Word: mitterrand
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...more than good personal chemistry behind the mutual striving for Franco-American entente. Indeed there was a broad range of foreign policy issues on which the Socialist President's views seemed more compatible with Washington's than those of his patrician predecessor. On East-West questions, for example, both Mitterrand and his Foreign Minister have emphatically denounced the Soviet menace in Afghanistan and Poland. In fact, the Socialists have made it clear to Marchais's Communists that they cannot hope to play even a token role in the government without endorsing that condemnation of Moscow's imperialism...
...Mitterrand and Cheysson have also voiced concern over the buildup of Soviet SS-20 missiles in Eastern Europe. They have strongly supported NATO's decision to respond by deploying U.S.-made Pershing II and cruise missiles on Western European soil...
...Mitterrand government will, of course, need far more than luck to implement its program of change for French society, but the Cheysson-Reagan exchange illuminates an important fact: so far as France's powerful administrative apparatus is concerned, there is less to the latest government switch than meets the eye. Whoever is running the country politically, bureaucratic power within the French civil service remains guarded by the graduates of a small number of closely knit, government-linked grandes écoles (great schools), which also provide manpower for the national political parties, be they of the left, right or center...
Even the highest levels of French politics tend to be knotted up in the same school ties. No fewer than eight members of Mitterrand's Socialist Cabinet, for example, are alumni of the vaunted Ecole Nationale d'Administration (E.N.A.), which also produced seven members of the outgoing Giscard government -including Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, a top-ranked scholar of the class of '51. Foreign Minister Cheysson (class of '48) is an enarque, as products of the elite school are known, who previously held posts with the leftist Fourth Republic government of Pierre Mend...
...fact, many younger members of the bureaucratic elite are sympathetic to Socialist policies-even though, in the long run, this may cost them some choice jobs. One of Mitterrand's priorities is to decentralize the bureaucracy, including the replacement of Paris-appointed local prefects in France's 96 departments by elected regional councils. For that task, Mitterrand will need the elite's cooperation, and he will probably get it. Says one E.N.A. official, explaining how graduates feel about working in an area of government that is slated for oblivion: "Their feeling is that there is always something...