FROM LILLY PADS TO KNEE PADS

Irrelevant France: Cheese-eating surrender monkeys? Cowboy jingos? It's time for America and France to cut the sniping (Christopher Dickey and Tracy Mcnicoll, 5/26/03, NEWSWEEK)

Marc Llong feels penitential. Waiting to board his flight to New York, the gray-haired French retiree leafs through Le Parisien, a working-class tabloid that's full of headlines about transatlantic tensions. "We were so bad," he says, shaking his head. The French government opposed the war in Iraq, seeming to side with the brutal regime of Saddam Hussein. The Americans fought anyway, and won. If the United States and France are ever going to get along again, says Lelong, "it's up to us to make the effort."

ROSEMAY MANGIN IS also at Charles de Gaulle airport, flying to Chile where she owns a hotel and cybercafe. She, too, thinks France's behavior was "shameful." What should President Jacques Chirac do now? "Get down on his knees."

Plenty of Americans-including President George W. Bush, no doubt-would be quick to agree. Along with his Defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, and other crusaders in the administration, he'd be more than willing to scourge the sinner. While Southern rednecks sport T shirts proclaiming Iraq first, then France, talk-radio revels in frog-bashing. Neocon intellectuals opine on France's impudence-or worse, its irrelevance in a modern world utterly and absolutely dominated by the U.S.A. [...]

Realistically, France's economy may be the fifth largest in the world-but it's not a fifth the size of America's. Its military may be ready and willing to deploy in Africa every so often, but the forces are puny and practically immobile when compared with the juggernaut that swept from Basra to Baghdad in three weeks. In order to even dream of balancing American power, France has to think of itself as Europe, which has a collective GDP rivaling that of the United States. But Europe, despite years of French urging, has no common foreign policy or an army of its own. Nor does it see itself as France.

Three quick thoughts:

(1) "Southern rednecks"? -- is there any other group, than white males, who a major media outlet would characterize in these kinds of terms in this day and age?

(2) Is there a more exquisite irony than the fact that in order to vindicate French nationalism, France has to surrender its sovereignty in an alliance with Germany?

(3) We mentioned earlier in the week that reexamining common knowledge can ofttimes prove fruitful. Here's a case where the authors make no attempt to question the received wisdom and their essay suffers as a result. Are France and Anglo-America really the natural allies the authors assume? Or have they actually been diverging for centuries? And is it important to America and the world that America reconcile itself with France, or might we all be better served by a recognition that French statism is antithetical to the Anglo-American ideal of freedom? Posted by Orrin Judd at May 24, 2003 7:42 AM