Is French Foreign Policy Dead?

Abstract

The Europeanization of French Foreign Policy: France and the EU in East Asia. By Reuben Y. Wong Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. 256 pp., $80.00 (ISBN: 1-4039-9590-7). Reuben Wong argues that prevailing realist explanations no longer adequately account for the increasingly European bent of French foreign policy. Neorealists concede, at most, that structural changes within Europe and the international system have compelled France to accept the need for more interstate cooperation and accommodation with other European states through intergovernmental institutions. Liberal institutionalists view France's European policy as one of interstate bargaining, focused on economic interests, which leads to European policy convergence. Wong contends that recent scholarship in comparative politics challenges all state-centered models of foreign policy. Scholars writing from a “European-idealist” perspective posit that Europe is a separate foreign policy actor with a “consistent personality” that is influential in the world and engaged by other national and international actors (p. 4). In The Europeanization of French Foreign Policy , Wong asserts that, although French national ambitions and the cultivation of “special interests” have not disappeared, the evidence clearly shows that French foreign policy has undergone an incremental “Europeanization.” Wong identifies three theoretically distinct processes of Europeanization. The first process is “national adaptation,” which he defines as “a top-down process” of policy convergence led by European institutions and “caused by participation over time in foreign policy making at the European level” (p. 11). The result of this convergence is the creation of “norms and rules” that constrain state behavior. In this institutionalist view, European Union (EU) organizations are full-fledged actors in the process, influencing member states and representing them in negotiations with outside states. The second process is “national projection,” which is a “bottom-up and sideways process” involving “the projection of national preferences, ideas, and policy models into Europe” (pp. 7, 12). This process reflects a realist or neorealist view that EU policies are the result of competitive …