The Wall Street Journal Europe
July 2, 2003

Five Million Reasons France Opposed the War
By MIKE GONZALEZ

http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB105709253421028900,00.html

France is a prickly ally, in Henry Kissinger's words, because from time
immemorial it has seen Gallic interests in terms of being in opposition
first to those of England and then those of the U.S. This at any rate is the
conventional wisdom in foreign policy circles. But what if France is
morphing into something else, and it is now propelled to act by radical
Muslim interests?

Recently I gave a talk here in which I posited the conventional wisdom,
expounding on how France's leadership under President Jacques Chirac was
caught in an age-old protracted combat with the Anglo-Saxon world. Afterward
a member of the audience approached me and, after the usual polite words of
praise for my speech, said he had another version of events.

A few months earlier, as the Franco-American dispute over Iraq was building
to a crescendo, he had been at a dinner with a member of President Jacques
Chirac's inner circle, who told those around the table that he had just
communicated a clear message to the president: If Mr. Chirac persisted in
backing the U.S. over Iraq he would face nothing short of an "insurrection"
from a sizable portion of France's five million plus Muslims.

The dinner was a private affair, but comments from other politicians bear
out that this fear existed. The issue is moreover met head-on in an Internet
symposium held by FrontPage Magazine on June 9, which virtually gathered
together such luminaries as Jean-Francois Revel, Alain Madelin, Guy Milliere
and others (http://www.frontpagemag.com1). It's the best thing I've read on
this so far.

The proposition that France no longer pursues its traditional interests out
of fear of Muslim riots is far trickier to ponder or write about than the
"France has always been difficult" version of recent events. First of all
they're related: the Muslim angle only adds a new dimension to historical
prickliness. One must also make clear that to pose the question is not the
same as to be anti-immigration.

What's more, only a liberal solution to the problem, one that rejects
identity politics and refuses to entrust the running of Arab communities in
France to overseas clerics, would work. It is after all the National Front
and other parties on the racist fringe that argue for the separation of the
communities, and this is what some French say is producing an Islamist front
here that was at the forefront of opposition to the liberation of Iraq.

France's other European allies and the U.S. government also cannot afford to
blithely ignore this issue, given its implications. And if it is bad
statesmanship to ignore it, it is worse journalism. It is being openly
discussed everywhere.

That France was going to be changed by the fact that 10% of its population
is now ethnically Arab, a proportion that some demographers say may rise to
one-fifth in 20 years, was always a certainty. This change would necessarily
have foreign policy implications. America, the land of immigrants par
excellence, also has famously considered its population of Irish, Jewish or
Cuban descent -- to name only three well-known cases -- in weighing foreign
policy options.

The U.S., of course, overrode those considerations by twice waging war with
Germany last century, even though Germans are, by far, the largest single
ethnic component in the U.S. population. How they would react gave pause to
the very Anglo-Saxon Woodrow Wilson prior to committing the U.S. to World
War I. During the 1930s, the U.S. ambassador to London, Joe Kennedy, the
future president's father, acted out an ancestral Irish Anglophobia by
advising FDR not to back Britain. Wilson and Roosevelt ended up doing the
right thing anyway.

Did France not do the right thing during Iraq out of similar worries?

Yes, say some writers and politicians who, slowly but with conviction, are
beginning to grapple with this loaded issue in public forums. Many of them
contend that France will increasingly adopt a more Muslim outlook, rather
than integrate the newcomers.

Not all think this is a good thing. Some say the problem is much more
generalized too. They contend that, because Islam has not passed through the
crucibles of the Reformation, the Counterreformation and the stalemate
produced by the Thirty Years' War -- the wrenching philosophical and
military experiences that sheared the Christian churches of much political
power and rendered them more tolerant -- all Muslims are less accepting of
different views. Ergo, liberal society will inevitably have a "clash of
civilizations" in its hands with Islam. Even some French Muslims tell me
this.

Others say the problem is that fundamentalists are allowed to have great
impact with Muslims in France, and are able through Arab-language radio
stations and the use of the pulpit to carry out the same campaign of
misinformation that has so poisoned U.S. relations with the Muslim world.
Mohamed ibn Guadi, an Islamic expert at Strasbourg University, tells me
these stations carry anti-American and anti-Semitic content.

Messrs. Revel, Madelin and Milliere were very pessimistic about all this.
Mr. Madelin, France's leading liberal voice, said for example: "I hope it's
still possible to change the situation, but it would be necessary to act
now. Within a few years it will be too late. Already it's very late: the
positions adopted by the French government concerning the war upon Iraq were
partly dictated by the fear of riots."

"If nothing changes," Mr. Madelin went on, "the French view of the world and
the Arab view of the world will become so close, it will be hard to
distinguish one from the other."

And Mr. Madelin was optimistic compared to Mr. Milliere, an economist for
the Banque de France and a professor at the Universite de Paris. "France
today is completely unable to have a French view of the world," he told the
FrontPage symposium, neatly answering the question I pose in my first
paragraph.

"France does not serve its own interest: As a part of the West, if it was
the case, she would have to be on the side of the West, and so on the side
of the United States," said Mr. Milliere. "France behaves more and more as
if she does not belong to the West anymore and as though she is the leader
of the Third World. Doing this, France has nothing to win, maybe just
second-rate contracts and an ephemeral popularity among all the frustrated
in the world. France will win only one thing, and for a short time, peace
inside France: it will avoid riots among Muslims living in France now."

According to Mr. Milliere, and other Frenchmen I've spoken to, the U.S.
would actually be doing France a favor if it followed National Security
Adviser Condoleezza Rice's putative dictum, "Forgive Russia; Ignore Germany;
Punish France."

"If you make it more obvious and if you find a way to show to the French
public that the monumental mistake was made by the present French
government, you would help genuine friends of the U.S., like me,
Jean-Francois Revel, Yves Roucaute and Alain Madelin, to explain that
American interests and French interests are the same in this troubled and
dangerous age."

The problems for France won't end there, though. The Bush administration
seems genuinely intent on making sure its message gets through to the Muslim
world: the U.S. is not anti-Islamic; in fact it is in its interest for the
Muslim world to embrace democracy and free enterprise. Right now the U.S. is
working hard to bring this reality to Iraq and Palestine.

Can it get through to France's Muslims? "It's very difficult," says Mr.
Guadi. Mr. Milliere also made this point to me in a conversation. Perhaps
France will be the last Muslim country to be convinced of good U.S.
intentions.

Write to Michael Gonzalez at [email protected]