France
Giscard's baby
Andrew Lycett
Walking down the Rue du Faubourg St Honore at night, one is somewhat startled now by the cheerful Christmas tree, replete with flashing lights, atop the Elyse Palace. The French President, not content with his exploits as man of the people and guardian of the liberal society, is trying to outdo the shopkeepers around him. But when he settles down to his btiche de NoM this year, he has reason to fear that his light is fading. The image is tarnished. At home he is not managing to appear the Liberal he would like to be. In foreign affairs his carefully-nurtured policy of cultivating good trade-based relations with Third World countries is not bearing the intended fruit. Last week's Conference on International Economic Cooperation (CIEC) underlined this.
The gathering laboured much over little. Giscard's baby, conceived to win for France the moral leadership in the North-South dialogue, suffered a difficult birth. Its guardians left it unattended while they struggled for position and prestige. In spite of the insistence in the French Press that the Conference was Giscard's inspiration, he had in fact picked up an idea of Sheikh Yamani that there should be a formal meeting of oil producers and consumers. But between the idea and the first preparatory meeting in April, the oil producers forged an alliance of convenience with other developing countries. In April OPEC found that it could not discuss oil except as one of the many raw materials being exploited by the industrialised world at the expense of the poor.
The Americans walked out of that meeting because they were not ready to have a general parley on world economic development. But between April and the second preparatory meeting in October, the French, in consultation with other participants, came up with reasonable proposals to set up four Commissions on energy, raw materials, development and finance.
By October, the United States had also come to realise the mileage to be gained by appearing to accommodate the developing world. (Harold Wilson had already climbed on the bandwagon at the Commonwealth Prime Ministers' Conference in Kingston in May.) So the Americans were prepared to return to Paris in October making fine-sounding noises. Their chief negotiator even maintained that the CIEC could be the most important development since the founding of the UN.
When Henry Kissinger came to Paris last week, he too said the right things about the need for progress in all four Commissions. But the core of his speech was a call to the oil producers to pull their weight with the industrialised countries in righting the economic problems of the world, for oil price rises had "dealt a serious blow to global stability and prosperity". America's principal interest in the Commissions was "to reach a common evaluation between changes in energy prices and the stability and performance of the world's economy."
OPEC Ministers reacted strongly to what they suspected was America's attempt to lead the CIEC back to first base and make it an energy talking shop. Algeria particularly, seeking to win back the intellectual leadership of the Third World, reopened the area of discussion she had embarked upon at the October meeting, the defining of the guidelines of the Commissions. Without greater precision on this, she feared it wpuld be easy for the industrialised countries to turn all Commissions from interrelated development problems to simple discussions on oil. If participants could not agree on this now, she proposed a special meeting of the co-chairmen of the Commissions on January 26 before the mainwork of the Commissions begins on February 11.
Algeria's tactic, however, antagonised both the more conservative OPEC members such as Saudi Arabia, who saw little point in yet another preparatory meeting, and also the non-oil producing developing countries who woke up rather late to the fact that they were getting a raw deal on the Commissions. The latter felt that such a meeting of co-chairmen would prove an excellent opportunity for OPEC members to come to an agreement with the developed countries on how to keep the Commissions an energy talking' shop. They muttered curses about the preponderance of the "OPEC Mafia".
But eventually such a meeting was the only compromise vaguely acceptable to all. The conference has not been Giscard's only setback. Other strands of his proud independent foreign policy have been coming unstuck. His attempts to find a role for France in the Mediterranean, particularly in the Lebanon, have failed. He suffered a severe snub when he visited the Soviet Union in October. Even his feud with Britain over the minimum support price for oil looked pointless, given that by the
Sirno alternative sources of energY
end of the same week the International Energy Agency meeting in Paris had recommended a minimum price of seven dollars a barrel. Britain is certainly not the only loner in Europe, as debates in France on the question of direct elections to a European Parliament have served to show. The ex-Premier Michel Debre, who leads the Gaullist barons, has said that direct elections would run counter to the French constitution, while Alexandre Sanguinetti, the former secretary of the UDR, has claimed that they would lead to the eclipse of the French nation. Even the President's henchman, the Interior Minister Michel Poniatowski, now echoes their cries.
'The nation' becomes increasingly the watchword as the Napoleonic superstructure of the state gets into gear again. No regional autonomy, no democratisation in the armY, the Government now ordains Giscard's Independent Republicans, mindful of legislative elections in the spring of 1978, try hard to drive a wedge between the Socialists and the Communists. According to the latest opinion Polls' the Scoialists are the most popular party in the country and Giscard is almost resigned to . sharing power with them in the Assembly from 1978. But the Socialists, equally conscious Of the Presidential elections in 1981, do not want to get too close to Giscard. As the CIEC battled out its compromise, the Socialist leader Francois Mitterand led a joint march of his party and the Communists to protest against arbitrary arrests in the army. The demonstrators were joined by mernberS of the white collar union, the CGC, angrY at increased social security contributions theyri were having to pay. For a normally Piaci. group of civil servants to make this Inclv` shows the extent of the economic hardship developing at all levels of society. Giscara knows what this means. If the economic stability painfully won in the later years of de Gaulle disappears, his own failures in foreign and domestic affairs will become more seriou: It will no longer be a matter of rigging oP a ne A set of lights. His power will have failed, all"
around.
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