Chirac Under Fire after EU Unites to Warn Iraq (merged)

Society Pakistan & World Affairs
1

Looks like the French are getting more and more isolated in their opposition to the US and UK approach to handling Iraq. The near unanimous support of the recently liberated Eastern Europeans for the US position is heartwarming. These people know what it is like to be subjected to decades of tyranny and appreciate the menace that is Saddam.

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - Thirteen candidate countries on Tuesday endorsed the European Union’s warning to Iraq that it risks war as a last resort if it does not cooperate fully with U.N. disarmament efforts.

But what should have been a celebration of a united position across Europe was soured by a tirade by French President Jacques Chirac against East European candidates who backed the United States’ hardline policy on Iraq.

Chirac’s outburst, branding the candidates ill-behaved and reckless for siding with Washington, drew reactions ranging from scorn to polite disdain from east European leaders invited to Brussels for a briefing on the EU emergency summit.

At a late-night news conference on Monday, Chirac said the 13 should have consulted the EU before issuing their joint letters and they had “missed a great opportunity to shut up.” He also said Romania and Bulgaria had jeopardized their chances of joining the EU by joining the pro-American camp.

Czech Foreign Minister Cyril Svoboda retorted: “We are not joining the EU so we can sit and shut up.”

Romanian President Ion Iliescu asked whether France and Germany had asked anyone’s permission before issuing their own joint anti-war statement last month, which unleashed a wave of pro-American letter-signing by other European governments.

LAUGH OFF

Several candidate leaders chose to laugh off Chirac’s affront. Hungarian Prime Minister Peter Medgyessy said in impeccable French that he was sufficiently well-behaved not to respond to such comments.

“In the European family, there are no mummies, no daddies and no kids. It is a family of equals. In particular, there are no kids who are not mature enough to be partners with other members of the family,” said Polish Foreign Minister Wlodzimierz Cimoszewicz.

And Romanian Prime Minister Adrian Nastase said: “Every time I have a dispute with my wife, I shout at my sons. So the problem of Mr. Chirac apparently is with the Americans and not with Romania and Bulgaria.”

While several candidates regretted they had not been invited to participate in the summit, rather than receiving a briefing from Greek Prime Minister Costas Simitis the next day, they were quick to align themselves with the 15-nation EU’s stance on Iraq.

“The European Union and the 13 reiterate their determination to ensure a common stance, to avoid new dividing lines…,” the 28 said in a joint declaration after a month of rival statements and open letters that have divided Europe.

At Monday’s emergency summit, the EU’s 15 leaders agreed a tougher than expected statement that declared for the first time that war could be used as a last resort. They warned Iraq that U.N. arms inspections could not go on indefinitely.

On the EU side, one diplomat called it “outrageous” that five aspirants – Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta and Poland – only sent foreign ministers to Tuesday’s Brussels briefing.

BLAIR RAPS CHIRAC

Back home from the summit, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who had pressed in vain for the candidates to participate in the summit, delivered a rebuke to Chirac.

“I hope no one is suggesting they should be anything other than full members of the European Union and perfectly entitled to express their views,” he told a news conference.

Blair wrote to the candidate leaders saying he had fought in vain for them to be invited and giving them his personal account of the summit discussion.

He said the way Europe handled the Iraq issue would have a profound impact on transatlantic relations for generations.

Chirac’s outburst again exposed rifts on Iraq between those resisting any rush to war, led by France and Germany, and others like Britain and Spain and most eastern European countries, who support the tough U.S. stance on Iraq.

But he won some support from European Commission President Romano Prodi, who said the candidates had to realize the EU was a political union and not just an economic club, but he was sure they would get used to it. And an EU diplomat said Chirac’s feelings were shared by some other member states, who believed the candidates had been manipulated by Washington to divide Europe and marginalize France and Germany in their anti-war drive.

“Chirac expressed aloud what many feel in the chancelleries,” the diplomat said. “That they were naive enough to fall into the trap caused the discontent.”

http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=worldNews&storyID=2246638

2

Sounds like this is a lot less about Iraq, and more about Chirac trying to use the EU to counterbalance the US. What was he thinking?

The IHT was a little less kind:

Chirac essentially told the East Europeans who will swell the EU’s membership to 25 over the next three years that they risked being blackballed if they did not demonstrate more loyalty to a conception of Europe’s role in the world that suits the French and German governments and not the United States.

The violence of the remarks acknowledged openly for the first time one of the basic reasons that Iraq has become such an existential issue for France, and in its manner, Germany.
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Confronting the United States, and marking out a line where European-Atlantic coalescence must stop, involves an attempt to re-establish their leadership in a Europe whose institutional future points toward the French and Germans being submerged by a new wave of entrants refusing to define Europe’s raison d’être in a foreign and security policy automatically opposed to the United States.
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Pure arithmetic and majority voting tell the tale. They turn France and Germany into minority presences over the expansion programmed for the next years. NATO goes to 27 members next year, reinforcing its American orientation. With most of same new countries involved, all regarding the United States as their ultimate protector, the EU increases to 25 in 2004, and then to 27 or 28, including Turkey, in 2007.
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Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder referred, a trace obliquely, last week to the conflict, saying that the Iraq question really meant protecting “European sovereignty,” and that the actions taken now would determine the development of Europe over the next 10 to 15 years. But with its shared borders and history of savaging Eastern Europe, the Germans are in no position to use the menacing and near-condescending language that came from the French president.
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Basically, Chirac told the candidates: You must think as France and Germany do. With near total support for his positions in France, Chirac, thought-police style, set up as an obligation for the emerging half of the continent the unanimity at home that Liberation, the left-wing newspaper said over the weekend, “has something suffocating about it.”
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With a paucity of finesse that would have rivaled Donald Rumsfeld, Chirac told the new Europeans their positions were “dangerous” and “reckless.” Indeed, he said, they “would have done better to shut up” than sign on to letters, one involving eight countries organized by Britain, and the other taking in the Vilnius Group of 10 EU and NATO candidate countries, that supported the position on Iraq of the United States.
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And Chirac threatened. He said it would take the vote of only one current EU member in a national referendum to block the entire enlargement process. As for Romania and Bulgaria - perhaps singled out as ingrates because they are grant-supported members of the French-funded organization of nations nurturing the French language - Chirac said, “If they had tried to decrease their chances for getting in Europe, they couldn’t have done a better job.”
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Although no other member country spoke in his manner, or offered him support, Chirac insisted the former Soviet bloc countries’ attitude “can only reinforce an attitude of hostility” in their regard. This came from a man who clearly sees himself as Europe’s dominant voice - but after a majority of 16 countries in NATO, with a procedural maneuver isolating France, forced Sunday night the delivery of defensive material to Turkey that a French, German and Belgian blockade had denied for a month.
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Rather than applause, Reuters reported from Brussels, there were “seething” reactions, particularly within the European Parliament, to Chirac’s tirade.
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The intensity of the confrontation and the willingness of the East Europeans to make references to appeasement while continuing to state their affinity for the American position on Iraq, especially after France and Germany had brought Russia along to join their challenge to the United States, has clearly gone beyond what France had calculated.
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In a weekend meeting of German and Czech officials in Munich, the Czech Republic’s foreign minister, Cyril Svoboda, recalled the Munich agreement of 1938, when Czechoslovakia was sold out to the Nazis by Western Europe, and warned of the consequences of appeasing a totalitarian regime. The same suggestion to appeasement, with its implicit linking of Iraq and a part of Europe, was made more directly on Monday by President Vaira Vike-Freiberga of Latvia, an EU and NATO candidate.
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Commenting on the different attitudes in Europe after the massive anti-war marches over the weekend, she said of Latvia’s post-World War II occupation by the Soviet Union, “We certainly have seen the results of appeasement. It’s much easier to tolerate a dictator when he’s dictating over somebody else’s life and not your own.”
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And she went on to emphasize the central issues that the EU’s rejiggered common statement on Iraq skirted and left, without direct policy advice, to the Security Council. The core obligation on Iraq’s disarmament, she said, “is what we are going to do about it, and what is the time frame that Iraq is to be given, and, of course, what happens if it doesn’t comply.”
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The pugnaciousness of the candidate countries was reinforced by what British diplomats said was successful French and German pressure on Greece, the EU’s current rotating president, to reverse an invitation it made to the candidates to attend Monday night’s summit as observers.
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“Some EU countries were probably afraid to hear voices they don’t want to hear at the summit,” said Janusz Reiter, the former Polish ambassador to Germany, who is now head of the International Relations Center in Warsaw.
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Another Pole, Radek Sikorski, a political scientist working in Washington, was quoted by Reuters as taking the issues directly to the French and Germans. “France and Germany can no longer control the continent,” he said. “America has too many friends in Europe who realize that America and Europe are one civilization.”
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This only emphasizes the confrontational nature of what Chirac said. At its most destructive, the outburst could well be the step too far that fractures Europe’s confidence in its capacity to manage its vast expansion and reorganize its institutions, while creating a sense of unity and democracy that could be shared by all its peoples.
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At the same time, it could be an indication that France is putting together the elements of an equation - saving the real Europe from the United States’ plans to undermine it - that would help justify a French veto later in the week of a new Security Council resolution authorizing a strike against Iraq.
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If it is only venting frustration at the cold prospect of France’s diminished influence in Europe, not incompatible with the French president’s personality, it is all the same a gesture that has brought Europe’s future new pain and dizzying uncertainty. How friendly can Europe be with the U.S.?

PARIS President Jacques Chirac’s warning to the new Europeans of EU and NATO enlargement that they cannot side too much with America and fit his definition of membership in the family of Europe has exposed, with an outburst of pure rage, a profound, long-term contradiction that could tear the EU apart from within.
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While Europe has bandaged for the moment its wounds over NATO and Iraq at a Brussels summit meeting Monday night - offering up on paper a statement of unity that bears little resemblance to real policy - Chirac essentially told the East Europeans who will swell the EU’s membership to 25 over the next three years that they risked being blackballed if they did not demonstrate more loyalty to a conception of Europe’s role in the world that suits the French and German governments and not the United States.
.
The violence of the remarks acknowledged openly for the first time one of the basic reasons that Iraq has become such an existential issue for France, and in its manner, Germany.
.
Confronting the United States, and marking out a line where European-Atlantic coalescence must stop, involves an attempt to re-establish their leadership in a Europe whose institutional future points toward the French and Germans being submerged by a new wave of entrants refusing to define Europe’s raison d’être in a foreign and security policy automatically opposed to the United States.
.
Pure arithmetic and majority voting tell the tale. They turn France and Germany into minority presences over the expansion programmed for the next years. NATO goes to 27 members next year, reinforcing its American orientation. With most of same new countries involved, all regarding the United States as their ultimate protector, the EU increases to 25 in 2004, and then to 27 or 28, including Turkey, in 2007.
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Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder referred, a trace obliquely, last week to the conflict, saying that the Iraq question really meant protecting “European sovereignty,” and that the actions taken now would determine the development of Europe over the next 10 to 15 years. But with its shared borders and history of savaging Eastern Europe, the Germans are in no position to use the menacing and near-condescending language that came from the French president.

Basically, Chirac told the candidates: You must think as France and Germany do.

http://www.iht.com/articles/87142.html

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New Europe Slams French President Chirac

Some great comments can be found here…

4

France is like a spoiled adolescent. They want to be treated like adults but when it comes down to putting up or shutting up, they bitch and moan.

5

It is interesting how Chirac accuses US of being arrogant but snubs his lesser powerful neighbours by threatening their upcooming entry into the EU.

Chirac is a bully with out the guns.

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"In the days leading up to the Arab-Israeli War, France abandoned Israel and threw its hat in with the Arabs nations."

You gotta love that. They are adept at changing Flags and alliances. At least they are consistent.

7

Chirac's partronizing and arrogant remarks did more to alienate "Old Europe" than anything the US could have said or done. His threats their alignment with the American position backfired. Unlike Chirac, these Eastern European countries remember who it was that liberated them (and it wasn't the German or the French). I hope these fresh EU faces rattle the old guard and lead Europe to a more sensible foreign policy.

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[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by Seminole: *
I hope these fresh EU faces rattle the old guard and lead Europe to a more sensible foreign policy.
[/QUOTE]

What is that "more sensible foriegn policy" ?
Agree with US? Come up with a policy that serves your(european) national interest? Just curious......

Kaleem

9

A more sensible policy would be to work together to help stabilize the world and keep the peace. France should have never voted for 1441 if they did not intend to follow through with it. They are making the UN as impotent as the League of Nations became.