THE French minister delegate for European affairs, Mr Pierre Moscovici, a long-time aide to the Prime Minister, Mr Lionel Jospin, jolted the summit in Amsterdam yesterday when he implied that EMU was not certain.
"The next six months will be absolutely decisive," he told French radio. "Then there will be a political discussion between Europeans to know whether, yes or no, we will create the single currency.
The Jospin government was determined to carry out its economic programme, Mr Moscovici said. "We must see what will be the situation of our public finances, and it is in light of this situation that we will decide whether or not to move to the euro. I really hope we will."
After Mr Moscovici's remarks sent a shudder through the gathering, Mr Jospin issued a statement reaffirming his desire to achieve EMU within established deadlines.
Despite lingering doubts about the Jospin government's commitment to European integration, the summit reassured France's partners that "cohabitation" between the Gaullist President and Socialist Prime Minister can function. The debate on European employment policy and the tentative scheduling of a conference on the same subject next autumn also allowed Mr Jospin to save face with voters to whom he promised a more humane Europe.
The consensus among French politicians yesterday was that the Amsterdam compromise, which added a resolution on growth and employment to the Dublin Stability Pact, was a modest victory for Mr Jospin, for "cohabitation", for Europe and the euro. "The merit of the French government is to have opened a debate which otherwise would not have taken place," Mr Moscovici said.
By accepting the compromise, France found an honourable exit to a crisis of its own making, but commentators said the experience was necessary and even salutary.
"We had to make European integration less monetary, less technical, less orthodox," an editorial in Liberation said. "Otherwise the peoples of Europe would have drawn away from it, otherwise the wishes of French voters would have been ignored... So we talked about employment, social cohesion, growth, recovery, solidarity - and not just criteria, exchange rates, debt percentages and rigour. All that had smelled a little stale; we opened a window."
Mr Jospin may not have realised his oft-stated goal of reorienting European integration, but French Socialists hope the vague text appended to the Stability Pact will be the thin end of the wedge.
Mr Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the French finance and economics minister who precipitated a week-long crisis when he tried to postpone the signing of the Stability Pact, noted that the Common Agricultural Policy was based on just a few sentences in the treaty of European Union. Likewise, he felt, the newly adopted text on growth and employment could be an important starting point.
Only two of Mr Jospin's four demands concerning the euro were addressed at Amsterdam: the most important - for a growth and employment pact - has been settled. His request for an "economic government" to counter-balance the European central bank gave way to a more amorphous "economic pole" to co-ordinate policies. The demand for a competitive euro may be solved by the appreciation of the dollar against European currencies. The last condition, that Italy and Spain participate in EMU, will resurface later.
