Many key problems of the contemporary political sphere, from climate change to bank regulation, must be addressed through a commitment to supranationalism and leadership. With this in mind social democrat’s today would do well to understand the political intellect of a neglected European leader, Francois Mitterrand. Instrumental in the constr uction of the EU, his character remains opaque and his legacy contested. At the Elyséewith a unified Socialist Party he moved Europe towards greater Union and forged deep relations with Germany. Was he on the right or the left? Was he ever a socialist? Thirty years ago, 10 May 1981, European history changed direction. In Britain, Margaret Thatcher was getting into her stride, undoing the post-war mixed economy and welfare state settlement. In Spain, a colonel walked into the Cortes and waved his machine gun in a last desperate attempt to restore authoritarian rule in Spain. And in France, Francois Mitterrand, born in 1916, the same year as British Prime Ministers Edward Heath and Harold Wilson, became France’s first Socialist president, bringing to an end a quarter of a century of right-wing rule in the country. Today fifteen years after his death, Mitterrand is, to paraphrase Churchill, a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma, largely unknown to the Anglosphere. In December 1980 Mitterrand went to Washington for a meeting of the Socialist International. The New York Times declined to write a report on this French politician running to be president of France in 1981. For the media world of New York and London Mitterrand was a disreputable, somewhat dodgy political character with a dubious past. All that the panjandrums of the New York Times knew was that Mitterrand had made an alliance with the Communists and would make four of them ministers just as Ronald Reagan was denouncing communism as the ‘evil empire.’ . This misjudgment cost the newspaper a scoop. Five months later Mitterrand was president of the world’s fourth biggest power, and was destined to play a lead role in European and world affairs for a longer period than either de Gaulle remained in the Elysée or F D Roosevelt in the White House. Like many major historical figures who have led their country, what we know of Mitterrand is elusive, changing over time and historical perspective. The essential Mitterrand remains like mercury, impossible to grasp. Was he on the right and then moved left? Was he ever a socialist? Interestingly, the same questions have been asked of the next major leader of Europe in the decade after Mitterrand’s death, Tony Blair. Today everybody can agree Blair imposed himself on British, European and world politics, but like Mitterrand no one shares quite the same analysis and conclusions about where he came from, what he did, what he stood for, and what his final place in history will be. Unlike the ahistorical Blair however, Mitterr and was rooted in French histor y. If Paris was worth a mass – as Henry IV cynically put it as he switched from Protestantism to Catholicism to gain control of France in the 1580s – then the anti-communist Mitterrand was willing to support an alliance with the French CP as the left collectively mobilised the post-1968 generation of activists clamoring for a change after the long rule of the right. Mitterrand knew his history. He grew up in provinces in the 1920s in a France obsessed with the Dreyfus affair. He was a student in Paris in the 1930s during the Popular Front government of the p o l i c y n e t w o r k e s s a y 1| The meaning of Mitterrand | Denis MacShane | April 2011 www.policy-network.net The meaning of Mitterrand Denis MacShane
