In reaction to Noëlle Lenoir's "What France must do to repair the No vote's damage

On 29th May 2005, 55% of French voters (on a turnout of 70%) emphatically rejected the European Union’s (EU) constitutional treaty. The “no” vote revolved specifically around the constitutional treaty’s perceived lack of provisions for a “social Europe”. Amongst the reasons cited by the voters for voting no (see le Monde, 31 May 2005) were the fear of rising unemployment, and the overly “liberal” content of the constitutional treaty – or, in Chirac’s terms, its “Anglo-Saxon” market liberalism.

This was an outcome that did indeed discredit France’s political class, as Noëlle Lenoir suggests. Yet eighteen months after the referendum defeat, the matter of the Treaty and French politicians’ stance towards it appears largely irrelevant as French politics gears up for the 2007 French presidential election, and the matter of who said what in the referendum is forgotten. In the intervening months, France has undergone serious domestic disturbances which will undoubtedly be the focus of voters’ attention in 2007; these include the “unacceptable violence in the suburbs”, as Ms Lenoir refers to the riots of October-November 2005; and the “general inability” of the French state to address the problems of French social structure (the “political and social model” that Lenoir criticises), specifically the challenge of diversity. These are likely to be more important test-beds of French credibility at home and abroad than any abstract question of French influence in the European Union.

This is not to say that Ms Lenoir is mistaken to be concerned about France’s influence in the European Union. But the tone of this article does rather perpetuate the defensive diplomacy that she rightly denounces as destructive. The French non did not, as she feared, prevent 14 other EU countries from going on to ratify the constitutional treaty. More significantly, during her own term in office (2002-2005), France continued to exert influence, sometimes, but not always, negative or blocking, over key matters of EU macro-economic policy such the eurozone’s Stability and Growth Pact, or the notion of “public service” provision across the EU. Relations with both Germany and the UK are largely cooperative, and French input into multinational decision-making, in the EU and beyond, has been far from negligeable, including in the fields that Ms Lenoir argues to be of crucial importance: European military capacity, and security of energy supplies.

But nostalgia for the past is fruitless. To claim that the stymied federal intent of the 1954 European Defence Community was a mistake for which France is still paying rather understates the ongoing distaste demonstrated by the French governing elite for supranational institutions at the European level; it also underestimates the complexity, in 2006 as in 1954, of organising Europe’s security and defence, just as it over-estimates the appetite outside France for a “real political project” for Europe – even the constitutional treaty was an exercise in intergovernmental consolidation, even if the Convention process was overtly political. This is ground where France and the UK, for example, seem fated to talk past each other, particularly when the talk is based on terminology that can only muddy the waters (“models”, “free trade”, “entente”, “federal”, “project” etc.).

Noëlle Lenoir claims that “France’s comeback on the European scene is indispensable” if the EU is to progress. This perspective overdramatises the impact of the French referendum result, and is unnecessarily defensive. The potential for French influence in the EU is considerable, should the winner of the 2007 French presidential election have the capacity and will to manage party, parliament and public opinion. Both Royal and Sarkozy, the leading presidential contenders for the 2007 election, agree with Lenoir that the EU still needs some form of “common constitutional framework”, but their voters will be looking for practical politics, over vagueness of purpose or empty rhetoric.