Global Policy Forum

Is France the most influential nation at the United Nations today? To anybody who doesn’t follow events at the U.N. closely, this may sound silly. The United States still has more political and financial clout than any other member of the organization, even if it has to endure frequent criticism from poorer countries. Russia has used its status as a permanent member of the Security Council as a blunt instrument to protect Syria from U.N. sanctions for more than a year. China has become an assertive player in New York, often taking a low profile but using its influence to help friends such as Iran and North Korea.

In the face of these three powers, France and Britain -- the two permanent European members of the Security Council -- may seem to have comparatively little leverage. Both have had to trim their policies at the U.N. to meet calls for austerity from home by, for example, trying to hold down the costs of peacekeeping operations. France has also slashed back its development and humanitarian aid budgets.

There have long been signs that European influence at the U.N. is on the wane. In 2008, Franziska Brantner and I published a report showing that non-Western countries were increasingly opposing European positions on human rights in U.N. votes. One reason was that European diplomats were endlessly talking among each other, holding more than 1,000 coordination meetings a year in New York alone, rather than lobbying their non-Western counterparts. But shifts in global economic and political power were also driving the decline in the European states’ authority.

When the Eurozone crisis broke, therefore, there seemed to be a good chance that Europe’s position at the U.N. would collapse altogether. Yet France, often but not always working in tandem with Britain, has played a decisive role in a series of U.N. debates over the past few years, sometimes even outmaneuvering the Americans.

With the U.K., it initially led the drive for some sort of military action in Libya in March 2011, although their limited plans for a no-fly zone might not have achieved very much in isolation. U.S. officials emphasize that it was only the Obama administration’s decision to back a much broader military campaign that changed the diplomatic calculus in New York. Yet many diplomats, not only French and British ones, believe that Paris and London managed to goad Washington into finally taking action.

This analysis is still open to debate: American accounts of the Libyan episode emphasize debates within President Barack Obama’s inner circle, rather than trans-Atlantic diplomacy, as the game-changing catalyst. But France spearheaded the U.N.’s unexpectedly tough intervention in Côte d’Ivoire in April 2011, and the French and British played a major part in setting up the diplomatic battle over Syria that has destabilized the U.N. over the past year. “It was Britain and France, without the backing of the United States,” as Colum Lynch of the Washington Post reported this summer, “that first pressed for a tougher reaction from the Security Council.” Obama administration officials questioned the usefulness of a quarrel with Russia, but the U.S. could not avoid getting pulled into a series of fights in the council once the Europeans set the ball rolling.

France and Britain have now largely given up on the U.N. approach to Syria, instead choosing to unilaterally recognize the Syrian opposition amid increased talk about arming the rebels. But the French have continued to use their position on the Security Council to orchestrate the international response to the collapse of Mali, despite differences with Washington over the proper sequencing of any potential intervention. Paris also created a stir last week by backing the Palestinian Authority’s successful drive for an enhanced status in the U.N. General Assembly. 

This latter gambit irritated the U.S. and arguably made it easier for other European governments to offer the Palestinians explicit or implicit encouragement. Germany, which was widely expected to join the U.S. in opposing the initiative, ultimately abstained. Britain also abstained, but indicated that it supported the Palestinian initiative in principle. There has been hand-wringing in Israel over this loss of EU support.

France, many diplomats conclude, has come out of this series of crises looking like an agenda-setter at the U.N. (Fairly or not, Paris tends to get more credit than London for their joint maneuvers over Libya.) Some had expected that Nicolas Sarkozy’s defeat in this year’s presidential elections by the more cautious François Hollande would lead to fewer displays of French “élan” in U.N. affairs, but this has not yet been the case.

But could France’s apparent influence prove to be illusory? However one interprets the Libya episode, after all, the Obama administration’s intervention was ultimately decisive. France and Britain could not even persuade fellow EU member Germany, which at the time held a nonpermanent seat on the Security Council, to join their cause. The prolonged push to manage the Syrian crisis through the U.N. ultimately led nowhere and did collateral damage to the institution, as U.S. officials had feared. And the Palestinian bid for a special status at the U.N. would almost certainly have succeeded without French support -- large numbers of states, including some EU members, had backed it before Paris did.

Meanwhile, France’s diplomatic dexterity may also cause it trouble over the longer term. After the experiences of the past two years, the second Obama administration may be more skeptical of French initiatives at the U.N. -- there were differences last month over how to handle the latest crisis involving the Congo and Rwanda, for instance. And a number of France’s European partners, notably Germany, are equally wary of letting Paris push policies on questions where there is no consensus in Brussels, such as on Palestine.

France still faces the reality that it has to back up its strategies at the U.N. with diminishing real-world economic and military resources, as does Britain. It has long been a cliché that the two powers “punch above their weight” in New York. If Europe as a whole continues to lose geopolitical weight, France may find that diplomatic panache is not enough to sustain a role on the international stage. Equally, Europe as a whole might benefit if all its members were able to maneuver as smartly as the French.