How the French president has overturned the normal rules of diplomacy

TO UNDERSTAND just how much Nicolas Sarkozy has upturned French diplomacy, try inserting the name Jacques Chirac into the following report. The French president invited himself to Camp David (see picture), where he appeared alongside "dear George", spoke warmly of "the great American nation" and called for a special summit of G8 countries to "refound capitalism" soon after the American presidential election. The Americans should host it, he declared, "because the crisis took off in New York". President George Bush, appearing rather startled, limply agreed (the White House has since announced that the summit will meet near Washington, DC, on November 15th).

The whirlwind of emergency summits held or planned by Mr Sarkozy over the past few weeks has been positively dizzying. He wants to hold yet another European Union meeting (France occupies the rotating six-monthly EU presidency) to prepare for the new financial summit. At the end of this week he was due in Beijing for an EU-Asia summit, hoping to get the Chinese and others on board. AH this has come after weeks of frantic shuttling, before the financial crisis hit, between Paris, Moscow and Tbilisi in efforts to mediate in the war between Russia and Georgia.

It is hard to recall that, only a few years ago, France's voice went unheard not only in Washington but also in Europe. Europe was deeply split over the Iraq war in 2003-04. In the EU, France was undermined by its rejection of the constitutional treaty in 2005. Yet today Mr Sarkozy has put France—and Europe—back on the diplomatic map. To be sure, it is easier to behave like an alpha-male leader with a lame-duck American president. And gallingly, Mr Sarkozy has had to share the limelight over Europe's bank-rescue plan with Britain's Gordon Brown. But it is the French president who has had the EU mandate to act as globe-trotting European diplomat-in-chief. He has milked it for all it is worth.

Indeed, as Europe congratulates itself on its show of united leadership, the argument is increasingly being heard that it should entrench such a role. Recent events, goes the argument, show that Europe needs a permanent president, as proposed in the Lisbon treaty, which has been on hold since the Irish rejected it in a referendum in June. This week Mr Sarkozy argued that 'the world needs a Europe that speaks with a strong voice", and noted that this was difficult with a rotating presidency. Jose Manuel Barroso, the European Commission president (above, in the back of the golf-cart), made the same point in an interview with Le Figaro. Just think, some mutter darkly, what would have happened if the financial crisis and the war in Georgia had taken place under the preceding Slovenian presidency.

Yet there is an obvious flaw in this argument: it equates leadership with institutions. If Mr Sarkozy has appeared as a strong European leader, this is because of his political qualities and egotism, not because of the EU's institutional arrangements. Indeed, it is possible to take precisely the opposite line over the Lisbon treaty: that Mr Sarkozy's hyperactivism demonstrates that strong European leadership does not need a new institutional set-up; and even that to have had another worthy as permanent EU president would just have created another obstacle.

For the essence of Mr Sarkozy's approach, at home and abroad, is not to allow the niceties of protocol to get in his way. He seems to have quietly forgotten that the G8 is currently chaired by Japan (the financial summit is now formally a G20 meeting). Nor was it EU orthodoxy to invite Mr Brown to a summit of euro-area members, since Britain is not one. But Mr Sarkozy's unFrench, sleeves-rolled-up pragmatism means doing whatever it takes to get things moving. When his October 4th G4 summit in Paris on the financial crisis failed to prevent each-for-himself squabbling, he simply changed the format and tried again a week later. There are reports that he might want a job for himself as president of future euro-area summits.

It is not clear what would have happened had the Lisbon treaty been in force. Short of a heavyweight figure like Britain's Tony Blair in the job, how would a middling EU president have dealt with Russia or the market meltdown? And how long would Mr Sarkozy have tolerated dithering before stepping in to take things in hand? "No doubt about it," says one French diplomat, "he would have been in the plane with the EU president anyway."

It takes unusual leadership qualities to get European countries to agree to anything, let alone to act beyond their national interests. Arguably, on the financial crisis, and after his first flop, Mr Sarkozy achieved the first, but not the second. His original idea for a common European bank bail-out fund was dropped in the face of German resistance to being seen to pay for others. The current rescue plans may have been co-ordinated, but the details are being decided by individual national governments, and no money is being pooled.

The remaining two months of the French EU presidency will test how lasting are Mr Sarkozy's consensus-building powers. He may have proven his ability to charm, cajole and bully fellow Europeans into a show of unity. But he often leaves in his wake a few bruised egos and much disgruntlement. The Spanish, for instance, were offended to have been left out of his G4 meeting, to which he invited only Britain, Germany and Italy. The Germans were deeply angered earlier this year by Mr Sarkozy's original plan for a Mediterranean Union that would have excluded them, as they have no shoreline on the sea.

With Europe facing recession, diverging interests may create fresh strains. It will be hard to secure an EU summit deal on climate-change targets in December, for instance (see article). Mr Sarkozy's call for European sovereign wealth funds to protect companies from foreign predators was instantly attacked in Germany. His proposed "economic government" for the euro area, long pushed by France, was dismissed by Mr Barroso, who called the notion that such a body might give instructions to the European Central Bank "dangerous". The EU's divisions between free-market liberals and state interventionists will be exposed in rows over subsidies to industry, competition rules and capping executive pay. Mr Sarkozy has shown that he is not Mr Chirac when it comes to leading Europe during a crisis. But many old fault-lines in Europe remain.

Article 4

End of the phoney peace

From The Economist print edition

Britain is entering a recession. Labour and the Conservatives disagree on how to soften it

THE last time the British economy was contracting, George Osborne was a student. This week, only a scandal involving the Conservative Treasury spokesman drew attention from the most dismal economic news since 1992. Figures to be published on October 24th were expected to confirm that the three months to the end of September saw the first quarter of negative growth for more than 16 years. Gordon Brown admitted on October 22nd that Britain was almost certainly heading into recession, and a day before the prime minister spoke, Mervyn King offered his grimmest take on the economy in his five-year stint as governor of the Bank of England, warning of *a sharp and prolonged slowdown in domestic demand." The pound promptly fell to its lowest ievel against the dollar since 2003.

Mr King's emphasis on recession, together with notes from the previous meeting of the Monetary Policy Committee showing that its members voted unanimously for the half-point cut in the base rate announced on October 8th, suggests enough worry to prompt another rate cut, perhaps as early as November. Companies would welcome it: the latest survey by the Confederation of British Industry, the main employers' body, recorded the steepest single-quarter fall in manufacturing confidence since 1980.

Most of this gloom has been widely predicted: it was only a matter of time before the financial crisis began to afflict the real economy, and growth had already stalled in the previous quarter. But Mr Osborne is not the only Briton who has never known a recession in his working life. The psychological impact of a shrinking economy may be huge precisely because it is unfamiliar. And whereas the credit crunch has hit much of the world, it may cause especial upheaval in heavily indebted Britain—not least politically. The past month has seen an emboldened prime minister, a diminished opposition, an improbable cabinet reshuffle, and the rise and fall of a political truce between the government and the opposition. All this before a recession had officially begun.