Cordiality out the window? Franco-British tensions and France’s difficult position laid bare by the AUKUS crisis
Boris Johnson and Emmanuel Macron on 18/06/20. Image Credit: Number 10 on Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.
Sophie Dunning explores the latest rift in France and Britain’s historically fraught relationship but argues that ultimately the two countries would do well to put their differences to one side.
Peter Ustinov, a British actor and committed internationalist, once said that “The French and the English are such good enemies that they cannot help but be friends”. Indeed, the Franco-British “special relationship” is held together by a curious cocktail of proximity and envy, common goals and suspicion. Suspicion and envy have certainly come to the fore in recent weeks in what the French are calling la crise des sous-marins, a.k.a. AUKUS: a new defence pact and nuclear submarine deal between the United Kingdom, the United States and Australia, announced on the 15th September. The deal, worth 66 billion dollars, sinks France’s aspiration of being the submarine provider for Australia and renders null and void their own bilateral agreement, worth around 30 billion euros, which had been two years in the making.
Most distressingly for the French, AUKUS was engineered by their allies duplicitously and secretively: Josep Borrell (whose job title, in true Brussels style, is High Representative of the Union of Foreign Affairs and Security Policy/Vice-President of the Commission for a Stronger Europe in the World) said that neither France nor the EU were informed of the pact. The current crisis seems to be the culmination of five years of worrying post-Brexit spats and insults between the two cross-Channel allies, but the history of the Franco-British “special relationship” has never been problem-free.
The mutual dislike of the Brits and the French has much to do with their long history of conflict; the two regions were intermittently at war for almost a millennium until the signing of the Entente Cordiale in April 1904. The Entente Cordiale was partly a reaction to the perceived threat of Germanic alliances following on from the unification of Germany, but it was also the consequence of a cultural rapprochement between France and Great Britain that had been occurring since the late nineteenth century. It was in this era that Brits began to celebrate French wine and food through Francophile societies, and that the French started playing rugby, joining, in 1910, England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland in the competition that would become the Six Nations.
Most importantly, however, the Entente Cordiale was about empire: the two powers sought to ensure one anothers’ collaboration as they expanded their civilisations across the globe. The first and most important article of the agreement dictated that Great Britain would help France control Morocco if France agreed to step aside and let Britain take Egypt. It was, therefore, their imperial goals in North Africa and their strategic aims in Europe that brought the two countries together during the twentieth century, though the union has frequently been less harmonious than the political cartoon below would suggest.
Postcard of the Entente Cordiale from 1904.
The French have often been wary of Britain’s own “special relationship” with the United States and have long referred to both Brits and Americans as les Anglo-Saxons. This conceptualisation of Britain and America as a historical entity reflects a French anxiety about exclusion from potential alliances that transcend the European space. Indeed, it is often when the United States becomes involved that the cracks begin to appear. Such was the case in 1963 when the French President, Charles de Gaulle, blocked Britain’s request to join the European Economic Community, partly out of suspicion of Anglo-American ties. Similarly, in 2003, it was Tony Blair’s readiness to follow the Americans into war in Iraq that riled the French and provoked tensions in the Franco-British alliance.
For the French, AUKUS really smarts. France is a country steeped in military history and as Hugh Schofield explained on the BBC podcast, ‘From Our Own Correspondent’, the French revolutionary past and its “self-conception as a beacon for human rights” makes France a particularly pro-military country in which citizens of “whatever political stripe celebrate their military past”. Consequently, they are also particularly “prickly” about military failures. This sensitivity reared its head rather humorously in 1998, before the renovation of St Pancras International, when a French politician wrote to Tony Blair asking that Waterloo station be renamed, as it was “upsetting” for French citizens to hop off the Eurostar — the mascot of 21st-century Franco-British metropolitan connectivity — to a reminder of their defeat at the hands of the British 183 years earlier.
It’s hardly surprising therefore that the French took swift diplomatic actions to demonstrate their indignation in the wake of the AUKUS revelation, cancelling a gala in Washington that was to celebrate 240 years of Franco-American cooperation and recalling their Australian and American ambassadors.
There is more than just France’s pride at stake here however. AUKUS has been described by one anonymous commentator (quoted by Hugh Schofield) as “one of those moments in history where people suddenly notice how the tectonic plates of geopolitics have shifted. Normally the changes are too slow to see, but then there comes an event that reveals all.” The deal actualises British, American and Australian commitments to countering Chinese hegemony in the Indo-Pacific; demonstrating the Anglo-centric orientation of Johnson’s vision of “Global Britain”.
For France, AUKUS has revealed a worrying reality. Macron has been left without the funds, the status and the assurance of inclusion that the Franco-Australian arms deal should have promised. By finally reifying French anxieties about an “Anglo-Saxon” sphere of influence, the deal poses serious questions for the former imperial power about her place in the world, particularly in the context of what has been hailed as a “new cold war” in East Asia.
These implications are not lost on the French, nor on the new presidential candidates hoping to win their votes in April 2022. Two French presidential candidates, Xavier Bertrand and Fabien Roussel, have called for France to remove its support from NATO, as in 1966, in response to the political and military humiliation. Bertrand went on to suggest that if the US does not value the French as an ally then France should look elsewhere: “rien n’interdit d’avoir des discussions avec la Chine, avec l’Inde” (“there is no reason not to have discussions with China, with India”) he stated, and urged a renewed “dialogue politique de haut niveau avec le président Poutine”(“high-level political dialogue with President Putin”).
This political tokenisation of AUKUS and the threat of a revisionist French position in the world seems concerning, however a radical shift of geopolitical orientation is unlikely and Macron himself, though insulted, has not suggested opening talks with China, India or Russia in response. He too knows the importance of countering China in the Indo-Pacific and knows that AUKUS will benefit Europe as a whole.
Nevertheless, the AUKUS powers will not benefit from excluding France in the long term and to this end, Boris Johnson’s blasé dismissal of French accusations of betrayal is a concern. Speaking outside the Houses of Parliament, Johnson glibly told the French to “prenez un grip about all this and donnez-moi un break because this is fundamentally a great step forward for global security”. This response is distinctly un-cordial, un-funny and most importantly, unwise. Full of what Hugh Schofield has dubbed “post-Brexit swagger”, Johnson has forgotten that not only does France need its allies, we too, need the French on side.
France is one of the highest contributors to NATO, coming in only behind the US and the UK; furthermore, France is the only one of the three powers with an actual presence in the Indo-Pacific via its départements d’outre mer, in which 1.5 million French citizens reside and where 8000 French soldiers are already stationed. In Europe as well, the recent fuel and food shortages in the United Kingdom have shown that Johnson is in no position to be burning bridges with his European neighbours.
Ultimately, a permanent rift between France and its Anglophone allies would only be of benefit to their common enemies. Though the peak of the storm has passed for the Franco-American alliance and French and American diplomatic counterparts have now re-made contact in New York, little has been done to mend bridges across the Channel. Luckily, there is time to make amends: as Tom Tugendhat MP has clarified, AUKUS will be an ongoing project in which other allies will be included in the future. Speaking in the House of Commons, he urged the government to “help the French climb down” from their anger by offering to include them in the alliance moving forward, because “we do need France’s contribution”.
Boris Johnson would do well to heed his advice. The threat that Chinese power poses to people living in East Asia and the Pacific, as well as around the world, requires a united response: France and the United Kingdom would do well to rise above their historically troubled friendship and work together as partners to tackle this threat.
