The French vote against the European constitution was a matter of timing rather than substance, writes Abdel-Moneim Said* In the second half of the 1960s the US was in the grip of a socio-political upheaval that riveted the attention of the world. In the wake of the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy the American civil rights movement had reached a new level of intensity. The anti-Vietnam War movement was in full swing and students were in open rebellion against the draft, as well as against the myriad forms of conservatism that infected the political and academic establishment. Against this turbulent backdrop Stanley Kramer's Guess who's coming to dinner (1967) was released. The film opens when beautiful, vivacious Joey calls her parents and drops the bombshell that she will be turning up for dinner with her fiancé. Sorry for the last-minute notice, she tells her thunderstruck parents, but her fiancé wanted to get their blessing for his marriage to their daughter before flying off to Switzerland to assume some high-profile post within the international medical community. So far we have the makings of an ordinary, if amusing, drawing room comedy. But this film was very much a product of its time. What the daughter had not prepared her liberal-minded parents for -- her father, a journalist, was an outspoken opponent of racism and had brought up his children to believe in racial equality -- was that the suitor (Sidney Poitier) was an African-American, something the parents discover only when they open the door. The espoused liberalism of Joey's parents (Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracey) is put to the test. Poitier is flawless: handsome, courteous, a university professor highly reputed in his field whose expertise is in great demand in various parts of the world. He is, in other words, the ideal husband, except that he is African- American. This leaves the Tracey character struggling not only with his residual prejudice but also with his fears for his only daughter's future happiness in a biracial marriage in racially charged America. The film concludes as one might expect: after some anguished soul- searching the father delivers a speech over dinner blessing the marriage. Naturally, reality rarely plays out so happily as the events in the film. Forty years later and America pats itself on the back for its magnanimous liberalism in appointing African American Colin Powell as appointed secretary of state. A little later it congratulates itself once more when Condoleezza Rice -- African- American and a woman, albeit conservative -- is appointed as his successor. Last year the US commemorated the 50th anniversary of the admission of the first black girl into an all- white school, an event that raised anxieties over the extent to which race barriers still exist. Questions of a similar nature form the subtext to the French people's rejection of the EU constitution. France, more than any other nation, gave birth to secular liberalism. France, together with Germany, were the driving forces behind European unity, and the European Coal and Steel Community, the basis of the EU, was the brainchild of French Foreign Minister Robert Schuman. France has never before voted against a measure that deepens and expands European unification and economic integration. Unlike Britain, which has always regarded Europe as an extension of the NATO alliance with the US, the French school of realpolitik saw in a united Europe the possibility of an independent power able to hold its own against the US and check Washington's drive towards unilateral global leadership. Following the creation of the European Common Market, the implementation of laws permitting for the free movement of labour, services, goods and capital between EU countries, the establishment of a European central bank and the introduction of the euro, France's Valerie Giscard d'Estaing spearheaded the drive to create a European constitution. Yet it was the French who were the first to reject the constitution, paving the way for a Dutch "no" and raising doubts over the future of European unity. And the French vote was quite simply a response to the EU's new guest list. Some of these guests -- the countries of Central and Eastern Europe -- seem more attached to the US than to Europe while, Turkey, in addition to its ties with the US, is culturally, ethnically and psychologically not the sort the French are accustomed to having over for dinner. The French found themselves in the same predicament as the liberal white man in the Kramer film who was suddenly faced with having to make a decision regarding himself and his family entailing general and universal principles that he had until then enthusiastically espoused. It was easy for France to tout a philosophy of European union based not on national, linguistic or religious ties but on the cherished liberal values of liberty, equality and fair competition. But the theory began to unravel in practice when the EU expanded eastwards and northwards to increase its membership from six to 25 nations and then entered into negotiations with Bulgaria, Croatia, Romania and Turkey, and penciled in negotiations with Ukraine, Macedonia and Albania before the middle of the century. As many European politicians and commentators warned that the move to create a united central bank and common currency, followed by the sudden expansion from 15 to 25 members, and from that to the ratification of the constitution, came too quickly to allow governments and people time to absorb the consequences. Until the mid-1990s, when Austria, Sweden and Finland were admitted into the EU, the regional body represented Western Europe as commonly perceived even before World War I -- the centre of economic, scientific and democratic progress. The eastward expansion into areas that were not regarded as part of the process of building modern Western civilisation, certainly as it is defined by France, radically altered the situation. And this alteration required a period of assessment. Such events cannot, of course, be attributed to historical or psychological factors alone. Economics play an important part. To establish equality among the various new member states entails both the redistribution of wealth and of power sharing with new groups of peoples. France was the least prepared of the Western European states to accept nations that were net labour exporters while others, such as Britain, had succeeded in divesting themselves of the burdens of the welfare state and were more economically competitive than France. Yet regardless of the psychological or economic factors that determined the French vote the incentives for building a stronger and more tightly bound Europe remain strong. The question now is how long it will take before the French accept all the guests that have been invited to dinner. * The writer is director of Al-Ahram Centre for Political and Strategic Studies.
