“Hello, I can’t understand why the French, especially those in Paris, hate the British so much. Despite the historical wars of CENTURIES ago, we have been through so much together, especially during the World Wars. We have worked together since then, the Channel Tunnel being an example. Many French citizens work in Great Britain and many Brits visit or settle as expats in France. The attitude of the average Paris-born person is ridiculous and just outright rude! As someone who was thinking of living in Paris for a year, I am very put-off by this superficial attitude of many Frenchies. Can you explain why the French or Parisians have this dreadful attitude towards the British?”
Letter to the editor, Swamp.Media.com, April 25th
The French and the British may have fought wars together as allies, they are virtually neighbors separated by a narrow body of water, once bound within the European Union and share much history and many values to the present day. Maybe it is the fact that France conquered Britain beginning with the Battle of Hastings in 1066 (the “Norman Conquests”), or maybe it’s just part of being “French.” How about the Napoleonic era? Conflicts were common. Both France and England also engaged in excessive global colonialism from the 17th through the 20th centuries, often having bordering colonial territories with less-the-clear boundaries. Fighting for resources and global influence was particularly acute between Brits and the French. Skirmishes from North America to Asia were part of their relationship, even as royals intermarried on occasion. Remember the French helped the nascent 13 US colonies in their revolution against England.
These two powers even engaged in secret treaties to carve up losers in wars and hapless powerless nations where they were most vulnerable, occasionally creating new “nations” along the most unnatural boundaries that failed to take the local population into consideration. Like the infamous back-room Sykes-Picot Treaty of 1916 that established each nation’s respective post-WWI claims to large sections of the Middle East. Nobody consulted the people who lived there.
Even when the Maastricht Treaty (aka, The Treaty on European Union) was signed in 1992 and implemented by subsequent agreements, that rather obvious lack of trust that the French evidenced against the UK lingered. Believing that the UK were financial sector “cowboys,” very much like the United States also viewed as economically predatory by the French, the French were determined to keep the European Central Bank anywhere but England, even willing accept once mortal enemy Germany over England. Wow!
The Brits retaliated by retaining their own currency, but the Central Bank was located in Frankfort and run with a heavy emphasis on German financial values: based heavy fears of the kind of currency diluting inflation they experienced after WWI and less concerned with economic contraction, whether by way of recession or even a potential depression. This is one of the reasons that the Central Bank focuses on “austerity” when making loans to financially struggling EU member states, as we have seen in Spain, Portugal and Greece. Hardly the go-go growth models embraced by British capitalism.
In many quarters of France, when the Brits pulled Brexit out of a hat and voted to leave the European Union, there was a sigh of relief. Good riddance? The difficulty in reaching a post-Brexit accord with the UK was littered with issues, some seeming without reference to France – like keeping Northern Ireland (part of the UK) economically within the EU via an open border with Ireland (EU) – to simple yet difficult UK-French battles over fishing rights, which obviously had to deal with the “English” Channel. Were these real or just a way to keep the tensions front and center? The fishermen felt the reality; the politicians may have felt the traditional animosity.
Some of the unresolved issues, ones that allow for French insistence on economic containment of UK efforts in the continued economic world, are now devolving around the wording of the post-Brexit accord. You see, the UK is heavily dependent on its marketing of global financial services and its equity markets as one of its largest economic sectors and less so on manufactures. But the accord deals only with goods, a catch-22 of which the French are acutely aware.
The April 22nd BBC.com explains: “The European Parliament [was] expected to ratify the post-Brexit EU-UK trade deal, amid tensions including a French threat of reprisals against the UK… The Trade and Co-operation Agreement (TCA) has been operating provisionally since January and [was] ratified by MEPs [on April 27th]... French Europe Minister Clément Beaune accused the UK of blocking fishing rights. He said the EU could respond with ‘reprisals’ in financial services.
“The TCA covers EU-UK trade in goods… It means goods - but not services - can be traded free of tariffs or quotas. The UK economy is dominated by services… The TCA has still resulted in more paperwork, extra costs and less trade between the two sides, since the UK left the EU.
“Praising the deal when it was agreed in December, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson said ‘we have taken back control of our laws and our destiny.’… He described it as ‘a deal which will if anything allow our companies and our exporters to do even more business with our European friends.’…
“France's Clément Beaune threatened reprisals in sectors such as financial services if the UK failed to implement agreements on fishing in full… The UK made fishing rights a key issue in the negotiations, with control over access to its waters seen as a sign of British sovereignty… Mr Beaune warned that France could hold up approvals for British financial service operators to work in the EU.
‘‘The United Kingdom is expecting quite a few authorisations from us for financial services. We won't give any for as long as we don't have guarantees on fishing and other issues,’ he said on French news channel BFMTV… French fishermen have complained of being prevented from operating in British waters because of difficulties in obtaining licences.” Indeed, the final vote tally on the TCA among the Members of the European Parliament says it all: 660 votes in favor to 5 opposed, while 32 abstained. I suspect we shall see petty grievances to litter the future relations of the European Union (pressed by France) and the UK. Sigh!
I’m Peter Dekom, and it is strange that the very construct (the EU) that was created to prevent intra-European animosity, which historically gave rise to numerous smaller wars (often prolonged) and two major world wars, never completely settled the British-French mutual distrust, a fact which seems to face renewed escalation in the post-Brexit era.
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