France and Britain are great powers brought low by little men

Thanks to the Telegraph for allowing us to repost this article.

I’ve sometimes envied the French. Not just for their vast natural spaces (twice our territory for the same population), their food and the usual tourist attractions.

Not for their health service, which has much the same problems as ours. Not for their social failings (even more NEETs than we have). Not, of course, for their taxes and debt. Not even for their “culture”: the Louvre is awful, though admittedly their exhibition curators are more knowledgeable than ours, and less obsessed with wokery.

No, what I have sometimes envied is their willingness to assert their Frenchness on the global stage, their confidence that France has a legitimate voice because of what it represents.

French politicians and diplomats speak for France. They defend French interests. They have a national strategy, and they seem to follow it. They do so unashamedly, even unscrupulously. Britain found that out over Brexit, to the shock of our politicians and officials.

The French make life difficult for us. They take our fish. They want us to pay for the privilege of defending Europe. They won’t stop illegal migrants crossing the Channel. In short, they act unhesitatingly in their own interests, not ours. Moreover, they all seem to agree about this. And they have done so for a long time.

Much can be traced back to the lofty, brooding figure of Charles de Gaulle. Amid our present political floundering, an equivalent “Anglo-Gaullism” seems attractive.

One pillar of De Gaulle’s world view was deep antagonism towards America, a feeling that was personal, cultural and geopolitical. This stance has been periodically taken by all the General’s successors. Britain’s opposite strategy was to cultivate a “special relationship”. It is unclear, to put it mildly, whether British pliability has been more successful than French rigidity.

There was more to Gaullism than being rude to the Americans. It included a broad national strategy of revival and assertion. De Gaulle insisted on nuclear energy security (we still import more and more of their electricity) and a fully independent nuclear deterrent. He maintained a close and sometimes corrupt relationship with former colonies.

La Francophonie, a copy of the British Commonwealth, cultivated soft power. European integration, of which De Gaulle was suspicious, was acceptable only as a means of asserting French interests – the very opposite of the British approach of surrendering power and sovereignty from a position of perceived weakness.

Should Britain therefore decide to be more Gaullist? To some degree, obviously yes. Any self-respecting country should be able to assert its interests, speak up for its values, and rely on its politicians and officials to be – well, patriotic.

Imagine a British De Gaulle today (impossible, I admit). He would not be surrendering energy security and the remains of our industry in the name of net zero. He would not be giving away the Chagos Islands, allowing Spain to control approaches to Gibraltar, or leaving Northern Ireland under EU law. He would not allow Trump to use British bases, but he would say so firmly and not change his mind overnight.

He would ensure that Cyprus was defended and that talk of giving up the bases was squashed. He would be cultivating the Commonwealth. He would spend money and effort on defence and power projection.

But all this seems to be beyond us, not just because Starmerism is a sort of anti-Gaullism, but because of an enfeebled political system and an elite culture of surrender epitomised by the “Foreign Office mind”.

In short, we cannot just become Gaullist. Gaullism had deep French roots. These included an ancient tradition of state authority, very different from our liberal suspicion of power.

There was also a longing on the French Right for a national saviour above politics. Above all, Gaullism was born of catastrophe: occupation by the Germans, defeat in Indo-China and the horrifying Algerian war of independence which threatened to bring down the French state.

De Gaulle could therefore be the saviour, writing a new constitution making him a republican monarch. Luckily, he came to power halfway through what the French call the “Thirty Glorious Years” of economic growth, now a distant memory.

For more than 60 years, France has lived under his monarchical republic, whose president possesses far greater power and prestige than a British prime minister could dream of. Of course, De Gaulle’s reign was humiliatingly cut short by student riots and strikes, but not before he had transformed the country.

But what of Gaullism without De Gaulle? That was and is the problem for France and for any would-be Anglo-Gaullist. To cut a long story short, Gaullism without De Gaulle has culminated in Emmanuel Macron.

He began with the lofty Gaullist ambition of directing the country from the heights of the Élysée without soiling his hands with political machination. He ends unable to resolve a political stalemate, unable to carry out indispensable economic and financial reforms, able only to fret and strut on the world stage, making declarations and calling conferences to which no one pays attention. Just like Starmer, in fact.

This strange convergence of France and Britain, despite their contrasting histories and institutions, provides food for thought. Both nations are, or should be, great powers.

But it is far from clear that their political class or their people are now willing to make the effort or pay the cost. They hope for the best as their fate is determined by others. This worried De Gaulle, who famously said that France had to behave as a great power precisely because she no longer was one.

Part of Gaullism was always posturing and bluff. Perhaps this could work in a stable world, in which, whatever happened, America was there to defend Europe against the Soviets, and tweaking the American tail provided some relief to a humiliated France. Perhaps Britain’s opposite policy, the “special relationship”, also made sense in that world.

But that world has gone. Are Britain and France, Gaullist or not, capable of maintaining their security and interests when hard power is flaunted by reckless predators? Will a politician who is not De Gaulle grasp the nettle?