Chirac tackles "noble" subject of business with reluctant Europeans

PRESIDENT Jacques Chirac began his first state visit to the Czech Republic yesterday, completing a tour of central European capitals of countries wishing to join the European Union and NATO.

The French leader has two main objectives to dispel a notion that has taken root that France is opposed to EU and NATO enlargement, and to drum up business for France.

Since last September, Mr Chirac has travelled to Warsaw, Budapest and Bucharest. Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic are expected to be the first countries from the former Soviet bloc to qualify for both EU and NATO membership. France is backing the candidacy of impoverished but substantially francophone Romania.

Before the French President's arrival, the Czech President, Mr Vaclav Havel, said he wanted Mr Chirac "to state clearly the date when negotiations on admission to the EU will start, to be sure that it really will happen six months after the Amsterdam summit". And, Mr Havel told journalists, "we would also like to know to what extent these negotiations depend on the success of the InterGovernmental Conference".

Late yesterday, Mr Havel said Mr Chirac had assured him of his "firm conviction" that the EUreforming IGC will be completed in Amsterdam and that all deadlines will be met.

Mr Chirac's two day stay in Prague is the most delicate of his central European journeys. Unlike Poland and Romania, the Czech Republic does not have strong cultural ties to France. As Mr Chirac said himself in an interview with the Czech news agency, Paris and Prague were in the past estranged by the September 1938 "shame of Munich". While Czech representatives were forced to wait outside, the French premier at the time, Edouard Daladier, and the British prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, signed an agreement with Hitler which dismembered Czechoslovakia.

But yesterday, the Czech Foreign Minister, Mr Josef Zieleniec, graciously forgave France's historic betrayal, saying that Mr Chirac was the "political heir" of Gen Charles de Gaulle, who denounced the Munich agreement in 1942.

Franco Czech relations have been strained by differing visions of NATO enlargement. France believes enlargement will be successful only if Russia's security concerns are taken into account. France's attitude - including support for a proposed five power summit attended by Russia - convinced many central Europeans that Paris wants to impede NATO enlargement, a charge French officials deny. For his part, the Czech president has said that "NATO must not let its policy be dictated by Russia".

Mr Chirac's visit is also an attempt to bolster French political and economic influence in a region that has been dominated politically by the US, and economically by Germany, since the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Opinion polls show Czechs to be reluctant Europeans, and Prime Minister Vaclav Klaus (the other of the "two Vaclavs", as the Czechs call their president and prime minister) opposes European Monetary Union, which France supports strongly.

"There is no longer a difference between so called noble subjects like politics and geo strategy and less noble subjects like business," he told a Czech magazine. In recent years, the French company Renault lost out when Volkswagen bought the Czech Skoda automobile manufacturer. Total pulled out of a project to privatise Czech refineries, and Air France bungled its takeover of the Czech airline CSA. France hopes to win Czech contracts in banking, nuclear energy, agro industry, transport, low income housing and gas distribution.