MB Civic

The US president is really a Frenchman
By John Thornhill

Published: November 15 2006 18:40 | Last updated: November 15 2006 18:40

After the “thumpin’” given to the Republicans in the US mid-term elections, the question can no longer be avoided: is George W. Bush really French?

The very suggestion would surely provoke a string of choice Texan expletives in response. After all, France is the country that President Bush loves to scorn. President Jacques Chirac’s opposition to the Iraq war won him the undying ingratitude of his US counterpart and the unaffectionate nickname “Jackass”. Since then, the White House has given the impression that it regards most French views as weak and unmanly (except when in agreement with the Bush administration) and fundamentally anti-capitalist.

But in many respects Mr Bush would appear to fit more snugly into the French political tradition than his own. His championing of military interventionism, absolutism and national exceptionalism has uncanny echoes of Napoleon, Louis XIV and Charles de Gaulle. Did voters in the US mid-term elections simply come round to the view that Mr Bush is a political alien?

Consider Mr Bush’s military adventurism. The president has a very un-American (and particularly un-Republican) habit of starting wars – in Afghanistan and Iraq – rather than finishing other people’s. But that tendency is very French.

Contrary to their image as “cheese-eating surrender monkeys”, the French have the statistical distinction of being the most belligerent nation on earth. Between 1816 and 1980 they fought more wars than any other nation: 22 (compared with 19 for Britain and eight for the US) initiating conflict seven times. Long before Mr Bush devised a strategy of pre-emption, the French had been practising it in Africa – often without the explicit authorisation of the United Nations.

Mr Bush also has decidedly Gaullist notions about the exceptionalism of his country’s destiny and the universalism of its values. Other US presidents, of course, have believed in their country as a “shining city on a hill” but few have been so missionary in their zeal in spreading its values abroad – by force if necessary.
Mr Bush’s “transformational” policies in the Middle East bear a striking resemblance to Napoleon’s attempts in the 1790s to export the French revolution’s values at the point of a bayonet, aiming to overturn oppressive autocracies in central Europe.

The US president, who included the existentialist Albert Camus on his summer reading list, has also shown a particularly French trait in glorifying theory over practice. Whereas most US presidents have fought wars against other countries, Mr Bush has launched a war against an “abstract noun”: terror. No wonder some left-bank intellectuals, including Bernard-Henri Lévy and André Glucksmann, have been gushing in their admiration for such intellectual audacity.

Yet his response to all criticism appears to have been inspired by the French singer Edith Piaf: “non, je ne regrette rien”. Although he may publicly deride French statism,
Mr Bush would also appear to have a very Gallic conception of the centrality and authority of the state.

He has massively increased public spending while in office and fought to extend the executive powers of the presidency. Seeking to justify the secret wire-tapping of US citizens, administration lawyers have been making the case that the president can in effect define the country’s national security interests in whichever way he wishes.

Louis XIV reputedly summed up this convenient absolutist philosophy some three centuries ago: “L’état c’est moi”. Mr Bush put it just as succinctly but a little less eloquently earlier this year when he said: “I’m the decider and I decide what’s best.”

However, in the mid-term elections US voters showed that they did not much care for Mr Bush’s French fashions. They have signalled their displeasure with the Iraq war and supported greater Congressional control over the presidency, reanimating the checks and balances in the system.

The paradox is that most Europeans do not like a “French” president living on Pennsylania Avenue either. They would far rather have what they see as a true “American” president instead, one who demonstrably upholds the values that made the US the beacon of democracy for most of the 20th century, one who supports the multilateral organisations that his predecessors created, one who talks quietly but carries a big stick.

The – as yet largely unspoken – fear in Europe is that a disillusioned US will retreat into itself after its French liaison rather than recommitting itself to the world.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2006