Rambo in the Elysée

Der Spiegel" publie une revue de presse allemande intitulée "Rambo à l'Elysée".


THE WORLD FROM BERLIN
'Rambo in the Elysée'
French President Nicolas Sarkozy made his first major foreign policy speech Monday, in which he set forth his thoughts on the EU's growing membership and its changing role in world affairs. German commentators take a look.


AP
French President Nicolas Sarkozy makes a foreign policy address at the Elysée Palace in Paris Monday. Some Germans question whether he is the right person to be shaping the debate on EU membership and goals.
Delivering his first major foreign policy speech on Monday, French President Nicolas Sarkozy repeated his opposition to Turkey's joining the European Union, but said that accession talks with Ankara should go ahead. At the same time, he suggested that the EU should convene a committee of 10 "wise men" to think about how the union should be composed in 2020.


In the speech, he also called on the European Union to adopt a more unified and bolder security strategy. He suggested that he might support Germany's bid to be secure a seat on the United Nations Security Council. He also chided Russia for using a "certain brutality" in its political use of energy supplies, and he urged the international community to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear arms.

Sarkozy will have a greater opportunity to voice his opinions about the EU next year when France assumes the six-month rotating EU presidency.

In their responses, German editorials generally pointed out that France's vision for itself in the EU might be larger than the role appropriate for a mid-sized power. A number also criticized Sarkozy's style as a bit strident and suggested that he still had a few things to learn about international diplomacy.

In an editorial entitled "Rambo in the Elysée," the business daily Handelsblatt writes:

"The more poorly he speaks about certain things, the more seriously he takes himself. The speech that the head of state formulated yesterday was simply a manifold claim for French leadership, both in Europe and across the globe. The EU should formulate a security strategy under French leadership and one that will also reform NATO. Under Sarkozy's personal leadership, the UN Security Council should find solutions in September for the crisis areas of Africa."

"But despite this show of omnipresence, Sarkozy has also learnt some lessons. He has had to accept, against his will, that the accession talks with Turkey are going to go ahead. The troublesome reality of France's mid-sized power when it comes to foreign policy will catch up with this president, too."

The conservative daily Die Welt writes:

"The aim is clear: With the help of a strong EU, which will be led decisively by France, Paris wants to assert itself as a player on the global stage. One can interpret his attempt to extend the European Union toward Africa as an answer to Germany's increased influence following its reunification and EU expansion. The desire to secure a place for Germany on the Security Council belongs to the realm of rhetoric. It will stir the Germans up, but in the end it won't lead to anything."

"In Paris, nothing has changed -- or almost nothing. In one area Sarkozy is making some adjustments: He is working hard to improve France's relationship with the US, which was so strained under Chirac. If his plan works out, he will benefit the entire West."

The left-leaning Tageszeitung writes:

"Sarkozy's verbal support for a permanent seat for Germany on the UN Security Council rings hollow and will at best provoke a pained smile in Berlin."

"Sarkozy demonstrated a few weeks ago just how lacking in credibility his demand for a 'strong Europe' in terms of foreign policy is. When it came to the freeing of the Bulgarian nurses from Libyan incarceration, Sarkozy was merely following French economic interests."

Citation :

A number also criticized Sarkozy's style as a bit strident and suggested that he still had a few things to learn about international diplomacy.

Understatement of the year

In an editorial entitled "Rambo in the Elysée," the business daily Handelsblatt writes:
[color:5eb1=red:5eb1]

Citation :

"The more poorly he speaks about certain things, the more seriously he takes himself.

that's journalism (unfortunately we need to go get it abroad)

C'est pas gentil pour Stallone, de comparer Sarko à Rambo !

Chirac was the death of Europe, and Sarkozy will be the death of France-Germany couple.

From International Herald Tribune :

Kouchner, French foreign minister, draws antiwar protesters in Washington

For anyone still doubting the striking turnabout in U.S.-French relations, it was enough to see the reception Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner got during a speech here before his meetings Friday with top Bush cabinet officials.
Kouchner, who made news this week by warning that a failure to resolve mounting tensions with Iran could mean war, had barely begun speaking Thursday in a crowded hotel ballroom when several antiwar protesters jumped up and unfurled pink banners that read: "Bush + Kouchner = Warmongers!" One woman tried to climb onto the stage.
Guards escorted the protesters away as they shouted, "No war with Iran! No war with Iran!"
More than one jaw dropped in the dark-suited crowd of about 400. Kouchner is a Socialist who joined the rightist government of President Nicolas Sarkozy and is also a founder of the Nobel Prize-winning humanitarian group Médecins sans Frontières.
Kouchner, however, quickly took command. "But they are right," he told the crowd. As the chants continued from beyond the closed doors, he offered an undiplomatic, "But I agree, stupid!" drawing laughter. He directed the guards to let the protesters return.
The energetic 67-year-old minister then spent much of his speech - as he had spent much of the week - explaining what he meant last Sunday when he told a radio interviewer, referring to the crisis over Iran's uranium-enrichment work, "It is necessary to prepare for the worst," and "the worst, it's war."
On Thursday, as the surprised members of the antiwar group Code Pink filed back into the room, Kouchner said, "I'm not in favor of war with Iran, I want to prevent the war - so they were right!"
His comments, at an event sponsored by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, came a day before Kouchner sat down with Stephen Hadley, the national security adviser to President George W. Bush, and later with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to discuss Iran, Iraq and broader Middle East issues.
Underscoring the changed U.S.-French dynamic, Bush warned Friday that the free world was "not going to tolerate" a nuclear-armed Iran. In Paris, Sarkozy said he favored stronger UN sanctions, which were discussed Friday at multi-nation talks in Washington.
Of all the world's problems, Kouchner said Thursday, Iran posed "the crisis the most pregnant with threats."
"Without exaggeration," he said to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, "I would say that our responses to this situation today will shape the world in which we live tomorrow."
A nuclear-armed Iran, he said, was "unacceptable." And repeated good-faith efforts by the West to engage with Tehran, he said, had been rebuffed.
"To those who say that we should handle Iran with kid gloves since it could destabilize the region, I say this: Look at its adventurism today and imagine what it would be like if Tehran thought itself one day protected by a nuclear umbrella."
The United States, Russia, China and their European partners need to pursue dialogue with Iran, "while keeping our heads cool, as far as we can go," Kouchner said in his speech. But "dialogue without sanctions is unfortunately tantamount to weakness."
He called for "robust sanctions in the United Nations Security Council," adding, "we will do everything in our power to avoid the dreadful alternative laid out by President Sarkozy: the Iranian bomb or the bombing of Iran."
While Kouchner's line on Iran was bound to be welcomed in Washington, the minister staked out differences with the Bush administration.
He said that "the shock wave from the Iraq crisis is strong and probably lasting," affecting Middle East power balances, the U.S. and Western images in the world, and the ability to confront crises.
But while the two sides sometimes followed divergent courses, they should "not sink into belligerent rhetoric."
He also said he hoped a global warming conference convened by Rice in Washington next week would be productive, and he subtly goaded the hosts for stronger action. "A great nation like the United States has a duty not to impede efforts to combat global warming," he said in the speech. "On the contrary, a great nation like the United States has a duty to take the lead in those efforts."
He also said it was urgent to make progress in resolving the Israeli-Palestinian hostilities.
"There is a glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel," he said, but it was "urgent to isolate the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from the whirlpool of regional crises, to cut the bonds that have formed between Tehran and Gaza."

http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/09/21/america/kouchner.php

Pour ceux qui peinent à lire l'anglais, traduction automatique :

Citation :

Pour quelqu'un en doutant toujours du revirement frappant dans les relations américaines-françaises, il était assez pour voir le Ministre des Affaires étrangères de réception Bernard Kouchner reçu pendant un discours ici avant ses réunions vendredi avec le haut les fonctionnaires de cabinet de Bush.
Kouchner, qui a fait des nouvelles cette semaine en avertissant qu'un échec de résoudre les tensions montantes avec l'Iran pourrait signifier la guerre, avait à peine commencé à parler jeudi dans une salle de bal d'hôtel pleine quand plusieurs manifestants d'antiguerre ont bondi et ont déroulé des bannières roses qui lisent : "Bush + Kouchner = Warmongers!" Une femme a essayé de grimper sur le stade.
Les gardes ont accompagné les manifestants loin comme ils n'ont crié, "Aucune guerre avec l'Iran! Aucune guerre avec l'Iran!"
Plus qu'une mâchoire a tombé la foule convenable-sombre d'entre environ 400. Kouchner est un Socialiste qui a rejoint le gouvernement de droite du Président Nicolas Sarkozy et est aussi un fondateur du groupe humanitaire Gagnant prix Nobel Médecins sans Frontières.
Kouchner, pourtant, a vite pris la commande. "Mais ils ont raison," il a dit la foule. Comme les chants ont continué de l'autre côté des portes fermées, il a offert un non diplomatique, "Mais je suis d'accord, idiot!" dessinant un rire. Il a dirigé les gardes pour laisser le retour de manifestants.
Le ministre de 67 ans énergique a alors dépensé une grande partie de son discours - comme il avait dépensé une grande partie de la semaine - expliquant qu'il a voulu dire dimanche dernier où il a dit à un interviewer radio, en faisant allusion à la crise sur le travail d'enrichissement d'uranium de l'Iran, "Il est nécessaire de se préparer au pire," et "le pire, c'est la guerre."
Jeudi, comme les membres surpris du groupe d'antiguerre Déterminent le code Rose classé en arrière dans la pièce, Kouchner a dit, "je ne suis pas en faveur de la guerre avec l'Iran, je veux prévenir la guerre - donc ils avaient raison!"
Ses commentaires, à un événement sponsorisé par le Centre pour les Études Stratégiques et internationales, sont venus un jour avant que Kouchner s'est assis avec Stephen Hadley, le conseiller de sécurité nationale au Président George W. Bush et plus tard avec le Secrétaire d'Etat Condoleezza Rice pour discuter l'Iran, l'Iraq et les plus larges questions du Moyen-Orient.
En soulignant le français américain changé dynamique, Bush a averti vendredi que le monde libre "n'allait pas tolérer" un Iran armé-nucléaire. À Paris, Sarkozy a dit qu'il a préféré de plus fortes sanctions de l'ONU, qui ont été discutées vendredi aux discussions de multination à Washington.
Des problèmes de tout le monde, Kouchner a dit jeudi, l'Iran a posé "la crise le plus significatif avec les menaces."
"Sans exagération," a-t-il dit au Centre pour les Études Stratégiques et internationales, "je dirais que nos réponses à cette situation formeront aujourd'hui le monde dans lequel nous vivons demain."
Un Iran armé-nucléaire, il a dit, était "inacceptable". Et les efforts de bonne foi répétés par l'Ouest pour se livrer avec Téhéran, il a dit, avaient été repoussés.
"À ceux qui disent que nous devrions manipuler l'Iran avec les gants de gamin depuis que il pourrait déstabiliser la région, je le dis : Regardez son aventurisme aujourd'hui et imaginez qu'il ressemblerait si Tehran a pensé lui-même un jour protégé par un parapluie nucléaire."
Les États-Unis, la Russie, la Chine et leurs partenaires européens doivent poursuivre le dialogue avec l'Iran, "en gardant nos têtes fraîches, autant que nous pouvons aller," a dit Kouchner dans son discours. Mais "le dialogue sans sanctions est malheureusement équivalent à la faiblesse."
Il a demandé "les sanctions robustes dans l'Organisation des Nations Unies le Conseil de sécurité," l'ajoutant, "nous ferons tout dans notre pouvoir d'éviter l'alternative épouvantable disposée par le Président Sarkozy : la bombe Iranienne ou le bombardement de l'Iran."
Pendant que la ligne de Kouchner sur l'Iran a dû à coup sûr être accueillie à Washington, le ministre a revendiqué des différences avec l'administration de Bush.
Il a dit que "les remous de la crise d'Iraq sont forts et probablement la durabilité," en affectant des balances de pouvoir du Moyen-Orient, les Etats-Unis et des images Occidentales dans le monde et la capacité d'affronter des crises.
Mais pendant que les deux côtés suivaient quelquefois des cours divergents, ils ne devraient pas "couler dans la rhétorique belliqueuse."
Il a aussi dit qu'il a espéré qu'une conférence de réchauffement du globe convoquée par Rice à Washington la semaine prochaine serait productive et il a imperceptiblement aiguillonné les hôtes pour la plus forte action. "Une grande nation comme les États-Unis a un devoir de ne pas entraver des efforts de combattre le réchauffement du globe," a-t-il dit dans le discours. "Au contraire, une grande nation comme les États-Unis a un devoir de prendre l'initiative dans ces efforts."
Il a aussi dit qu'il était urgent de progresser dans le résolvant des hostilités israéliennes-palestiniennes.
"Il y a une faible lueur de lumière à la fin du tunnel," a-t-il dit, mais il était "urgent d'isoler le conflit israélien-palestinien du tourbillon de crises régionales, couper les obligations qui se sont formées entre Téhéran et Gaza."

France and the European Central Bank

Faulty Sarkonomics
Sep 27th 2007
From The Economist print edition

The French president is wrong to attack the European Central Bank
AFP
IT HAS been a tough few weeks for the world's central bankers. The summer's seizing-up of financial markets posed severe policy dilemmas, and led some critics even to question the value of central-bank independence. It could not be a worse time for a politician to launch broadsides at a central bank. Yet that is what France's President Nicolas Sarkozy has done, triggering a public spat with his compatriot, Jean-Claude Trichet, president of the European Central Bank (ECB).

Mr Sarkozy's gripes take two forms. He has criticised the ECB for injecting liquidity into dried-up financial markets, arguing that this amounts to a bail-out for speculators that does not help business. And he has blamed the bank both for failing to cut interest rates and for negligently letting the euro appreciate. He has even drawn unfavourable comparisons with America's Federal Reserve, claiming that it has rescued a struggling economy by slashing rates, whereas the ECB's refusal to do likewise means simply that “we sink”.


These attacks are not only inconsistent but also wrong-headed. It is always unseemly to criticise an independent central bank in public—imagine the fuss if America's George Bush were to lay into the Fed's Ben Bernanke in similar terms. Worse, Mr Sarkozy is largely awry in his economics. The ECB's monetary-policy record is good, in some ways better than the Fed's. It has provided macroeconomic stability, curbed inflationary pressure and prevented the build-up of the imbalances that bedevil the American economy. And the idea that the ECB is responsible for Europe's sluggish growth is belied by the strong performance of individual countries: not only the small and peripheral, such as Ireland and Finland, but also Spain and, more recently, even Germany.

The truth about weaker euro-area economies, notably France and Italy, stares Mr Sarkozy in the face: their ills are home-grown. He himself admitted this before his presidential campaign, when he called for a “rupture” with France's past. Behind his bluster at the ECB he is pushing supply-side reforms, including a loosening of the gummed-up French labour market. Indeed, his allies suggest that attacks on Mr Trichet may create a useful smokescreen for the more important business of getting on quietly with economic reform.

Unfortunately the smokescreen is not likely to help. French voters backed Mr Sarkozy in May because they accepted the case for reform in theory. But whether they will back it in practice remains far from certain. And by going after the ECB, Mr Sarkozy only encourages a deeply held belief among many French people that their economic problems are created largely by outside forces, such as globalisation, free trade, unfair competition, outsourcing, the European Commission—or the euro and the ECB. Fostering this belief is hardly a way to make people more amenable to painful changes at home.

Nor will it make it easier to practise fiscal austerity. Nettled by Mr Sarkozy's shots, Mr Trichet has fired back at his country's profligacy. France has the biggest public spending, as a share of GDP, in the European Union; in the past decade its public debt has grown faster than that of any other old EU country; it is ignoring the euro area's (weakened) stability-pact ceilings on public borrowing. Ahead of this week's relaxed budget, even Mr Sarkozy's prime minister, François Fillon, confessed that the French state was “bankrupt” (see article).

Don't shoot the messenger
It is clear that the French government has much work to do in further reform and liberalisation, and in sorting out its own finances, before the economy gets back on track. Mr Sarkozy, who made much in his campaign of the need to tell voters the truth, should be spelling this out, rather than taking pot-shots at the ECB. Yet there is one point that Mr Sarkozy's assaults, which uncannily echo those made by his predecessor, Jacques Chirac, on his own national central bank (which was then run by Mr Trichet), has laid bare.

As recent events have shown, central bankers cannot act entirely outside their political context. In most countries suitable channels exist for governments to make their views known, without threatening their central banks' independence. A “euro group” of finance ministers exists, but there is little genuine dialogue between national governments and the ECB. Sadly Mr Sarkozy's attacks only make the ECB more stubborn in refusing to listen to politicians. Yet it could find it helpful to have more exchanges with national governments—provided they are discreet and unpublicised. Making monetary policy by megaphone never leads to good results.

Ce qui est bien, Juju, c'est que tu nous fait même faire un peu d'anglais.

EU polls would be lost, says Nicolas Sarkozy

Referendums on the new European Union Treaty were "dangerous" and would be lost in France, Britain and other countries, Nicolas Sarkozy has admitted.

The French president's confession that governments could not win popular votes on a "simplified treaty" - drawn up to replace the EU constitution rejected by his countrymen two years ago - was made in a closed meeting of senior Euro-MPs.

"France was just ahead of all the other countries in voting no. It would happen in all member states if they have a referendum. There is a cleavage between people and governments," he said.

"A referendum now would bring Europe into danger. There will be no Treaty if we had a referendum in France, which would again be followed by a referendum in the UK."

The comments confirm suspicions that the real reason why Britain, and all other EU countries, apart from Ireland, were refusing to hold popular votes was because governments were afraid they would lose them.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/11/14/wfra114.xml

Mais surtout, surtout arrêtons la discussion là plutôt que réfléchir à ce quon pourrait faire pour réduire le déficit démocratique

Et comment redonner confiance aux populations en l'Europe....il faudrait déjà arrêter de taper dessus à chaque fois que quelque chose ne va pas en France. A force de répéter que tout est de la faute de l'Europe, les gens ne voient plus ce qu'elle a apporté et continue d'apporter !! Vous imaginez la crise des subprimes sans l'euro?

c'est la faute des dirigeants, c'est facile de tout mettre sur le dos de l'Europe, et sarko sait très bien faire ça! d'ialleurs, attendons que ses réformes débiles foirent et on entendra la chanson, c'est la faute à l'Europe, c'est la faute à l'Euro...

Remarque, l'année prochaine la France est à la tête de l'Europe, il va se retrouver coincé !! difficile d'en dire du mal quand on dirige heh

Nadette a écrit:

Remarque, l'année prochaine la France est à la tête de l'Europe, il va se retrouver coincé !! difficile d'en dire du mal quand on dirige heh

Il mettra ça sur le dos de ses prédécesseurs, c'est ce qu'ils font tous.

Ben franchement, c'est pas ce qui s'appelle de la rupture ! je dirais même que c'est un sacré respect de la continuité...