C'est Rien

The great transatlantic rift may end with a shrug, not a bang

The presidential results were in, and the good people of Europe were shocked. A reckless right-winger, famous for thrusting around his military hardware any which way regardless of foreign opinion, had won a surprisingly easy election, and now my shell-shocked friends were talking about moving far away. You just had to make sure not to show up with a flag-sticker on your car, because it would probably be keyed by angry locals.

The year was 1995, the country was France, and the new president was Jacques Chirac.

We forget sometimes how foreign our obsessions of the moment will seem 10 years from now. Was it just a decade ago when Republicans were the party of balanced budgets and junking the Education Department, while earnest liberals championed regime change abroad? Why yes it was.

For the last 12 months and more, those obsessed with the diplomatic fallout between Washington and Paris have contorted themselves into positions of either exaggerated hostility or premature rapprochement. France is the back-stabbing enemy that needs to be destroyed; Bush is a cowboy Hitler who must be stopped; and/or the free world as we know it depends on sweet reconciliation between the two.

The only thing uniting these three camps is the belief that the French-American conundrum is at all urgent or even important. Increasingly, and despite my own contributions to the genre, I'm becoming convinced it is not. The French are too powerless, the Bush Administration is too unconcerned, and (most importantly?) the high traffic of goods and humans between the two countries may yet ensure that World War IV will not be a dispute over unpasteurized cheese.

In my annual Christmas visit to France, I was struck by three themes: How half-hearted even the anti-Bushism has become (several acquaintances who despise the man nevertheless criticized the Gallic "virus" of anti-Americanism); how marginalized the French feel in global affairs as a direct result of Chirac's ham-handed diplomacy, and how envious they are of the dynamism in previously mockable neighbors like Spain.

"We are really losing influence now, even in Europe," one journalist friend told me. "Chirac has really screwed up."

The French have always punched above their diplomatic weight, but that's a historical accident of sorts that seems destined to decrease. With the demise of colonialism and the rise of the United States, French is no longer the language of diplomacy, let alone business or culture. Signs of slippage are everywhere, from the storefront signage in Paris (where English is pervasive, regardless of rules), to allegedly Francophone countries like Romania. I spent three weeks in the latter last year, and almost every "bonjour" was met with a "hello," and English-language publications outnumbered French by something like 10 to 1.

Crucially, the expansion of the European Union—often portrayed by American Euroskeptics as some kind of insidious French plot—is not increasing Paris' power, it's diluting it. Chirac's obscene and ultimately failed attempt at punishing Central Europeans for supporting George Bush's Iraq policy has emboldened Poles and Czechs who were already more oriented toward Washington. With integration now a fact on the ground, and not some far-off lure, New Europe has less reason than ever to bow and scrape at the beck and call of Paris and Bonn.

France's semi-permanent high-unemployment economic crisis is also leaching its power. Countries to the north, south, east and west are showing more vitality in growth and job-creation, and are inevitably catching up in culture as well. Small wonder that Chirac is agitating loudly for a kiss-and-make-up with Bush.

But from Washington's side, no matter how much Condoleezza Rice talks up "restoring America's reputation in the capitals of Europe through a vigorous campaign of public diplomacy," and no matter how many fence-mending tours Bush takes in his second term, the substance of American policy is bound to remain the same: Far more militarily assertive in the Middle East than Old Europe would like, more sympathetic toward Israel than Brussels ever seems to be, and less inclined to heed international public opinion than any presidency in at least a generation.

In this environment, the question is not whether divisions exist and will continue to until Chirac and Bush finally leave office—they do, and they will—but rather why anyone really cares. After all, Germany hasn't exactly volunteered for the Coalition of the Willing, but you don't see any Bill O'Reilly Beemer boycotts or Young Republicans pouring out steins of Lowenbrau in front of the German Embassy. France, for all its ability to irritate, represents just 4 percent of the EU vote, 13 percent of its population, and 7 percent of the United Nations Security Council. Its economy is around the size of California's. To paraphrase Johnny Rotten, they're just another country.

If anything, the mutual hostility and whither-the-West angst is a slightly dysfunctional way of saying "Je t'aime." More than one percent of each country visits the other every year, and the French are as obsessed with American pop culture as the Yanks are with perceived Gallic wine snobbery. We hate because we still care, and because both sides have managed to project identifiable national personalities in an increasingly transnational world.

So raise a glass of Bordeaux-grown Mondavi, slip in a nice Luc Besson flick, and party like it's 2015.