When Mitterrand returned to Paris after a visit to Washington he told Attali to get him one like it

When Mitterrand returned to Paris after a visit to Washington, he told Attali to get him one like it. American-based multinationals, he once remarked, were so dominant that “the real capital of Europe is Washington”.Long before talk of a single currency became general, he confided to his diary: “The Americans have dominated by their currency the Europe they liberated by their weapons. The Europeans will free themselves if they can create a currency of their own.”The Elysee chronicles of Mitterrand’s talkative aide Jacques Attali, published verbatim but not perhaps to be taken as such, are full of presidential side-swipes at American presumption – including, ludicrously, envy of the terrestrial globe that Reagan kept in his office. His enemies called him Florentine, thinking of long knives and Renaissance alleys, and his record on Europe included scepticism and disillusion as well as hope. Far more than Monnet, he saw the United States as both a safeguard and a potential danger.

He always remembered how his grandparents wept at any mention of France’s defeat by Prussia at Sedan in 1870. Born in one Franco-German war and marked, equivocally, by another, he had every reason to back the uniting of Europe; and if he voted against the European Defence Community, that was only because he still feared that it might revive German military strength.He was never, in fact, as single-minded as Monnet. To reconcile France and Germany in a greater community: we reacted rapidly then, two years after the death of Hitler and the collapse of his Reich.”
Franco-German reconciliation was Mitterrand’s prime European objective, as much as it was Monnet’s. “I have never forgotten”, Mitterrand wrote in his diary a few years earlier, “the enthusiasm of the early days: the European Congress at The Hague in 1947, the Home Congress in 1948, the passion that enflamed us all. For some statesmen it might have been a routine act of homage with electoral overtones.

For Mitterrand, it was a genuine tribute – a confirmation that both men saw Europe as vital to France’s future. It was a ceremony to transfer to that national Valhalla the mortal remains of Jean Monnet, the founder of the European Union. On a cold dark November night in 1988, Francois Mitterrand addressed a huge crowd in front of the Pantheon in Paris. Are they serious enough to cancel out the prize of greater security, fairness and long-term economic success that he offers as the reward for giving the state another chance?My guess is that if the stakeholder message gets across, it will be popular. It has the right feel for this grumpy, unhappy and insecure recovery. In retrospect, people feel that there was something wrong about the boom- bust economic rollercoaster of the Eighties and early Nineties.

The house price boom followed by the crash is too neat and universal a morality story for the British to forget before the next election. And there is a moral hardness about Blair’s central proposal, that we get more back from society only by putting more in, which seems like common sense of a kind old Labourism lacked.This may be the year of the general election that changes Britain more than any since 1979. What Blair has made certain of is that it will not be a contest merely between tired politicians and implausible manifestos It will now be a genuine battle of ideas as well.. All these new obligations, for instance – the only one missing is a new contract between GPs and patients in which New Britons promise to upgrade and invest in their cardiovascular systems prior to an annual health audit.These are the most obvious drawbacks to Blair’s ‘’stakeholder society” which, in other respects, goes a long way towards rediscovering a credible project for the centre-left. an empty box”.First, it relies on faith in politicians and bureaucrats. Why, one might ask, should the state be wise in directing human capital for the next century when it has been so foolish about directing industrial capital during the past century? Aren’t media companies and sophisticated 14-year- olds likely to make better judgements about the next trends and skills needed than the directors of Labour’s University for Industry?Second, there is a governessy, disciplinarian tone that a stroppy country like ours might eventually find hard to swallow.