Zbigniew brzezinski

GRANDEUR AND REDEMPTION 
France seeks reincarnation as Europe; Germany hopes for redemption through Europe. These varying 
motivations go a long way toward explaining and defining the substance of the alternative French and German 
designs for Europe. 
For France, Europe is the means for regaining France's past greatness. Even before World War II, serious 
French thinkers on international affairs already worried about the progressive decline of Europe's centrality in 
world affairs. During the several decades of the Cold War, that worry turned into resentment over the "Anglo-
Saxon" domination of the West, not to speak of contempt for the related "Americanization" of Western culture. 
The creation of a genuine Europe—in Charles De Gaulle's words, "from the Atlantic to the Urals"—was to 
remedy that deplorable state of affairs. And such a Europe, since it would be led by Paris, would 
simultaneously regain for France the grandeur that the French still feel remains their nation's special destiny. 

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For Germany, a commitment to Europe is the basis for national redemption, while an intimate connection to 
America is central to its security. Accordingly, a Europe more assertively independent of America is not a 
viable option. For Germany, redemption + security = Europe + America. That formula defines Germany's 
posture and policy, making Germany simultaneously Europe's truly good citizen and America's strongest 
European supporter. 
Germany sees in its fervent commitment to Europe a historical cleansing, a restoration of its moral and 
political credentials. By redeeming itself through Europe, Germany is restoring its own greatness while gaining 
a mission that would not automatically mobilize European resentments and fears against Germany. If Germans 
seek the German national interest, that runs the risk of alienating other Europeans; if Germans promote 
Europe's common interest, that garners European support and respect. 
On the central issues of the Cold War, France was a loyal, dedicated, and determined ally. It stood shoulder lo 
shoulder with America when the chips were down. Whether during the two Berlin blockades or during the 
Cuban missile crisis, there was no doubt about French steadfastness. But France's support for NATO was 
tempered by a simultaneous French desire to assert a separate French political identity and to preserve for 
France its essential freedom of action, especially on matters that pertained to France's global status or to the 
future of Europe. 
There is an element of delusional obsession in the French political elite's preoccupation with the notion that 
France is still a global power. When Prime Minister Alain Juppe, echoing his predecessors, declared to the 
National Assembly in May 1995 that "France can and must assert its vocation as a world power," the gathering 
broke out into spontaneous applause. The French insistence on the development of its own nuclear deterrent 
was motivated largely by the view that France would thereby enhance its own freedom of action and at the 
same time gain the capacity to influence American life-and-death decisions regarding the security of the 
Western alliance as a whole. It was not vis-a-vis the Soviet Union that France sought to upgrade its status, for 
the French nuclear deterrent had, at the very best, only a marginal impact on Soviet war-making capabilities. 
Paris felt instead that its own nuclear weapons would give France a role in the Cold War's top-level and most 
dangerous decision-making processes. 
In French thinking, the possession of nuclear weapons fortified France's claim to being a global power, of 
having a voice that had to be respected worldwide. It tangibly reinforced France's position as one of the five 
veto-wielding- UN Security Council members, all five also nuclear powers. In the French perspective, the 
British nuclear deterrent was simply an extension of the American, especially given the British commitment to 
the special relationship and the British abstention from the effort to construct an independent Europe. (That the 
French nuclear program significantly benefited from covert U.S. assistance was, to the French, of no 
consequence for France's strategic calculus.) The French nuclear deterrent also consolidated, in the French 
mindset, France's commanding position as the leading continental power, the only truly European slale so 
endowed. 
France's global ambitions were also expressed through its determined efforts to sustain a special security role 
in most of the Francophone African countries. Despite the loss, after prolonged combat, of Vietnam and Algeria 
and the abandonment of a wider empire, that security mission, as well as continued French control over 
scattered Pacific islands (which have provided the venue for controversial French atomic tests), has reinforced 
the conviction of the French elite that France, indeed, still has a global role to play, despite the reality of being 
essentially a middle-rank postim-perial European power. 
All of the foregoing has sustained as well as motivated France's claim to the mantle of European leadership. 
With Britain self-marginalized and essentially an appendage to U.S. power and with Germany divided for much 
of the Cold War and still handicapped by its twentieth-century history, France could seize the idea of Europe, 
identify itself with it, and usurp it as identical with France's conception of itself. The country that first invented 
the idea of the sovereign nation-state and made nationalism into a civic religion thus found it quite natural to 
see itself—with the same emotional commitment that was once invested in "la patrie"—as the embodiment of 
an independent but united Europe. The grandeur of a French-led Europe would then be France's as well. 

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This special vocation, generated by a deeply felt sense of historical destiny and fortified by a unique cultural 
pride, has major policy implications. The key geopolitical space that France had to keep within its orbit of 
influence—or, at least, prevent from being dominated by a more powerful state than itself—can be drawn on 
the map in the form of a semicircle. It includes the Iberian Peninsula, the northern shore of the western 
Mediterranean, and Germany up to East-Central Europe (see map on page 64). That is not only the minimal 
radius of French security; it is also the essential zone of French political interest. Only with the support of the 
southern states assured, and with Germany's backing guaranteed, can the goal of constructing a unified and 
independent Europe, led by France, be effectively pursued. And obviously, within that geopolitical orbit, the 
increasingly powerful Germany is bound to be the most difficult to manage. 
In the French vision, the central goal of a 
united and independent Europe can be 
achieved by combining the unification of 
Europe under French leadership with the 
simultaneous but gradual diminution of the 
American primacy on the continent. But if 
France is to shape Europe's future, it must 
both engage and shackle Germany, while 
also 
seeking 
step-by-step 
to 
strip 
Washington of its political leadership in 
European affairs. The resulting key policy 
dilemmas for France are essentially 
twofold: how to preserve the American 
security commitment to Europe—which 
France recognizes is still essential—while 
steadily reducing the American presence; 
and 
how 
to 
sustain 
Franco-German