Wellington
Opinion
Fusion after fission? ... France wants to be friends again
The nuclear powers have always taken New Zealand and South Pacific opposition to their wretched weapons of destruction very personally.
The United States persistently deemed David Lange’s anti-nuclear policy anti-American despite clear evidence that it had widespread pub lic support, as was proved by the fact that an undeniably pro-American National Party eventually embraced it. The French, for their part, saw last year’s outbreak of condemnation of resumed testing at Mururoa as evi dence that New Zealand, Australia and the peoples of the Pacific wanted France to quit the region.
This was never true and even those who favour independence for French Polynesia and New Caledonia in the conviction that all indigenous peoples have a right to choose their own destiny, accepted that a precipitate withdrawal by France would be a disaster for everyone in the region.
With the Mururoa site now closed for good, France has embarked on the task of repairing the damage President Jacques Chirac’s summary resumption of testing last year did to its standing in the Pacific.
It will not be easy, as the French must have realised, when they ended the 1992 moratorium of Chirac’s predecessor, Francois Mitterrand.
In those three years, France had pre sented a new face to the Pacific. It changed its entire philosophy towards the
region. Suspicion was replaced with
entente cordiale, self-imposed isolation with co-operation - and the entire South Pacific climate was the better for it.
As France opened up its territories politically and economically to their neighbours, the diplomatic and economic environments improved to their best con dition in a decade. All that goodwill was lost overnight with the decision to resume testing. The reaction was swift, genuine, deep and widespread.
It came not just from New Zealand and Australia, which had spearheaded opposi tion to the previous resumption in 1973.
The South Pacific Forum, which had warned in 1994 that a new round of tests
would be a “major setback to the current positive trend in relations between France and the region”, suspended its annual dia logue with Paris.
That it was not willing to kiss and make-up overnight was apparent from the Forum’s reluctance to restore the dialogue immediately following the end of testing.
At the time of writing, the Forum has still not approved France’s attendance at this month’s summit in Majuro.
France wants to be there, the French ambassador to Wellington, Jacques Le Blanc, told me, so that it can “hear at first hand what the Pacific Island countries expect from us”. France, he said, was anxious to discuss what it could do to improve the delivery of aid to the region.
In other words, France, which is already the fourth biggest Pacific donor after New Zealand, Australia and Japan, wants to be
a good neighbour again.
It is not entirely an altruistic aim. The French, like all European countries, are keenly eyeing the dynamism of the entire Asia-Pacific region and want to be a part of it in the 21st century.
The balance of economical power has moved away from the Atlantic axis that dominated after the Second World War and is now very much focused on the Pacific Rim.
It is not just a matter of looking after its territories in the Pacific and striving to keep them under the influence of Paris.
They have to form their own trade and investment links with their neighbours
while France expands its econom ic ties with the broader region.
To this end, Le Blanc revealed that France will send a high-powered trade and investment mission to New Zealand early next year. It was hoped, he said, it would mark
formally the complete resumption
of friendly relations following the end of nuclear testing.
The mission, which will include chief executives of France’s major companies, banks and financial institutions, is being personally backed by Chirac, who has urged French companies to make expan sion of trade and investment in the Asia-Pacific region a priority.
About 50 French companies have
established operations in New Zealand to date, compared with 250 in Australia, which indicates there is plenty of room for expansion.
Ironically, in view of last year’s talk of boycotts of French products in retaliation for nuclear testing, France actually lifted its exports to New Zealand to a record level. France also posted a trade surplus with New Zealand for the first time.
Although the export figures were skewed by Air New Zealand’s one-off purchase of seven new French aircraft for a domestic subsidiary, sales of other goods were 10 per cent up on 1994. This probably reflected the buoyant New Zealand economy more than anything else.
While encouraging more French com mercial participation in the region, Paris is also keen to see New Zealand compa nies invest in French Polynesia and New Caledonia to expand its integration with regional economies.
The figures show there is still some way to go. In the first quarter of 1996, New Caledonia shipped more than a third of its exports to France while buying 56 per cent of its imports from France and the rest of the European Union.
New Zealand accounted for only 6.5 per cent of imports into New Caledonia, its nearest neighbour, while distant mar kets such as Japan, the United States, Korea and Taiwan remain bigger cus tomers. ■