Happy days are here again? France's reintegration into NATO and its impact on relations with the USA

Abstract

This paper's title, invoking as it does the optimism of Franklin D. Roosevelt's theme song during his 1932 presidential campaign, speaks to a growing expectation that a profound change for the better is in store for the Franco-American relationship. That bilateral relationship has long been billed as one between the world's two ‘oldest allies’, with the unstated assumption being that because they have been such longstanding ‘partners’ in international security, they must typically interact in a constructive fashion, advancing in the process not only their own respective national interests but also the interests of the greater community (the ‘West’) to which they belong. The reality of their interaction since they initially became allies (in 1778) is, of course, quite different, and is best characterised by long periods of strategic ennui disrupted by occasional moments of bliss and just as occasional bouts of vehement animosity. Although alliance dynamics have not been the only, or even the chief, source of upset in the Franco-American security relationship, there is no denying that at times the two states have differed bitterly over matters precisely because they have been allies. The Western alliance, for each state though for different reasons, has served as a symbolic referent of the first order of importance. Therefore, the nature of their involvement with NATO could be said to serve as a shorthand means of assessing the nature of their involvement with each other. If this is so, then France's reintegration into NATO's military side might reasonably be taken as a harbinger of long-term improvement in the quality of the France–US strategic relationship. This seems to be what many analysts believe, at least. It is the aim of this article to examine critically this supposition.

Keywords:

• France
• NATO
• USA

Notes

1. It was written in 1929 by Milton Anger and Jack Yellen, and was featured the following year in a popular but now forgotten Hollywood musical, ‘Chasing Rainbows’.

2. A poll conducted by the German Marshall Fund in July 2009 revealed that 77 per cent of Europeans (as opposed to 57 per cent of Americans) had a favourable opinion of President Obama; on the other hand, there are signs that European leaders think less highly of Obama than do their publics (Casanova 2009, Cohen 2009).

3. ‘Suboptimality’ when set against the assumption widely circulated that these two countries are really very old and successful security partners; thus suboptimality is taken as a measure of how short they fall from their self-advertised standard of genuine ‘friendliness’ and robust cooperation. I discuss this in greater detail below. It is possible that when compared with other bilateral relations they have, the quality of their dealings with each other is not out of the norm (though I suspect that when it comes to America's dealings with other western states over time, the relationship it has with France does rank as less cooperative than the links it has forged with other members of the group).

4. In fact, France has had far ‘older’ allies than the USA – Sweden during the Thirty Years War, to cite the most important example – and if for America France might have been its first ally, it was an alliance that formally ended in 1800, with the treaty of Mortefontaine, ratified the following year (Zahniser 1975, p. 70, Goubert 1991, p. 116, Wedgwood 1999, p. 241, 344).

5. Not focusing on France per se, but highly relevant to this discussion, is Reiter (1994).

6. The earlier instance of hostile action concerned French and American warships fighting each other in the so-called ‘Quasi War’ of the late 1790s; the later instance involved French forces loyal to Vichy firing at American soldiers landing in North Africa in November 1942.

7. Tardieu was a major figure in the French political class of the early twentieth century, having represented Georges Clemenceau as special commissioner in Washington during the latter years of the First World War, been an important drafter of French positions at the Versailles peace talks, and subsequently a cabinet member in several governments of the 1920s and 1930s, twice serving as prime minister (technically, président du Conseil). He was also a political journalist, and a leading intellectual of his era. In the words of one biographer, Tardieu was ‘an intellectual colossus [who] strode through a third of a century of history wielding more power over the Republic than its constitution-makers had ever dreamed of’ (Binion 1960, pp. 12–13). Another writer called him the ‘bright hope of the French moderate Right: alone in a group of fusty, used-up politicians, he seemed to represent the new postwar world’ (Bernier 1993, p. 61).

8. Perrin du Lac was a French colonial administrator who, for reasons both political and geopolitical, found himself stranded in the New World from 1789 until 1803, when he was finally able to return to France.