You could feel a frisson of excitement and dread last night around the rococo halls of the Quai d'Orsay, the palatial home of the French foreign ministry, as the staff welcomed their leftist-activist-minister back from his conservative government's peace mission to the troubled banks of the Potomac.
There was a sense – among a ministerial staff made up mainly of former human-rights activists whose casual back-patting manner resembles early episodes of The West Wing more than the grave world of traditional French diplomacy – that history is being made here. In a set of gestures culminating in a rapprochement, almost an entente cordiale, with George W. Bush this week, France had entered into a bold and risky experiment, one the whole world should watch.
The author of the experiment is Bernard Kouchner, the 67-year-old physician, Socialist Party stalwart and founder of the charity Doctors Without Borders, who this summer became President Nicolas Sarkozy's unlikely choice as foreign minister. In the past dozen weeks, in a whirl of dramatic trips to every continent, Mr. Kouchner has outlined a mission that is as improbable as everything else in his life: to unite Europe and the United States in muscular humanitarian missions to improve the world, without immediate regard for national interest.
The Kouchner project is a dramatic bid for political idealism – possibly the last time any major nation will make such a bid for a very long time. The Iraq war has seen to that: As an attempt at projecting democratic ideals onto the world, with backing by an awkward group of idealists on the right and the left, it has failed so grotesquely as to discredit humanitarian idealism, possibly for another generation.
Mr. Kouchner's central and possibly fatal dilemma is that the principles he played a key role in creating over the past four decades may have created a disaster that has rendered his principles unworkable.
Self-interest on the rise
The world is retreating into spheres of national interest, and humanitarian actions have become very hard to sell. In the U.S., weakened and neutered by its wars, both political parties seem to be taking an inward, self-protecting turn. Russia and China are engaged in expensive missions that serve only their own ends, often with terrible human, economic and ecological costs. The European Union is having a long moment of indecision.
Bernard Kouchner, the man who invented the concepts of humanitarian intervention and the “duty to protect” and made them part of United Nations doctrine, who persuaded nations to stick their noses and sometimes their guns into the business of others, may be uniquely positioned to perform the judo-flip necessary to put the world's powers to work on this moment's gravest humanitarian problems. He certainly believes he is. Having spent 40 years close to both the dictators and the democrats who run the world today, he may have a reasonable claim.
He also seems to believe, according to his staff, that he can do the contortions needed to keep his project's two worst enemies at bay: Nicolas Sarkozy, who could force him out of office at any moment, and the United States, which could ruin everything with a short-sighted spasm of violence, such as bombing Iran.
“I know the difficulties of doing this,” he explained recently. “Americans and Europeans today are listened to with suspicion as soon as we start talking about democracy and human rights. It is a terrible irony. The risk now is that the messenger may have killed the message, that the very name of human rights entails rejection and suspicion among the very people it should help.”
There are plenty of people, “realists” and others, who believe the world is better off if nations protect their interests and mind their own business.
