U.S. Global Clout Particularly Galling to French

For Jacques Chirac, who rose from night-shift dishwasher in America to the presidency of France, and today comes calling at the White House, true friends don’t always have to agree.

“There is neither rivalry nor competition,” the French leader assured a group of U.S. correspondents here this week. “On the other hand, there can be different approaches.”

Those “different approaches,” however, have led to friction in the two countries’ relationship.

On issues ranging from a transatlantic tiff over bananas to treatment of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and the future of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the French staunchly pursue their own strategies and policies, causing them to butt heads with the Americans more often than any other European ally.

French Foreign Minister Hubert Vedrine refers to the United States not as a superpower, but as an even more unchecked “hyperpower” that needs hemming in by the United Nations and other international organizations. As for Prime Minister Lionel Jospin, he deplores American “unilateralism.”

“On the European side, we find it unbearable that the United States alone decides what is good for the world,” Herve de Charette, France’s foreign minister from 1995 to ‘97, summarized in an interview. “On the American side, they find French arrogance, the French habit of having opinions about everything, exasperating.”

One Paris-based U.S. diplomat said: “The French don’t deny the right of any country to pursue its own interest. They just don’t like the amount of influence we have.”

As the enormous success of a new movie starring Gerard Depardieu indicates, many of the French seem to feel a special affinity with their ancestors the Gauls, who fought bravely but unsuccessfully against Rome, the great power of the day.

“This phenomenon of [American] hyperpower extends to all fields: economic, technological, military, and everywhere in the world there is CNN and Hollywood,” Vedrine said in an interview in the Paris newspaper Liberation late last year.

When pressed, French diplomats acknowledge that there is no mad scramble in the rest of Europe to fall in behind France.

“For France, Europe has to be a genuine power, with a diplomacy of its own, with its own aircraft carriers and all the rest,” said Gerard Araud, deputy French representative to NATO’s headquarters in Brussels. “But we are probably the only country to feel that way.”

The Franco-American frictions must be measured alongside more than two centuries of relations, deeply held common values, close cooperation in hot spots such as Bosnia-Herzegovina and an extraordinary traffic of ideas and human beings across the Atlantic in both directions.

Chirac and President Clinton, his host for talks, a working lunch and a joint news conference today, are said to enjoy particularly good ties. And what other European leader can say that, as an 18-year-old summer student at Harvard, he worked the 6 p.m.-2.a.m. shift washing dishes at a Howard Johnson’s restaurant, where he was quickly promoted to counterman and made “pretty good” turkey sandwiches?

“France’s policy is not one of aggression against or competition with the United States, and I would not accept it,” Chirac, 66, said during the meeting with Paris-based correspondents. But he also noted that “Europe’s interests are not automatically those of the Americans.”

The French president, who flew to Washington on Thursday for meetings with leaders of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, said he is proposing a mechanism to regulate the huge movements of speculative capital that the back-to-back financial crises in Asia and Russia proved are a threat to global economic stability.

France also will seek an end to the U.N. embargo on Iraq, which the United States supports but officials in Paris contend merely reinforces Hussein’s popularity among Iraqis. In exchange for being allowed to sell oil, the Iraqi dictator would have to consent to a renewal of weapons inspections, the French say.

During Chirac’s visit, his seventh to the U.S. since his 1995 election, the French leader and Clinton will also discuss Russia, NATO’s 50th anniversary summit in Washington in April and the Kosovo peace talks, where the parties meeting outside Paris have been given until Saturday to make a deal.

“If we have to face problems in the modern world, we must do it together,” Chirac said.