FRANCE: In the days following France's rejection of the European constitutional treaty, President Jacques Chirac showed how seriously he took the crisis by appointing one of his most trusted aides, Catherine Colonna, as European affairs minister. Her appointment marks a shift in priorities: for the first time, the European affairs minister is at least as powerful as the minister of foreign affairs.
Ms Colonna, who visits Dublin today, is a convinced European. She rejects the assertion of Luxembourg's prime minister, Jean-Claude Juncker, that "Europe no longer makes people dream", saying: "Europe must make people dream. We must be proud, proud of what has been accomplished. It's incredible, formidable. Europe is a miracle."
A career diplomat, Ms Colonna achieved the feat of never committing a single gaffe as Mr Chirac's spokeswoman from 1995 until 2004. In the country which invented the langue de bois (empty verbosity), she earned the gratitude of journalists by providing honest, articulate answers.
Ms Colonna is part of the "Washington gang" - members of Mr Chirac's inner circle who served at the French embassy in Washington in the early 1980s. Her good friend Dominique de Villepin, today France's prime minister, and Jean-David Levitte, now ambassador to the US, are others.
It is indicative of the more humble attitude in Paris since the May 29th referendum that Ms Colonna is visiting Ireland and one or two other countries, probably Scandinavian, to learn from their economic success.
In the run-up to the European Council of October 27th/28th, devoted to competitiveness and social policies in the EU, Ms Colonna says: "Several countries, including Ireland, certainly have things to teach us about reconciling economic efficiency with European social values . . . I may bring back a few ideas for the prime minister and president."
The Irish Government is still drawing up its White Paper on the European Constitution, and Irish officials seem to hope that France might vote a second time, as Ireland did on the Nice Treaty. Ms Colonna does not think so.
"We cannot imagine how it would be possible to ask the French to vote on the same text a second time," she says. "I know my compatriots, and I don't think it would be sensible." Nor is renegotiation likely. "No one is talking about it," she says, "and the result would probably be a text of poorer quality."
Yet France, like Ireland, persists in wanting a constitution for Europe. The referendum in Luxembourg, which ratified the treaty this summer, "showed there was not a momentum for rejection", Ms Colonna says. The council's decision to take stock of the situation in mid-2006 "keeps all possibilities open for the future".
Turkey is to begin negotiating with the EU on October 3rd. But Ankara put its British supporters in a difficult position and offended much of the Union by declaring at the end of July that its signature of the Ankara protocol on customs union in no way implied recognition of Cyprus. "This new element led us to demand an explanation from Turkey . . . and to ask a logical, commonsense question," Ms Colonna says. "Isn't it odd on the part of a country - Turkey - that aspires to join the Union to start by contesting the composition of the Union? There's a contradiction there we'd like to get rid of."
Fritz Bolkestein, the former EU commissioner, helped to sink the French referendum by telling journalists that, under his erstwhile services directive, if he could not find a plumber for his holiday home in France, he would call a Polish plumber, who would cost less anyway.
The mythical "Polish plumber" crystallised French fears of east Europeans taking their jobs. With a sense of humour, Ms Colonna has hung a poster of a Polish plumber, a gift from the Polish ambassador, in the waiting room of her office.
"Unfortunately, we didn't explain enough that enlargement was positive for France," Ms Colonna says. "Now - not as a promise of future development - if you looked, you might find three or four Polish plumbers, but there are tens of thousands of jobs thanks to enlargement."
The EU needed to address the impression of citizens that enlargement "was a process whose limits and finality you couldn't see, which you were not sure was under control", Ms Colonna says. "Ultimately," she adds, "it is a question of European identity, of what it means to be European. We need to debate it more profoundly than we have until now."
In their speeches, the French president and prime minister vow to defend the "French social model", which critics associate with high taxation and an inefficient social protection system. "The point of the October Council is not to have a confrontation of model versus model," Ms Colonna says. For France, the goal of the council is to consider "how Europe can reconcile a dynamic economic model oriented towards growth with . . . the social dimension".
This question, she says, "is at the heart of European identity today, at the heart of the questions facing our societies".
Ms Colonna grew up on a farm in the Indre-et-Loire department and she has called herself "a pragmatic, down-to-earth country girl". The French and the Irish, she says, share a "spontaneous, slightly excessive, demonstrative" character. There is more to their friendship than joint defence of the Common Agricultural Policy. "We're attached to the land, to the countryside, to the climate. It's not just an economic variable. There is something more culturally profound."
After a working lunch with Noel Treacy, her Irish counterpart, Ms Colonna will meet another "country girl", the Minister for Agriculture, Mary Coughlan. She'll catch up with the Taoiseach, whom she knows from her years at the Élysée, and finds "très sympa", at his constituency office in Drumcondra.
At her lecture on Economic Growth and Social Models at the Institute of European Affairs, Ms Colonna will stress that, under the Villepin government, "there is a genuine determination to more actively seek growth and employment". In the evening, at the French ambassador's residence, Ms Colonna will award Pat Cox, the former president of the European Parliament, the rank of Commander in the Legion of Honour.
