Post by Wayne Hall on Sept 16, 2017 10:41:53 GMT -5
French nuclear weapons policy
An extract from How the French Left Learned to Love the Bomb by Diana Johnstone. New Left Review 1/146 July/August 1984
newleftreview.org/I/146/diana-johnstone-how-the-french-left-learned-to-love-the-bomb
In 1977 the Union of the Left fell apart in wrangling over efforts to update the Common Programme for the March 1978 legislative elections. It was in the course of this revision that the two major parties of the French Left rallied to nuclear armament, separately and each in its own distinctive fashion. Some basic motivations may have been the same. Claude Bourdet [3] END Bulletin number 6, autumn 1981. Claude Bourdet is a former French Resistance leader and founder of the Mouvement Pour le Désarmement, la Paix et la Liberté (mdpl). explains that they ‘wanted to secure the support of the non-reactionary part of the officer corps’ and believed that this could be achieved by supporting the French deterrent. Bourdet also argues that both Socialists and Communists had been ‘infected by the Gaullist theory’ of défense du faible au fort (the weak’s defence against the strong)—to wit, that even a very small nuclear force like that of France could inflict enough damage to deter a potential aggressor. This ‘infection’ was able to spread because there was never any debate on strategic issues in French political circles.
As the Left, after twenty years in opposition, faced the prospect of actually exercising government responsibility, it had to come up with a serious defence policy. To do so, it had to borrow from the right. It was the Communist Party leadership that took the plunge first, springing the new line on its unwary membership on 11 May 1977, when the Central Committee unanimously approved a report by Jean Kanapa. Communists, it said, remained fundamentally hostile to nuclear weapons and would continue to strive for their worldwide prohibition. But like it or not, ‘today, as far as France is concerned, nuclear armament is a fact. Today, it represents the only means of real deterrence available . . . to meet a threat of aggression, to neutralize any possible imperialist nuclear blackmail.’
In reality the 1977 Kanapa Report made official a longstanding wishful interpretation of Gaullist nuclear deterrence: that it could be tous azimuts, pointed in all directions, thus assuring French independence from both superpowers. The Kanapa Report actually called for the intermediate-range nuclear missiles stationed on the Albion Plateau in southeastern France, and currently aimed eastward, to be given a ‘multi-directional capacity of 360 degrees’, so that they could be fired at any point on the globe. This modification (never again mentioned) might have given France the capacity to blast away at the mid-Atlantic, or perhaps the Azores; but the bold words served the more immediate purpose of suggesting to the Party rank and file that France might be able to advance toward socialism under its own little nuclear umbrella. Whether Communist leaders really believed this is open to very serious doubt. But it provided an ultra-left sugar coating to the bitter pill of the endorsement of nuclear weapons. More seriously, the Kanapa Report was a defence of classic deterrence against President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing’s Atlantiste deviation—that is, his move back toward integration of French forces and strategy into nato. In his close working partnership with Chancellor Schmidt, Giscard had taken steps toward the participation of French tactical nuclear weapons in the ‘forward battle’ in Germany. Communist leaders had grounds to suspect that the Socialists harboured a similar heretical intention of ‘flexible response’, and their early adoption of the force de frappe constituted an attempt to pull the Socialist Party toward a more Gaullist position. Many rank-and-file Communists, however, oblivious to strategic niceties, welcomed the Kanapa Report as a sign that the pcf was defining its own independent ‘Eurocommunist’ position on defence questions, in defiance of Moscow.
France’s Revolutionary Mission
It took Socialist leaders several months longer to secure their party’s endorsement of the nuclear force. Meanwhile, Mitterrand had suggested that the troublesome question might be settled by popular referendum, while the rival factions in the Socialist Party cast the issue—and drowned it—in terms of their habitual ideological in-fighting. A key role in winning the ps over to nuclear weapons was played by Chevènement’s ceres, which embraced the same left-Gaullist interpretation of nuclear national independence as the pcf, apparently with less scepticism. For the ceres it was unthinkable that the Left could carry out ‘its ambitious project under American nuclear protection’. [4] Pierre-Luc Séguillon, ‘Défendre le Socialisme français’, in ‘La Gauche Nucléaire’, Alternatives Non-violentes, December 1982. Chevènement’s group at the time was championing the ‘ambitious project’ of a ‘rupture with the capitalist system’, and it seemed evident that the only way to succeed with such audacity—which would surely be fought by powerful American and German interests—was to be ‘sanctuarized’ by a weapons system assumed to have the last word. Such debate as there was in the ps tended to be reduced to confrontation between the nationalist left around Chevènement and the pro-American conservative wing led by Robert Pontillon, who still put his faith in the American nuclear umbrella.
However, the ceres support for nuclear weapons was scrupulously selective. Chevènement opposed development of the neutron bomb, because it was a tactical weapon that could draw France into America’s nato strategy of ‘flexible response’ and thereby weaken the strategic deterrent. By this time, the anti-nuclear movements of the sixties seemed to have vanished almost without a trace. In the mid-seventies, on the margins of the ps and around the small Unified Socialist Party (psu), a new critique of nuclear weapons was beginning to focus on the undemocratic social model that they implied and indeed imposed. This critique appealed to the social value system expressed by the term autogestion, or self-management, at that time the rallying cry of the left intelligentsia. In May 1977, a number of prominent left intellectuals [5] At least one of them, André Gorz (Michel Bosquet), has since changed his mind. Others included Simone de Beauvoir, General Jacques de Bollardière, Claude Bourdet, René Dumont, Alain Joxe, Henri Laborit, Brice Lalonde, Alexandre Minkowski, Théodore Monod, Jean-Paul Sartre, and the farmers of Larzac. addressed a series of questions on nuclear defence to the Socialist and Communist parties, observing that ‘the atomic weapon is not socializable’, that heavy weapon technologies ‘by their concentration of power, rigid functioning and unity of command, facilitate the domination of an “elite” over the “mass” and of the state apparatus over society, but exclude democracy, autogestion and socialism.’ The intellectuals warned that ‘nuclearization of society is a means of strengthening the most authoritarian forms of power.’
Christian Mellon has noted the striking and almost total absence, in the French nuclear debate, ‘of two types of argument which are used massively by the new European movements: fear and ethics.’ It is a significant commentary on the French political mood that appeals to emotion or ethical considerations are generally eschewed on the left as intellectually feeble, dishonest or, in any case, ineffective. In practice, however, the purely political appeal to democratic values has aroused very little popular response.
At the end of the 1977–78 policy debate in the ps, the anti-nuclear minority accepted a compromise calling for the ‘maintenance’ of the third leg of the nuclear strategic force, nuclear submarines, during a transition period in which the government would search for an alternative form of defence. As a gesture toward disarmament, the other two legs of the nuclear triad, the land-based missiles on the Albion Plateau and the Mirage-4 nuclear strategic bombers, could be sacrificed. These sacrifices were forgotten in the party’s new programme, the ‘Socialist Project’ written by Jean-Pierre Chevènement and published in 1980. [6] Projet Socialiste, Club Socialiste du Livre, 1980. Strongly marked by the ideology of its author, the Project laid out policy guidelines based on a view of France as a potential ‘hinge between North and South’, ideally situated to approach a ‘transition toward socialism in the heart of the developed world’ and a ‘rupture with the international capitalist order’. To this end, France would have to promote ‘independence from the two superpowers’ and ‘disengagement from blocs’. All this seemed a far cry from the Atlantisme of the old Socialist party, the sfio. The Project argued that the traditional defence orientation, directed solely against a threat from the Eastern bloc, had to be broadened out, since ‘the logic of blocs’ bore in itself ‘infinitely greater threats’. The salt negotiations had created two ‘sanctuaries’, American and Soviet territory, which left Europe as potential battleground between the two. nato risked being reduced to a ‘satellite European sub-system’ of the American defence system. Thus France must refuse to be dragged back into nato’s integrated operational command, as Giscard seemed to be doing by agreeing to take part in the ‘forward battle’. France would maintain its obligations to the Atlantic Alliance, but must at the same time retain fully autonomous control of its deterrent force. In the Socialist Project, the French nuclear force was no longer tolerated as a fait accompli, it was presented as crucially important to Europe. ‘Because it is in a position to spoil the prospects of a battle in Europe, the French deterrent is henceforth a factor of stability for the whole continent. It constitutes a key element in negotiating a collective security agreement in Europe.’
The Socialist Project laid out the verbal compromise between Mitterrand’s favourite old-fashioned concept of ‘balance’ and ceres’s radical-sounding rejection of ‘blocs’ which was to become a standard feature of French Socialist defence rhetoric. To allow European security to depend on a permanent balance between the two superpowers ‘would mean resigning oneself to maintenance of the political and social status quo,’ the Project noted, adding that it was impossible to ‘endorse the maintenance of existing military blocs without undermining in advance the very possibility of an original socialist experience in France.’ On the other hand, no autonomous European defence could be envisaged if there was not even the prospect of a common European political authority ‘capable of exercising deterrence’. The only ‘practicable’ course was thus to keep the ‘independent French deterrent force, an element of collective security conceived on the European scale’. It was no longer to be scrapped (as the Communists had wanted in 1972), nor merely ‘kept as is’, as the Left had decided in 1977, while waiting for disarmament. The task now was to improve it. Its ‘modernization’ would not cost as much as people thought, since deterrence ‘du faible au fort’, of the strong by the weak, does not require the huge arsenals of the superpowers. Besides, the Project said optimistically, ‘a modernized French deterrent would see its effectiveness multiplied by the present balance between the two superpowers, neither of which can allow the part of Europe it dominates to fall into the other’s sphere.’ An implicit belief in France’s unique revolutionary role in world history is a crucial, if unavowed, factor in the political culture of the French Left. It helped condition French socialists to accept nuclear nationalism as the necessary defence of world revolution and progress.
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An extract from How the French Left Learned to Love the Bomb by Diana Johnstone. New Left Review 1/146 July/August 1984
newleftreview.org/I/146/diana-johnstone-how-the-french-left-learned-to-love-the-bomb
In 1977 the Union of the Left fell apart in wrangling over efforts to update the Common Programme for the March 1978 legislative elections. It was in the course of this revision that the two major parties of the French Left rallied to nuclear armament, separately and each in its own distinctive fashion. Some basic motivations may have been the same. Claude Bourdet [3] END Bulletin number 6, autumn 1981. Claude Bourdet is a former French Resistance leader and founder of the Mouvement Pour le Désarmement, la Paix et la Liberté (mdpl). explains that they ‘wanted to secure the support of the non-reactionary part of the officer corps’ and believed that this could be achieved by supporting the French deterrent. Bourdet also argues that both Socialists and Communists had been ‘infected by the Gaullist theory’ of défense du faible au fort (the weak’s defence against the strong)—to wit, that even a very small nuclear force like that of France could inflict enough damage to deter a potential aggressor. This ‘infection’ was able to spread because there was never any debate on strategic issues in French political circles.
As the Left, after twenty years in opposition, faced the prospect of actually exercising government responsibility, it had to come up with a serious defence policy. To do so, it had to borrow from the right. It was the Communist Party leadership that took the plunge first, springing the new line on its unwary membership on 11 May 1977, when the Central Committee unanimously approved a report by Jean Kanapa. Communists, it said, remained fundamentally hostile to nuclear weapons and would continue to strive for their worldwide prohibition. But like it or not, ‘today, as far as France is concerned, nuclear armament is a fact. Today, it represents the only means of real deterrence available . . . to meet a threat of aggression, to neutralize any possible imperialist nuclear blackmail.’
In reality the 1977 Kanapa Report made official a longstanding wishful interpretation of Gaullist nuclear deterrence: that it could be tous azimuts, pointed in all directions, thus assuring French independence from both superpowers. The Kanapa Report actually called for the intermediate-range nuclear missiles stationed on the Albion Plateau in southeastern France, and currently aimed eastward, to be given a ‘multi-directional capacity of 360 degrees’, so that they could be fired at any point on the globe. This modification (never again mentioned) might have given France the capacity to blast away at the mid-Atlantic, or perhaps the Azores; but the bold words served the more immediate purpose of suggesting to the Party rank and file that France might be able to advance toward socialism under its own little nuclear umbrella. Whether Communist leaders really believed this is open to very serious doubt. But it provided an ultra-left sugar coating to the bitter pill of the endorsement of nuclear weapons. More seriously, the Kanapa Report was a defence of classic deterrence against President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing’s Atlantiste deviation—that is, his move back toward integration of French forces and strategy into nato. In his close working partnership with Chancellor Schmidt, Giscard had taken steps toward the participation of French tactical nuclear weapons in the ‘forward battle’ in Germany. Communist leaders had grounds to suspect that the Socialists harboured a similar heretical intention of ‘flexible response’, and their early adoption of the force de frappe constituted an attempt to pull the Socialist Party toward a more Gaullist position. Many rank-and-file Communists, however, oblivious to strategic niceties, welcomed the Kanapa Report as a sign that the pcf was defining its own independent ‘Eurocommunist’ position on defence questions, in defiance of Moscow.
France’s Revolutionary Mission
It took Socialist leaders several months longer to secure their party’s endorsement of the nuclear force. Meanwhile, Mitterrand had suggested that the troublesome question might be settled by popular referendum, while the rival factions in the Socialist Party cast the issue—and drowned it—in terms of their habitual ideological in-fighting. A key role in winning the ps over to nuclear weapons was played by Chevènement’s ceres, which embraced the same left-Gaullist interpretation of nuclear national independence as the pcf, apparently with less scepticism. For the ceres it was unthinkable that the Left could carry out ‘its ambitious project under American nuclear protection’. [4] Pierre-Luc Séguillon, ‘Défendre le Socialisme français’, in ‘La Gauche Nucléaire’, Alternatives Non-violentes, December 1982. Chevènement’s group at the time was championing the ‘ambitious project’ of a ‘rupture with the capitalist system’, and it seemed evident that the only way to succeed with such audacity—which would surely be fought by powerful American and German interests—was to be ‘sanctuarized’ by a weapons system assumed to have the last word. Such debate as there was in the ps tended to be reduced to confrontation between the nationalist left around Chevènement and the pro-American conservative wing led by Robert Pontillon, who still put his faith in the American nuclear umbrella.
However, the ceres support for nuclear weapons was scrupulously selective. Chevènement opposed development of the neutron bomb, because it was a tactical weapon that could draw France into America’s nato strategy of ‘flexible response’ and thereby weaken the strategic deterrent. By this time, the anti-nuclear movements of the sixties seemed to have vanished almost without a trace. In the mid-seventies, on the margins of the ps and around the small Unified Socialist Party (psu), a new critique of nuclear weapons was beginning to focus on the undemocratic social model that they implied and indeed imposed. This critique appealed to the social value system expressed by the term autogestion, or self-management, at that time the rallying cry of the left intelligentsia. In May 1977, a number of prominent left intellectuals [5] At least one of them, André Gorz (Michel Bosquet), has since changed his mind. Others included Simone de Beauvoir, General Jacques de Bollardière, Claude Bourdet, René Dumont, Alain Joxe, Henri Laborit, Brice Lalonde, Alexandre Minkowski, Théodore Monod, Jean-Paul Sartre, and the farmers of Larzac. addressed a series of questions on nuclear defence to the Socialist and Communist parties, observing that ‘the atomic weapon is not socializable’, that heavy weapon technologies ‘by their concentration of power, rigid functioning and unity of command, facilitate the domination of an “elite” over the “mass” and of the state apparatus over society, but exclude democracy, autogestion and socialism.’ The intellectuals warned that ‘nuclearization of society is a means of strengthening the most authoritarian forms of power.’
Christian Mellon has noted the striking and almost total absence, in the French nuclear debate, ‘of two types of argument which are used massively by the new European movements: fear and ethics.’ It is a significant commentary on the French political mood that appeals to emotion or ethical considerations are generally eschewed on the left as intellectually feeble, dishonest or, in any case, ineffective. In practice, however, the purely political appeal to democratic values has aroused very little popular response.
At the end of the 1977–78 policy debate in the ps, the anti-nuclear minority accepted a compromise calling for the ‘maintenance’ of the third leg of the nuclear strategic force, nuclear submarines, during a transition period in which the government would search for an alternative form of defence. As a gesture toward disarmament, the other two legs of the nuclear triad, the land-based missiles on the Albion Plateau and the Mirage-4 nuclear strategic bombers, could be sacrificed. These sacrifices were forgotten in the party’s new programme, the ‘Socialist Project’ written by Jean-Pierre Chevènement and published in 1980. [6] Projet Socialiste, Club Socialiste du Livre, 1980. Strongly marked by the ideology of its author, the Project laid out policy guidelines based on a view of France as a potential ‘hinge between North and South’, ideally situated to approach a ‘transition toward socialism in the heart of the developed world’ and a ‘rupture with the international capitalist order’. To this end, France would have to promote ‘independence from the two superpowers’ and ‘disengagement from blocs’. All this seemed a far cry from the Atlantisme of the old Socialist party, the sfio. The Project argued that the traditional defence orientation, directed solely against a threat from the Eastern bloc, had to be broadened out, since ‘the logic of blocs’ bore in itself ‘infinitely greater threats’. The salt negotiations had created two ‘sanctuaries’, American and Soviet territory, which left Europe as potential battleground between the two. nato risked being reduced to a ‘satellite European sub-system’ of the American defence system. Thus France must refuse to be dragged back into nato’s integrated operational command, as Giscard seemed to be doing by agreeing to take part in the ‘forward battle’. France would maintain its obligations to the Atlantic Alliance, but must at the same time retain fully autonomous control of its deterrent force. In the Socialist Project, the French nuclear force was no longer tolerated as a fait accompli, it was presented as crucially important to Europe. ‘Because it is in a position to spoil the prospects of a battle in Europe, the French deterrent is henceforth a factor of stability for the whole continent. It constitutes a key element in negotiating a collective security agreement in Europe.’
The Socialist Project laid out the verbal compromise between Mitterrand’s favourite old-fashioned concept of ‘balance’ and ceres’s radical-sounding rejection of ‘blocs’ which was to become a standard feature of French Socialist defence rhetoric. To allow European security to depend on a permanent balance between the two superpowers ‘would mean resigning oneself to maintenance of the political and social status quo,’ the Project noted, adding that it was impossible to ‘endorse the maintenance of existing military blocs without undermining in advance the very possibility of an original socialist experience in France.’ On the other hand, no autonomous European defence could be envisaged if there was not even the prospect of a common European political authority ‘capable of exercising deterrence’. The only ‘practicable’ course was thus to keep the ‘independent French deterrent force, an element of collective security conceived on the European scale’. It was no longer to be scrapped (as the Communists had wanted in 1972), nor merely ‘kept as is’, as the Left had decided in 1977, while waiting for disarmament. The task now was to improve it. Its ‘modernization’ would not cost as much as people thought, since deterrence ‘du faible au fort’, of the strong by the weak, does not require the huge arsenals of the superpowers. Besides, the Project said optimistically, ‘a modernized French deterrent would see its effectiveness multiplied by the present balance between the two superpowers, neither of which can allow the part of Europe it dominates to fall into the other’s sphere.’ An implicit belief in France’s unique revolutionary role in world history is a crucial, if unavowed, factor in the political culture of the French Left. It helped condition French socialists to accept nuclear nationalism as the necessary defence of world revolution and progress.
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