French diplomacy has been thrown into confusion by events in Egypt, undermining leading figures in the government, writes David Tresilian in Paris Since the events in Egypt began on 25 January and up to the resignation of president Hosni Mubarak last Friday, Egypt has rarely left the front pages of France's newspapers or failed to lead the country's news broadcasts. While popular reactions to the protests have been positive, many commentators sharing in the euphoria reaching them via television pictures from Cairo's Tahrir Square, official reactions have been more nuanced, with the French government being pressed to explain its close relationship with the former Egyptian regime and where the latter's collapse now leaves French diplomacy. As was the case during the earlier revolution in Tunisia, which also saw that country's president forced from power following weeks of protest against his rule, the French government appears to have been wrong-footed by events in Egypt, and aspects of the country's foreign policy, built on strong relationships with the former Egyptian and Tunisian regimes, may now need to be recalibrated. While this will in large part depend on the policies of the new governments that eventually emerge in Egypt and Tunisia, in the meantime the focus in France has been less on inter-state relationships and more on inter-personal ones. French Foreign Minister Michèle Alliot-Marie, criticised during the Tunisian revolution for offering the government of former Tunisian president Zein Al Abidine Ben Ali the benefit of French crowd-control techniques at the height of the popular protests in the country, has also had to explain why she took her new year holidays in Tunisia as a guest of an associate of the former president. Alliot-Marie has thus far resisted attempts to eject her from office, and revelations about French prime minister François Fillon that emerged last week may well shed light on his own silence on the matter. According to reports in the French weekly Le Canard encha"né, "if Fillon, ordinarily so outspoken, was studying his socks carefully when Michèle Alliot- Marie was trying to justify her behaviour in parliament, it was because he had good reason to pretend that it had nothing to do with him." Fillon had spent his new year holidays in Egypt as a guest of the former Egyptian government, the paper said, and this time it was not a question of a "plane lent by a simple friend of the regime," as had been the case for Alliot-Marie. Instead, "Hosni Mubarak in person" had apparently arranged for a private plane to be put at the disposition of Fillon and family for a visit to Abu Simbel. While Alliot-Marie and Fillon's behaviour has done nothing to endear them to the French public, it has drawn attention to the close relations, both public and private, between the French government and the former Tunisian and Egyptian regimes, France having supported both despite concerns about their dictatorial character and poor human-rights records. Tunisia had for many years been considered to be an economic success story and a showcase for French and European cooperation with the countries of the Arab Maghreb, as well as a comparatively cheap tourist destination and an ideal place for European companies to set up operations. If the popular protests in Tunisia against Zein Al-Abidine bin Ali's rule forced a change in European perceptions of the country, this has been all more the case for Egypt as a result of the protests against the Mubarak regime. The latter had long been seen in France as an important diplomatic partner, notably within the framework of the Union for the Mediterranean , an organisation of 43 countries from Europe and the Mediterranean Basin created in July 2008 as part of a relaunched Euro-Mediterranean partnership and presided over by France and Egypt. As has been the case in many other European countries, comment in the French media has focused on what the change in Egypt may mean for the overall political situation in the Middle East, notably the Israeli- Palestinian peace process, as well as for relations with Europe and whether democratic transition in Egypt could lead to an Islamist government. However, perhaps unlike in at least some of these other countries strong intellectual links between France and the Arab world have meant that public discourse on the latter tends in some respects to be more informed in France than in other European countries, this spilling out into the country's media. French newspapers have been running articles by experts on the Arab world analysing every aspect of the events in Egypt, with some having been genuinely illuminating. Writing in the French newspaper Le Monde on 28 January, the Egyptian intellectual Mahmoud Hussein, a commentator on the country's affairs since the 1960s, told French readers that the Egyptian, like the Tunisian, revolution was a demand for freedom and dignity that should not be confused with a desire to replace one non-democratic regime with another. "A feeling of powerless has dampened spirits" in most Arab countries over the past quarter of a century, Hussein wrote. "The dictators in charge, speaking a language of technocracy, have been able to count on the unconditional support of the western powers, which have seen them as the only possible rampart against religious fundamentalism." "It is this spell that the Tunisian [and then the Egyptian] people have broken. The revolutions they have brought about have said no to modern despotic states as well as to mediaeval theocracies. They have said yes to the separation of religion and politics... Every member of the protesters, mixing people from every social class and from every age group, has been thinking the same thing: no to poverty and corruption and yes to dignity and freedom." French commentators have underlined this message, with Gilles Kepel, author of a series of widely read books on political Islam, writing in the same newspaper on 6 February that the Arab world, which had been unaffected by "the waves of democratic transition that had overthrown the military regimes in Latin America and the 'people's republics' in Eastern Europe at the end of the 20th century," could now be experiencing its own version of "universal history." According to Ghassan Salamé, formerly a government minister in Lebanon and now a professor at the Institut d'études politiques in Paris, writing in Le Monde on 8 February, the insurrections in Egypt and Tunisia "were essentially moral ones, rejecting the corrupt and corrupting authoritarianism" of the respective regimes. While they were clearly bad news for the authorities, they were hardly good news for the Islamist opposition. The young people who had led the revolutions were unlikely to listen to the Islamist gerontocracy any more than they had listened to the gerontocracy of the former regimes, Salamé said. "Social transformations in the Arab world have left a smaller place for the Islamists than at the beginning of the 1990s, and the Islamists have nothing to say to young people." If young people wanted a model, Salamé wrote, they should be looking towards Turkey, which incarnated "the democratic process, growth, a more and more restricted role for the army" and an increasingly assertive and pro-Palestinian foreign policy. Another Lebanese commentator, Georges Corm, the author of a string of works on Middle East affairs, also writing in Le Monde on 12 February, saw lessons in the Tunisian and Egyptian experience not only for the Arab world, but also for European countries. "The divine surprise," Corm wrote, of revolution in the Arab world, had not come from Lebanon, where the 2005 "Cedar Revolution" had "only aggravated internal tensions," but from Egypt and Tunisia. "The wave of neo-liberalism imposed on the countries of the south of the Mediterranean over the past 30 years has led to the growth of local oligarchies, with the privatisation of state industries having contributed to this, as well as to the growth of property speculation and the development of a financial and banking system that only benefits a new business class." The revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia, Corm wrote, were protests against this way of running things, which had made the economies of the southern side of the Mediterranean the prisoners of rent-seeking and plutocracy and had stifled any real dynamism or innovation. "In order for things to change over the long run in the Mediterranean region and to create a dynamic and competitive Euro-Mediterranean order that values social justice, should European civil society not now follow the example of what the [European] media has up till now contemptuously called 'the Arab street'," Corm asked.
