THE FRENCH National Assembly carried out a strange simulation of democracy yesterday when it debated a decision already taken and announced last week by President Nicolas Sarkozy: the return of France to Nato’s integrated command.
By declaring the debate to be about France’s foreign and defence policy in general, and turning the issue into a vote of confidence in the government, prime minister François Fillon “drowned the fish”, as an old French expression says. Although many right-wing deputies hate the Nato move, the majority could not bring down their own government.
Fear that the National Assembly might vote against the return to the heart of Nato lay behind this procedural sleight of hand. In the Senate, which did not even bother holding a sham debate, President Sarkozy was likely to have been defeated were it not for the confidence move.
Yesterday’s debate was, the Green group leader Noel Mamère said, “a political rip-off . . . a masquerade . . . a bitter pill we are forced to swallow.”
One of the right’s favourite stratagems was to accuse previous presidents of being equally undemocratic. “When Gen de Gaulle decided to pull France out of the integrated Nato command,” said Jean-François Copé, the right-wing UMP group leader, “he did it in a letter to the US president, without even consulting his ministers, much less the parliament . . .”
The words “independence” and “influence” recurred like punctuation marks throughout the hours of speeches. The right claims the return to Nato integrated command strengthens both. The left says both are diminished.
Mr Copé noted that March 7th, 1966, the day Gen de Gaulle sent his letter, “was a mythical date for me. At school, they presented this event almost as the birth of national independence”.
When Mr Fillon exclaimed that “Our nation takes orders from no one!” the rumbling on the left-wing benches rose to a clamour.
Mr Fillon told the left “to spare us lessons in democracy” and tried to minimise the importance of the change in France’s relations with Nato.
“Nato is but one aspect of our diplomacy and security,” he said. Nato “is only one structure among others . . . no longer the expression of a global policy . . . one means among others of enabling our country to respond to the challenges of our times.”
Mr Fillon was contradicted by Mr Copé, although both men belong to the right-wing UMP: “Let us not beat around the bush,” Mr Copé said. “Nato is the heart of the debate that mobilises us today.”
Mr Fillon presented the move as “taking a last step” in the process of creeping reintegration that began in 1967.
If the move changed so little, asked the former Socialist prime minister Laurent Fabius, whom the Socialists chose as their principal orator in the debate, then “Why the solemn declaration by the president? Why engage the responsibility of the government ?
“Why make the return the centrepiece of the [Nato] 60th anniversary celebrations?”
Mr Fillon kept slipping Gaullist phrases – “a certain idea of France” and “from the Atlantic to the Urals” – into his speech, like subliminal hints that he was not betraying the general.
He received loud applause from right-wing deputies when he defined France’s relations with the US as “allies but not vassals, faithful but not submissive, fraternal but never subordinate”.
To hear the prime minister tell it, France has changed the course of US policy.
Washington now agrees with Paris on the need for dialogue with Tehran, he noted. Likewise, Washington has been persuaded by France that the Afghan war must not “be managed through exclusively military means”.
Both sides rejoiced in the election of President Barack Obama, but as Mr Fabius cruelly pointed out, “it was during President Bush’s term that Mr Sarkozy took his decision”.
The former president Jacques Chirac’s attempt to reintegrate Nato foundered because the US refused to give France the Nato southern command in Naples.
One of the arguments used by the right is that Washington has at last agreed to give France real power.
“All the specialists know that Norfolk and Lisbon are not major commands,” Mr Fabius said.
“I would like to know if these commands are the same ones turned down by President Chirac.”
Forty-three years after de Gaulle’s decision, left and right have flip-flopped. “In 1966,” Mr Fillon pointed out, the left “violently opposed the decision of Gen de Gaulle to withdraw from the integrated structure of Nato . . .
“It is always entertaining to see the opposition exploit the godsend of Gaullism . . . to see the left celebrate a heritage it so long contested.” Mr Sarkozy’s decision was “the symbolic death of Gaullism,” said Mr Mamère.
Mr Fabius, too, invoked Gen de Gaulle’s memory.
“Fundamentally, Gen de Gaulle’s attitude in 1966 was against a bipolar world, in favour of multipolarism,” said the Socialist politician.
“We are in the process of subscribing to the logic of power blocs. We cannot accept this.”