The Maastricht Treaty and France's "Great Design"

Abstract

THE FRENCH REFERENDUM OF SEPTEMBER 20, 1992, concerning the ratification of the Maastricht Treaty, spectacularly imposed the idea of Europe, a concept long judged distant and too abstract by the majority of French people. This was a hazardous if not imprudent gamble, since nothing required the consultative referendum that a parliamentary vote could have easily replaced (at least in France). The referendum yielded the wellknown result: partial victory for Treaty supporters, victorious defeat for its detractors. Nonetheless, if the French debate--so passionately evoking the full force of the Dreyfus Affair or the Algerian War-seriously sidetracks the construction of Europe, France still remains a country transformed by more than a decade of socialism and almost as long a period of a strict monetary policy. But there is the old and the new in this. The old, regarding Maastricht, is the return of the revolutionary phraseology and the affirmation of the Republic, possibly marking the of the end of the French exception, as Franqois Furet has phrased it. What is also old, is the anti-European holy alliance of the extreme right and the extreme left, united for the first time since the 1930s in their mutual loathing for parliamentary institutions. The new--which is not new in itself, but must be stated or restated-is that after the referendum, there are two Frances: a France of the rich and elevated cultural capital (pro-Maastricht), and a France of fear, poverty and ignorance (anti-Maastricht). Indeed, that the class struggle is a reality (which official France denied in the eighties) and that the public votes in protest amounts to a rude awakening after the bliss of the 1980s. If the average person has finally been invited to take an interest in the European question, and has finally been consulted on what concerns him or her, reflection on the question still clearly began before September 20, 1992.