Multilateralism, Multipolarity, and Regionalism: The French Foreign Policy Discourse

French officials portray resistance to unilateral American military action in Iraq as stemming from French allegiance to collective security authorized by the United Nations Security Council on the basis of the UN Charter and international law. In the dramatic Security Council debate over authorization for military action against Iraq, the French representatives affirmed their allegiance to collective security through the UN and warned against the dangers of unilateralism and preemptive war without proof of weapons violations and a unanimous UN mandate. This highly visible clash with the United States over multilateralism masks a more complex foreign policy in which the UN is only one of several arenas for French foreign policy initiatives. While insisting on the preeminence of the Security Council in resolving international conflicts, France actively pursues a separate regional foreign policy through the European Union as well as a bilateral foreign policy focused on francophone Africa. Deference to the UN pays a twofold dividend, giving France big-power parity through the potential use of the veto and providing a framework of international law from which to criticize and try to contain go-it-alone US interventionism.

Critiques of the French position impugn these motives, citing instead economic self-interest, a desire to curry favor with Middle East regimes, regional alliance building in an evolving European security context, and a desire to lead a global anti-American backlash against a US administration that has abandoned multilateralism for a strategy reflecting imperial ambition. These accusations are both true and unexceptional. Mostly, they represent a continuation of French foreign policy going back decades, a policy that

reflects France's resentment of its exclusion (at the hands of the United States) from its historic role as a central player in Middle Eastern diplomatic and economic relations;

has, since Charles de Gaulle expelled NATO forces from France in the 1960s (quite ironically, given its own colonial past), repeatedly accused the United States of imperial overreach.

The insistence on multilateralism and adherence to international law does not prevent French foreign-policy makers on the Left and the Right from conceptualizing international relations as the pursuit of national interests within a world of competitive nation-states and regional alliances. These views are reflected in the recurring theme of multipolarity in the foreign policy discourse, a term that sometimes appears to be a marker for anti-Americanism but that also serves to preserve a sphere for French initiative within regional organizations like the EU. At the same time, French policy makers and commentators insist that French policies are genuinely compatible with those of the United States. The war on terrorism, the war in Afghanistan, the events in Kosovo, and recent African peacekeeping operations are all cited as evidence of French-American cooperation. Even with respect to the war with Iraq, the French and the Americans both insisted that Iraq fulfill its UN obligations by relinquishing its unconventional weapons capability and fully accounting for illicit weapons programs. The French also envisaged the possibility of an eventual use of force, insisting, however, that the UN inspections process be granted additional time.¹

French foreign policy invokes principles of preeminent multilateralism, autonomous regional groupings, and unapologetic nationalism. France adamantly defends the UN Security Council and its charter-given prerogatives that guarantee France a prominent place at the collective security table. This stance, while based on an insistence on collective security and the sanctity of the UN Charter, in fact magnifies France's place in international diplomacy and actually allows it to pursue national interests in France's historic spheres of influence, for example, in Africa. At the regional level, France has labored since the 1950s to develop a European security structure that was not dominated by the United States. French support for a stand-alone European security and defense capability distinct from NATO is only the latest manifestation of that desire. However, France's enthusiasm for regionalism does not prevent an interpretation of future European security policy in a way that would devolve to individual member-states substantial prerogatives in their traditional areas of influence (North and sub-Saharan Africa, in...