Quality | 2010.02.12
My heart refuses to race to this cross-Channel love-in | Martin Kettle
Logically, allied Britain and France should tie the military knot and stand as one. Only 900 years of enmity stand in the way
After all the grief that this country\'s military alliance with the United States has got us into lately, it may come as something of a relief to learn from the Labour government\'s defence green paper that British service chiefs are now looking at whether France may have what it takes to be our new military best friend. Don\'t hold your breath over this. There is something about the phrase Anglo-French co-operation that is doomed to be forever a contradiction in terms.
On the face of it, of course, this is all terribly negative and frustratingly illogical. England, then Britain, and France may have spent many centuries intermittently at war with one another. But since the fall of Napoleon – and that\'s a long time ago now, though the shadow remains – we have been solidly, if sometimes grudgingly, on the same side in most European and world conflicts. Neither of us is a world power. We are neighbours and allies. So why not tie the military knot and face the world as one?
Because of the world-view expressed by Sir Humphrey Appleby to Jim Hacker in Yes Minister long ago, that\'s why. Britain\'s nuclear deterrent, Sir Humphrey explains to an uncomprehending Jim, exists not to protect us against the Russians – but against the French. Nine hundred years of enmity, he says, mean that "If they\'ve got the bomb, then we must have the bomb." Well, that certainly puts a different complexion on it, admits a chastened Hacker.
"Don\'t like the French. Don\'t like their Frenchified ways," sing the Nelson-era naval officers in Benjamin Britten\'s opera Billy Budd (EM Forster\'s libretto wouldn\'t survive the equality bill if it was written now). But the officers\' prejudices are with us still, and not just among red-top journalists (remember the Sun\'s "Hop off you Frogs"?). And the French press can be pretty rude about Britain too, lest we forget.
Even the Royal Navy, which is apparently the one of the three armed services currently most up for joint ventures, is not free of suspicion towards France. We have never been told about the precise circumstances in which the UK nuclear submarine HMS Vanguard managed to bump into the French nuclear sub, Le Triomphant, in the middle of the vastness of the Atlantic Ocean a year ago, but it was fairly obviously not part of a co-operative exercise.
As with the military, so with the politicians. The current government has worked hard at its relations with Paris but it has often reverted to anti-French disdain, and not solely over Iraq. Tony Blair was more pro-European than Gordon Brown – he went on holiday to France more than Brown, which wouldn\'t be hard – and even briefly dipped his toe in the waters of Anglo-French military co-operation in 1998. Yet both of them always lived their politics with their feet in Europe and their heads in America. They always preferred – as too many in Labour still do – to draw their political lessons from distant non-European nations rather than from anywhere in Europe, especially France. There was – and still is – an almost philistine dismissal of France in much of the Labour hierarchy today.
Nor is the hostility a one-way street. Even the Anglophile Alexis de Tocqueville once admitted to "that often unreflecting instinct of hatred which rises in me against the English". Robert Gibson\'s entertaining book on Anglo-French relations since the Norman conquest, nicely titled Best of Enemies, contains much else in this vein. And it is not many years since a French diplomat confessed in my hearing that, when in doubt, the view at the Quai d\'Orsay was that French diplomacy should always be guided by the default principle of doing down the British.
Opinion polls on both sides of the Channel don\'t bear this out. Cheeringly, they rather like us, and, cheeringly, we rather like them too. Arsène Wenger has certainly helped. And France has more Anglophile public figures than you might suppose, while British political life has a long list of Francophiles too. Austen Chamberlain – the only Tory leader of the 20th century except William Hague never to be prime minister – was a notable example, and even got a Nobel peace prize for his work with the French. Anthony Eden, the last PM before Blair to speak French well, was another – unfortunately so, as things were to turn out at Suez.
Our most important Francophile though, was Churchill. It was he who, in June 1940, and with the fall of France imminent, signed up to the still astonishing Declaration of Union between the two countries, crafted by Jean Monnet. In the light of the events of the last 70 years, this declaration reads in some ways even more remarkably today than it did then. France and Britain, it said, would "no longer be two nations but one Franco-British Union", with a constitution providing for "joint organs of defence, foreign, financial and economic policies". They would be ruled by a single cabinet and the two parliaments would be "formally associated". Every citizen of France "shall enjoy immediately citizenship of Great Britain" and vice versa. Their armed forces would be treated as one.
The declaration is one of the great might-have-beens of modern history. It collapsed under the pressure of events in 1940. But its underlying Anglo-French principle, though dear to Churchill\'s heart after the war as well as before it, also buckled irrevocably. It did so because, from that day to this, the British always looked to the Americans to guarantee the postwar world, while the French, from De Gaulle to Sarkozy, always bridled at it. Less might-have-been. More not in a month of Sundays.
Which is where things still are today, whatever the green paper may say (and actually, if you read it, it says rather less about Anglo-French communality of interest than the briefings to the press that accompanied it). Logic may say that two comparable neighbouring powers of declining status should throw in their lot together, giving both, as well as the EU, the clout and the assets that neither can now afford alone. Wishing doesn\'t make it so. A combination of cultural mistrust and divergent national interest means it isn\'t going to happen.
The relationship between Britain and France is often compared to a marriage. A "government source" was at it again this week, telling the Times that we are "like an old married couple who bicker a lot but ... know that we can\'t live without each other". Personally, I don\'t have much more confidence in the Anglo-French marriage than in John Terry\'s.
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/[...]e-britain-enmity-military-knot
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