Diplomats, government functionaries, and aging movie stars all like to sign things. In the cases of diplomats and functionaries, signaturing documents provides a sense of somethingness to formless careers. That and well-catered receptions.

On Jack's recent Indian junket, nine bilateral documents were signed between France and India. These are all very nice but none advanced Jack's grand multipolar schemes much.

The trip's celebrated $2.5 billion Airbus-Indian Airlines* signing was a formality, the deal having been concluded back in September. And the Joint Declaration on Cooperation on Civil Nuclear Energy was little more than agreeing again to something already agreed for the parties to appear agreeable.

Although the two countries could not seal a pact on nuclear cooperation, they reaffirmed their commitment to a Sept 2005 agreement under which Paris promised to do all it could to help New Delhi get access to civilian atomic technology. [The] two countries cannot sign an agreement until India finalises a plan to separate its civilian and military atomic facilities under an agreement it signed with the United States last year. A pact between India and France is dependent on a successful deal between New Delhi and Washington as that could allow the Nuclear Suppliers Group, a informal group of nations that controls atomic trade, to let members do business with India. Singh said India would fully honour its nuclear deal with the United States.

America galls Jack's kibe, but what can he do? After all the gay parties and receptions, after the last samosa has been pocketed in the rented tux, Jack must wait on America. But will India wait for Jack?

OUI THE ANGLO SAXONS
Take Overpriced French Weapons Out,
What Is Left In Delhi-Paris Relations?

OP-ED February 21, 2006 (Indian Express) - Nine agreements — including on nuclear energy and defence — don’t a nice relationship make. Rather, Jacques Chirac’s visit serves as a reminder of the growing dissonance between New Delhi and Paris. For a section of the Indian establishment, this is sacrilege. France and its self-proclaimed exceptionalism have many admirers here. When the Cold War was on and India defined non-alignment as seeing the Soviet point of view first, French declarations of “strategic and political independence” went down well in South Block:** the cultivated anti-Americanism of the French seemed to fit so nicely with our own simulated prickliness towards the Anglo-Saxons.

But truth be told, a globalising India is drawing closer to the Anglo-Saxons and drifting away from Europe and France. Whether it is the right of Sikhs to wear turbans or Laxmi Mittal’s interest in buying up European steel majors, India and France could increasingly be [at] daggers drawn. At WTO, India has bigger problems with the French-led Europe than with America. It is France with its massive subsidies to agriculture that holds back on liberalisation of global trade in agricultural goods. While Indian professionals are migrating in droves to the US, France and continental Europe remain utterly unattractive destinations for Indian techies. Even on cultural exports, France, despite all its claims to being a superior culture, is protectionist. India, like the US, is both a more open cultural market and an enthusiastic exporter of cultural products.

On secularism, too, the limitations of the militant French version of complete separation of Church and State have been exposed as too intolerant of minorities. India’s readiness to allow all faiths to let it all hang out and its “salad bowl” approach to multiculturalism are closer to the Anglo-Saxon version. Since he was a young man, Chirac had developed a profound interest in the cultures of India and China. That empathy is of no help in letting France cope with the new challenges of globalisation and the rise of India and China on the world stage. Germany, another stalwart of the “social model”, is beginning to embrace change, personified in its new chancellor, Angela Merkel. But France is still in effective denial that the Gaullist version of capitalism has little future and that Reagan-Thatcher style economic reforms must chip away at the over-developed and over-bearing state. If India stopped buying the mostly over-priced French weapons, there wouldn’t be a lot to talk about at the next state visit.

We note in passing Jack's Indian holiday went largely unnoticed and unremarked in America's MSM. Ah, but Pave notices and Pave remarks.

* "Indian Airlines plans to buy 19 A319s, four A320s and 20 A321s as a part of a five-year fleet renewal programme." But no pride-of-fleet monster A380s.

** A metonym for the Indian government, the South Block of the Secretariat Building houses the Office of the Prime Minister, the Ministry of Defence, and the Ministry of External Affairs.

PFFT (What is this?): French magic 0 | Rayonnement français 0

Bonjour,

Et la vague de racisme et de protectionisme qui envahit la Mecque du libre-échange....
Pourquoi ne voulez-vous pas livrer vos ports à DPW et aux intérêts musulmans ?

Good luck with muslims in yours ports !!!