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First Among Equals
In the European Union, France calls the shots.
Her farmers consume the lion's share of Common Agricultural Policy funds. She continues to flout the rules of the Stability Pact, the cornerstone of Eurozone economic policy. French businesses enjoy staggering levels of protection from their government. Germany, with the Eurozone's biggest economy, continues to bewilder outsiders by prostrating itself before France.
France's response to criticism? France is "too important" to be tied to rules governing Europe's other countries.
It seems that the EU's policy makers agree: Attempts by officials to bring France to book more often than not end with Europe taking an altogether meeker line on its home-grown rogue state.
So why, then, are French Eurosceptics beginning to stir?
An interesting article in the Independent points to worries about the Constitution. Although the document was drafted by a team led by a Frenchman - of course - some on France's centre right are beginning to show signs that it may endanger French sovereignty and shift the balance of power slightly towards Eastern Europe.
As EURSOC One pointed out yesterday, France's ruling class is overwhelmingly behind the European enterprise.
After all, they created it: Like France, the EU is statist, interventionist, bureaucratic and elitist. Like France, its political dynamic is designed to transfer power from the individual to the state.
But why would a country like France, so protective of its national identity, choose to dilute itself in the EU? The simple answer is that France sees the EU not as a gathering of powers but as a magnifying glass for French power. France would never enter into a deal that compromised its sovereignty - instead, it took a lead in the EU's creation, making certain that French institutions and structures would govern the continent. Germany, desperate for international respectability after the last war, was happy to sign up. Smaller countries had little choice.
Since its inception, France has written Europe's laws and ignored those which didn't suit it. The EU, cowed by the power wielded by France and its representatives throughout the Union, fails to challenge her.
This week, France bailed out troubled engineering giant Alstom. The EU, already despairing of France's scornful rejection of its laws governing state ownership and influence on business, reacted by threatening to ban the bailout.
The French responded with a deal, agreed by the EU's competition commission, that saw even more government money go to Alstom, albeit in a different format.
Competition commissioner Mario Monti claims that he will revise the terms of the deal in six months. Don't hold your breath - the EU is still waiting for France to take back 480 million Euros "loaned" to a similarly troubled computer manufacturer in 2001.
This plays well with the French establishment. An issue of Le Monde this week showed a cartoon of Chirac walking away with the Air France / KLM and Alstom deals under his arm, as Uncle Sam despairs of how he is thwarted day and night by his French rival.
Quite why the US should be so upset about these deals is not clear: If anything they hurt the EU's dream of a single market.
Which is where France's Eurosceptics come in. On the far right, Le Pen and his supporters in the Front Nationale are opposed to the EU. Likewise, the FN's counterparts on the far left fear that the EU is an American-influenced ploy to bring the free market to socialist France.
This is all to be expected. But the EU's hope of bringing France into line is beginning to worry the union's traditional supporters in the centre.
France's Socialist Party - effectively leaderless and lacking direction since their historic election defeat last year - is divided. On one hand, they see the EU as the ultimate incarnation of their statist policy. On the other, the PS is desperate to regain votes lost to the far left, and may decide to play up opposition to the constitution to win support.
Some on France's centre right fear that the EU's eastward expansion - taking in Atlanticist states such as Poland - will tilt the balance of power away from France, which opposed enlargement.
France's proposed referendum on the constitution is said to be in danger.
Other observers note that rumblings of discontent from France are merely being talked up in order to put the frighteners on other nations prior to the debate on the constitution this month.
France made the EU in its image for its own aggrandisement. It is unlikely to sign anything that threatens its position. EURSOC believes that the Constitution is France's payback for agreeing to enlargement. Her centre left and right have nothing to fear. For the rest of us, however, it is a different story.
