Routledge Cross Channel Currents: 100 Years of the Entente Cordiale

Cross Channel Currents explores the understandings and misunderstandings that make up the Entente Cordiale - the hundred-year relationship between Britain and France, as well as the everyday common interests and shared pleasures that give it substance.Contributors include the late Roy Jenkins, in a witty and personal view of Winston Churchill's relationship with France; Pierre Messmer, a companion of Charles de Gaulle during World War II and later his prime minister; former Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd, who remembers the historic meeting of Edward Heath and Georges Pompidou; Hubert Vedrine, a former French foreign minister, on the difficulties of cross-Channel relations; and their successors Dominique de Villepin and Jack Straw. Review 'Cross-Channel Currents, a thought-provoking collection of fifty or so historical and political essays, reminiscences and futurology, by distinguished French and British authors, published to mark this week's hundredth anniversary of this elusive Entente.' - The Independent About the Author Douglas Johnson is professor emeritus of French history, University of London.Richard Mayne is a writer and broadcaster. He was personal assistant to Jean Monnet, a senior official of the European Commission, and for six years its UK representative.Robert Tombs is a reader in French history at the University of Cambridge, and the author of France 1814-1914 (1996). Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Excerpt from the Introduction That sweet enemy, France. The phrase, from Sir Philip Sidneys Astrophil and Stella, dates from 1591, but after four centuries its hint of a lovehate relationship still touches a nerve. Like magnets, the French and the British feel mutual attraction: yet, the poles reversed, they grope for each other in vain, baffled by what forces them apart. As another poet, the Canadian Earle Birney, put it:We French, we English, never lost our civil war, endure it still, a bloodless civil bore;no wounded lying about, no Whitman wanted.Its only by our lack of ghosts were haunted.For a hundred years, the Entente Cordiale has sought to lay any lingering ghosts with qualified success. This book surveys that century of Franco-British history and asks how the Entente fares today.In doing so, it examines controversies and crises. At times these have involved real clashes of interest. Some disputes are indeed a zero-sum game. But not always. Increasingly, France and Britain resemble each other. Both were once world-class powers with extensive empires. Their political ideals have much in common and they share a broadly European culture. Each is endowed with a fine and sophisticated language. In the twenty-first century, both are uncomfortably dwarfed because neither is now a superpower. Each faces similar problems of immigration and globalisation. Both make common cause in the European Union, but each is concerned for its ancient nationhood. Does such likeness make for like-mindedness or liking? It can, but frequently does not. Britain and France have been said to resemble deux chiens de faïence, china dogs staring at each other from either side of the fireplace, in identical but diametrically opposite poses, each the mirror image of the other. And the images are blurred by language, mental habits, history, propaganda and folk memory. Language raises not only linguistic problems (approximately solved by translation), but also semantic or hermeneutic complications. Most obviously, English, more than French, has Germanic as well as Romance roots. This makes ordinary French expressions seem abstract or pompous to unaccustomed British ears, while to French listeners some English expressions can sound curt or even brutal. Add the French habit of analysing problems as if from an administrative overview, putting principles first. This often clashes with the British habit of beginning with practical details and then