Britain and France: the impossible, indispensable relationship

By Bagehot

DAVID Cameron will visit Paris tomorrow for a tense bilateral meeting with Nicolas Sarkozy. Senior officials expect the French president to ask the British prime minister a blunt question: what, David, do you actually want from me, and from Europe just now? That is an almost impossible question to answer. In essence, Britain faces the following scenario as the euro crisis swirls. Egged on by France above all, the 17 countries of the euro zone are planning to try to save their single currency with deeper political and economic integration. Britain thinks that in the short term some sort of deep integration is a necessary condition for saving the euro, and fears the consequences of a euro collapse. But Britain does not want to take part in that integration, will not pay for it, knows that it will be marginalised by it, cannot veto it and probably cannot extract many concessions from the process of creating it. Oh, and deep down the British government does not think it will work.

The stage is set for a very nasty crisis, in which France and Britain will be at loggerheads. The irony is that in other ways, notably in security and defence, Britain and France have rarely enjoyed such good relations in recent times. Just look at the strong support that Mr Sarkozy's administration is offering Britain when it comes to Iran, and the Iranian student assault on Britain's embassy in Iran. France is proposing some of the toughest sanctions ever contemplated against Iran, directly touching Iranian oil exports. We are a world away from Jacques Chirac, Mr Sarkozy's predecessor, who once asked American interviewers if it would be such a disaster if Iran had a nuclear bomb (before aghast French presidential aides attempted to say that he had not said that on the record).