by Philip Short
More serious was the economic downturn. Farmers, facing a reduction in subsidies from the EEC’s Common Agricultural Policy, went on the rampage, attacking town halls and prefectures, burning trucks carrying imported agricultural produce and disrupting government meetings. There were strikes by dockers, nurses, steelworkers, truck drivers and public servants. As tax revenues declined, budget cuts loomed, forcing the government to reduce spending at what was politically the worst possible time.
By December Mitterrand had to admit that his protégée had failed.39 To Jack Lang he complained that she had been unable to trigger ‘the magic of power’. In fact, the problem was far more basic. Cresson had never been able to gain control of the government machine. Her staff at Matignon were ineffectual amateurs. Dominique Strauss-Kahn, then Minister of Industry, remembered the government being ‘a total shambles’. Hubert Védrine, Mitterrand’s diplomatic adviser, who had taken over from Bianco as Elysée Secretary-General, spoke of ‘not spending a single day that was normal’ as long as Cresson held office.
She had undone all the good that the Gulf War had brought Mitterrand. His support, in the country and in the Party, was slipping away. For the first time since his re-election his approval rating fell into negative territory. On the Left voices could be heard suggesting that he step down so as to trigger an early presidential election which Michel Rocard, whose popularity was undiminished, stood a good chance of winning against a quartet of right-wing leaders – Barre, Chirac, Giscard and Le Pen – who were quarrelling among themselves. Mitterrand was bitter. ‘If they think I am going to resign before my term is up, they’re wrong,’ he told Fabius. ‘If it would help, I would do it of my own free will. But for those who want to bury me, No!’
That winter Fabius was finally able to succeed Mauroy as Socialist Party First Secretary. But it was a pyrrhic victory. The quid pro quo was that Rocard would be the Party’s candidate for the presidency in three years’ time. Then, in March 1992, in a grim foretaste of the battles to come, the Socialists obtained only 18.3 per cent of the vote in elections for provincial councils in the départements and the regions. It was their worst result since the Party had been re-launched at Épinay twenty years earlier.
Less than a week afterwards, on Thursday, April 2, ten and a half months after Cresson’s appointment, the President accepted her resignation.
It was a stunning rebuke.
He had insisted on installing a Prime Minister whom none of his colleagues wanted and who herself had opposed his decision, just as, two years earlier, he had tried to impose on the Socialists a First Secretary whom the majority of the Party did not want. In both cases he then failed to give them the support that might have allowed them to succeed. ‘God’, as the cartoonists now called Mitterrand, was becoming adept at setting in motion the pieces on the political chessboard and then watching from on high to see how the game played out. But he was not God, he was mortal. When they failed, he failed too. By the time Cresson resigned in April, 65 per cent of the French people said they were dissatisfied with him. Pierre Bérégovoy, whom he named to succeed her – not with any enthusiasm but because he was the only alternative – had just a year to turn things round before the parliamentary vote. Mitterrand had waited too long. The new Prime Minister had an impossible task.
François Mitterrand was not alone in misjudging the mood of his party and his country in the early 1990s. In Britain, Thatcher had been forced to resign. In the United States, George Bush would not be re-elected. In the USSR pressure was building on Gorbachev.
In January 1991, Soviet troops had tried rather half-heartedly to regain control of Lithuania and Latvia, which had declared unilateral independence a year earlier. The operation was an embarrassing failure. Gorbachev insisted afterwards that it had not been authorised by Moscow. To Mitterrand it suggested that the Soviet leader was losing control. When he met Bush in Martinique in March, he counselled prudence. ‘It would be a mistake to force Gorbachev to go beyond the limit of what he can stand,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what his chances are, but I don’t want to make him lose . . . What’s at stake is his international reputation, his authority in the world . . . Otherwise the Soviets will say to him: “You haven’t been able to prevent an economic crisis, separatism, disarmament, the loss of Soviet influence . . . You must go!”’ Bush agreed. From then on, the West tried discreetly to bolster Gorbachev’s position. John Major invited him to attend the G7 summit in London. The Americans involved him in the Middle East peace talks. But five years of economic reforms had brought a sharp decline both in Soviet living standards and in Gorbachev’s popularity at home. After the Baltic states, other Soviet republics demanded self-rule.40 When Bush and Mitterrand met next, this time in Rambouillet, Gorbachev’s future was once again at the forefront of their concerns:
BUSH: How is it going to work out between the Soviet Union and its constitutive republics? It’s a huge problem . . .
MITTERRAND We need the world and the USSR to realise that Mr Gorbachev is their last chance before chaos. Up to now he’s proved his strength – he has already ruled for longer than Lenin. [But] his economy is in agony . . . and we must not forget the problem of the generals in Moscow . . .
BUSH: On that point, our specialists have been saying for the last few weeks that there’s less to fear from the Soviet army.
MITTERRAND: It’s true that Gorbachev has been skilful there but he remains fragile.41
Five weeks later, on Monday, August 19 1991, shortly after 6 a.m., the Soviet news agency, Tass, announced that the Vice-President, Gennady Yanayev, had taken power because, ‘for health reasons’, Gorbachev was unable to fulfil his responsibilities. The trigger had been a proposal to increase the powers of the republics at the expense of the central Soviet government. Conservatives, led by the KGB Chairman, Vladimir Kryuchkov, foresaw that that would lead to the USSR’s disintegration.
Mitterrand’s first reaction was that the putsch would not succeed. ‘Gorbachev appointed all those jerks [the coup leaders] in the winter to neutralise them,’ he told Védrine. ‘They are cretins. They won’t bring it off because they represent only the past and are flying in the face of present-day Soviet realities.’
But in telephone conversations later with other Western leaders, he was much more prudent. To Major and to Bush, both of whom denounced the coup as unconstitutional, he said merely that the West should remind Moscow of ‘the principles and criteria’ – diplomatic codewords for democratic and economic reform – which the Soviet Union had to respect if it wished ‘to have a dialogue with us’. To both men he gave the impression that he regarded the putsch as a fait accompli. Gorbachev was out of power and, like it or not, the West would have to deal with his successors. On television that night he conveyed the same message. France, he said, expected ‘the new leaders’ to honour their undertakings. ‘If they are sincere and they want to preserve the chances of peace within the framework fixed by Gorbachev, there is no reason to worry. We shall soon know.’ Only towards the end of the interview, in response to a question, did he say that he condemned what had happened in Moscow.
Dumas and Védrine listened with a sinking feeling to the President’s acquiescence in the day’s events. In the light of what followed, his comments looked even more inept.
Later that night Bush came out publicly in support of a call by Boris Yeltsin, the head of the Russian Federation, ‘for the restoration of the legally elected organs of power and the return of Mikhail Gorbachev to his post of President’. Yeltsin had climbed on to a tank outside the Russian parliament building, urging a crowd of 20,000 protesters to resist the putsch and calling for a general strike. Images of his defiance, which, despite the regime’s censorship, managed to find their way on to Soviet television, identified him for the Soviet people as the strongman around whom the coup’s opponents would rally. The following night, KGB units, backed by tanks, were sent to storm Yeltsin’s headquarters but backed off. The putsch leaders lacked the stomach for a fight. Nex
t morning it was all over. Gorbachev was freed from house arrest in his villa in the Crimea, where he had been on holiday with his family when the plotters struck, and flew back to Moscow. Yanayev and his companions were arrested.
How could Mitterrand have misread the situation so badly?
He was not alone. The German Chancellor, Helmut Kohl, had reacted similarly. But Kohl had the excuse that he had to cope with German reunification.
Part of the explanation was that the French President had been expecting Gorbachev to be overthrown for so long that, when it happened, it seemed logical. Gorbachev himself had warned repeatedly that he might be unseated by a coup. Why question it, if that was his fate? Mitterrand thought he could ‘read’ Russia. The pendulum had swung too far and too fast in the direction of reform and now the inevitable correction had occurred.42
Moreover, as a European – and here he rejoined Kohl – his beliefs had been forged in the Second World War. Nationalism, to Mitterrand, was a perennial source of conflict. If the Soviet Union broke up, he had told Bush in March, ‘we will have twenty more states in Europe [and] it’s not going to help us at all . . . In Europe [nation-states] are permanent sources of war.’ It was a nineteenth- as much as a twentieth-century view. Nationalism, Mitterrand believed, could be neutralised only if it were confined in a larger entity. That was the rationale for the European Community. Empires brought stability, whether they were communist, democratic or feudal. ‘The Austro-Hungarian Empire,’ he said, ‘was actually rather convenient. We were wrong to get rid of it.’
It followed that if Gorbachev was unable to hold the Soviet empire together, it was better that he be replaced by a more conservative leadership which could. The President of the European Commission, Jacques Delors, made a similar judgement. A more orthodox Soviet leadership, he said, ‘could have a positive side . . . Nationalist passions would be calmed.’
Once Bush had publicly backed Yeltsin, Mitterrand changed tack, ‘firmly condemning the coup d’État’ and demanding Gorbachev’s return. After failing to reach the Soviet leader by telephone, he called Yeltsin to assure him of his support. On television on Wednesday night, after Gorbachev’s safe return to Moscow, he insisted that he ‘had always thought it would finish this way’.43
The following Saturday the Soviet leader resigned as the Communist Party’s General Secretary and Yeltsin, now the real power-holder in Moscow, decreed the nationalisation of party property, followed by a total ban on Communist activities throughout the Russian Federation. The Ukraine – where a thousand years earlier the Rurikid dynasty had laid the foundations of the Russian State – declared itself independent. At a Cabinet meeting on August 28, Mitterrand spoke with mixed feelings. ‘It would be nonsensical after having denounced the Soviet system for decades to complain now that at last it is changing. But as Head of State, I have to measure the consequences for us and for Europe.’ He feared, he said, that the Union’s collapse would ‘bring grave threats for our continent . . . of anarchy and confrontations’.
In the Balkans and the Caucasus, that bleak assessment would be justified. But not in Russia itself. On December 8 1991, Yeltsin and the leaders of Belarus and the Ukraine formed a loose grouping which they called the Commonwealth of Independent States. By then, all fifteen Soviet republics had become independent. On Christmas Day, Gorbachev resigned as Soviet President. As Mitterrand had anticipated – prematurely – at the time of the putsch, four months earlier, his role was at an end. Next day the Soviet Union ceased to exist. Russia took over its nuclear arsenal, its permanent membership in the UN Security Council, its embassies abroad and the rest of its international obligations.
The disintegration of the Soviet empire, accompanied by the dissolution of its military arm, the Warsaw Pact, completed the end of the Cold War which had been officially proclaimed at the CSCE in Paris a year earlier. The ‘new world order’ announced by George Bush had become a reality. There was only one superpower: the United States of America.
France, like other medium-sized powers, found its influence sharply reduced. Its status as a maverick in the Western alliance counted for little when there was no latent conflict for that alliance to confront. The same was true of Britain and the ‘special relationship’ with America. Special relationship for what? In September 1991, Mitterrand had proposed a four-power summit of the US, the USSR, Britain and France, to discuss ways of securing the Soviet nuclear arsenal, parts of which were based in Belarus, the Ukraine and Kazakhstan. It would have been the first such meeting for more than thirty years.44 Bush demurred. ‘We mustn’t give the impression of forming a club,’ he told Mitterrand. ‘You are right,’ the President replied frostily. ‘You will reach decisions with the Russians. If you don’t want a four-power meeting, France will be all the freer . . . We will act according to our own interests.’
With the Middle East and East–West relations fenced off as Washington’s preserve, France’s sphere of activity was reduced to its own backyard: Africa and, above all, Europe. Mitterrand wanted the European Union, prefigured in the Single European Act, to be the crowning achievement of his second term, a European legacy to rival the accomplishments of de Gaulle.
The economic component – a single market and eventually a single currency – was relatively straightforward. Economics have the same laws everywhere.
Political cooperation was more difficult. Foreign and defence policy are at the core of national sovereignty. Mitterrand was as reluctant as anyone to give up national decision-making. But he foresaw that if Europe and, by extension, France were to have a voice in an increasingly globalised and multi-polar world, the continent would have to speak and act as one. The first question was whether the Europeans would be willing to surrender even a small part of their sovereignty for the greater power of all. It was the issue Churchill had raised at The Hague forty years earlier. The second was how to reconcile Europe’s ambitions with the desire of the United States to retain a leading role in the continent’s affairs.
Margaret Thatcher’s departure had been an enormous stroke of luck for the French President. She and Mitterrand had got on well enough. But she would have done her damnedest to block progress towards a European Union. John Major, her successor, had made clear from the outset that he intended to take a more positive approach:
MAJOR: We want to play a meaningful role in Europe, it’s in everyone’s interests. We don’t want to be considered as an island on the margins of Europe . . .
MITTERRAND: Europe has grown used to Britain’s opposition, and to making plans without you in the belief that you would catch up with the train. That’s what you always did . . . We used to have the impression that your country was somewhere else. What you are saying now is not necessarily more reassuring, but it is certainly much cleverer! . . .
MAJOR: I hope I shall spend more time in the driver’s cabin than catching up with the train! There are areas where we have shared interests . . . We are not as far apart as you think.45
On the single currency, Major said he did not want it to be thought that ‘we British were trying to block the process’ but admitted that ‘we have huge difficulties with parliament and our public opinion’ and he could not commit himself to a firm starting date.
The real apple of discord was defence. In Mitterrand’s view, the end of the Cold War meant that, sooner or later, the Americans would leave Europe. Major acknowledged that that was possible. Where they differed was over how Europe should respond. Mitterrand wanted to strengthen the Western European Union to serve as the nucleus of an autonomous European defence force which would operate alongside NATO. Major disagreed. ‘I don’t want to give the Americans a pretext to reduce their commitment,’ he said. In any case, he added, apart from Britain, France, Germany and perhaps Italy, the other European armies had little credibility. Before there could be talk of European defence, the member states needed to show that they were willing to make the effort.
Mitterrand had clashed with George Bush on this issue at Key Larg
o in April 1990. The US President had argued that, for Americans, ‘NATO is the only plausible justification for [our] military presence in Europe’, and in the changed circumstances of the 1990s this meant that the Alliance had to have ‘an expanded political role’.
MITTERRAND: I’d like to know what we’re really talking about. If the American leaders would spell out what they mean by ‘the political role of NATO’ everything would be a lot easier . . .
BUSH [struggling]: Well, in a political situation that has changed, NATO’s role will be different. Not just military, but more political . . . NATO will have to change gear . . . to get us through the critical period. We don’t know who the enemy is any more.
MITTERRAND [silkily]: Yes, it’s a nuisance not having an enemy.46
The proper role for NATO now that the Cold War was over would be the subject of increasingly dyspeptic exchanges throughout the rest of Bush’s term in office. In Martinique, in March 1991, two months after his meeting with Major, Mitterrand assured the US President that he accepted that NATO was for the moment the only viable defence Europe had. ‘I hope Europe will gradually acquire the means to defend itself,’ he added. But that was not yet the case, so there was no reason for the Americans to be ‘fearful of European unity’:
There’s no need to be . . . For the next twenty years, you must not put the question in terms of either/or . . . NATO and the idea of European defence should coexist: it’s not one or the other . . . There will be progress on military matters when there’s political progress. It will take a lot of time. Your British friend isn’t very keen; nor are the Dutch; Ireland is neutral; and as for the Germans, since they’ve become big they no longer know what they’re supposed to be doing.47
The US Senate, Mitterrand said, ‘cannot have its cake and eat it’: it could not both call for American troop reductions in Europe and oppose efforts by the Europeans to assume their own defence.