To explain the dilemma that is at the heart of France’s armaments policy today, this Adelphi considers the origins of the institutional arrangements that have underpinned the French arms-export doctrine since the Cold War.
At the 2013 Paris Air Show, attended by the world’s biggest military and commercial aircraft manufacturers, President François Hollande made a joke as he helped the 88-year-old CEO of Dassault Aviation, Serge Dassault, to climb the stairs of an exhibition stand: ‘It’s the state that’s supporting Dassault… as usual,’ he said.1 His words were overheard by a journalist and caused something of a stir in the defence community, even compelling a Dassault Aviation executive to declare in the media that ‘Dassault Aviation does not live at the state’s expense’.2 The quip had touched on a sensitive issue, namely the relationship the French state maintains with the country’s defence industry – and specifically its substantial backing for arms exports.
The French state espouses the doctrine that arms sales are intrinsic to the country’s strategic autonomy. The rationale is as follows: for France to be able to act independently in the defence and foreign-policy domains, which means not having to depend on other states when it wishes to use force, it requires its own weapons-manufacturing capacity. However, the French defence industry cannot survive on domestic orders alone: it also needs to export. Arms exports are therefore both an expression and a vital component of France’s sovereignty. As the defence minister, Florence Parly, put it in 2018, ‘arms exports are the business model of our sovereignty’.3
This doctrine has remained largely intact despite transformations in the global arms trade in the post-Cold War period caused, for example, by Europeanisation, the emergence of multilateral arms-trade norms and the liberalisation of the defence-industrial sector. Although there have been some subtle, below-the-radar changes in French arms-export policy, the overall policy direction has hardly ever been questioned. Furthermore, a vast administrative structure has been created for the purpose of implementing this doctrine – indeed, the defence bureaucracy is largely geared towards promoting arms exports. And this has become a mutually reinforcing relationship: the bureaucracy helps sustain the doctrine and in doing so it also preserves its own scope and influence.
But French arms-export policy comes at a price, because sustaining the arms industry also generates its own kind of dependency. Though France did not become strategically dependent on the United States, as Gaullists feared it would, the country’s defence industry has become economically dependent on its foreign customers, some of which are authoritarian, repressive regimes. This is a potential liability for France’s defence and foreign policies. Also, at a time when European countries are committing themselves to joint defence efforts – in particular by renewing cooperative projects, whether through the European Union or at the bilateral and minilateral levels – clinging to its traditional arms-export policy may become a burden for France in its relations with key European partners. President Emmanuel Macron himself has prioritised deeper European defence cooperation, in particular with Germany. However, the differences of perspective between France and Germany pose a dilemma for French defence and armaments policy. Germany’s current arms-export regulations are generally more restrictive – for example Berlin has placed an embargo on arms sales to Saudi Arabia because of its role in the war in Yemen – whereas the traditional French doctrine implies being potentially open for business with all customers unless they are subject to a United Nations arms embargo (and even that has not always been an impediment – for example France was one of the main suppliers of arms to South Africa during the apartheid era).4
While cooperation with Germany appears indispensable if the goal is to create larger markets and build the foundations of a future European defence policy, mutual inflexibility on export policy may jeopardise Franco-German projects to jointly build, for example, combat aircraft or main battle tanks. The question, therefore, is whether France will choose increased European defence cooperation, which it has long advocated, or preserve its traditional approach to arms exports. The latter would entail continued reliance on distant customers rather than European partners, and if France maintains that course without re-examining its core assumptions or even being open to debate, the country’s defence policy and strategic ambitions may eventually be undermined.
A chequered history
France’s arms-export policy has succeeded in maintaining a domestic defence industry generally capable of supplying the French armed forces with the equipment they need (there are a few significant exceptions, such as uninhabited aerial vehicles), and the underlying assumption that arms sales are in the national interest has survived despite a litany of scandals over the years. To give just a few examples, these include:
L’affaire des vedettes de Cherbourg
In 1967, when President Charles de Gaulle declared an arms export embargo against the combatants in the Six-Day War, the shipbuilding projects already under way in the port city of Cherbourg in Normandy included missile boats – vedettes – for Israel. Though initially the embargo only affected combat aircraft that France was going to deliver to Israel, after January 1969 it was extended to all arms sales. This prompted a reaction from Israel, which had already paid for the vedettes and was awaiting delivery. On Christmas Eve 1969, five missile boats vanished into the night from Cherbourg docks – and were next spotted a few days later in the Mediterranean, sailing under Israeli military command towards Haifa, which they reached on 31 December. The crux of the scandal was that the vedettes almost certainly could not have escaped from Cherbourg without secret complicity on the part of senior French officials, who it seems wanted to find a way of honouring the contract with Israel while preserving good relationships with Arab states.
L’affaire des Exocet
During the 1982 Falklands War, the British destroyer HMS Sheffield was sunk by a French-built Exocet anti-ship missile fired by one of the Argentine Air Force’s French-built Super Étendard combat aircraft. The British government immediately pressured France not to allow any more missiles to reach Buenos Aires. France complied but, controversially, French Exocet technicians who had been in Argentina at the start of the war remained there, assisting with the maintenance of the missile systems previously delivered.5 Though the episode put a little strain on the Franco-British relationship, it undoubtedly also showcased one of the French defence industry’s most advanced products.
L’affaire Luchaire
Between 1983 and 1985 the French company Luchaire was granted licences to sell around 450,000 artillery shells to Portugal, Brazil, Thailand and Yugoslavia – but in fact the shells were destined for Iran, which of course was not only at war with Iraq at the time but also had very strained relations with the West.6 Luchaire had presented false certificates to the French authorities, but it later transpired that Ministry of Defence officials had known what was going on. Indeed, a report ordered by defence minister André Giraud (1986–88) found that Luchaire’s illicit operations had been deliberately covered up by the staff of his predecessor Charles Hernu (1981–85),7 a conclusion corroborated by later investigations.8 Furthermore, there were suspicions that commissions on the contracts with Iran had been paid to the Socialist Party to finance election campaigns.9
L’affaire des frégates de Taïwan
This episode, which had a heavy whiff of corruption and intrigue, began in 1991 when the French government authorised the sale to Taiwan of six La Fayette-class frigates, to be built and armed by Thomson-CSF (later to become Thales) and DCN (later to become Naval Group). The contract was signed after unauthorised commissions were paid to Taiwanese intermediaries, which possibly also led to kickbacks in France. A series of suspicious deaths and probable suicides seemed to be connected with the deal – from the head of the Taiwanese Navy’s procurement office, whose body was found in the sea off Taiwan in 1993, to a former Thomson-CSF engineer, who fell to his death from the window of his Toulouse apartment in 2001. An international panel of arbitrators eventually ruled in 2010 that the Taiwanese government was owed compensation for the payment of the earlier bribes: Thales had to pay €170 million (US$226m) and the French state itself had to pay €460m (US$610m) on behalf of DCN, which had been fully state-owned in the early 1990s.
The Taiwanese affaire actually marked a turning point for French arms-export policy. Although the sale of the frigates to Taiwan – followed, later in the 1990s, by Mirage 2000 combat aircraft – was a timely boost for the French defence industry during a period when its markets were contracting following the end of the Cold War, the exposure of dubious practices increased the pressure within the French government for an overhaul of the regulations governing sales of materiel. Indeed, it was clear from interviews conducted during the research for this book that bad memories of the Taiwanese episode lingered within the Ministry of Defence and Ministry of Foreign Affairs for many years afterwards, along with anxieties about the possibility of such a case being repeated.
President Jacques Chirac, after his election in 1995, decided to halt payments to intermediaries who had been involved in securing two important contracts: with Saudi Arabia for the sale of – again – La Fayette-class frigates (generally referred to as the Sawari II contract), and with Pakistan for the export of Agosta-class submarines. There might have been an element of self-interest in Chirac’s decision, as there were suspicions that the contracts had included kickbacks to finance the presidential election campaign of his rival Edouard Balladur, but it nonetheless had wide-ranging consequences. It sharply reduced the flow of arms from France to Saudi Arabia, as Riyadh restricted its orders to upgrades of existing systems and did not sign another major contract with a French supplier until the Hollande presidency (2012–17). As for the impact on relations with Pakistan, an ongoing judicial investigation in France is looking into whether the bombing of a bus in Karachi in 2002, in which 15 people including 11 French naval engineers were killed, could have been the indirect result of the cessation of payments to intermediaries.10 Meanwhile, Balladur, prime minister between 1993 and 1995, and François Léotard, his defence minister at the time, are currently due to appear before the Cour de Justice de la République, a special court that examines cases of possible ministerial misconduct, over their alleged involvement in corruption related to the Sawari II and Pakistan submarine contracts.
It is hardly surprising that governments can become deeply involved in trying to ensure that defence companies win export contracts. After all, defence sales can make a major contribution to national security, technological advancement and job creation; they can play a role in forging closer relations with other countries; and, of course, they can generate enormous revenues – the global arms trade in 2017 was estimated to be worth at least US$95 billion,11 and in 2018 France earned €6.97bn (US$8.23bn) from its sales of materiel.12 But of course, arms-export policy reflects a balance between promotion and control. Based on a range of criteria, governments decide which types of equipment can be exported and which other countries are appropriate customers.
In France, politicians have tended to absolve themselves of responsibility for decisions regarding arms exports by relying instead on the efficacy of the government’s bureaucratic machinery – and by using the bureaucracy as a lightning rod when questions arise about controversial sales. But when it comes to arms-export policy, it is illusory to pretend that a bureaucratic process, however rigorous, can somehow take the place of strategic political decision-making.
The choice facing France
There is a dilemma at the heart of France’s armaments policy today: it wants to increase defence cooperation with its European partners, in particular Germany, yet is reluctant to alter its liberal arms-export policy, which has been economically and strategically successful in the past. To explain how this contradiction came about, this book shows how the arms-export doctrine embedded itself in the French defence establishment and therefore became difficult to adapt. To understand the challenge the country faces, it is useful to consider:
the origins, under President de Gaulle in the 1960s, of the doctrine of promoting arms exports;
the bureaucratic institutional arrangements that continue to exert a powerful influence in favour of the status quo;
the principal shifts in the global arms market since the end of the Cold War;
the experimentation with placing greater restrictions on arms exports during President Chirac’s years in office (1995–2007), followed by the reversion to the norm under President Nicolas Sarkozy (2007–12) and very few changes under his successor President Hollande (2012–17) or, so far, President Macron (2017–).
Put another way, this book considers the effects on French arms-export policy of rule by the right, the left and cohabitation, and suggests that the limited impact of differing stripes of government underlines the structural rigidities that are the embodiment of the long-standing doctrine. It will conclude with a look to the future and an exploration of potential avenues for change under President Macron, including the prospects for deeper cooperation with European partners in the field of arms-export policy.
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