1989 economic summit in Paris - 21 July 1989

I wonder if the Paris summit would have monopolised the news quite so much last weekend if it had not coincided with 200th anniversary of the French Revolution.

I don’t wonder for long. I think the answer is it wouldn’t, not because recollecting the French Revolution in itself would have spurred the mass of people here and there to deep thought, but because it allowed Monsieur Mitterrand to put on a fiesta, a public show, that was made for television and – as we learned long ago – any facet of the news today that makes for gaudy television automatically becomes the focus of the news.

Monsieur Mitterrand spent $75million – too many, a lot of his countrymen said – on marching regiments, military bands, paratroopers, jets streaming coloured smoke, fireworks, a riot of pomp and colour, but when we’d enjoyed all this as a television special two things, I think, emerged from the actual meetings.

One was the rather nervous, at times comic, difference of opinion as expressed by the leaders about the meaning of the French Revolution. The other was the quite remarkable, probably historic, change in the Europeans’ view of America’s role in this, and any future, summit.

The American press and the television commentators were quick to feature Mrs Thatcher’s downright and impenitent view of the French Revolution. I say "feature" – they didn’t pick on her, as surprisingly the British press did, implying, when they didn’t say outright, that she’d performed some terribly undiplomatic gaffe. I haven’t seen a single American comment that said so, thought I haven’t seen the Boston Irish papers.

Rather, Americans, I’d say, were more inclined to admire than condemn her statement that what the French Revolution produced was a load of headless corpses and a tyrant.

This view of where the Revolution was headed from the start was first taken by the great Edmund Burke less than a year after the Revolution got under its bloody way. A national newspaper here reprinted on the 14th, on its editorial page, Burke’s famous and devastating essay "Reflections on the Revolution in France" which makes Mrs Thatcher’s comment sound like very mild, off-hand complaint.

Burke’s piece reads today as a letter of condemnation written to the revolutionary leaders. Instead, he charged, of keeping what was good and endurable in the French constitution and expunging what had suffered waste and dilapidation, “Instead of regarding opposed and conflicting interests as natural in the political world and providing a salutary check to precipitate action, you began by despising everything that belonged to you until the moment when you became truly despicable.”

So Burke wrote, the rest followed, “Laws overturned, tribunals subverted, industry without vigour, commerce expiring, the people impoverished, a church pillaged, and a state not relieved. Civil and military anarchy made the constitution of the kingdom. The cruelty of the revolutionaries has not been the base result of fear. It has been the effect of their perfect sense of safety in authorising treasons, robberies, rapes, assassinations, slaughters and burnings throughout their harassed land.”

Well, at least Mrs Thatcher did not present Monsieur Mitterrand with a blood-red, morocco-bound copy of Burke’s essay. Dickens’s Tale of Two Cities was enough of a reminder of the vast slaughter of ordinary people that followed the decapitation of the nobles.

What I think dampened American criticism was the fact that this rousing little controversy didn’t rise out of thin air. It was sparked by Monsieur Mitterrand himself and his confident claim that the revolution had led the way in proclaiming liberty and the rights of men.

Americans of all political stripes were moved to say, wait a minute, two years before the French Revolution broke out the entire American Constitution had been written and ratified by unanimous consent of the states and in the revolutionary year itself, the ten amendments that formed the Bill of Rights, they were written, both documents embodying individual rights and protections far beyond anything that came out of the French Revolution.

Britons, of course Mrs Thatcher, jumped in with the reminder that the first check on a monarch’s power, the first charter of the people’s liberties, was signed at Runnymede in 1215.

These reminders were unanswerable and Monsieur Mitterrand decided to play down the idealistic beauty of the revolution choosing to express his displeasure in a formal way by relegating Mrs Thatcher to the third role of the notables watching the big show.

Well, it was fun while it lasted and on one of our evening networks at least, a clever bit of film editing of Mrs Thatcher’s press conference – Monsieur Mitterrand impeccably welcoming Mrs Thatcher and just as impeccably seeing her off – produced a little sequence of social satire worthy of Ernst Lubitsch.

The second what I said ???????? might mark a permanent change in the institution of the economic summit is the quite new view that European leaders take of the role of an American president, and the new limits on the role that he’s able to play.

Now this change has something to do with the difference between the character and charisma of Mr Reagan and Mr Bush but much more to do with the European response – the German response especially – to the breakout of perestroika in the Soviet Union and, by contagion, in Poland and Hungary, or, some people say, the breakdown of those Communist regimes and the willingness of their leaders to admit – economically at least – their system is failing.

There’s been a lively debate going on here on many television panels between conservatives and liberals, Republicans and Democrats, congressmen, former Cabinet officers, public figures of opposing political stands about whether or not the Cold War has ended.

This argument, this theme, has always shadowed most previous summits. It appears to have been put on hold at Paris, since the United States and Britain made very clear before the meeting that no new talks about nuclear missiles of any shape or size would go forward until there’s a signed agreement on the reduction of conventional forces. And whereas at all previous summits the protagonists were the President of the United States and the General Secretary of the Soviet Union – whether they were present or absent – whereas the undeclared agenda was the confrontation of the two superpowers and how to end the Cold War, this summit was very different.

One third of the final communiqué was about protecting the earth’s ecological balance. A task force was set up to stop the laundering of fortunes through the international drug traffic. The third big concern was the ruinous debt of the nations of the Third World and here six of the seven nations were pleased, or relieved, to leave this thankless task to Washington and its strategy of nudging, begging, bullying American banks to negotiate.

Incidentally, the pressing American concern to help in forgiving, forgetting or negotiating the huge national debts of the nations of South and Central America drew much sympathy from the other six but not much help.

And here we come to the reason why President Bush was not – could not – be this time the commanding figure that Mr Reagan was at other times. Not just that Mr Bush is easy-going and not talented by way of simple magnetic eloquence, but this time the United States is no longer the open-handed rich uncle of yesteryear.

It was the Japanese who talked about billions in aid behind the Iron Curtain while Mr Bush offered Mr Walesa a mere hundred million, a genuine shock to Mr Walesa who probably hadn’t heard about America’s own $120 billion deficit. “A hundred million”, said Mr Walesa, “I need ten billions.”

Well, the American deficit is going down while the economy – against the predictions of all the liberal economists during the past eight years – is robustly healthy. But because Europe is prospering too, and more willing to accept Mr Gorbachev as a friend and not as an inevitable foe, the Europeans have a new confidence, a new sense of their own importance as economic movers and shakers, so that, as somebody said, unlike President Reagan who came to these economic summits to conquer and command, President Bush was more like a tourist who came to look around and shop.

By the way, most of the ideas, the prescriptions, that found their way into the communiqué, did not for once come from Washington but from London, Bonn, Paris.

Mr Bush and Secretary of State Baker are not saying so out loud, but they know it and if Mr Bush can bear the small wound to his vanity and can brace himself to resist the sinister warnings of his party’s right wing, surely he will recognise a healthy change in a Europe that no longer feels obliged to kowtow to Washington as Poland and Hungary are no longer compelled to kowtow to Moscow.

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