THE BROOKINGS INSTITUTION CENTER ON THE UNITED STATES AND EUROPE CUSE ANNUAL CONFERENCE 2007 Washington, D.C. Monday, April 30, 2007 2 Welcome and Introduction DANIEL BENJAMIN, Director of the Center on the United States and Europe, The Brookings Institution The French Elections Chair: JIM HOAGLAND, The Washington Post Panelists: LAURENT COHEN-TANUGI, Skadden Arps, Notre Europe PHILIP GORDON, The Brookings Institution CORINE LESNES, Le Monde NATO in Afghanistan Chair: CARLOS PASCUAL, The Brookings Institution Panelists: LT. GEN. KARL EIKENBERRY, Deputy MR. of the NATO Military Committee ASHRAF GHANI, former Finance Minister of Afghanistan MARVIN WEINBAUM, Middle East Institute Islam in Europe Chair: JEREMY SHAPIRO, The Brookings Institution Panelists: DANIEL BENJAMIN, The Brookings Institution TUFYAL CHOUDHURY, Durham University JONATHAN LAURENCE, Boston College * * * * * 3 P R O C E E D I N G S MR. BENJAMIN: Well, good morning. I'm Daniel Benjamin, Director of the Brookings Center on the U.S. and Europe, and I want to welcome you to our fourth annual conference. It's hard to think of a time when Washington has been more self- obsessed, whether it's the war over the war between the two ends of Pennsylvania Avenue; the war over the stewardship of the World Bank; or, for those who have other interests, the question of who ABC News will out next. And so had anyone said that they wanted to spend the day simply refreshing Google news at their desk, one could have had a lot of understanding for them. With that said, I'm very pleased that so many of you have turned up to listen about some key issues regarding what is going on in Europe and regarding the endeavors that join the United States and Europe together. As is customary for our annual conferences, we have chosen not to pick a single overarching theme for the day out of our belief that there is much more going on at many different levels than could ever be captured by such a theme and that this would be more of a limitation than an inspiration to creative thinking. We're going to look at three very different kinds of issues today. First we'll look at high politics and the issue of Europe's changing leadership, and so our opening panel is on the French elections. Later in the day we'll discuss the very crucial tests that the United States and Europe face together through their core institution, NATO, and its mission in Afghanistan. We'll consider the stakes and also the prospects for this difficult undertaking. Finally we’ll consider what's going on at the grassroots in terms of the changing composition of Europe and a demographic shift that may be the most dramatic that Europe has experienced in many decades if not even centuries. 4 Putting this program together has taken a significant amount of effort, not least on the part of or panelists, and some of them have traveled a great distance. I want to thank them personally for coming in from Europe. Laurent Cohen-Tanugi; Tufyal Choudhury; General Karl Eikenberry. All those flew from Europe. I think the door prize for the longest trip would go to Ashraf Ghani, who flew in from Kabul, but he made it a more humane endeavor by staying for the week. That may be a record, though, for distance. Anyway, we also have to thank our sponsors, and I'm afraid we have too many for me to list right here. I think they should be on your program. But I do want to recognize one of our most stalwart supporters, Cesare Merlini of the Council on the U.S. and Italy, who has come here from Rome. And I also want to thank the German Marshall Fund for its generosity in supporting this specific event. With that, I want to turn it over to Jim Hoagland, who's hoofed it up from 15th Street, which is also a long distance sometimes, and allow him to begin the panel on the French elections. And thank you very much for being with us today, Jim. 5 The French Elections MR. HOAGLAND: And thank you. I want to commend the audience on getting up to be here at 9 a.m. It's a remarkable turnout. But I think you've chosen well. It's a fascinating election. I've just come back from ten days in Paris, and for me, being there for the first tour, the first round of the election, really was a pleasure, as well as a good bit of work, to see France, which many times has struck me over the last fifteen to twenty years as being in a mild depression. I don't mean economic as much as psychological. And on Sunday, April 22nd, the French at least briefly, but I think perhaps more than briefly, snapped out of it and went to the polls in almost record numbers for a first tour and were passionate about this campaign. They also succeeded in eliminating the extremes in this round in contrast to 2002. This was, in many ways, a vote against 2002 -- the results of 2002. That's what I observed. Now we're going to go to people who have thought about this much more concretely perhaps than I've been able to do. They are well known enough you don't need introductions, but in case you do, it's printed in the overview that's available outside. So, I'm going to not take away from their time by going into long introductions and just simply ask them to give us a five- to seven-minute summary of their views on the French elections. Then we'll come back for a short discussion up here on the panel, and then we'll go to Q&A from the audience. So, we'll start with Laurent Cohen-Tanugi from Skadden Arps. MR. COHEN-TANUGI: Thank you, Jim. Good morning. I will -- with five, seven minutes' time I will maybe limit my remarks to domestic politics at this point, and then we can go on to broader subjects later. It is, in fact, a fascinating election. I am impressed by the level of 6 interest that this election generates, including in the United States. I would say from a French point of view, it has really become interesting ever since the third man, François Bayrou, emerged, which made things a little more complicated and interesting. What I would do is first give you my views about the outcome of the first round. I think this outcome is very positive, for a number of reasons. One, as Jim said, we've had a record turnout with almost 85 percent, which is really extraordinary and has not been seen since 1965, and that's clearly the result of the trauma of the 2002 election, which only had a 72.5 percent -- 72 percent turnout, and that contributed in part to Le Pen being in the second round. But there also has been a very strong interest in the campaign for a number of reasons. This is a critical moment for France. We have new candidates, and also, as I was saying, the Bayrou phenomenon has generated a lot of interest and intensity in the race. The second reason why I think the outcome is positive is that the socialist candidate, Ségolène Royal, made it to the second round, and I think this is very important first of all because that raises the stigma of 2002 when no candidate from the left was present in the second round and also because it gives the electorate a real choice and a clear debate between right and left, and I think that's -- if Bayou had been in the second round, things would have been blurred. There would have been too much sort of maneuvering in the debate and the choice would have been less clear. The third reason, and this is not in contradiction; I think it's -- Bayrou's performance of 18.5 percent, or seven million voters, is quite remarkable. It was totally unexpected at the outset and I think it's a positive phenomenon. It will undoubtedly shake things up for the future. And the fourth reason why the first one was positive is of course that Le Pen is now down to 10.5 percent. I think this is largely the result of 7 Sarkozy's strategy, which has been very controversial and criticized, but at least he has succeeded in taking away a significant number of voters from the Front National, and I personally believe that with Le Pen's age and if Sarkozy succeeds, we are likely to see the Front National recede in the future. The other extreme candidates have done very poorly -- about, you know, 12 percent total, and so the outcome of the first round can be seen as a victory of the sort of government parties, which total more than 75 percent of the vote between Royal, Sarkozy, and Bayrou and, to some extent, a victory of the “yes” camps to the European referendum, which is like a reversal from May 2005. Now, a few words on the the prospect for the second round. This first week has been dominated surprisingly by -- still by the third man, François Bayrou. Even though he's out of the race, he's managed to stay the center of the stage because obviously both camps are trying to attract as much as possible of his voters. It's clear that for Ségolène Royal, her only chance of winning is to attract more than half of the seven million voters that voted for François Bayrou, and that's quite a challenge, because even though normally you would think that most of François Bayrou's voters would vote on the right, because after all François Bayrou is a man of the center right, the expectation was that the voters would split 50/50, and of course the challenge for Royal is to get more than that, and that's with the assumption that Sarkozy would only get roughly 30 percent of his voters.