, in tower blocks that had become slums, where, as he put it, ‘everyday reality is made of elevators that don’t work, broken letter boxes, dilapidated apartments . . .’
Even the President was impressed. ‘Rocard is an enthusiast,’ he commented. ‘He believes in what he’s doing and he’s working at it.’
The plight of the millions of families who lived in squalid low-income housing estates in the suburbs of the big cities had never been at the forefront of the Socialist Party’s concerns. In the 1960s and ’70s, the Communists represented the disinherited. When their influence collapsed, most of their clientele went to the extreme Right or the extreme Left. The Socialists’ core support came from the working class and the bourgeois intelligentsia: teachers, civil servants, doctors, lawyers and other members of the liberal professions.
Christina Forsne, the left-wing Swedish journalist with whom Mitterrand had a long-standing liaison, wrote later that she could never make him understand that his failure to deal with the wretchedness of the ‘new poor’ was not only morally shaming but fraught with consequences for the future. He always replied that ‘everything economically possible’ was being done. Her criticisms were all the more striking because they came from a sympathetic source.
Under the presidency of François Mitterrand [she wrote], on the outskirts of [the big] cities there was real moral and material misery. The police no longer dared go there, families disintegrated, 90 per cent of the places in the kindergartens and schools were filled by immigrant children, there was violence, vigilantes and drugs. At the beginning of the ’90s, in the worst-off districts, two out of three families lived in destitution. Under the long-drawn-out reign of a Socialist President, social marginalisation and poorly controlled immigration became a veritable time bomb . . .
I never felt that his heart bled for the suburbs . . . It was only when the violence spilled over – when racism started to kill – that he really became engaged . . . I used to pester him: ‘Why are the Socialists deaf to all these problems?’. . . In return all I would get was a new speech about human rights . . . I would try to open his eyes, to ask him why he was incapable of communicating with these people who were struggling every day to survive, who couldn’t look
at things from the same perspective as he did . . . Weren’t they, the ‘little people’, who were defenceless, the ones he should be helping and supporting first? . . .
I never understood how he could be so blind . . . After our long discussions, I used to be worn out. With the strange feeling that this President ‘of all the French people’, [as he used to describe himself,] admitted that in the end these [borderline] people would have to be written out of a future that was being built without them.23
It may be argued that she was merely opposing one form of left-wing idealism against another – the grass-roots social democracy of Olof Palme’s Sweden against the intellectual socialism of the French. But she put her finger on a problem which no French leader, whether on the Left or the Right, was ever able to resolve – even if some, like Michel Rocard, tried harder than others: the blight of social decay in impoverished suburban ‘zones’, the French equivalent of the inner cities in Britain and the US, and the destruction of human dignity it entailed. She was right, too, about one of the causes. The mainstream leaders of the French Left were happy to trumpet their solidarity with the Third World, their defence of human rights, their championship of intellectuals persecuted by dictatorial regimes, but nothing could ‘remove the scales from their eyes when it came to . . . the anger rumbling right beside them’.
The problem illustrated a key difference between the political approaches of Mitterrand and Rocard. The President looked for solutions that were principled, the Prime Minister for solutions that worked. ‘Between us . . . it was the shock of two cultures,’ Rocard said later. ‘We were not made from the same wood.’
The ‘honeymoon’ between them, such as it was, did not last long. Mitterrand began to complain that Rocard was not ‘Left’ enough, conveniently forgetting that it was the Prime Minister’s ‘moderate’ image and acceptability to the Centre that had made him choose him in the first place. That soon became an article of faith. No matter what Rocard did, Mitterrand was never satisfied. But the Prime Minister calculated that the longer he could stay at Matignon, the better his chances of contesting the presidential election in 1995, and he calibrated his attitude to Mitterrand accordingly. ‘If you’re hanging on to a bull by its tail,’ he told his colleagues, ‘the worst it can do is shit in your face. It can’t throw you with its horns.’
Rocard was not Mitterrand’s only domestic problem. The start of his second term had been tainted by financial scandals. In the summer of 1988, a group of investors – including Mitterrand’s old friend, François Dalle, from l’Oréal; Samir Traboulsi, an influential Lebanese businessman close to the Finance Minister, Pierre Bérégovoy; and the Hungarian-American financier, George Soros – had made huge profits during a raid on the French bank, Société Générale, allegedly by insider trading.
A few months later the name of another member of Mitterrand’s inner circle was cited in a similar case of financial skulduggery. Patrice Pelat, a friend since their days as PoWs together, was alleged to have profited illegally from a tip-off concerning a takeover bid by Pechiney, the state-owned French aluminium company. Pelat and Mitterrand were so close that he would enter the President’s office without knocking. At the Elysée he was known jokingly as ‘the Vice-President’. It was embarrassing enough that Dalle had been compromised. If Pelat was shown to have broken the law, it was getting dangerously near the centre of power. Moreover in both cases, the tip-offs from which they had benefited were said to have come from within the government.fn2
Pelat issued impassioned denials. But he was a rogue and Mitterrand knew better than to believe him. ‘He says it’s not true,’ he told Fabius, ‘but my intuition tells me that it is true, at least partly.’ In February 1989 the President told a television interviewer that, if his old comrade were shown to be at fault, ‘I cannot continue the same kind of friendship’ as before. Three weeks later Pelat died of a heart attack. At his funeral, Mitterrand broke down and wept.
No one seriously claimed that he had been directly involved in leaking information. But the charges of malfeasance against two of his closest friends and the smear campaign that followed were impossible to lay to rest. The mud stuck. At well-heeled dinner parties all over France, no one could talk of anything but Mitterrand’s hypocrisy in pretending that he had no interest in money while enriching his cronies.
Worse was to come. During the municipal elections that spring, a routine police investigation disclosed that the Socialist Party chief in Marseille, Michel Pezet, had been taking kickbacks from a prominent public works contractor. Normally matters of this kind were hushed up. Politicians on both Left and Right had to get their campaign funds from somewhere and, in the absence of public financing, false invoices and kickbacks were the accepted method. This time, however, for reasons that were never explained, the investigation was allowed to continue.24 In April a raid on the offices of Urbanet, a consultancy bureau whose official purpose was to advise Socialist town and provincial councils on public works contracts, turned up four spiral notebooks containing detailed accounts for the system of occult financing which had been set up for the Socialist Party by Pierre Mauroy on Mitterrand’s instructions in the early 1970s. Over the previous seventeen years, the investigators discovered, Urbanet had brought the Socialists an average of 100 million francs (£10 million or US $16 million) annually in illegal funding.
The Right was certainly no less culpable. But the evidence found by the police dealt almost entirely with the malversations of the Left.
Mauroy insisted that the only answer was an amnesty. Otherwise, he told Mitterrand, thousands of Socialist elected officials could end up being charged. The President reluctantly agreed. But the outcry at this ‘shameful attempt at self-whitewashing’, as one magistrate described it, forced the government to think again. The amnesty was rewritten to cover businessmen who had provided illegal funds but MPs were excluded, which meant they could not be accused of whitewashing themselves. It was a breathtaking piece of hypocrisy – in practice there was no way that politicians could be charged for accepting illegal funds if those who provided them were amnestied – but it did the job. Early in the New Year the amnesty law passed. The Socialists breathed a collective sigh of relief.
But their troubles were not over.
Three months later, in March 1990, the Party held its biennial congress at Rennes in Brittany. Fabius was keen to try again for the post of First Secretary. Mitterrand did not dissuade him. But the Party split into three competing factions. Fabius and Jospin each had the support of 30 per cent of the delegates. Rocard, with 24 per cent, held the balance of power. They could agree on nothing and for the first time in the Party’s history, the congress ended without being able to elect a new leader. A few days later, Mauroy was reappointed because there was no other choice.
For the second time in two years, Mitterrand had ‘committed himself to Fabius not enough to make him win’, as Jean-Louis Bianco put it, ‘but enough to irritate everyone else and to end up making Fabius’s failure appear to be his own’. The Socialists were divided into warring clans. Still worse, the President’s closest followers – the ‘Mitterrandists’ – were irremediably split. He said afterwards that he had underestimated the violence of the passions the contest had aroused. He was not being honest with himself. He had misjudged Rennes, just as he had misjudged the leadership election in 1988, because he was blinded by his antipathy towards Rocard and wanted to prevent him ever becoming his successor.
As if that were not enough, the row over the amnesty, which had seemed to have been laid to rest, flared up again more fiercely than ever. This time the target was the former Overseas Development Minister, Christian Nucci, who had been accused during Mitterrand’s first term of misappropriating 7 million francs (£700,000 or US $1.2 million) which he had used for political expenses. Two weeks after the debacle at Rennes a panel of senior judges, who had been investigating the case, complained that the amnesty had been ‘made to measure’ to enable Nucci to escape trial. They were right.
Mitterrand had insisted that the law be worded in such a way as to ensure that the ex-minister would be covered.
The accusations of ‘self-whitewashing’ resumed with a vengeance. Magistrates’ associations, on the Left as well as the Right, denounced ‘the cynicism of [the] political class’. In the provinces, angry judges, complaining of ‘a two-speed justice system’, ordered prisoners to be set free on the grounds that ‘if stealing . . . millions of francs of government money does not trouble public order, why should stealing cars be a problem?’ Three-quarters of those questioned in opinion surveys declared themselves scandalised by the amnesty for Nucci and two out of three thought the country’s politicians were dishonest.
It had not been a good year. Mitterrand’s reputation had been dragged through the mud. The congress at Rennes had confirmed his loss of control of the Socialist Party. The amnesty, which at first had seemed an elegant way to dispose of a problem which discredited the political class as a whole, had rebounded against the Left with a violence that left all of them reeling.
As usual, Mitterrand blamed his bête noire. ‘Rocard is . . . behind all this hatred against Fabius,’ he raged. ‘What dwarves they are! . . . Rocard will pay dearly for this. I’ll get rid of him. I have only to find a pretext.’ In fact the Prime Minister was not remotely responsible for Fabius’s defeat. Nor was he to blame for the amnesty. But the President needed to vent his spleen on someone and Rocard was his whipping boy. ‘What a disaster!’ he complained. ‘Why did I listen to Rocard? He wanted this amnesty to protect his friends and keep the Socialist Party’s support.’ It was completely untrue. Rocard had been against the amnesty from the start but being, as he put it, ‘a good soldier in a bad cause’, had piloted the law through parliament under pressure from the Elysée and the Socialists.