Le nucléaire, une chance pour la France

Alain Minc, 21 de Julho de 2005
Extraordinaire effet du "politiquement correct", le prix du pétrole s'envole, mais le mot même de nucléaire demeure tabou. Tétanisés par la menace politique "verte", les gouvernements restent en effet muets, et la France, à l'instar des autres grands pays européens, rase les murs.
Sa spécificité nucléaire lui permet certes d'obtenir l'implantation d'ITER. Mais elle lance l'EPR [European Pressurized Reactor, le futur réacteur nucléaire] dans la plus grande discrétion, se garde bien de s'enorgueillir que 78 % de son électricité soit d'origine nucléaire, et ne joue pas la partie qui s'ouvre à aussi grande échelle qu'elle le devrait. Car elle dispose d'une opportunité désormais décisive dans la compétition européenne : devenir le fournisseur d'électricité nucléaire du continent.
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L'abandon par nos voisins du nucléaire, il y a de longues années, et donc la perte de compétence technique ; le poids politique des écologistes, beaucoup plus prégnant qu'en France ; l'état d'esprit des opinions publiques, plus rétives que chez nous ; l'incapacité collective à comprendre que le nucléaire est désormais la réponse la plus intelligente au réchauffement climatique : autant de raisons qui exigeront de nombreuses années à l'étranger avant que le nucléaire puisse y accomplir sa résurrection.
Ce qui constituait hier un archaïsme devient un atout. Notre retard pour rejoindre le consensus international "écolo-baba-cool" : une chance. Notre attachement à un opérateur national pataud mais puissant : un avantage. La capacité d'un Etat centralisé à dominer des collectivités locales réticentes : une bénédiction. Le maintien d'un savoir-faire jugé hier obsolète : un miracle.
Quel est l'objectif ? Recréer un parc nucléaire, à l'instar de ce qui fut décidé en 1974. Bénéficier, en France, d'une énergie peu chère susceptible d'attirer des investissements industriels, car, avec un pétrole entre 50 et 60 dollars le baril, la bataille sur le prix de l'énergie compte autant que la concurrence sur les coûts salariaux. Disposer d'un excès de capacité qui fasse de nous une source d'approvisionnement obligée pour nos partenaires.
Manque-t-il de l'argent pour ce projet ? En aucun cas. Le bilan d'EDF demeurera certes lourd, après son introduction en Bourse, mais les techniques modernes permettent de mobiliser des capitaux privés sur un véhicule financier qui vendrait à EDF et aux autres opérateurs son électricité sur une longue période : la finance contemporaine imagine des opérations infiniment plus risquées que celle-ci.
Ne fait donc défaut que la volonté politique, une volonté à l'ancienne, comme celle dont Georges Pompidou avait fait preuve lorsque, président affaibli par la maladie, il avait néanmoins lancé le programme nucléaire sur lequel nous vivons encore.
Que Jacques Chirac médite la leçon de son maître en politique sur l'art et la manière de sauver une fin de mandat... Nous pouvons, si nous le voulons, inventer à nouveau notre pétrole.

The only option is to intervene

By Philip Stephens Published: July 14 2005
It is all too much. Look around at the poverty, the tyrannies, the broken states, the ethnic conflicts, the global marketplace in weapons of mass destruction. Reflect on the wickedness of those whose corruption of Islam brings death and mayhem to our cities. We cannot fix everything. Better to man the barricades.
The existential threat of a nuclear holocaust has been replaced by that of the pervasive insecurity of global terrorism. The dangerous order of the cold war has been replaced by the unpredictable chaos wrought by the suicide bomber. In the clash of ideas with liberal democracy, communism has given way to extreme Islamism.
This transformation has muddled the familiar impulses of political right and left. Liberal interventionists find themselves in the embrace of American neo-conservatives. Anti-imperialists of the left stand alongside realists of the old right in renouncing Rudyard Kipling’s burden.
The confusion was crystallised by the Iraq war but it runs deeper. There are disagreements within the opposing camps as well as between them. Interventionists agree on ends but quarrel about means. Realists include isolationists and nationalists.
But the big division remains between those who believe that they must remake the international landscape and those who would shelter behind the fortress walls.
Last week leaders of the Group of Eight industrial democracies had a stab at tackling poverty and climate change. They made some progress. Debt relief and increased aid for Africa will make a difference. The opening of a dialogue between the US, China and India on global warming is a small step but a step nonetheless.
These are issues, though, that cannot be filed away. A communiqué is one thing. The aid package will mean something only if it is followed by a decade of remorseless endeavour, as much by Africa as by donor nations. Cooling the planet will be a great deal more painful than agreeing at last that it is getting hotter.
Yet even before the G8 had affirmed its intentions, the bombings in London had reminded us that these were two big challenges among many. Islamist terrorism is a threat that will be with us for many years. Its roots lie deeper than the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians or the war in Iraq. Much of the Muslim world remains untouched by modernity.
To cast a glance across the Middle East is to look at a slew of undeveloped nations, many under authoritarian rule, most with large populations of restless and alienated young people denied both prosperity and political participation. Islam’s militants could not ask for more fertile ground.
The lists of broken and threatening states in this and other parts of the world seems to get longer. The horrors of Darfur slip in and out of our consciousness at the whim of the news bulletins. Iran’s nuclear ambitions, tensions between India and Pakistan over Kashmir and a paranoid tyrant in North Korea join the roll of clear and present dangers.
Western governments have learned that nation-building is a painful and costly business. Defeating the Taliban in Afghanistan was easy. Creating a functioning democracy in a nation in thrall to tribal power and tradition is something else altogether.
Why bother? We all know the feeling when confronted by a seemingly impossible number of tasks. If you cannot do everything why try anything? The best we can do is protect our strategic interests – securing oil supplies, destroying terrorist enclaves, building homeland defences.[sic] While realists thus declare that policy must be guided by narrow national interest, their allies on the left proclaim the west must not violate the United Nations charter by interfering in the affairs of sovereign states. Washington’s mission to spread democracy is denounced as imperialism in a fresh wrapper.
The realists seem to have common sense on their side simply because they call themselves, well, realists. We cannot expect to wave a magic wand over so much tyranny and want. Yet scratch below the surface and, in truth, realism defies the realities of today’s world. It speaks to an age when conflicts were essentially about territorial conquest, when nations could otherwise insulate themselves from the domestic policies pursued by their neighbours, and when the rights of the citizen were subjugated to those of the state. It is a doctrine of the cold war, when the threat of mutually assured destruction made an unanswerable case for the status quo.
The fall of the Soviet Union unleashed both the frozen pressures for political change and the suppressed chaos of authoritarianism across the world. Globalisation has brought with it the realities of interdependence and vulnerability. This interconnectedness is defined not just by the vast international flows of goods and capital but by large-scale migration and the market in ideas that comes with fast communications. Globalisation has given us cheap Chinese T-shirts and Indian software; it has also brought the international trade in atomic weapons design and al-Qaeda websites.
The atrocity of September 11 2001 demonstrated the perils of leaving failed states such as Afghanistan to their own devices. The attacks on London a week ago, perpetrated by British citizens, showed that national borders are no defence against an evil ideology. Distant dangers have become threats on our doorsteps.
The real argument in foreign policy should not be between self-styled realists but between the interventionists. Everything that has happened in the past decade or more – and recall that this week Europe hung its head in shame at the 10th anniversary of Srebrenica – says the west cannot escape the consequences of events in far-flung countries.
What matters is the nature of the intervention. Iraq stands as grim testimony to the dangers of imposing democracy at the point of a gun. Yet tyrants such as Saddam Hussein cannot be allowed to prosper.
Effective action demands the legitimacy that flows from the rule of law. It requires robust multinational institutions – not the UN of the cold war but one ready to act in defence of international order. Yes, intervention will be messy, imperfect and hugely costly. But true realists will judge that, like democracy, it is a great deal better than the alternatives.

Lessons of Mideast Empires

By Jim Hoagland, PostSunday, July 17, 2005;
Americans felt free to debate whether they wanted to be directly involved in the conflicts of the greater Middle East as recently as 1967. Talk about the good old days.
A national addiction to oil imports has ended that freedom or at least that illusion. A unilateral and increasingly lonely commitment to help Israel survive in a sea of hostility has also led
the United States to create a national history in a region it once let others sort out.
When Britain announced the end of its "East of Suez" presence in 1967 and urged Washington to fill the vacuum, U.S. policymakers agonized and resisted. Until June of that same year, Israel depended more on France for military hardware and nuclear cooperation than on Washington. Iraq nestled in the Soviet sphere of influence while Iran prospered under an American-backed ruler.
Perfect that balance of forces was not. But living in the region around that time, I felt that Washington possessed one huge advantage: The United States did not have to overcome the bitter colonial history that Britain, France, Turkey and others had to work around in dealing with the Arabs. U.S. skepticism about colonial empires worked in America's favor.
Israel's 1967 occupation of Arab territories, the 1973 oil crisis, the overthrow of the shah of Iran, Saddam Hussein's multiple wars of aggression, the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and other events changed that: The American debate can no longer be about whether to be involved but rather about how the course and outcome of that involvement are to be managed.
Americans are creating a history that includes not only immediate consequences but ones that may not be felt for years. That is one secondary but salient moral to be drawn from the
7/7 London bombings. Three of the blasts were apparently set off by British citizens of Pakistani descent -- by members, that is, of the diaspora of Muslims drawn in great numbers to the European capitals of former colonial empires.
Aime Cesaire, the incandescent surrealist writer from Martinique, once wrote a play in which African guerrillas move through Paris blowing up statues of colonial-era soldiers and missionaries. No such luck today: It is human beings, not statues, who are being blown up for symbolic effect.
Cesaire's work captured the tortured relations of colonizer and colonized who become absorbed into each other's bloodstreams, collective consciousness and homelands -- as the Muslim ghettoes of Britain and France demonstrate long after the fact of colonialism.
Do not misunderstand. This is not to compare America's current mission in the greater Middle East to colonial conquests of the past. The disappearance from the nation's op-ed pages of the phony debate of a year ago over the desirability of "a new American empire" shows how shallow such thinking is.
But it is equally shortsighted to ignore altogether the implications of taking on this far-reaching mission in lands where the experience of empire is so recent -- and where that experience has been shaped into a misleading but superficially compelling narrative of unilateral foreign evil and exploitation.
Empire was far more complex than most nationalist narratives suggest. This emerges clearly from the incredible contrast presented by the selection of London to host the 2012 Olympic games on one day and the murderous bomb blasts in the same city the next.
By playing brilliantly on London's history as a multicultural beacon for all races and religions, the organizers of the British bid turned the Olympic selection committee away from France's justifiable lauding of Paris as a beautiful, luxurious and deserving national site. Britain deployed the virtues of empire to win the competition. France played on the joys of kingdom and lost.
The selection of London implicitly acknowledges the benefits of human contact, even in colonial guise. Aime Cesaire and Leopold Senghor developed and propagated the philosophy of negritude in the elegant French they perfected in Paris; Kenya's durable economy was built on British foundations; India's democracy has deep roots in the colonial experience, and so on.
None of that saved colonialism, which was morally and economically unsustainable. In fact, ending empire helped fuel the dynamic growth in Europe that drew in immigrant populations from Africa and Asia, which assimilated unevenly, if at all, over the past half-century.
We Americans have lost the innocence -- distance may be a better word -- that we once claimed in the Middle East. We can and do argue over whether that loss is due to historical inevitability, rash decisions, heroic ambition or, as I suspect, a combination of those factors. But we cannot turn back the clock and pretend we have any option but to manage that involvement as best we now can.