Anglo-French affairs
It should have been a punch-up. On both sides of the channel the papers were stuffed with accounts of the Blair-Chirac row. A Franco-British summit had just been postponed. Even the Eurostar had broken down. Against this unpromising background, top officials from Britain and France assembled in the palatial splendour of the British embassy in Paris for a seminar on Franco-British relations, sponsored by the Centre for European Reform under its estimable leader, Charles Grant.
Yet anyone expecting broken crockery or shattered champagne flutes was disappointed. Aside from nervous jokes about "le timing" of the meeting, the discussions took place in a spirit of calm and good fellowship that was almost surreal, given the political storm raging outside. So what does one conclude from this? Well, partly that professional diplomats are just that-diplomatic. The people who have to talk to each other every day will keep chatting, regardless of their political masters. But while hysteria about a breakdown in Anglo-French relations is overdone, it is also true that the prospects for constructive co-operation are looking dimmer now than for a while. It is not just the arguments about the CAP and Iraq. It's also the fact that what was meant to be the centrepiece of Anglo-French co-operation-the EU's "rapid reaction force"-has got stuck. The French are fed up with waiting for the Turks to agree to allow the EU force to have access to Nato assets. The Brits won't countenance anything that looks like a break with Nato. Result: the French are trying to cut a deal on defence with Germany.
Who let the dogs out?
For most of the Anglo-French conference, your correspondent remained alert and interested. On occasion, however, I found my mind wandering to the subject of British ambassadors and their dogs. It seems increasingly evident that ambassadors in key European embassies get some sort of dog allowance-perhaps to stress the traditional British love of animals and to encourage a feeling of informality? Nigel Sheinwald, our man at the EU, has a snappy little thing which still seems unreconciled to the idea that embassies tend to have lots of strangers trooping through them. John Holmes, the ambassador in Paris, has two soppy labradors who flop around the place a lot and are allowed to attend formal dinners. No doubt this creates a charmingly homely atmosphere. On the other hand, it can be remarkably difficult to maintain a serious conversation about the relative merits of Nato and the European rapid reaction force, while a labrador is nuzzling your private parts from underneath the table.
That old language problem
Like many Brits who have to spend time in Brussels, Peter Hain is embarrassed by his lack of languages. At a recent conference on European regionalism, Hain twice apologised for being monolingual-and then confided that he is brushing up on his O-level German with weekly lessons at the foreign office. This revelation was greeted with embarrassed silence. Frankly, most Brits in Brussels are still pretty hopeless at languages by local standards. Reasonable French is pretty standard and anything else is a bonus. (Probably the most accomplished linguist among the journalists is Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, the allegedly little-Englander Daily Telegraph correspondent.) British linguistic limits lead to widespread feelings of inadequacy.
Your correspondent was recently chatting (in English naturally) to Gerassimos Thomas, the commission's spokesman on the euro. During the conversation, Thomas unselfconsciously received phone calls in French, Spanish and Italian-his mother tongue is Greek. Slightly daunted by this, I went for a restorative coffee to the hotel next door. The young woman making my cappuccino spoke in turn to clients in English, German, Dutch and French-and then told me that she was from Norway. And she is serving coffee.
Clash of civilisations
What a perfect time for Valery Giscard d'Estaing-the beloved chairman of the European constitutional convention-to give a little extra impetus to the "clash of civilisations." By announcing that Turkey joining the EU would mean "the end of Europe," Giscard d'Estaing was giving public utterance to something that is routinely said behind closed doors. But his timing could not have been worse: the west is gearing up for a war with Iraq, there are growing fears of an al Qaeda attack in Europe and the Turks have just elected a government with deep Islamist roots. So why did Giscard d'Estaing do it? His defenders say that he takes his responsibility as grandfather of the new Europe seriously and felt duty-bound to state the bleeding obvious, before the EU gets itself into a negotiation with the Turks from which it cannot retreat.
Conspiracy theorists may also care to take a glance at recent editions of Le Monde. A few days before the paper published Giscard d'Estaing's thoughts, it ran an interview with Hubert Vedrine, France's foreign minister under Lionel Jospin, who said similar things about Turkey's "un-Europeanness." Then a day later there was a long article on efforts to get some sort of commitment to Christian values inserted into the constitution Giscard d'Estaing is drafting, complete with a photo of the great man embracing the Pope. His next meeting with the Turkish delegates to the constitutional convention should be interesting.
