AMB. BUJON DE L’ESTANG: Oh, it’s a very long history because we actually have been your oldest ally since the very early days of American history. As you certainly know, the French were instrumental during the way of independence. The Marquis de Lafayette, Monsieur de Rochambeau were leading the French troops that fought alongside the American insurgents. And when eventually we won the day after the battle of Yorktown, that was the beginning of an alliance that lives in a very vibrant fashion to this day. So it’s really a long history of friendship and alliance.

AMB. BUJON DE L’ESTANG: This time as ambassador it will be six years next summer. It’s my fourth time around.

AMB. BUJON DE L’ESTANG: Like almost every other European country, we have a very professional foreign service and we have professional ambassadors. Very few political appointees. Ambassadors are selected among the foreign service officers by the government and appointed by the president of the republic, by a decree of the president of the republic.

AMB. BUJON DE L’ESTANG: I think it is about the size of Texas. Maybe a bit smaller.

AMB. BUJON DE L’ESTANG: And home to 62 million.

AMB. BUJON DE L’ESTANG: Well, there must be because you have thousands of companies and small companies –

AMB. BUJON DE L’ESTANG: Oh, they all do business in France. They all do business in France, and either they trade with France or they have invested in France, or they have a French subsidiary. There is a lot of American investment going to France.

AMB. BUJON DE L’ESTANG: Very well, I think. France is one of the main countries that attracts American investment, and it is attracting American investments now, but it has done so for a very, very long time. So I think it’s certainly one of the main destinations of American investment.

AMB. BUJON DE L’ESTANG: Well, an ambassador is formally the representative – the official representative of that country to the United States, so I am the official spokesman for the French government. I maintain contacts with every branch of the American government, the executive and the legislative branch as well. I’m here to advise a number of French people doing business in the United States and American people doing business or having cultural exchanges, or traveling to France. It’s such a diverse job that it is always very difficult to sum it up in one sentence or two.

AMB. BUJON DE L’ESTANG: Well, you should ask the British more than me about this. But it is true that the British have always thought of themselves as being – living on the margins of Europe because they’re an island. And being a sort of bridge between the American continent and the European continent, which is perfectly fine. But they are also, and they belong by their culture and their history into Europe. As continental Europeans we feel that very, very strongly. The British have been staunch allies during the last two world wars. We have had centuries of relations with them. There is a very strong feeling of friendship between France and Britain, and we do feel that they belong in Europe.

So we certainly appreciate that they are a member of the European Union. It is true that in certain policies they have elected to remain on the sidelines, usually for a transition period. History of these last 30 years shows that after sometimes periods of hesitancy they have elected to join in and to be full members of the various policies that we have developed in the European Union. They do not belong for the moment in the European Monetary Union, in the Euro. Maybe they’ll take a fresh look at all of this after their election.

Anyway, they know that as far as we are concerned, they would be most welcome, of course, in the European Monetary Union.

AMB. BUJON DE L’ESTANG: This is my working office in the embassy chancery building. This is where I spend most of my days.

AMB. BUJON DE L’ESTANG: This is in Georgetown on Reservoir Road, opposite the Georgetown University medical school, and the trees that you see are the trees of the compound. It’s very leafy in that area.

AMB. BUJON DE L’ESTANG: A bust of Abraham Lincoln. I also have in the antechamber a bust of Jefferson and a bust of Franklin. But I confess that I feel a particular admiration for Abraham Lincoln, so this is the bust that I put in my office.

AMB. BUJON DE L’ESTANG: I have – well, the list would be long. I have a great interest for the Founding Fathers. I think Jefferson, maybe because he lived in France. Benjamin Franklin. Your first two ambassadors to Paris, really, in that order – Benjamin Franklin first and Jefferson second – are fascinating characters because they are the embodiment, really, of everything that was attractive and interesting in the Age of Enlightenment. They were universal minds. They have shown considerable intellectual curiosity for a great variety of subjects. They were philosophers. They were politicians, and I think they have invented one of the best forms of democracy that we have ever seen work on the surface of the earth.

AMB. BUJON DE L’ESTANG: We have a long list of interesting characters as well. We have characters like our great kings, of course. Louis XIV, for instance, Henry IV back in the 17^th century. Louis XIV, who was the king at the top probably of the power of France in the late 17^th, early 18^th Century. And in the modern world, of course, a number of fascinating characters. One of them who I have the opportunity to approach and work with was the General de Gaulle, who was an extraordinary figure, both in the war and after the war when he was elected president of the republic in 1958.

AMB. BUJON DE L’ESTANG: I was not yet in General de Gaulle’s office when President Kennedy paid his visit to Paris, but I think Kennedy and Mrs. Kennedy fascinated General de Gaulle in a way. They had a sort of triumphant visit to Paris in 1961, if I’m not mistaken. They certainly exerted a great fascination on General de Gaulle. There was a great age difference between the two. Kennedy could have been de Gaulle’s son in terms of age, but I think he was so radiant that he certainly exerted a considerable attraction on French public opinion and on General de Gaulle himself.

AMB. BUJON DE L’ESTANG: There were phases of tension over Vietnam, for instance, although this was the very, very beginning of the American entanglement into the Vietnam War. But it is true that de Gaulle had warned President Kennedy against an American intervention in Vietnam, and he disapproved of that. But there were also phases of great closeness. For instance, we should never forget that when the Cuban missile crisis erupted, General de Gaulle was the first of the allies of the United States who offered full support to them in the confrontation with the Soviet Union at that time. This, I think, is very telling of a constant feature of French-American relations. We may have our differences. We may even have different interests sometimes, but when there is a very serious crisis, when push comes to shove, when we come to a moment of truth, France is always shoulder-to-shoulder with the United States. That was very evident in the case of the Cuban missile crisis. But I think it is just a symbol of the more permanent feature in French-American relations.

AMB. BUJON DE L’ESTANG: I think you could qualify me as a true Parisian. I was born in Paris, I grew up in Paris, I am a Parisian.

AMB. BUJON DE L’ESTANG: No, it’s a name that my family used to wear in the 18^th century, and for reasons of their own, which I can understand, they dropped the second half at the time of the French Revolution. And Bujon de L’Estang became Bujon throughout the 19^th and most of the 20^th Century. It is my grandfather, actually, the father of Andre Bujon, who sort of resurrected the name, and I’ve worn that name, which my father was also wearing, through my life.

AMB. BUJON DE L’ESTANG: Well, I can tell you that this is one of the many trials that are in progress in the world about people having disappeared during the government of Mr. Pinochet in Chile. Some Frenchmen have disappeared and are presumed dead, and families are suing the Pinochet regime for that in France, in the French courts for the moment. Mr. Kissinger was indeed served an invitation to testify in that court trial while he was in Paris.

AMB. BUJON DE L’ESTANG: You want to have my reaction or the reaction of the French to the fact that some business executives are appointed into government positions in general?

AMB. BUJON DE L’ESTANG: I think we don’t have to take a sort of ideological view of this. We know how the American system works. It is true that American business executives are frequently playing very important roles in the administration of the country, which I believe sincerely is a very good thing because they bring a lot of experience of the real world.

But I suppose you are pointing at some cases in which one could argue that there is a conflict of interest of some kind. I have no specific comments on this.

AMB. BUJON DE L’ESTANG: Alcatel is a major corporation that is mostly a telecommunications company. It is the company that evolved from a former company called the Companie General de Electricite, which had a larger scope, and the present chairman and CEO of Alcatel has refocused Alcatel on its core businesses, which all revolve around telecommunications and telecommunications equipment.

AMB. BUJON DE L’ESTANG: I don’t know. I don’t know whether it is effective or not, but I think it is clever, I think it is intelligent. Alcatel is, I think, a very interesting company in itself because it’s really a world class global player. This is a company which has fully gone into globalization. It has sales around the world. It is present in the United States, where it has investors and made very important acquisitions over the last few years. It was recently involved in merger talks with Lucent, as you know. That fell through last week. It is a very active, dynamic and aggressive company, which I think is a very good symbol of the way French business is entering the globalized age.

AMB. BUJON DE L’ESTANG: No. I played absolutely no part in it, although I’m very good friend with the chairman and CEO of Alcatel, Mr. Tchuruk, who himself has had a long American experience because he started his professional career as an executive at Mobil.

AMB. BUJON DE L’ESTANG: Well, I think what happened is actually very bad. I say this all the most – all the more because it happened to us in the past. We had a similar episode. I cannot remember the exact year. I believe it was 1971 or 1972, where exactly the same thing happened to us. We were not elected as members of the committee of human rights of the United Nations for whatever reason.

I don’t know whether this will happen in the future again. I hope it will not. It will certainly be for American diplomacy to do whatever is necessary to cover all the bases there.

What I can say is that what has happened in that vote is I think very, very regrettable. We voted for the United States, of course. We made it public also, although it was a secret ballot. We said publicly we had voted for the United States, and we very much regret that the US were not elected. We think it is a bad blow to the United Nations, and that it is a bad blow for human rights in general. Human rights is something that France and the United States have shared all along their history. I think it is a concept that was invented, I’m tempted to say jointly, by the United States and France. And it is very interesting to see the coincidence in dates between the Declaration of Rights of 1776 in the United States and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen of 1789 in France. The same philosophy, the same value, the same perspective, really, on human rights.

It is also, I think, very interesting that the UN Declaration of Human Rights was conceived and elaborated after World War II jointly by French and Americans. Eleanor Roosevelt on the American side, Rene Cassin, a French professor of law, on the French side. Therefore, I cannot conceive of a Commission of Human Rights at the United Nations without the United States. I hope they will resume their seat as early as possible.

AMB. BUJON DE L’ESTANG: Yes, my wife lives here with me. My children are grown-ups, they have their own lives elsewhere, but they come and see us frequently.

AMB. DE L’ESTANG: Four children.

AMB. BUJON DE L’ESTANG: They range from 36 to 22, and seven grandchildren, I should add.

I’m going to hang up, but I’d appreciate any information that you could give me on that. Thank you.

AMB. BUJON DE L’ESTANG: Well, thank you for asking the question, which I think is particularly relevant in the present context of the energy crisis, and of the intention expressed recently by the US government to try and revive the nuclear option in American energy policy. The project that you mentioned is the Yucca Mountain project, a site for – a retrievable site, as we say in the jargon, meaning that this is a site where spent fuel will be stored and could eventually be retrieved if necessary for other purposes, like reprocessing and the like.

It is slightly different, it is a slightly different option from what we have done in France. Let me, without being too technical, explain why. The United States government decided back in the '70s not to go for the reprocessing of spent fuel because they did not want to enter the plutonium economy. That is a difference with the French policy, in which we made the decision back in the '70s to reprocess the spent fuel coming out from nuclear reactors. Reprocessing is a chemical process in which we separate the uranium which can be re-enriched and re-used in nuclear fuels. Plutonium, which can be also used as fuel in oxide form, and final waste, which has to be vitrified and disposed of in special repositories.

What we have developed in France is reprocessing, vitrification of the final waste, and disposal of that final waste in vitrified form in various sites that we are in the process of selecting. So we have not gone for an interim retrievable storage like Yucca Mountain would be. But what I can tell you is that when we made the decision back in the '70s to develop a nuclear program in France, we enjoyed a considerable support from the French public for all kinds of reasons that may be very idiosyncratic French. The French understood that nuclear energy was a viable proposition, was economical, was safe, and therefore was certainly a way to get more energy independence.

We still enjoy -- although the Greens have prospered now, if I may say so -- we still enjoy considerable support from the French public, and even if there is local opposition sometimes to proposed sites of storage, which are very understandable because everybody is afraid before they get fully informed, of having the storage in their neighborhood. Even if we have sometimes demonstrations and troubles about transportation of spent fuel, which is one of your concerns, the opinion polls show very clearly that there is a considerable support for the nuclear option in France.

The fact that the program works well, that we produce today 80 percent of our electricity through nuclear energy, and that we never have had, thank goodness, any serious incident, any accident with one of our nuclear facilities is in itself, I think, something, an element which should reassure you.

AMB. BUJON DE L’ESTANG: Eighty percent of our electricity comes from nuclear generation.

AMB. BUJON DE L’ESTANG: The other 20 percent comes from hydroelectricity, coal-fired power plants mostly, and some fuel fired power plants, although we are phasing these out.

I’m a farmer here in Oley and I was visiting in the eastern part of France where it’s pretty rural. I’m sorry about this nuclear stuff you’re telling me. I was really going to ask you about the man named [Jose] Bove, who was protesting the McDonald’s. One of my relatives had a wedding in France last year, and I think the name was Bove. I know the name was Bove, but they’re not related to this McDonald’s saboteur. They call me the family eco-terrorist, although I’ve never committed an act of terrorism. But I’m very much concerned with our native landscape and maintaining the diversity of nature.

I’m a cancer survivor as well and I’ve seen these big things of waste, you know, and I used to go get my chemotherapy, I’d walk there to try to keep my strength up, and I see that the hospitals, they package their waste in – you know, it looks like Christmas, but they wrap them in very carefully in cardboard boxes, and it says chemicals, nuclear medical waste on the outside. Somebody’s job, I guess it is, to take that stuff away.

I mean, maybe your nuclear power is all right, 80 percent of your power comes from that, but you do have to store that vitrifying whatever it is somewhere.

AMB. BUJON DE L’ESTANG: Respond on the nuclear waste?

AMB. BUJON DE L’ESTANG: I did not understand exactly what the question was, but I understand the concern about nuclear waste. By the way, what this lady saw was certainly not nuclear waste because it’s never exposed – it’s never exposed in heaps anywhere. It is of course stored underground and very safely. So it is not possible to see in the countryside or anywhere stockpiles of nuclear waste.

No, I think it is very legitimate to be concerned about what we do with nuclear waste because we know that radioactivity keeps alive for centuries and therefore it is only normal that we be most careful vis-à-vis our children, vis-à-vis the public on what we do with nuclear waste. What I was saying is that the high level waste that we store after reprocessing is disposed of in a very specific and careful manner. It is really vitrified, put into glass containers – because glass is the most impermeable material that you can find. It resists water infiltration.

These big cylinders of waste are put into stainless steel canisters. The stainless steel canisters are then put underground into concrete shafts that go very deeply underground, and that are put into very, very stable geological formations like basalt or like clay or like salt domes, which also resist water infiltration.

So my point is really that every precaution is taken for fully isolating this waste and even if it is perfectly understandable, again, that people would feel a resistance to have this in their neighborhood, they should be reassured that the system is certainly extremely safe. So don’t be afraid about nuclear waste taking over the French countryside. I see absolutely nothing of this happening.

AMB. BUJON DE L’ESTANG: Of course you had a very special election last year, as we all know. I don’t know whether you realize how difficult it was for people living outside the United States to completely understand what was going on. It is true that European public opinions, and I can speak for the French public opinion, were baffled by what was happening in the American scene.

We were for one reason, which you should understand very easily. We also have a presidential election in France, but we are not a federal country and the system of the election itself is very different. The French president is elected by direct popular vote, and we have a two-ballot election. In order to get elected on the first ballot, you need to get 50 percent. If no candidate gets 50 percent of the vote of the first ballot, we have two weeks later a second ballot, which is a runoff between the two top candidates. But the person that gets the most votes gets elected.

So it is difficult for the French, for instance, to understand that one candidate could win the popular vote but that another candidate would get elected by the electoral college, which is of course a very important feature of your federalism. So I did indeed spend a lot of time during the election and the 36 days that followed explaining to the French what had been happening and how this was possible through your federal system, and explaining also the legal system, the court system, the role of the Supreme Court, which was very important in your latest election, because all of this is very alien to our own constitutional system and to our own electoral system.

But I think when all was said, and when President George W. Bush emerged as the winner, the French understood very well that the democratic system in the United States had functioned well. The French public admire, I must say – maybe because we as Latins are impatient people. The French people admired the patience and the discipline that the American public demonstrated during these days of trial, and we very well understood that from day one George W. Bush was a full-fledged president, and that he had been the winner in the democratic process, however intricate, that prevails in this country.

AMB. BUJON DE L’ESTANG: We are not opposed to the sanctions on principle. We are opposed to their ineffectiveness. That’s really what I would say in a nutshell. But I have to backtrack a little to answer fully your question. First, I have to remind you that we fought in the Gulf war alongside the United States, and that when the war was over we fully participated in the debates and the votes that the UN Security Council that defined the regime of sanctions. So the sanctions had our full approval when they were instituted.

Now over the years we found that the sanctions were becoming more and more ineffective in the sense that they were causing, creating a great burden and a great suffering for the Iraqi people, while obviously they were not hitting hard Saddam Hussein and his government. We thought that it was not in the interests of the international community, it was not in the interests of the authority of the United Nations that we continue to implement blindly a regime of sanctions which was not working, and which was hitting the wrong targets.

So our difference with the United States over the last maybe two years was not of a substantial nature. It was a tactical difference, really. We were sharing the same goal. I mean by that we were in full agreement with the United States for trying to dismantle the programs of weapons of mass destruction that Iraq had developed. We were trying to prevent a rearmament of Iraq, and we certainly wanted to keep a system working that would assure us of that result.

But tactically we thought that we should modify the system in order to make it more effective. I am very pleased to say that the United States have now, I think, moved in our direction and have taken a fresh look and a new approach at having a system of sanctions that work. We are presently trying to redefine that system of sanctions. We are working together with the United States in the United Nations Security Council. We are working in order to reestablish unanimity among the five permanent members on the system of sanctions on Iraq. We have made very good progress over the last few weeks, and these tactical differences that you mention are now progressively disappearing between us and we are working well together on that subject.

But I’ve always been curious. I’ve followed the pattern of your educational system and have always been intrigued with it. We are having some serious difficulties with education in the United States now, and I wondered if you could tell us a little bit more about how your educational system may have evolved since the 70s. I know during the 70s you had some minor crises in education also.

AMB. BUJON DE L’ESTANG: I think we have very similar problems in France and the United States on education. The main difference is that education in France is a public service and most of the high schools and colleges are government-sponsored. They are really government institutions, although there are also some private schools. But basically we face the same problems in the sense that the way education is now reaching every person in the society has created a sort of demographic revolution that is forming the educational system.

We are trying to raise the level of education of the whole population. We have difficulties defining standards of education that fit everybody, and we are trying to maintain a proper level of education while bringing education to everybody. This is creating all kinds of tensions that are very similar in the French system and the American system.

AMB. BUJON DE L’ESTANG: I think there – I see no contradiction there in the sense that the United States certainly has a very impressive human rights record, and because of its contribution to the development of the concept of human rights in the world, it certainly belongs in the UN Human Rights Commission. That’s what I wanted to say.

Now the issue of the death penalty is something that shocks the Europeans. This is not, I think, something specifically French, but something which you should think of as a European attitude in general. All Western European countries have at one date or another abolished the death penalty. In France it was a vote of the French National Assembly of 1981 that abolished the death penalty. And it is true that the Europeans have great difficulties understanding how a country that has such a magnificent human rights record as the United States could consider constitutional and maintain and use a system that we believe is an archaic system. This is a very strong belief in Europe, that the death penalty is something of the past that is very difficult to defend in a modern system.

We can understand, even if we deplore, that some countries maintain the death penalty because they have a standard of human rights that is less than impeccable, but we are all the more shocked by the death penalty in the United States because the United States is a splendid example of promotion of human rights. It makes it all the more a contradiction in our eyes.

AMB. BUJON DE L’ESTANG: There is a European parliament, as you well know, which is elected by popular vote in all the members of the European Union, and that does control the activity of what you call the bureaucracy. That is to say, the commission.

But I disagree with you on the assertion that the European Union is really run by a bureaucracy. There is, of course, in the European Union a bureaucracy, like there is in any normal nation-state, an administration, if you like. But the European Union is run, really, by the government of the countries that compose the European Union. The example of Prime Minister Jospin’s suggestion that we create or reinforce the umbrella that we have of an economic government is exactly that. The economic government that he talks about is really the representatives from the elected governments of the countries that compose the European Monetary Union.

We are not talking about faceless bureaucrats here. We are talking about national governments’ cabinet ministers that are the representatives of the elected people. So that’s what we are talking about. It is really the heads of government of the 15 countries that compose the European Union, that run the European Union, that hold several summits a year. They do it jointly with what we call the commission, which is indeed appointed bureaucrats, but the government is indeed subject to the democratic control of the voters in the 15 countries that compose the European Union.

We may – we may consider that under certain angles the respective powers of the non-elected bureaucracy and the elected officials could be re-balanced in some ways. We are striving to do that. We are also trying to develop the role of national governments in controlling the legislation that is the legislation of the Union. And the role of the European parliament itself has considerably developed over the last few years.

Don’t forget that the European parliament, for instance, overthrew the latest commission a year ago, which is really a sign of growing democratic control.

AMB. BUJON DE L’ESTANG: I don’t think so, judging by the development of the Internet in France. First, there is no restriction whatsoever. Quite to the contrary. I think the government has been trying to promote the use of computers and the use of the Internet in the education system, for instance. And if you look at the curves on how the Internet is developing in France, you’ll really see an explosion of the Internet in France. People are using it more and more.

Even if in the beginning it is true they were maybe a bit slower than in other European countries to get to the Internet, I don’t think anybody feels particularly threatened by the Internet. It is true that English is the language that is most used in the Internet, but it is not exclusive. A number of sites are created in France every day that are using jointly French and English. It is developing very, very fast. Everybody is using the Internet, and I don’t think people really feel threatened. They understand that it is a new means of communication that is here to stay, and that we had better domesticate it, which is what we are trying to do.

AMB. BUJON DE L’ESTANG: Thank you.

AMB. BUJON DE L’ESTANG: On fuel cells, you mean on petrol sales?

AMB. BUJON DE L’ESTANG: Oh, yes, I understand. I think there is great interest for that. Certainly everybody should be concerned about energy conservation and a new means of using energy. The idea to develop these cells for automobiles is, I think, very interesting and the French automobile industry is as interested as the American automobile industry in this.

AMB. BUJON DE L’ESTANG: Renault is very much in business, but they decided to pull out of the American market a few years ago. They are a major automobile manufacturer in Europe. They have bought recently a controlling share in Nissan Motors in Japan, and they are envisaging to re-enter the American market under the name Nissan. But you’ll know it is a Renault.

AMB. BUJON DE L’ESTANG: Thank you very much. This was very enjoyable, and I thank all the callers for their very good questions.