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what Nicole Bacharan, a social scientist, calls “the one-man soap
opera.”
These were more than peccadilloes. But sharp elbows were needed to
shift France from sleepwalk mode.
Only in recent weeks has the distance traveled come into focus:
France, reintegrated in 2009 into the command structure of NATO,
spearheading the United Nations-backed NATO military operation in
Libya; providing armed muscle to the U.N. forces in Ivory Coast; and
giving its pacifist-trending ally Germany a lesson in 21st-century
Atlanticism.
Adenauer and de Gaulle must be turning in their graves. Here was
Germany standing wobbly with Brazil, Russia, India and China —
and against its closest allies, France and the United States — in the
U.N. vote on Libyan military action. And here was France providing
America’s most vigorous NATO support.
This was a dramatic inversion of postwar roles. It revealed the drift of
a navel-gazing Germany unprepared to lead despite its power and
impatient with Adenauer’s Western anchoring. It also demonstrated
France’s break under Sarkozy from the posturing Gaullist notion of a
French “counterweight” to America. These are seismic European
shifts.
In Benghazi, the capital of free Libya, when they see a NATO aircraft
they say, “There goes another Sarkozy.” After the French shame of
Rwanda, a genocide where Mitterrand let time do its fullest work,
that’s something.
Perhaps it’s only now with Sarkozy that another, deeper French
shame is passing, one Mitterrand and Chirac knew: the “strange
defeat” of 1940 with its paralyzing subsequent obfuscations.
Certainly, a presidential election next year has not been unrelated to
Sarkozy’s activism. Nor has a compensatory urge after France took

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