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April 3, 2003
What France is Playing At
Note: this is a post recovered from my old blog, before it died of an insufficient backup. Any comments/trackbacks on it have not been brought over, but can be seen with the original. The date is that of the original posting.
"Jane Galt" asks the question: "what were the French thinking?"
I believe that the French were influenced by four very strong forces:
- Philosophy
- Mollification of Arab Immigrants
- Economics
- European Power Politics
Philisophically, the French elites are deeply committed to transnational progressivism. They believe that the United States is dangerous, because not only are we a "nationalist" entity, who insists on doing things which are in our own interests, we are also mighty and frequently successful. The combination of our power and our lack of willingness to be ruled by our "betters" in the transnational camp means that the United States is likely to run around like a bull in a china shop, and break a lot of things in international relations. This can only be to the detriment of the transnational elites, because their philosophy derives a lot from Marxism, and we should have already collapsed from our own internal contradictions. If we are successful, and everything points to our being so, in pushing our national interests, and in the process we lift other nations to political and economic success, the elites will be (once more) discredited, and will likely lose their power.
Equally as important, France and Germany have a large Arab/Muslim immigrant community. The Algerians, Palestinians and Libyans in France, and the Turks and others in Germany, provide a large group of culturally unassimilated (thanks to multiculturalism) unemployed young men. If these Arab/Muslim immigrants were to rise up against the government, there would be a massive resurgence of nationalism in France and Germany in particular. This would result in a wave of brutality against the immigrants (who would certainly lose in the end) and a devastation of large parts of urban central Europe. This would be a disaster for western Europe. The French, Germans and Belgians have thus chosen to use a tactic which the Arab governments have successfully used for decades: turn the mob against the Americans and the Jews. The result of this is that WWI Allied cemeteries have been desecrated.
More importantly, or at least more immediately, than either of those reasons is that France has massive interests in Iraq. In addition to selling $9B worth of arms to Iraq, there are the TotalFinaElf contracts for oilfield exploitation, and numerous other large economic links. This is a significant proportion of France's economy, and that economy is struggling, and there are many groups (including the one which wrote that article) who are trying to make it worse, but not allowing any kind of employment or benefit reforms.
Probably most importantly of all of the four factors driving the French, Belgians and Germans is European power politics. Most of the Franco-German resistance to the war, beyond the limits of what sane people could consider reasonable, is driven by the need to humiliate Tony Blair. England is the single most dangerous nation to France and Germany right now, because England leans towards the US, and is strong enough militarily and politically to support and sustain the other European nations (the Vilnius 10, for example) who also lean towards the US. Since France and Germany want Europe to coalesce around a Franco-German core, in order to have some kind of political status above their intrinsic weight, the British political tendency to not cling blindly to Franco-German policies threatens the Franco-German aspirations to international power status. To the French in particular, the risk of destroying the UN is worthwhile if it provides a good chance of removing the British impediments to a European Constitution that would put France and Germany in control of virtually all of Europe.
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