Posted 2:22 PM by Paul
Jacques Come to Town

Chirac was in London last week and made the most of the fact that events have proved him right. In fact he took the Mickey out of the Government at every opportunity. In a very eloquent French way Jacques reminded us all that he was right all along about Bush’s intentions in Iraq and his inability to fight a successful war and then win the Peace without Arab support. He was clearly enjoying himself.

It’s a funny old world. Who would have thought that Jacques Chirac would have become a hero of the European Left? It seems like only yesterday that we were cheering as Mitterand defeated him twice to herald a new era of French Social Democracy. Except that it wasn’t. France went broke and all those rumours about the Socialist President being a Nazi collaborator turned out to be true. You couldn’t make it up. Just before he died someone even got hold of a photo of him in the uniform of the Petainist Youth Movement. He managed to keep that one quiet for 50 years. At the time Mitterand’s victory seemed to be the only positive news in the otherwise right wing unremitting landscape of the Reagan Thatcher years. My friend Jim was working on Wall Street at the time and he called me with the news that the New York Post had covered the news with the headline REDS TAKE PARIS.

Then there was the scandal of the contaminated blood which gave people AIDS and the Elf Oil bribery scandal. It was a reminder to us all that a large part of politics is about how political entrepreneurs use political parties as vehicles for their own self aggrandisement. The party machine becomes a machine for collecting votes and distributing favours. Ideology doesn’t come in to it.

Compared to nasty Francois naughty Jacques seems relatively clean.

But beyond all the political manoeuvring and point scoring, Chirac made a series of broad philosophical points that made sense.

Nations subjugated to colonialism in the recent past would be quick to see what we call democratisation as imposed Westernisation. Despite what Blair might say about the US being the only superpower we in fact live in a multi –polar world. Disagreements should at least in theory be worked out by a multi- lateral approach. No one has a monopoly on wisdom. Compared to Chirac’s broad sweep many Labour politicians’ geo-political world view comes over like a mediocre under grad paper. They constantly seem to be trying to convince you of their globalist free market credentials in an attempt to lay the ghost of their Marxist past. It feels like over compensation

Critics say that this is idle wishful thinking on the part of an old fraud. In fact Chirac is stating the facts. The USA has the most weapons and could blow us all up 100 times over but its economic power is waning. Some of its high value as well as its menial jobs are moving to China and India, two powers which comprise around a third of the world’s population. Only 10% of the Chinese population could be termed middle class, but that is 120 million people. Nearly half the population of the USA. Europe for all its problems is soon to be a bigger market for goods and services not just because it has a much larger population but because it will soon be richer. The USA will always be powerful, but it is no longer the only show in town. Perhaps power and wealth are moving back to where they were 1000 years ago – the East

Chirac’s analysis annoys many people including my old friend Noel Chandler who was holding forth on the subject over a pizza in Soho last week. For some British people supporting the USA on every single occasion is now the litmus test of our nationhood. France is seen as being ungrateful after the sacrifices made by the US forces on the beaches of Normandy in 1944. No one should ever forget those young men. That is true.

We also need a bit of perspective. Five divisions landed on D-Day. Two were British. Two were American and one was from Canada, a country with a 10th of the population of the USA. But we hear very little about the boys from Toronto and Montreal who lost their lives. The Russians had over 30 divisions in the field against the Nazis in the summer of 1944. They still regard D-Day as a bit of a side show. Helpful, but not the real war. Also there has to eventually be a statute of limitations placed on national debts of gratitude. Without the French, the USA would not have beaten the British in 1776. At what point did Washington stop thanking Paris? Probably before 1836.

Do I trust Chirac? Of course not, but I am not sure that I trust any of them in a way I might have trusted FDR, Churchill or Atllee.

Chirac does at least seem to have an idea about the way the world is moving.