Nicolas Sarkozy's European plans

Mary Dejevsky considers that Sarkozy will not live up to Westminster's hopes that he "would take a more 'British' view of the EU, as a grouping of states in which national sovereignty nonetheless trumps everything. ... He supports a 'mini' version of the constitutional treaty (about which the British, unlike the Germans, are ambivalent) and he opposes membership for Turkey. In fact, beyond climate change and, probably, defence, it is hard to see how Sarkozy's arrival at the Elysée will make Britain look less like the EU's odd man out. ... Sarkozy stressed that he wanted France to be more open to the world. But he coupled this with a promise of more curbs on immigration and an acceptance that French (and European) workers feared unfair competition. If they had misgivings about the EU, he said, it was because they saw it as a 'Trojan horse' for globalisation. This is not at all how the EU, or globalisation, are regarded by the British Government, which castigates the former for its rigidity and hails the latter as the future."

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