The French Prime Minister, Mr Lionel Jospin, is dispatching a faithful lieutenant, his Minister-delegate for European Affairs, Mr Pierre Moscovici, to Dublin today for Mr Moscovici's third meeting with the Taoiseach in less than a year. The Paris government wants a briefing on the situation in Northern Ireland.
"I shall listen to Mr Ahern," Mr Moscovici says. "Then we'll talk about the future of the European Union - the institutional aspects, defence and structural policies and employment." This evening Mr Moscovici will deliver a lecture on "France's European Policy" to the Institute of European Affairs in North Great Georges Street in Dublin.
The Jospin government remains popular after two years in power - an unusual event in France. And the Socialists and Greens are still celebrating their victory in last month's European election.
At 41, Mr Moscovici, a Socialist, is the second youngest cabinet minister, with a reputation for reliability and staying out of the turf battles that poison relations among some ministers. He calls European integration "fun and exciting" and regards his handling of the recent CAP and Agenda 2000 negotiations in Berlin as his greatest achievement in two years in office.
Mr Moscovici's affection for cigars, designer suits, bachelorhood and the cafes of St Germain-des-Pres might lead to an unfair association with the "caviar left"; yet he is a hard slogger who spends every weekend in the eastern French industrial city of Montbeliard, which he is determined to win back from the right in the 2001 municipal elections. His other great ambition is to see France through its next EU presidency in the second half of 2000.
The war in Yugoslavia is bound to crop up in Mr Moscovici's Dublin meetings. At the Rambouillet Conference, within the G8, NATO and the United Nations, Europe was a strong presence, he says. "In the early '90s, the Europeans were very divided regarding ex-Yugoslavia.
This time they were united - that's considerable progress."
But at the same time, he continues, "we noticed that there were shortcomings in European security and defence policy; that Europeans were not capable of taking charge of a conflict on their own continent themselves. Kosovo revealed how much we need a strong common foreign and security policy - and European defence."
Ever since Gen de Gaulle pulled France out of NATO's integrated command in 1966, Paris has sought to sway Europe to its own vision of security. "We are friends of the Americans," Mr Moscovici protests. "We are their allies. Let's not forget all we did together in the last two world wars . . . But we do not want the Americans to be the masters of our destiny in Europe. That's our attitude: friends and allies - but not masters."
French leaders no longer talk of "decoupling" European defence from the US, but even their vision of a two-pillar alliance has been hard to sell to Britain and Germany. "We want first of all to set up a European defence and security identity in the framework of NATO," Mr Moscovici says.
"And then we also want to set up an integrated and autonomous chain of command, specific to the Europeans, with closely co-ordinated policies for armament, defence budgets and intelligence gathering . . . Europe could intervene in crises in a strictly European or in a NATO framework. We want to create a choice, not an alternative."
During the Yugoslav war, European diplomacy was dominated by Britain, France, Germany and Italy, but Mr Moscovici rejects the idea that Europe is moving towards a directorate of big states.
"When I talked about unity of Europeans [in Kosovo] I was talking about unity of all Europeans," he says. The war highlighted the neutrality of four EU members. "For these countries, including Ireland, there is a choice to be made now," Mr Moscovici says.
"I think the states who are called neutral cannot, and do not want to, prevent the progress of European defence. So the choice for them is either to let it happen [without them] or go forward and perhaps reconsider their traditional positions. We are not going to preach to countries like Ireland. It is a sovereign decision to break or not to break a long-standing attitude of neutrality. But at the same time, European defence will move forward and nothing must stop it."
The EU's adoption of a "Balkan stability pact" raises the issue of dealing with President Slobodan Milosevic's Serbia. It is, Mr Moscovici admits, "an extremely delicate question".
France is loathe to condone dictatorship, "but at the same time we cannot not help the population for humanitarian reasons. We will see how to treat Serbia on a case-by-case basis. In the same way that we did not make war with a people but with a regime, we want to make peace with this people, but we do not want to assist this regime."
A third Intergovernmental Conference - required to change EU treaties - is now under way. It will be completed under the French EU presidency in the second half of 2000, and Mr Moscovici says it must succeed where the last one failed: in streamlining the EU Commission, widening qualified majority voting and re-jigging the weighting of votes within the European Council. Without these changes, the EU cannot accept new members. He regrets very much that Britain rejected the French idea of a "wise men's committee" to study these questions.
Ireland and France are great friends in defending shared agricultural interests, but when it comes to institutional reform, they tend to find themselves on opposite sides of the divide between big and small countries. Mr Moscovici conceded that "we did not have the same position at Amsterdam" but he implies that a compromise is now possible. "For example, we understand that the small countries do not want to give up their commissioners. So we will not make the same proposals as at Amsterdam. That's a gesture in one direction. On the other hand, for vote weighting, things have to evolve. Taking account of demography is a gesture that could be made in our direction."
Mr Moscovici was delighted with the outcome of the Berlin summit, where France fought to preserve the CAP. "[The French proposal for] degressivity [of price cuts] was not adopted, but we managed to get rid of anything like co-financing or nationalisation of the CAP. It's a good reform. The rest of Agenda 2000 made it possible to satisfy all the regional needs, including the Irish."