Discord and collaboration in Franco-American relations : what can role theory tell us?

Abstract

France and the United States have enjoyed a set of complex relationships since the founding of the American and French republics. Sometimes the FrancoAmerican relationship has taken on the character of rival siblings: each has claimed that its revolutionary heritage best embodies the verities of the Enlightenment. At other times, the Franco-American relationship has been characterized by mutual admiration sustained by an American infatuation with French culture into the early twentieth century and by French paternalism first found in the writings of de Tocqueville. The relationship deteriorated after World War II, as the contours of the Yalta settlement solidified. The United States refused to support French ambitions during the 1956 Suez crisis and its efforts to retain Algeria as an integral part of France. Similarly, France chafed under the institutional and material hegemony that the United States enjoyed in Europe after 1945, and was unwilling to support American foreign policy when it violated French interests, particularly in the Middle East, in Vietnam after 1954, and increasingly in Europe after 1958. The complexity of the Franco-American relationship can be ascribed to respective social constructions of American and French power and their interrelationship. When the United States entered the world stage as an industrial and military power in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, France looked back on the glories of Napoleonic France and faced a rising Germany that threatened to eclipse France. The course of the twentieth century further diminished France’s standing in the world and its estimation in the American mind: the quick defeat in World War II was compounded by the collaborationist Vichy regime; and France’s postwar constitutional instability was conjoined to military failures in Southeast Asia and Algeria. What was perceived as a terminal French decline was matched by the seemingly inexorable rise of the United States. As America harnessed its postwar economic, military, and cultural hegemony to implement containment, French and American strategic interests began to diverge as a result of national role conceptions (NRCs), which define national interests and the legitimate purposes of foreign policies. French and American NRCs have three major components: the meaning of their relative position in the international system; their foreign policy’s overarching purpose; and the conceptualization of the “other.” Their NRCs are alsoinherently oppositional: just as the United States has viewed itself as a benevolent hegemon that deserves the obedience of its European and Asian allies, France viewed itself as a great power capable of challenging and balancing the American hegemon and leading an autonomous Europe. Correspondingly, the United States viewed NATO allies (including France) as subordinates that ought to defer to American preferences, while France acknowledged the reality of American hegemony but did not accept that it was benevolent or that it required French obeisance where interests diverged.1 The purposes of American policy, beyond the seemingly self-evident systemic requirement of containing Soviet power, were the maintenance of global order, the creation of an international system consistent with American values, and the perpetuation of American military-strategic dominance globally and a liberal hegemony regionally, particularly in Western Europe (cf. Ikenberry and Kupchan 1990). Although the French foreign policy elite recognized the imperative of containing Soviet influence in Europe, it rejected Europe’s perpetual subordination to American power and strove to restore Europe’s “natural” role as a global force. More generally, the American and French NRCs shared a common “other” (Soviet power) and a common “we” (the Atlantic community), but the French “othering” of the United States – a necessary complement to the other elements of its NRC – was eventually reciprocated and accounts for the sometimes oppositional logic plaguing Franco-American foreign policy disputes.2 This chapter investigates the contribution that role theory can make to our understanding of Franco-American relations since the 1950s. We are particularly interested in Hubert Vedrine’s formulation that France is allied, but not aligned, with the United States (2002); and the reciprocal American treatment of France as an undependable or nettlesome “other” within the alliance despite France’s consistent material and diplomatic support of the United States, particularly during the Cold War. The inquiry will proceed in two steps: first, we present defining components of the French and American NRCs in the postwar period and their domestic origins where they are relevant to our argument. We then assess, second, the impact of those NRCs across three dimensions (attitudes towards the postwar status quo; the purpose of NATO and each state’s position within it; and the symbolic and strategic purposes of national nuclear deterrents). In the conclusion, we assess the salience and relevance of domestic elements of role and purpose in shaping the trajectory of Franco-American relations into the second decade of the twenty-first century.