This time, it’s personal

France vs. Britain

They nearly came to blows, said Stephen Castle and Andy McSmith in the London Independent. At their failed European Union summit last week, French President Jacques Chirac and British Prime Minister Tony Blair dropped all pretense, all diplomatic niceties, and actually said what they thought of each other. After negotiations over a budget for an expanded E.U. broke down, “50 years of European protocol was blown away” in just a few “explosive minutes.” Chirac, furious that Blair would not make any concessions on the U.K.’s share of the budget, let fly “one of the most furious verbal volleys in E.U. history.” Blair’s position, he spat, was “pathetic and tragic,” not to mention “selfish.” “Personally,” Chirac said, “I deplore the fact that Britain refused to pay a fair and reasonable share of the cost of enlargement.” A calmer, disdainful Blair dismissed France’s arguments as “bizarre.”

The confrontation had been brewing for some time, said Fraser Nelson in Glasgow’s Scotland on Sunday. The disagreement is quite simple. Back in the 1980s, the E.U. agreed to use much of its dues to subsidize farmers. Since Britain had few farmers and would not benefit from the subsidy, it was given a rebate on part of its dues. Now that the E.U. has a budget crisis, France wants Britain to give up the rebate, while Britain wants France to give up the farm subsidies. Someone had to cave. Who would it be? For days before the summit, Blair and Chirac behaved “like celebrity boxers, psyching each other up with various televised threats.” In the end, neither would budge, and the summit collapsed amid plenty of “acrimony.”

Will these two ever be able to face each other again? asked Patrick Hennessy in London’s Sunday Telegraph. When talks broke down, Blair “could not bring himself to utter” Chirac’s name. “Chirac, on the other hand, barked the words ‘Royaume-Uni!’ [United Kingdom] so often he sounded like one of the judges in the Eurovision Song Contest.” It was ever thus, said Thomas Ferenczi in Paris’ Le Monde. French and British leaders have always held each other in low esteem, making any working relationship problematic. Witness the “tumultuous” wartime cooperation between Charles de Gaulle and Winston Churchill, “punctuated by crises, arguments, raised voices.” De Gaulle frequently accused Churchill of kowtowing to the Americans. “Then, as now, trans-Atlantic relations were at the heart of the Franco-British quarrel.” The same was true for Francois Mitterand and Margaret Thatcher. Mitterand felt that Thatcher was “a Trojan horse” for Ronald Reagan. And now, Chirac and Blair are playing the same game.

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Matthew d’Ancona

Sunday Telegraph