French Negotiating Behavior: Dealing with la Grande Nation by Charles Cogan

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Synopsis

Even before it led opposition to the recent war on Iraq, France was considered the most difficult of the United States’ major European allies. Each side tends to irritate the other, not least at the negotiating table, where Americans complain of French pretensions and arrogance, and the French fulminate against U.S. hegemonisme and egoisme. But, whether they like it or not, the two nations are going to have to deal with one another for a long time to come.

Charles Cogan’s timely and insightful study can’t guarantee to make those encounters more fruitful, but it will help France’s negotiating counterparts understand how and why French officials behave as they do. With impressive objectivity and authority, Cogan first explores the cultural and historical factors that have shaped the French approach and then dissects its key elements. Mixing rationalism and nationalism, rhetoric and brio, self-importance and embattled vulnerability, French negotiators often seem more interested in asserting their country’s “universal” mission than in reaching agreement. Three recent case studies illustrate this distinctively French mélange.

Yet agreement is by no means always elusive. Cogan offers practical suggestions for making negotiations more cooperative and productive—although he also emphasizes the long-term damage inflicted by the crisis over Iraq.

Drawing on candid interviews with many of today’s leading players on the French, American, British, and German sides, this engaging volume will inform and stimulate both seasoned practitioners and academics as well as students of France and the negotiatingprocess.

This book is the recipient of the Prix Ernest Lémonon from L'Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques, 2006

Foreign Affairs

The latest in the U.S. Institute of Peace series on negotiating behavior, Charles Cogan's book takes on France, one of the most timely cases. Cogan, who spent 37 years in the CIA (including as Paris station chief) before becoming a historian at Harvard, plausibly argues that there is something particular about the way the French negotiate, due in part to their history and education. "Cartesian" logic and commitment to principles lock them into fixed positions that clash with the pragmatic Anglo-American approach. (One is reminded of the French diplomat who supposedly said that although NATO peacekeeping worked in practice, he wasn't sure it would work in theory.) Ultimately, however, it seems that the real issue with the French is a matter of what they want more than a matter of how they go about pursuing it. As Cogan demonstrates in this erudite and wide-ranging study, France's enduring desire to have a major role in world affairs and its persistent opposition to U.S. hegemony better explain its diplomatic positions than does any particular approach to negotiation. As one French ambassador admitted to him, France is pursuing "interests clothed in reason."

Biography

Charles Cogan is a senior research associate at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, after a distinguished career in the intelligence community. He has also been a journalist and a military officer. His previous books include Oldest Allies, Guarded Friends: The United States and France since 1940.