La Seduction: How the French Play the Game of Life (32 page)

Bernard Kouchner may have been France’s top diplomat, but I wouldn’t describe him as diplomatic.

A cofounder of the Nobel Prize–winning relief organization Doctors Without Borders, he challenged authority, destroyed convention, insulted opponents, and made up rules along the way. In the early 1990s, when he was filmed wading ashore in Somalia carrying sacks of rice provided for the starving by French schoolchildren, he was criticized for staging a manipulative media stunt. The satirical television puppet show,
Les Guignols
, features the puppet Kouchner permanently carrying a sack of rice on his shoulder.

Elegant, dapper, with movie-star looks despite his age (he is in his seventies), Kouchner had been France’s most popular politician on the left for years before he joined the cabinet of the center-right government of Nicolas Sarkozy as foreign minister in 2007. Kouchner even fantasized about running for president himself. I once asked him whether anyone could beat Sarkozy in a presidential election. “Me, I believe!” he exclaimed. “I am not so arrogant to say I’m serious, but I’m more popular than he is.”

“Do you
want
to be president?” I asked.

“Of course!” he replied. “It would be fun. It’s not so hard.”

No one has ever accused Kouchner of self-doubt.

At a reception at the residence of the American ambassador in January 2010, I was deep in conversation with Richard Holbrooke, President Obama’s special representative on Afghanistan and Pakistan, when Kouchner joined us. Holbrooke and I were seated on a couch too small for the three of us, so Kouchner went down on bended knee.

I had known both men for more than twenty-five years, and although they were old and close friends, their styles were different. Holbrooke was at times charming, at times brutal, always strategic and well briefed; Kouchner was always charming, infuriatingly disorganized, and often unconcerned about the details of his portfolios. He addressed women—and men—as “my dear.”

With Kouchner, formality could slide into familiarity with speed that could be disconcerting. “I’m with you…not enough,” Kouchner said to me in English.

Holbrooke interrupted. He urged Kouchner to get serious and tell his Kosovo seduction story. So together, the duo recalled the time in 1999 when Kouchner had just been appointed the United Nations chief administrator for Kosovo. The UN secretary-general, Kofi Annan, and Holbrooke were fierce supporters of Kouchner; Madeleine Albright, the U.S. secretary of state, had opposed his appointment. She had never met Kouchner, but she had heard he was difficult. On top of that, he was French, and it has long been a staple of Washington lore that France can be an unreliable ally. She had told Annan that the appointment was a “mistake.”

Kouchner discovered that Albright was vacationing in Innsbruck, Austria. He flew there from Paris to call on her. Before their meeting, he ventured into a field and picked her a bouquet of edelweiss.

“Like
The Sound of Music
,” Holbrooke said.

Kouchner evoked an idealized vision of Albright’s roots in the mountains of central Europe (even though she was born in a big city, Prague).

“I told her that she came from the mountains and from the flowers and that I was giving her more of them,” Kouchner said. “And it was done!”

Kouchner turned her around.

“This is a true story,” said Holbrooke.

“Well, yes, of course this is true! Obviously, it’s true,” said Kouchner. “And since then, Madeleine and I are friends.”

“Isn’t that the perfect story!” Holbrooke exclaimed. “It’s Bernard at his best, really using seduction to solve an international problem!”

Indeed, in her memoirs, Albright wrote that Kouchner had arrived at their first encounter with edelweiss. She confessed she had found him irresistible. “As soon as we sat down, he said, ‘I hear you don’t like me,’” she wrote. “I tried to resist, but within minutes he was telling me all about his hopes for Kosovo. I was impressed by his deep convictions, humanity, knowledge and dedication.”

And maybe by his charm as well. For all of his flaws, Kouchner, as Albright discovered, was hard to resist. While he was on bent knee next to Holbrooke and me, he balanced himself by firmly putting his right hand on my left knee. It was not a sexual advance but an instinctive act. Kouchner probably didn’t notice that he was gripping the knee of a female American journalist or think about what it would look like in a photograph.

At least I was wearing pants.

Months later, at a reception Kouchner hosted after the screening of a new French film, he was just as hands-on. He took a bottle of red wine from a waiter and poured for his guests. He passed around a platter of chocolate cakes. “Look at this service!” he said. “You see, the French touch!”

As I was leaving, Kouchner kissed me—loudly—on both cheeks. “Don’t forget that I’m in love with you!” he said.

I didn’t know whether to be flattered, amused, or insulted. I know he says this to all the girls. The guys, too, I think.

What is diplomacy if not one never-ending seduction? You assemble all your best arguments and wrap them in pretty packaging to create a relationship with the other side. If you’re strategic and clever and come to the table with attractive incentives, you may prevail. If the other side is also strong and determined, you compromise. The seduction may take one phone call between heads of state or decades of mind-numbing negotiations among teams of experts. It may take the forgiveness of a debt, the delivery of high-tech weaponry, a creative argument, or a humble bouquet of edelweiss.

Certainly, France has weapons other than words. It is a nuclear power and one of only five permanent members, with a veto, on the United Nations Security Council. It has a well-equipped and well-trained military, with troops deployed in places like Afghanistan and the Ivory Coast. It has a knowledgeable foreign-policy elite. It has the capacity to export its technical achievements: its passenger jets, high-speed trains, and nuclear reactors. This means that France is taken seriously on the global stage and that it projects a sense of power greater than its physical size, population, and economy might warrant.

But France’s capability to use force to subdue others disappeared long ago. It was the dominant power in the world for a relatively short time—about 150 years between the victories of Louis XIV in the seventeenth century and the defeats of Napoléon in the nineteenth. Since then, it has had to rely more on powers of persuasion. In the years since World War II, France has had to adapt to its stature as a relatively minor power, learning how and when to woo the wider world. France is too weak an economic and military power to counterbalance the United States but too strong and too strong-willed to take orders from it. In addition, it has to compete with two sets of powers: established ones like the United States, Russia, and China, and emerging ones like Brazil and India, whose strengths and potential on many fronts are greater than its own. Natural as it may seem for a country skilled in the arts of seduction to win this contest, the record is uneven. In a permanent wound to its pride, it has lost one of its most powerful weapons—the supremacy of the French language, which long ago ceased to be the language of international diplomacy.

France is both blessed and cursed by the remnant of its colonial philosophy: its
mission civilisatrice
, or civilizing mission. This was the governing principle of French colonial rule in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In practice, French colonialism was exploitative, coercive, and often brutal. But as part of its mission as a world power, France felt it had a duty and a unique role among the European countries to bring light to the dark corners of Africa and Asia by “civilizing” their populations. This conviction was based on the belief in the superiority of French culture and the perfectibility of mankind.

Other colonial powers—the British, the Dutch, the Germans—conquered to enhance their wealth and power. They treated their subjects as “the other” and so allowed them to keep their customs and traditions. Wealth and power motivated France as well. But it adorned this imperial mission with a costume of “civilization”—and tried to assimilate the people it conquered. The French told the colonized that by adopting its culture, values, and language, they too could become model French subjects and, in some places, even citizens.

This has made France a country experienced in the art of “soft power,” getting others to do one’s bidding through attraction rather than coercion. The French have long sought to fine-tune the skills to woo, cajole, and persuade, at the negotiating table and on the ground. “If you look at the countries using soft power and the culture of public diplomacy, the French have been the pioneers,” said Joseph Nye, the Harvard University scholar who coined the phrase.

But the art of influencing others through attraction (translated into French as
séduction
) often fails. The assumption that the rest of the world wants to dress like the French, live like the French, speak like the French, and become French is beautiful in concept but flawed in reality. It failed in the French colonies, most spectacularly in Algeria.

Algeria’s bloody and violent popular revolution toppled the Fourth Republic, leading to a complete French withdrawal in 1962. Algeria symbolized the rejection of France’s civilizing mission. This defeat—along with humiliation, guilt, and resentment—still haunts the French consciousness.

French diplomats are schooled in a diplomatic tradition dating back to the glory days of the eighteenth century, when France’s intellectual influence and military power were at their peak. The eighteenth-century Prussian emperor Frederick the Great preferred to speak French rather than his native German and built a French rococo palace, Sanssouci, near Berlin. Russia’s Catherine the Great detested France but loved French culture and made French the language of her court; she corresponded with Voltaire and welcomed Diderot to Saint Petersburg. Until the 1970s, the Westernized elite in Iran spoke French, ate French food, watched French movies, hired French governesses; Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi wrote his memoirs in French. When I first visited Iran during the 1979 revolution, I was struck that French words permeated the Persian language, even
merci
for “thank you.”

These days, however, in the practical realm of diplomacy and in an era of French decline, the talent for constructing elegant arguments can be beside the point. More important for successful negotiation are pragmatism and flexibility. That’s because diplomacy requires mastery of both the art of conversation and the art of persuading the other to embrace your point of view. The brilliance that may work in the salon, and that may have worked better when France was acknowledged as the leader of the European world, doesn’t travel well to the twenty-first-century negotiating table.

“You have to be supremely confident and work in the sense of playing the game and prolonging the process,” Gérard Araud, a senior French diplomat, explained to me. “But seduction fails when you run up against someone who refuses to play the game. Then you need to have a plan B. But in the French system, if you have a plan B you’re presupposing failure. That’s part of our problem. We use the seduction of words. But we may not be pragmatic seducers.”

Even when the French try to use flexibility to nudge the other side to compromise, cultural misunderstandings can make the process difficult. Araud told the story of torturous negotiations with an American counterpart in 1999 over new strategic rules for NATO. Araud took the position that the text had to specify that any military intervention should be in accordance with the United Nations Charter; the American diplomat rejected that condition.

“What happens if you want to intervene and the Russians block it with a veto?” the American asked.

“I intervene,” Araud replied.

“I don’t understand,” the American said. “You want us to say ‘according to the UN Charter’ and you tell me that you’re ready to violate the UN Charter?”

“Wait a minute,” Araud said. “When you marry, you say that you’ll be faithful to your wife. After that, then there is real life.”

The American looked at him in horror.

“Obviously, we had a cultural misunderstanding,” Araud later recalled. “I was trying to say that in life, you need principles. You do your best to stick to your principles, but it happens that you don’t stick to your principles. But here, there was a cultural impasse. So I said to him, ‘Okay, forget it! Forget it! Bad example!’”

The story had a happy ending. “The matter was resolved by the two presidents, Jacques Chirac and Bill Clinton,” said Araud. “They both knew a lot about marital fidelity.”

More often than not, however, the French approach is more rigid. Jean-David Levitte, who served as national security adviser for President Sarkozy, acknowledged the influence of France’s intellectual heritage. “Our problem is Descartes,” he said. “The British method is pragmatic, empirical. The British come to the table with the interests of the United Kingdom in mind. They try to understand French interests and find a way to move forward. We are educated to give brilliant presentations: A plus B, in two parts and two subparts. That means our diplomatic presentations conform 100 percent to the interests of France and the formal instructions we have received. And then we exasperate our counterparts by giving them an impeccable, unanswerable Cartesian argument that is 100 percent right. Logic and reason would require them to say, ‘It’s perfect! I surrender.’”

The only problem, Levitte added, is that in the real world it doesn’t work. He called the practice the
maudite dissertation
—the cursed dissertation.

Levitte learned that lesson the hard way, when he was serving as France’s ambassador to the United States during the most serious diplomatic crisis between the two countries in nearly half a century. It was triggered by President Jacques Chirac’s opposition to the decision by the Bush administration to wage war against Iraq in 2003. France’s approval rating among Americans plunged from nearly 80 percent to about 30 percent, below those of Saudi Arabia and Libya. French products were boycotted. French wine was poured down kitchen sinks. Vacations to France were canceled. French fries became “freedom fries” in the House of Representatives’ cafeteria. The image of the idealized Frenchman as a lady-killer who could undress you with a look and soothe you with a bedroom voice vanished from the mind of America. It was replaced by the stereotype of the arrogant, effete snob who talked through his nose. Chirac was portrayed as a worm and as Joan of Arc in drag.