Word: mitterrand
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With the cold war over, it hardly seems time to start building an all-new army in Europe. Yet France and Germany are doing just that. President Francois Mitterrand and Chancellor Helmut Kohl last week proposed the creation of an all-European army, starting with a small Franco-German brigade that is already in existence and eventually comprising troops from all the nine nations in the Western European Union. Staunch Atlanticists initially opposed the idea: British Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd called it an unnecessary "duplication" of NATO. But others, including the U.S. -- which is not a member...
...purported constitutional ban on deploying troops beyond NATO's boundaries -- Britain and the Netherlands viewed Bonn's rhetoric as grandstanding, a ploy to extend German influence in Eastern Europe. The French, meanwhile, seemed "torn between their desires and what makes sense," as a senior Italian diplomat put it. Francois Mitterrand dearly wants a distinct West European "defense identity," but the French President has a Bismarckian distaste for the Balkans. "These countries," he fairly snorted two weeks ago, "have been at the origin of several great wars into which we were then dragged...
...Mitterrand, on an official visit to Germany, argued that Yugoslavia must not be allowed to "poison European cohesion." But beyond whatever precedent it was setting for the fragmenting Soviet Union and other parts of Eastern Europe, the crisis was already seeping venom into the West. The main rubs: How could the E.C. enforce a peace, and what kind of peace did it want? With French support, German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher undertook to jump-start a rusting security mechanism, the Western European Union. Consisting of nine of the 12 E.C. members -- Denmark, Ireland and Greece do not belong...
...short of intervention were not good. Susan Woodward, a fellow at Washington's Brookings Institution, criticized the E.C. for waiting too long. The storm has been gathering for months, she notes, but only when fighting broke out in June did the Community attempt to set up a peace conference. Mitterrand said in Germany last week he did "not see it as the end of human progress if we reconstitute the Europe of tribes." But would tribal Europe, starting in the Balkans, overtake and drown the tolerant Europe of ideas...
...optimism is overblown. The cordon of communist-run industrial towns around Paris has frayed over the past decade as the country, ever more prosperous, moves rightward. In the 1988 presidential election, the Communist Party polled only 6.8%. Nonetheless, even as Soviet totalitarianism self- destructs, President Francois Mitterrand's minority Socialist government depends on 26 Communist deputies to pass its legislation. Unlike Communist parties in Italy and Spain, France's apparatus has no plans to change its name. Forty-six of France's 226 largest cities, including Bobigny, remain in Communist Party hands. And there, the mood is a mixture...