MANUEL CRITIQUE DU PARFAIT EUROPEEN. By Jacques Genereux. 165pp. Paris: Seuil. 12euros. 2 02 080332 1
JE VOUS PARLE D'EUROPE. By Elizabeth Guigou. 320pp. Paris: Seuil. 18euros. 2 02 060044 7
L'HOMME EUROPEEN. By Dominique de Villepin and Jorge Sempru. 239pp. Paris: Plon. 18euros. 2 259 20269 1
As befits a literate nation, the battle of the European Constitution in France was fought out not only on the airwaves, in angry street-corner meetings, and in vast rallies, but also in books and pamphlets whose profusion will have impressed every visitor to a French bookshop over recent weeks. These three works are just a small sample, but they can tell us something about the state of mind of the French intellectual-political class, and also, perhaps, about why France voted Non! and what this resounding negative may signify for the future of European politics.
Elizabeth Guigou's is the most substantial work, and unlike the others it was not written specifically for the constitutional referendum debate. But even this has the feel of a pamphlet. These are works written for the moment. The tone is rhetorical and effusive, for display rather than persuasion. Only Jacques Genereux is analytical, or, more precisely, dialectical. Guigou briefly sketches a history of the European project since the Second World War, and outlines the proposed European Constitution, but none of these authors is interested in factual exposition. These are typical products of a polished class of political intellectuals.
The genre reminds us that France is a country in which elegance and erudition, lightly worn, still have a space in the democratic arena. More ambiguously, they also reveal a country in which intellectually sophisticated elites know what is right for themselves and for everyone else and are fully confident of their right to lead. There is more than a tincture of self-admiration -admiration which the referendum result suggests is not shared by all their compatriots.
This self-absorption is most clearly visible in the way in which each of our authors treats the world outside France. The names of countries are blank screens onto which are projected fantasies of romance, fear or desire. The United States is caricatured. The transformation of Britain since the 1970s is unmentioned, as is the wave of successful social-market reforms in Scandinavia and the Netherlands since the 1980s. Italy, Spain and Poland are confined to walk-on parts. Russia is invoked, but its dilemmas are passed over. Even Germany, the other -manifestly junior -half of the "Franco-German couple" is taken for granted.
It is also striking that although the authors represent different and opposed political views, they are fundamentally of the same mind. This elite is extremely homogeneous. Genereux is a Socialist who campaigned for the Non, Guigou is a Socialist for the Oui, and Dominique de Villepin is a neo-Gaullist partisan for the Oui. But all are agreed that Europe's problem is essentially an institutional one -that the European project is the indispensable political project of the twenty-first century -and that France must have the dominant voice in the working-out of this project.
