De Gaulle and the death of Europe.

• Author: Mahoney, Daniel J.
• Position: Charles De Gaulle

The concept of "the national interest" is omnipresent in contemporary discussions of foreign affairs - in the speeches of presidents and senators, in the scribblings of editorialists, as well as in the speculations of academic specialists. The influence of this idea is one of the lasting legacies of the so-called "realist" school of international relations, whose luminaries included the political scientist Hans Morgenthau and the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr.

The American proponents of realism were publicists as well as scholars, and they engaged in a polemic against the notion that U.S. foreign policy ought to engage in crusades on behalf of such allegedly abstract causes as democracy, human rights, and anti-communism. Its proponents were "Burkeans" who tried, paradoxically enough, to wish away the reality of Jacobinism and its ideological pedigree. As Raymond Aron suggested, the American realists transformed historically specific periods in European statecraft when a "moderate Machiavellianism" had prevailed - the period between the wars of religion and the French Revolution, and again the century between the Congress of Vienna and the First World War - into a normative account of the permanently valid requirements of statecraft. Theirs was a conservative, nostalgic, and even reactionary lament against the unleashing of societal passions in an age of ideology and mass democracy.

What gave realism much of its allure was its claim to the authority then accorded social science. Some historically-minded realists such as Henry Kissinger occasionally concede the historically specific character of their realist prescriptions, but most lament the stubborn persistence of American "exceptionalism." This is somehow taken as evidence of the immaturity of the American people and of the utopian imagination of the American political class. Most realists fail fully to appreciate that American exceptionalism is another name for the universalism that is inseparable from American statecraft because it is integral to America's founding principles, and therefore to its very self-definition as a nation.

This is not the occasion to examine the nature of American exceptionalism or its role in the articulation of a distinctively American foreign policy. But it is useful to contrast the universalism of America's principles with the European state that best embodies universalist claims or pretensions: France, simultaneously the "eldest daughter of the Church" and the originator of what Burke called the "catechism of the rights of man."

The realists are undoubtedly right that American exceptionalism leads some Americans to reject the ways of the world. In their view, the United States is too good to muddy itself in the rough and tumble of international political life. In contrast, French universalism does not preclude the French from pursuing their interests, and they are unapologetic about the "Machiavellian" requirements of statecraft. (Witness, as one striking example, the cool response of French public opinion to the complicity of their intelligence services, and almost certainly of President Francois Mitterrand himself, in the bombing of Greenpeace's Rainbow Warrior in a New Zealand harbor in 1985.) And many on both the Left and Right, socialists and Gaullists alike, continue to believe that France has a distinctive "mission" to perform on behalf of liberty, even if France's relative rank in the world has declined in this century. In this sense, the French remain historically and politically-minded in a Europe that is increasingly depoliticized. (Whether this is just a fading ember from the fire lit by General Charles de Gaulle two generations ago is an interesting question.)

This French sensibility, simultaneously universalist and Machiavellian, is distinct from the idea of realism shaped and codified by American academic specialists. American realists despise all ideological pretensions - "power politics", and not the cultivation of glory or the defense or promotion of national ideals, are at the center of their political universe. They ignore the manifold and contentious ends of foreign affairs and reduce thinking about the national interest to a question of means: their realistic statesmen are concerned with the calculation of forces and the shifting requirements of the balance of power.(1) American net-realists, such as Kenneth Waltz, have scientized this already sharply reductive focus: their world is stripped of nations as well as ideologies, history as well as popular passions. International relations instead becomes a chess-like game that is played in almost complete independence from the messy contingencies of domestic politics.(2) Such theories dominate the teaching of international relations in the United States, where, in contrast and as Tocqueville tells us, public opinion is the sovereign and uncontested ruler of public life and, willy-nilly, of foreign policy itself.(3)

Not so in France. French thinking about foreign policy and the French understanding of the "national interest" have not been reduced to such desiccated formulae. Perhaps the best way to show this, avoiding the overly summary and abstract, is to highlight the thought of Charles de Gaulle, the French statesman and political thinker who has most deeply reflected on the meaning of France and its role in the modern world.(4) De Gaulle, with his penetrating recognition of the persistence of national identity, reminds American realists of the necessity and even the nobility of reflection on the independence, rank, and grandeur of political communities. In addition to de Gaulle, a range of important French thinkers from Tocqueville to Aron have shared questions with de Gaulle but have not always provided the same answers. These men have much to suggest about the prospects for self-government and national sovereignty, presupposed and championed by de Gaulle, in a Europe increasingly committed to a supra-national project of civil and commercial association that is lacking in authoritative political direction.

The Politics of Grandeur

If Americans think at all about France today, they do so through the lens of an unexamined prejudice. It is widely held that, of all European states, France has least resigned itself to its diminished place in the world, that France alone maintains a somewhat ridiculous and certainly irrational concern for its rank, even after ceasing to be a world power of any consequence. We Americans cannot resist being a bit condescending toward France and its greatest statesman, de Gaulle. While admired, he is often dismissed as the noble if irrelevant architect of France's anachronistic and annoying posturings. Putting all prejudices aside, let us try to articulate the politics of grandeur, as de Gaulle himself understood it. De Gaulle is commonly perceived as both a Machiavellian realist and a starry-eyed romantic. Perhaps this common opinion, in its confusion, provides the best starting point for a presentation of the Gaullist politics of grandeur.

De Gaulle undoubtedly shared certain first principles with the realist school. These include the recognition that the nation-state, as the contemporary embodiment of the political community, is the central unit of international life and the indispensable instrument of statecraft. De Gaulle also shared with realists an untroubled acceptance of the role that duplicity and flexibility inevitably play in diplomatic conduct, as well as a keen appreciation of the balance of power as the means by which order and a measure of sociality are maintained amid the competitive interplay of sovereign states.

De Gaulle had a broad and deep, perhaps an obsessive, historical memory: he quaintly called East Germany "Prussia" and "Saxony", and he feared the reunification and revival of a centralized "Reich", even a democratic and Western-oriented one.(5) He wisely and nobly promoted France's reconciliation with Konrad Adenauer's Germany, but he did not look forward to a united Germany in any form. Despite initial misgivings and hesitations, he supported the Atlantic Pact of 1949, partly out of anti-totalitarian conviction but mainly because he feared that the European balance of power was shifting dangerously in favor of a Soviet imperium. His rhetoric combined and oscillated between a genuine appreciation of the new ideological dimensions of politics in the twentieth century and a dogmatic insistence that what was really at stake in the Cold War was the age-old and unchanging question of the European balance of power.(6) He clearly recognized the totalitarian character of the Soviet-style regimes but was not convinced that the totalitarian or ideological character of the Soviet Union fundamentally affected its pursuit of imperial domination. This partisan of "eternal France" finally only saw "eternal Russians" at work in the machinations of communism and the movements of the Red Army.(7)

This helps explain why...