DEFENSE : France Taking Tentative Steps Back Into NATO Military Fold

When Atlantic Alliance defense ministers gather Wednesday in the Spanish city of Seville for their annual informal meeting, there will be a new face at the table--that of French Defense Minister Francois Leotard.

It is not that Leotard is new to the job. He has held his post since the French right returned to power in elections 18 months ago.

What is new is that a French defense minister is in Seville at all.

Indeed, Leotard’s participation in the three-day gathering marks the first time France has attended such a meeting since the late President Charles de Gaulle pulled his nation out of the military side of the 16-member North Atlantic Treaty Organization in 1966 amid accusations that the alliance was little more than a tool for American domination of Europe.

The decision to send Leotard to Seville represents the latest in a series of gradual, low-key French steps back toward the NATO fold rather than any sudden, dramatic U-turn.

Few predict the move signals any swift full French re-integration into NATO’s military structure. That would surely be seen as compromising the unfettered independence of the French military deterrent, an idea that remains a strict political taboo in Paris.

Still, both here at NATO headquarters and in Paris, Leotard’s presence is considered significant.

“It means something,” said Dominique Moisi, deputy director of the French Institution of International Relations in Paris. “It means the French are aware that their previous policy was leading them to self-exclusion, that if they wanted to have some influence . . . they had to be present.”

Added a senior NATO official: “This is a step in the right direction. It shows a new attitude on the part of France.”

It is also likely that Leotard’s presence will be more than merely symbolic.

“He’s not just going to Seville to listen, he’s going to take the lead in discussions about Bosnia-Herzegovina (where France has the single largest contingent of U.N. peacekeepers) and on security concerns in the Mediterranean,” the NATO official said. “He’ll be trying to say that Algeria is a security concern for all of Europe.”

Both for NATO and for France, this increasingly active French role is important.

For the alliance, participation not only would add the clout of what by 1997 will be Western Europe’s largest national military force. It would also boost NATO’s profile in the politically volatile Mediterranean and provide it with valuable experience in peacekeeping--central to NATO’s future.

For France, closer cooperation with NATO is a way to avoid an isolation that had threatened to marginalize in the post-Cold War climate.

De Gaulle’s vision of France as a powerful, nuclear “third force,” independent of both superpowers, may have been viable in the Cold War. But in the uncertain security environment of the 1990s, Paris has begun to realize it can exert greater influence from within NATO than from the sidelines.

Leotard’s presence in Seville stands as the culmination of this thinking.

The evolution, however, has been gradual. France has always maintained a representative at NATO military headquarters in Mons, Belgium, while French observers have long attended NATO military committee meetings.

But it was only with the end of the Cold War that this tentative cooperation intensified.

It has been especially visible in the Balkans, where French aircraft help enforce the NATO-enforced “no fly” zone over Bosnia and two French frigates are part of a NATO-Western European Union naval task force in the Adriatic imposing a U.N.-ordered embargo against Serbia and Montenegro.

France was instrumental in NATO’s decision to enforce a U.N. weapons exclusion zone around Sarajevo.

Still, the rapprochement has not come without resistance in Paris. NATO officials here recall earlier this year the surprise when the chief of the French defense staff, Adm. Jacques Lanxade, showed up at an alliance meeting of defense staff chiefs.

“About 15 minutes after the meeting began, he received a message from the (French) president’s office,” recalled one NATO official. “He left immediately.”