France and the Arms Trade

Abstract

HE characterisation of French arms sales as 'commercial pragmatism', a term applied to British policy, is only partially useful in explaining French behaviour. * * It captures little of the complexity or dynamism of the circumstances shaping French behaviour. No one factor but a nexus of three sets of differentiated but related factors must be relied upon to explain the scope and direction of French arms-sales policy and decisions. These include the exterior environment within which France acts, specifically the structure of global and regional security, and the efforts of successive French governments to influence and adapt themselves and the nation to that environment; the economic incentives, national and parochial, encouraging an open armstransfers policy; and the process by which politically authoritative decisions are made to produce and sell arms and know-how. Each of these levels of analysis provides a key to an understanding of French governmental action. None is alone sufficient to provide a fully satisfactory explanation. Moreover, the weightborne by each set of factors can be shown to have shifted during the course of time. If security and foreign-policy considerations predominated in the initial efforts after the Second World War to reconstruct France's defense industries, economic and internal-regime interests have progressively grown in importance. If arms sales are viewed from these three perspectives, and account is taken of the play of forces within each, it becomes clear that few activities permeate and penetrate French political and economic life more than the sale of military technology and arms-and few are more important. Distinguishing between foreign and domestic policy as the primary source of French conduct, therefore, has little or no relevance. Moreover, the guns or butter dichotomy, normally used by analysts to explain or condemn arms sales, has been transformed within the French context into an imperative of guns and butter. For most French within the government and bureaucracy concerned with arms sales, and many within the opposition, the security and foreign-policy functions of the government, on the one hand, and popular expectations of its