Voices : <i> Oui </i> or <i> Non</i> ? Six Speak Out on Unifying Europe : France’s Maastricht Treaty referendum may be the last chance for a common continental future.

In just under three weeks from today the eyes of Europe will be focused on France. On that Sunday, Sept. 20, voters from the 95 departements and four overseas territories of the French republic will decide whether to ratify the Maastricht Treaty on European political union and a single European currency.

French President Francois Mitterrand, 75, has put his long public career on the line in the vote. Few believe the aging French president could survive a strong voter rejection. In 1969, the late President Charles de Gaulle tied his fate to another, less significant, popular referendum and lost, forcing the great French general to resign.

But the central question, and the one that will be watched with intense interest in all the European capitals, is which way the French will swing on the Maastricht Treaty, named for the small Dutch city where it was signed last December. The treaty is a blueprint for European political and economic union--the long-dreamed-of United States of Europe.

When the Danes, the first of the Europeans to vote on the Maastricht Treaty, narrowly rejected it last June, it was considered a serious blow to the dream of a unified Europe big enough and strong enough to rival the United States and Japan on the world stage.

But France, along with Germany, is one of the so-called “twin pillars” of the 12-nation European Community. If the French vote “ non ,” it will be a devastating setback, if not a reversal, of the steady trend toward European federalism that has marked the four decades since the end of World War II.

“The French referendum,” the Spanish newspaper El Mundo said in an editorial last week, “is not simply a test case like the Danish fiasco. It is the last chance to continue on the road of European unity. A common European project is unthinkable without the French presence.” Added the London-based Economist: “The biggest event in British politics since the general election is about to take place--in France.”

Since June, when Mitterrand, provoked by the negative Danish vote, announced his decision to submit ratification of the treaty to the French people, the referendum has become a driving, central issue in French life. No dinner party is complete without a Maastricht debate. Business executives and bus drivers alike can be seen these days hunched over 48-page copies of the complicated treaty full of murky bureaucratic “Euro-speak.” The French government felled forests for the 5,000 tons of newsprint needed to print 43 million copies of the treaty. Newspapers focus on almost nothing else.

In the two months since Mitterrand announced the vote, the sizable lead then enjoyed by the “yes” voters has all but evaporated. Two recent polls, in fact, show the naysayers ahead. But the main campaign officially begins today. Mitterrand is scheduled to go on television Thursday night to defend the treaty against opponents.

Supporters and opponents have lined up an impressive cast of movie stars and other personalities for their camps. One pro-Maastricht group of French legislators even printed 10,000 postcards featuring seven dead French heroes--Charlemagne, Montesquieu, Napoleon, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Victor Hugo, Jean-Paul Sarte and De Gaulle--arguing that the great men would have voted for the treaty if they were still alive.

Living politicians, too, have lined themselves up in rival camps, often across party lines. Socialist former Defense Minister Jean-Pierre Chevenement, for example, a member of the same political party as Mitterrand, is firmly against ratification. Mitterrand’s longtime political enemy, former President Valery Giscard d’Estaing, is strongly for it.

Amid this bewildering assortment of positions and posers, six personalities, whose profiles appear on this page, represent the main strains of political thought in one of France’s most important votes ever.

AGAINST

PHILIPPE SEGUIN

Age: 49

Occupation: Member of French National Assembly; mayor of Epinal

Political affiliation: Rally for the Republic (RPR) party

Seguin, leader of the mainstream right-wing opposition to the Maastricht Treaty, sees the agreement as a threat to French sovereignty.

The Gaullist Rally for the Republic is the French political party most badly split by the Maastricht issue. RPR leader and two-time Prime Minister Jacques Chirac is cautiously for ratification. “Yes, but without enthusiasm,” Chirac says. Seguin is the most articulate Gaullist against it.

One group of Socialist legislators in the European Parliament has published postcards contending that if De Gaulle were alive today “he would have voted ‘yes’ ” on ratification. Seguin is certain the general would have said “no.”

The Maastricht Treaty, he has argued during whistle stops on his vigorous campaign against ratification, is the work of “supranational federalists” in the European capital of Brussels. If they have their way, he says, France will be robbed of its independence.

In recent weeks he has scored points by using the civil war in Bosnia-Herzegovina as an example of how a politically unified Europe, in which all 12 countries would have to agree before military action could be taken, would weaken France. “The Yugoslav affair is the best illustration of the dangerous and restrictive nature of Maastricht,” he said during a recent radio interview.

Seguin said he agreed with the French decision, acting under authority of the United Nations, to send 1,100 troops into Bosnia to protect humanitarian convoys. “But if it had been for a Maastricht-style Europe to decide,” he added, “there would have been nine votes for and three votes against, and France would have been blocked from intervening as she wished.”

Despite his strong stance against ratification, Seguin demonstrates his moderation by saying that he does not oppose construction of a politically and economically unified Europe. If the treaty is rejected by voters, he says, British Prime Minister John Major, in his capacity as acting EC president, should call an emergency meeting so a new, more acceptable, treaty can be negotiated.

AGAINST

GEORGES MARCHAIS

Age: 72

Occupation: Member of National Assembly; member of European Parliament

Political affiliation: Communist Party (secretary general)

The French Communist Party, led for the past 20 years by the nattily dressed former metal worker Marchais, was among the first to come out loudly and strongly against Maastricht.

The party has recently found new allies among alienated French farmers, many of whom oppose the Maastricht model because they fear that it will eliminate farm subsidies and put the small farmer out of business.

Marchais, just back from his first visit to the United States, sees parallels between Maastricht and the new North American Free Trade Agreement, which he says offers nothing to workers on either side of the Mexico-U.S. border.

“Basically it is a little bit similar to our opposition to the Maastricht Treaty. The economic and political alignment of the 12 EC members will result in a reinforcement of austerity, reduction in public spending and putting into question social rights and public services under pressure from big financial and industrial groups,” Marchais said. “The life of salaried workers and their families would become even harder.”

“It is a Europe on the liberal model,” Marchais added, referring to the British liberal economic model of open markets and diminished governmental checks on business activity. “It is a right-wing Europe.”

To build support for a “no” vote on Sept. 20, the Communist Party leadership decided this year to make opposition to Maastricht the theme of their annual festival, the Fete de L’Humanite, which each year draws several hundred thousand people, many non-Communists, to an array of international food booths, top entertainment and carnival rides outside Paris.

In recent years, a significant percentage of the party’s blue-collar labor force has been lost to the ultra-nationalist, anti-immigrant National Front Party headed by Jean-Marie Le Pen. This time the Communists and the Lepenists--as National Front followers are called--find themselves on the same side, fiercely defending France against foreign influences represented by the Maastricht Treaty.

AGAINST

JEAN-MARIE LE PEN

Age: 64

Occupation: Member of European Parliament

Political affiliation: National Front (president)

The noisiest and most strident opposition to Maastricht has come from Le Pen, the extreme right-wing politician who has consistently taken stands against ceding any national authority to a European Union. In 1956, as a young member of Parliament representing the populist right-wing Poujadistes movement, Le Pen voted against the Treaty of Rome--cornerstone of the European Community and precursor to the Maastricht Treaty.

Acceptance of the Maastricht Treaty, Le Pen warns his rabid followers, is nothing less than “the death of France.”

The job of French citizens, Le Pen said in a recent interview with Le Figaro newspaper, is to “convince even our compatriots who are closed to the ideas of fatherland, nation and state, to reject this project so obscure in form and so perverse at its base. Maastricht means more immigration, more crime, more unemployment and more taxes. It means fewer democratic rights and less freedom. All of that plus the fact that this arcane document was concocted secretly in the offices of internationalist technocrats and the dens of international financiers.”

In a speech in his Brittany hometown of La Trinite-sur-Mer on Aug. 22, Le Pen roamed the stage with his trademark remote microphone in the style of an American television evangelist, asserting that the treaty would also cause an increase in drugs and the AIDS virus.

Well-financed, the National Front was the first political party to put up large billboards opposing the treaty. With the mainstream right wing divided on the issue, Le Pen is clearly hoping the treaty’s defeat will build votes for his party in parliamentary elections next spring.

Beyond that, he dreams that the treaty will be rejected so soundly that Mitterrand will be forced to resign, 2 1/2 years before the end of his mandated presidential term. “The double order of the day,” Le Pen announced in his Brittany speech, “is the defeat of this shameful treaty and the downfall of the miserable caterer.”

The “caterer” who served up the treaty to his countrymen, everyone knows, is Francois Mitterrand.

FOR

VALERY GISCARD d’ESTAING

Age: 62

Occupation: Member of European Parliament; former president of France (1974-81)

Political affiliation: Union for French Democracy (president)

In a long, eloquent essay detailing his support for the Maastricht Treaty, Giscard began by listing the main historic events of the day.

The United States, he noted, is in the process of electing its next president. Japan is facing its first stock market and financial crisis. China is accelerating its economic development and quietly becoming a nuclear power. Russia is engaged in a desperate economic reform on the ruins of failed communism. And the former Yugoslavia is embroiled in a bloody civil war proving that intolerance, hate and violence “burns just at our door.”

But despite all these events, the aristocratic French leader wrote in Paris Match magazine, “it is the destiny of Europe that could have the most lasting consequences on the shape of the world of the next millenium.”

Even more than Mitterrand, Giscard has personally identified himself with unified Europe. It was during his term as president that both the European Council, composed of the heads of states of the member states, and the ecu, the common European currency, came into being.

Giscard is perhaps France’s most important living European federalist. A man of great, sometimes haughty, intelligence, Giscard is one in a group of elite postwar leaders for whom a United States of Europe--bigger in population than the United States of America--has been a driving ambition. Along with former German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, he created in 1986 a European Committee for Monetary Union.

For the Giscards and Schmidts of the world, the boundaries of their own countries were too limiting of their talents. Only a greater Europe has sufficient room.

“The train is in motion!” Giscard wrote. “. . . It left a dark and still-martyred Europe of the 1940s. It made the utopias of that epoch the realities of today: the reconciliation of hereditary enemies; free circulation of people and goods on a continent once bristling with borders and walls.”

FOR

ELISABETH GUIGOU

Age: 46

Occupation: Civil servant; minister for European affairs

Political affiliation: Socialist Party

As Mitterrand’s handpicked specialist on European Affairs and main government advocate for a “yes” vote on the Maastricht Treaty, Guigou represents the new breed of European professionals who favor the construction of a strong, centrally administered “modern” Europe. She sees supporters of Maastricht as progressive, enlightened, forward-looking.

“We prefer,” she argued strongly in a recent essay for Le Figaro newspaper, “to continue the calm march begun 40 years ago and vote ‘yes’ for a strong France in a modern Europe.”

Left-wing critics of Maastricht say the Europe that the treaty imagines is based on a classically “liberal” economic model that will make it easier for multinational banks and corporations to do business, but diminishes the status of labor in the 12-nation European Community. But for Guigou and other young supporters in the titularly left-wing Socialist Party, Maastricht represents a “progressive” Europe that will ensure that France participates in the economic benefits of a pan-European economy.

Under the Europe envisioned in the Maastricht Treaty, for example, interest rates would be determined by a central European bank. The 12 nations would have a common currency. France and other European countries would no longer be at the mercy of the dominant German Bundesbank.

This proposed economic and monetary union, Guigou argues, is not “a super-federal entity that will gobble up French sovereignty. Quite the opposite, it will give our country a voice in monetary decisions.”

Guigou is a graduate of the elite Ecole Nationale d’Administration (ENA), training ground for virtually all of France’s top bureaucrats and many of its leading politicians. With few exceptions--Gaullist Philippe Seguin being one of them--most ENA graduates are active supporters of the Maastricht accord. But they are also the target of many opposed to the treaty, who view their presence in key positions of government as evidence of a technocratic elite.

FOR

MICHEL NOIR

Age: 48

Occupation: Mayor of Lyon; member of National Assembly; former minister of foreign trade

Political affiliation: Independent

The tall, dark mayor of Lyon is one of those self-proclaimed Gaullists who contend that if the late French general were alive today he would vote to ratify Maastricht.

“The Maastricht Treaty is part of a 40-year process that was launched by De Gaulle,” Noir contended during a recent interview in his Paris office.

To support his case, Noir notes that the first proposals for political union of the then-six European Community states came in 1961 from Frenchman Christian Fouchet, who had the full support of De Gaulle. “In effect,” Noir argued, “De Gaulle already voted for Maastricht.”

In the ranks of the Gaullist right wing, the Lyon native is considered a black sheep because of his Maastricht stand. At a recent rally in Noir’s hometown, former ally Philippe Seguin called the Lyon mayor a “traitor.”

Until December 1990, Noir was a member of the same Rally for the Republic political party as Seguin. But the 6-foot-4-inch mayor, whose hobby is playing the cello, has always had an independent streak. When the RPR was considering forming political alliances with the extreme-right National Front Party, for example, Noir uttered the now-famous line, “I would rather lose an election than lose my soul.”

To Noir, the Maastricht Treaty is a necessity for both economic and political reasons. He sees the French hesitation to accept the treaty as a form of future shock, a fear of the unknown. But he says its defeat in this month’s referendum would be “devastating” for the future of Europe.

Worst of all, he fears that it would cause powerful Germany to break with the ideal of European integration.

“The effect of a ‘no’ on Germany would be enormous,” he says. “The German question exists for sure. There is always a temptation in Germany to go its own way and create an independent superpower. We need to drown Germany with a ‘yes’ vote.”

Words of Difference

French voters will cast ballots on the following question Sept. 20:

“Do you approve the bill of law submitted to the French people by the President of the Republic authorizing the ratification of the Treaty for European Union?”