If one needed the proof that Roger Cohen doesn’t understand France and suffers from both Americancentrism and from Sarkozyphilis, one can find it today on his column on Sarkozy’s France. In it, he describes France as being on amphetamines (we all know that amphetamines are very healthy and never lead to abuse and addiction). Sugary excerpt:
Now I know there’s a view of Sarkozy as a Bonapartist Caligula, consumed with himself, brooking no dissent, petulant to the point of puerility and governing in such perpetual motion that he will only see the wall he’s condemned to hit when it’s too late.
True, Sarkozy is not Saint Augustine, Gandhi or the Dalai Lama. I don’t like his attempt to subjugate the media — Le Figaro now fawns to a point that’s cloying and his control-the-message TV machinations are shameful. I also think the president should open his mind to Turkish membership of the European Union.
But this man is a tonic to his country and the most important European leader of his time.
In the space of a year, he has transformed France’s relations with the United States, Israel, its North African neighbors and NATO. On the domestic front, he has got a Socialist leader to confess he’s also a liberal, a word long so taboo to the French left because of its free-market associations that embracing it was worse than admitting incest.
Let’s take international matters first. Sarkozy’s Mediterranean Union summit — a kind of Club Med Bastille Day bash — had its share of vapid ostentation, but was significant for several reasons.
It got the Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, and the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, in the same room, drew the latter out of isolation and signaled a new European awareness of how its identity has become inseparable from societies across the “mother sea” that have sent so many of their Muslim sons and daughters northward.
At a deeper level, here was the European Union taking the initiative in its neighborhood rather than in the familiar fallback reactive mode where critiquing the United States masquerades as policy. The Union for the Mediterranean is a near-empty shell but an important impulse for Europe to think big.
Roger Cohen likes Sarkozy because he doesn’t understand France and because Sarkozy isn’t his president. He likes Sarkozy because France as an old and archaic corporation on the verge of collapse which needs a CEO to energize it and to whip it into shape. The trouble of course is that France isn’t a corporate and that it is the way that it is in great part because the French and Francité. It is alarming that Roger Cohen can never get out of his way to see the whole picture and that in this case, he is never able to realize that not every country has to American light or Americalike. In other words, it is acceptable that Roger Cohen doesn’t understand France, but what is unacceptable and even offensive is his stubborn attempt to believe that he gets it because when he goes to the French capital, he is an American in Paris. The trouble with Sarkophilis and Americancentrism is precisely their egocentrism.