Today's Date:

It’s a great pleasure to be with you gentlemen today in a time that is difficult for all of us and obviously very interesting. I think that you are used to hearing informal remarks, and I was under strict instructions to have no prepared remarks, so I have no prepared remarks. But I will speak to you, I think, just to get the ball rolling, in a triple capacity: as a Frenchman, as a European, and as a friend and ally, which gives three different angles under which I think we could approach some of the subjects of the day.

As a Frenchman, I have the great privilege of being the ambassador to Washington of a country that has been historically the first ally of the United States and that has been allied with the United States throughout your 2-1/2 – almost – centuries of history.

I claim this extraordinary privilege of being in a unique position, even vis-à-vis all my European colleagues, because I believe the United States, in its short history has been at war with about every major country in the world at one time or another, with the noticeable exception of France.

To be sure, we have had our differences, and we do have our spats periodically. This happens in every good couple or in every good friendship, and my favorite analogy when I think of the French-American relationship is that of an old couple. We know that we are together for good. When we disagree, we do disagree. But I think we end up with a goodnight kiss – – and we know that when the chips are down, we’re always together. This has been very much our history, I believe. It is true that on a variety of problems we do have different analysis or different sensitivities. We live in another world, after all. Europe is another world from the United States, and I would even be tempted to submit that in many ways it is becoming more and more of a different world, and that the United States may be, in a way, a daughter of Europe, but because of the new demographics, because of the new trends in immigration, because of the unique and very successful type of civilization you have invented here in this country, you are becoming, probably, more and more different from the European model from which the first immigrants came.

This is, in itself, an interesting subject of discussion, but we have different social models, we have different frameworks for our economies, we have a different vision of the role the state should play in the economy. I could go on and on. We have a variety of things that differ more and more in Europe and in the United States.

We also have a vision of the world that is not always the same. After all, we live six time zones away from the eastern coast of the United States, and we are far closer to the Mediterranean, far closer to the Arab world and to the Middle East. We have had relationships with those regions for centuries and centuries, and we have therefore a very different sensitivity.

So when I say that France and the United States have had their differences, they are usually about the vision of the world that we profess in our respective countries, and all too often, about the Middle East and Middle Eastern affairs. Since the ‘60s, for instance, and the Six-Day War, it is true that we have had an analysis of what happens in the Near East that has frequently deferred from that of the United States. I think it is a factor in an alliance as ours of richness more than anything else.

I know that President Bush says frequently in private that he considers that the fact that some of his advisors profess different opinions on various subjects is a factor of richness more than anything else, and I believe he is absolutely right. And the same is true for what we used to call the Western alliance. We believe that when we have a different opinion, we should share it with you and try to reconcile our views or try to adjust our positions. And I even go as far, frequently, as to say that precisely because we differ on a number of things, I do believe that we have a right to claim to be your very best friends because you do not expect from your best friends that they would always agree with you and always would tell you that you are the best and brightest, but that sometimes, when they believe you have a wrong analysis or you are about to make a blunder, they tell you so.

In that sense, I know that we are frequently presented as a difficult ally, and I do not accept this notion that we a difficult ally. I think we are a truthful and faithful ally, but we may be a demanding friend, and in that respect, we have our differences sometimes, but we agree, I think, on the very basics. And again, when we are facing a serious crisis, when push comes to shove, the United States know that they can always count on France and that France is always there. It was there in Korea, it was there in the Gulf War. President de Gaulle was the first foreign head of state to bring his support to President Kennedy at the time of the Cuba missile crisis. We fought alongside you in the Gulf War and again in Kosovo, and today we have 4500 people deployed on site in or around Afghanistan. This is just an illustration of what I am saying. So that’s my angle as a Frenchman.

As a European, I also want to say that we are engaged, and we have been engaged since the late ‘50s, in a major effort of building in Europe a sort of union of sovereign states that has reached today the stage of being the European Union. And I mention this because I know that this is frequently the source in the United States of either misapprehensions or misconceptions because you have your own experience of the unity of the 13 colonies forming the United States of America, and you tend to be impatient with the slow pace at which the Europeans are trying to build their unity, which in a way is understandable, seeing where you come from, but unfair to the Europeans because you may consider-- as I can consider that this glass is either half full or half empty – you may consider that European unity is progressing at a relatively slow pace, and in a way it is slow.

But on the other hand, when you realize that hardly half a century ago we were trying to rebuild from the devastation of World War II, the fact that we have achieved, for good, a complete reconciliation between France and Germany, that on this basis we have been able to establish a kind of state of perpetual peace within the borders of the European Union, and that we have already not only achieved economic integration between the countries of the 15 – the 15 countries that form the European Union, but also that we have built monetary union and replaced the existing 12 currencies of the 12 countries that form the European Union by a common currency called the euro, is an achievement which I believe is unprecedented in history – quite extraordinary if you think of it in all its dimensions – technical, economic, monetary, and of course, psychological and political – and indeed momentous because the idea behind it is clearly political.

On this basis, we will try to forge ahead in the years that are coming. We are engaged in a major effort at enlarging the European Union towards the east, which means really that we are trying to reunite the historical Europe that was divided for half a century by the Iron Curtain and the Cold War, and we are also trying to reform our institutions, which were devised for a group of six original founders which have difficulty working at 15, and which certainly need to be seriously transformed if we are to be 27 or 30 before the end of this decade.

So I know that it is difficult from here to follow the complexities and the intricacies of what we love to call the European construction, but you have to realize that the Europeans have changed considerably in a matter of a few decades. They certainly are your partners within the transatlantic community and the Atlantic alliance in terms of security, but they are a strange kind of animal which is at the same time a group of friends, a bunch of allies, and also very serious economic competitors, which of course is the source of a certain ambivalence that I frequently see in the way the Americans judge and have interest in what the Europeans are doing to build the European Union.

So there again, I think we have to realize that the Atlantic Ocean that separates us is not only a mere geographical barrier, but is also, I think, an important separation between two different psychological, let’s say – psychological worlds. We, in Europe, have a vision of the world that also is not always the same as that of the United States, and that brings me to a few very quick comments on September 11 and the post-September 11.

I think the tragedy that happened on September 11 raised, in Europe in general and in France in particular, considerable emotion and spurred an incredible wave of sympathy in the noble sense of the term vis-à-vis the United States. I have frequently witnessed in my own country, in France, such waves of sympathy vis-à-vis the United States. It happened time and again on different occasions of history, but I had never seen something like what happened in the wake of September 11, and any American who have – who was traveling in France at the time would tell you stories about it. We really felt that this attack was an attack against us all. Le Monde, the French evening newspaper, which is not particularly famous for its Americanophilia, had on that day an editorial entitled, “We Are All Americans,” which I think said it all. This is really the way the French reacted to what has happened.

And in the following weeks, I think, we tried to help you in any way we could – at the United Nations where we were in the chair of the Security Council in September which helped pass a couple resolutions that are the legal basis for the actions then undertaken in Afghanistan; in NATO – I’m sure you are familiar with the fact that NATO has an Article V, which calls for immediate assistance of the allies to one of the members that would be attacked. It had never been implemented in the 50 years of history of the Atlantic pact, and it was readily implemented on September 12 in favor of the United States, while it had been designed, of course, by the United States to come to the rescue of the European allies if they were to be attacked by Russia. It’s one of these ironies of history.

But I think it was also an expression of the strong desire of the Europeans to come to support the United States in what was to become the war on terrorism. I mentioned earlier that we have been involved, if only marginally, in the military activities that have taken place in Afghanistan and that we have presently 4500 military personnel deployed in the Sea of Oman, in Afghanistan itself, and in the neighbor countries as navy assets, air assets and ground troops. And it is our largest military deployment since Bosnia, for instance, and I think the second largest military deployment after that of the United States.

This being said, the solidarity of the French government has been offered by President Chirac to President Bush as early as September 18 when President Chirac was the first foreign head of state to come and pay a visit to the White House, and that remains true to this day, of course. We stand by your side and we have I think an unprecedented degree of cooperation in a number of fields. The military aspect is the more visible, of course, but there are other ways to respond to terrorism, and you must know that there is a great deal of common work going on in these other fields, whether they be the fight against the financing of terrorism or, of course, cooperation in the field of law enforcement and intelligence. And a good deal goes on on that level.

But I want here to come back to what I said earlier and to tell you that even if there is this complete solidarity with the United States and this complete agreement in the need to fight terrorism as priority number one, the Europeans in general have also a few concerns of their own. First, because the attack took place in the United States and not in Europe, the sensitivity over there is different. The degree of mobilization, if you like, of the people decreases as you move farther away from where the attacks took place, and I was even able to verify this in the United States. I traveled to California in November, for instance, and I addressed various audiences about the war on terrorism and I could see easily that the sensitivities there were different from what they are on the East Coast. This is geography really that we’re talking about.

So that goes for Europe, as well, and I think you need to keep that in mind. The Europeans certainly are in full agreement with the United States on the need to fight terrorism. They are quite willing to bring their assistance to this fight, but they see this from a little farther away. Also, we have a familiarity with terrorism, which unfortunately is far greater than yours because, until that terrible tragedy of September 11th, you have been remarkably well protected by your land mass and what I would be tempted to call in geographical terms only the sort of insular position of the North American continent, which is preserved by its two oceans. We have in France, in particular, suffered from terrorism time and again in the past. We have had to deal with it with our own means, and we know, therefore, that the response to terrorism has to be devised on a variety of levels and that military action alone cannot be the only response to terrorism. It can play a role, and it certainly did play an important role in Afghanistan, and it will again, maybe, play an important role in doing away with the strongholds of terrorists here or there.

But we know that there are other reasons for terrorism, and that we have to refine our analysis to think carefully about what nourishes terrorism and to find a variety of responses that can also be frequently economic, political or diplomatic. And this is one reason I believe why the Europeans, while understanding why the United States consider themselves at war and are fully mobilized for the war against terrorism, have frequently a different view of what the response to terrorism has to be and believe that they have an advice or a voice of their own that should be listened to and that is worth being heard.

The fact that they sometimes believe that their voice is not sufficiently heard in Washington or that their advice is not sufficiently heeded explains some of the frustration that have resulted in a few acerbic exchanges that you may have noticed over the last few days. But really what I want to say here is that the paradox of the present situation is that, in a way, we have never been so close because we believe that your response to September 11th and your fight against terrorism is also our response and our problem as much as it is yours. So we’ve never been so close and the sympathy has been again, extraordinary. But on the other hand, we realize when we think about what future targets of military campaigns might be or what future action maybe taken by this administration, we realize that we have very different analysis on a few key problems and that we have a greater need for consultation than we have ever had in the past.

I will keep it at that because I would like this to be an exchange, of course, and not a lecture. Thank you.

Q: Ambassador, I just wanted to say two things -- that first I think I speak on behalf of all us in the room that we are entranced by what you have said, the way you have said it, and it will strengthen already a great relationship the United States and France have, and it will continue to strengthen it as you continue to work here.

And I wanted to see -- if there’s someone from the White House here, they can report it, but otherwise, I’ll give a call to George W. Bush’s office and make sure that he and the White House know about this speech.

Secondly, may I just simply say that the way you gave it -- I many times think when someone gives a speech they read it and I think, well, they’ve got a very good staff that wrote that speech, but this came right from your own heart and from your own mind and it was absolutely wonderful. That’s a long way of saying I have one question.

I would appreciate very much your feelings on how long you think this war with Afghanistan is going to continue? How long will it be? Will it be a long one or a relatively shorter one? And also, what do you think the end result of that will be?

AMB. DE L’ESTANG: Thank you, Senator, first of all for your very, very kind words.

The question you ask is a difficult one because when you embark on a war, you really never know how long it will take. Never. The war in Afghanistan proper has been, in fact, shorter than most of us expected. I think it has brought remarkable results in a limited amount of time. The Taliban government has collapsed. Resistance has stopped and we are faced now with a situation in Afghanistan, which is different. There’s a friendly government there, an interim government. There is a big need to rebuild the country, which has been ravaged not only, of course, by the military action of the last few months, but by 23 years of continuous foreign and civil wars, so we have really to rebuild the country where everything is in need of rebuilding. And the American government is saying, quite rightly, that the war against al Qaeda in Afghanistan proper is not yet over. There are still pockets of resistance. There are still a number of either terrorists or former Taliban leaders on the run and it will probably take some time before this is over.

So I would personally expect that a sort of low-intensity level of military activity will continue for a number of months in Afghanistan proper and also that some measures will have to be taken in order to avoid that the al Qaeda fighters on the run are able to rebuild the stronghold of some kind in the neighboring region. Now this is for the war on Afghanistan.

The war against terrorism in general is of course, something of much greater magnitude and it will involve, as I say, much more than just military action, and this certainly a war that is worth fighting, but it probably will take a very, very long time if we are ever able to eradicate, for good, terrorism that is actually nourished by all kinds of reasons.

Q: Mr. Ambassador, in your remarks you referred to NATO, the quite impressive vote of support for the U.S. I wonder if you could clarify for us what France’s role in NATO is today? I was one of the American soldiers in France in 1966 who was asked to leave by the government of General de Gaulle and -- but since then, you know, it’s clear that France has cooperated with the military and political structure of NATO without necessarily being a full member. I wonder just what is the working arrangement between France and NATO today?

AMB. DE L’ESTANG: France is a full member of the Atlantic alliance, and when de Gaulle decided to pull it out of the organization in 1966, it just meant that he was actually pulling out the French officers from the various integrated military commands of the integrated military structure that there is inside NATO, but he also was careful to say at the time -- you remember certainly -- that France was a member of the alliance and would remain a member of the alliance.

This was a different world. We’re talking of something that happened 45 years ago at the peak of the Cold War and at a time when the United States was embarking in a long and ill-fated military adventure in Vietnam, which was certainly one reason why the general wanted France out because he didn’t want it to be dragged into military adventures that it would not approve of. This was really, I think, one of the explanations.

But we live today, Vietnam is far behind us and we live today in a completely different world. So we have -- you’re absolutely right to say that we have fully cooperated with NATO in modern times. It is true that we have never resumed our presence in the integrated military commands as if we were a full member of the organization, but in every ad hoc operation that we have mounted over the last decade, we have shown that we were willing to participate, that we were also willing to place our troops under integrated NATO commands without any kind of misgivings, and therefore, that this situation that prevailed in the ‘60s and ‘70s was not relevant to today’s challenges.

So long story short is we do behave as if we were a full member of NATO and the issue, which for a long time was a difficult diplomatic issue of whether we should reintegrate the military commands and at what conditions, has become moot really because all the operations we are mounting as NATO allies are really ad hoc operations that we have had to improvise, and that we’ve been able to work practical arrangements, pragmatic arrangements very well in Bosnia, in Kosovo or in Macedonia, for instance. These are the three latest examples.

So that is a good example of how history can do away with situations and transform them as it goes.

Q: Mr. Ambassador, as we know, the peoples of the United States and of Europe have shared the common culture, although there are differences among them -- and its common religion, Christianity and Judaism. However, the people who are involved in Afghanistan now are mainly Muslims, and there’s a sharp difference, isn’t there, between the Muslim culture and the culture the way of Europe and the United States have had. To what extent do you think that these religious and cultural differences can be reconciled and accommodated so there will be no feelings of inferiority on the part of people who are Muslims?

AMB. DE L’ESTANG: Islam is one of the great religions of the world. It’s been a great civilization, and we have had in Europe, I would say, an intercourse with Islam, which is extremely long. Just think of the Medieval Arab states in Europe; the fact that the Arabs were present, for instance, in Spain until the end of the 15th century and in southern Italy; the Crusades; I mean, all the history that we have had. We certainly recognize Islam as one of the major religions in the world and as a civilization that is extremely important, one of the great monotheist religions.

Islam has had some difficulties in a variety of places adjusting to the modern world for reasons that would be too complicated to go into here and that, added with differences in development and with the Arab-Israeli conflict which has been a direct source of conflict and frustrations and suffering for over half a century, has now created a kind of rift that we should address in a very careful way because there is really no reason why we would consider that Islam could not belong in the modern world. There is a great will in some of the Islamic countries to adjust to the modern world without in any way renouncing their beliefs and their own civilization, and we have to respect that.

We have also new trends in immigration. Everybody knows that we have many Muslim immigrants moving into Europe, for instance. They come from different places. They come from Pakistan or the sub-continent when they move over to the United Kingdom, from Magreb; mostly Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, when they move to France; or from Turkey when they go to northern Europe and Germany. But there is an influx of Muslim immigrants that progressively has an influence on the evolution of our societies. And even in the United States, I’m struck to see that there is an important Arab population, which is almost equal to the Jewish population, and that there are a number of Muslims in most American major cities. So it is a challenge for us to have also to understand this different civilization and to have to adjust to it.

We should certainly not reduce Islam to fundamentalism, and we must absolutely resist any attempt of assimilating Islam, which is a great religion which has preached tolerance for centuries, with fanaticism or terrorism, and this is really one issue in which we must beware of stereotypes or ready-to-wear ideas because they can prove extremely harmful, and we know better.

Q: Mr. Ambassador, France has a heavy reliance on nuclear power and we have rather slender reliance on it. How did France get that way? How is it that France has, I think, up to 80 percent of her power being generated by nuclear fission, I suppose?

AMB. DE L’ESTANG: Jim, you know me well and you know what my soft spots are. It’s very kind of you to tease me on nuclear energy.

It is true that we believe nuclear energy can provide a very, very important source of energy for the future of all of our societies, particularly when we have to tackle the issues of climate change and of course, of emissions of carbon dioxide. I’ve been – myself -- convinced for a very, very long time that nuclear energy is not only the safest way to produce a kilowatt hour of electricity, but that it is also the cleanest and, when things are done properly, can be also the most economical.

Jim, you know that in France, we are an energy-poor country, unlike the United States who are blessed with every riches in terms of energy. You produce oil, you produce coal, you produce almost everything. We are energy poor. We don’t produce oil. We had only a tiny production of natural gas in the South of France, which is now exhausted. We had a declining production of coal. We have finished harnessing every river that we could possibly harness. And we have one domestic source of energy, which happens to be natural uranium. That’s the raw material for nuclear energy. That is the reason why we turned to nuclear generation in the first place back in the ‘60s. When in the ‘70s the oil shock struck, France turned very naturally to nuclear energy to reduce our dependence on imported oil.

It is in the ‘70s that the French government launched into a major program of nuclear reactor building that led us to the situation we are in today. You have said it: We are producing about 80% of our electricity needs through nuclear generation, which is the highest rate in the world. We have more than 45 nuclear reactors -- I forgot what is the exact number -- that have worked flawlessly for the last 2-1/2 decades. We produce electricity at a very competitive price. Why have we been able to do this while the United States has not is a difficult issue. I would say that there are several levels at which we should address this question, I think.

The first one, I believe is that the French were ready for developing nuclear energy thanks to General de Gaulle precisely because of the nuclear military effort he made when he decided to build the force du frappe in the ‘60s, because in his rhetorics, he equated the needs to build a nuclear deterrent with the concept of national independence. To this day, although we are talking about an electro-nuclear program, something of an entirely different nature, I believe -- personally, it’s a personal theory of mine -- but I believe that subliminally in the minds of the French the idea of nuclear has been equated with a notion of independence. So that is a psychological explanation.

Then there is another reason, which is that unlike the United States we are not a huge continent. We are not a federal country. We have a different system of laws and we have a very centralized government -- a centralized government with one nuclear utility, Electricite de France, which at the time enjoyed a monopoly of producing electricity, which allowed of course for central planning of a nuclear program and for a centrally planned selection of nuclear sites. Then we decided -- unlike here -- to standardize the types of reactors that we would develop, and instead of having several nuclear-reactor builders, who each one propose a different type of reactors, or several different types, we had only one nuclear-reactor builder, which decided to go for the standardization of reactors they would develop. That gives you, I think in a nutshell, the answer: centralized government, one electricity utility, one reactor builder, and a standardized type of reactor instead of reinventing the wheel each time you want to build a new nuclear reactor. I believe this has been the explanation.

But this being said, to explain why we were successful in this program, I need to draw your attention to the fact that nuclear in this country, although no new nuclear reactor has been ordered since the late ‘70s, is still producing close to 20 percent of our electricity, and that it is therefore an essential part of the energy mix in the United States. And I do believe that because of the environmental concern and because of the many advantages of nuclear energy – economic and technological – we will witness a resurrection of this way of producing electricity in the years to come. If you are successful, as I hope you will be, in resolving the issue of the spent fuel -- and I believe that the decision by President Bush to propose to Congress to develop the repository site at Yucca Mountain in Nevada is a big step forward – once this problem, the bottleneck, I would say, of disposing of the spent fuel is resolved, nuclear electricity has a future in this country as well.

Q: if you think there is an axis of evil?

AMB. DE L’ESTANG: Is it really fair to ask me the question in this way?

I believe there is a lot of evil in the world, that there is no question about this, but this expression of the axis of evil, as you know, has stirred a variety of reactions in the world that were not all of them positive.

We are talking about a number of different situations and different problems there. I think the countries that were listed by President Bush in his State of the Union Address and described as the axis of evil are in fact three very different countries that are in themselves different problems, but that have one thing in common, which is that they are developing weapons of mass destruction, and therefore, that they pose a risk of proliferation. That is what they have in common.

We recognize the dangers of proliferation, of course, and we fully agree with the United States that proliferation is a major danger, and that we should work together to try and prevent the risks that stem from proliferation. We also believe that it is difficult to have a unique response to problems that are by essence different, and the fact that this problem was included in a speech devoted mostly to the problems of terrorism is interesting because terrorism is a problem, development of weapons of mass destruction is another category of problems, another category of headaches, if you like, but I think the president is right in drawing our attention to the fact that there may interference between the two because in the future terrorists might be tempted to use some of the weapons of mass destruction that are being developed by some countries in the world, and that we have to turn to these problems and to find the appropriate response. That’s how I would respond to your question.

Q: President Chirac is putting a bid on his second term. What do you think about that? And changing the terms from seven years to five years – will this help him?

AMB. DE L’ESTANG: That has already been done, as you know. We’ve had a constitutional reform recently that was passed that reduces the length of the presidential term in our constitution from seven years, as it was, to five. And the next president, whoever he is, will be the first five-year term president of the Fifth Republic.

Yes, we are having our presidential election in April and May. You know that, unlike the American presidential election, the French presidential election has two main characteristics: first, it is an election by direct popular vote – no electoral college there, and secondly, it is a two-ballot election with an interval of two weeks between the two ballots, the second ballot being a run-off between the two candidates that have come in front of the race in the first ballot -- the first ballot on April 21st, second ballot on May the 5th, and that will be followed by a parliamentary election six weeks later in order to elect the National Assembly, which also has a five-year term. So we will have a lot of electoral activity the next few months in France.

President Chirac has announced his candidacy about ten days ago. He will run as the incumbent president for a second term. A number of other candidates have also declared themselves, and a new candidate is going to declare himself, I think, very shortly, and it will be a very interesting and apparently a close election. Further than that, I would not comment because it is a golden rule for any ambassador of any country not to discuss his domestic politics outside of his own country.

But let me just take this opportunity to add one thing to what I said on Europe and European construction just before, which is that the year 2002 is an important year for Europe because you have major elections in two major countries: you have the French elections in the spring and early summer, and you have the German general election in October. And the fact that the two come together is maybe a good thing because you will have then two new governments assured of a five-year term that will be able to tackle together a number of important problems. And you know that it is really the coordination between France and Germany that has frequently proven to be the engine of European construction. So in a way, that coincidence in time, I think, is a blessing of sorts.

Q: the European reaction to the alleged corruption in judging at the Olympics. We’ve, of course, heard the American side, but what is the perspective from overseas?

AMB. DE L’ESTANG: Well, it is the same as yours, I think. It is the same as yours.

This was a very unfortunate incident from which may come some good, probably, for the future. I’m not a specialist of these matters, but it is an open secret that very few people in the world of skating were really happy with the ways notations are made and juries performed. So the unfortunate incident that has been revealed by the Salt Lake City skating competition will certainly have, I think, positive consequences in the way the whole system is really overhauled, and in the end, I think all was well that ended well. I was fortunate enough to witness the medal ceremony where the four gold medals were handed over, and I believe this was indeed a happy ending./.