Topic: France

NATO redux in Paris

In a speech to the French National Military Academy on 29 January US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton did her best to press the old wine of 20th Century security thinking into the new bottles of a shifting European security landscape.

The speech in its entirety can be found here. The report and analysis from Le Monde can be found here and here.

Europe’s political class is still scrambling to find its footing at the dawn of the era of the Lisbon Treaty and the new architecture of power, legitimacy and politics it is producing. The European Council of Ministers is consolidated around a new ‘president’ of Europe, the EU has a distinct new foreign policy and security spokeswoman and a beefed up operational capacity of the European Parliament.

Add to this the fact that NATO is itself in the middle of its own identity crisis. It’s own 1999 Strategic Concept is generally considered obsolete, and a highly visible, multi-national fact-finding and consensus building exercise is under way in order to identify a new one. The group of experts assigned the task is led by none other than Cold Warrior Madeline Albright.

In terms of the trans-Atlantic and European politics of security, the present juncture rivals 1989 and the transformation of the Cold War concept of security. [ More… ]

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Monsieur Van Rompuy

The President of the Council of Europe today addressed the Alliance Française, the international interest organisation for global users of the French language. Taking the floor It came 5 days after the International Day of Francophony, Van Rompuy spoke, in eloquent French, on the theme ‘Culture, globalisation and Europe: Google contra Proust?’.

It is clear If anything Von Rompuy speaks the language of Europe: universality versus particularity, universal values, human rights, evoking the European front guard from de Tocqueville to Marx. Latin traditions, Christian seditions, Aristotle, Calvin, Monnet and Benda.

The speech came one week after former French Prime MInister Jean-Pierre Raffarin, special envoy on Francophony to President Nicolas Sarkozy, had insisted that France would be ‘gentle, but firm’ in its insistence that the French language should continue to be one of the three working languages of the European Union (along with German and English), despite the latest enlargement and linguistic watering down. [ More… ]

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