France's Military Makeover

On Nicolas Sarkozy, defender of freedom, implementer of bans.

Those “cheese-eating surrender monkeys” from across the Atlantic have ditched that image in favour of a muscular foreign policy that's led to decisive results in the Ivory Coast and kept Moammar Gadhafi's forces from crushing Libya's rebellion, writes the National Posts's Jonathan Kay about the French. “France is a nation transformed – a sort of foreign-policy version of the 97-pound weakling who becomes king of the beach after going in for a few months of Charles Atlas,” says Kay. He writes that if France, so often pilloried for its supposed softness, can exact change through its military might, it deflates the notion that “a 'multipolar' world would mean that America’s foreign-policy punch would be sapped by the pacifistic influence of smaller NATO countries such as France, Canada, the U.K. and the UN.” Plus ca change, indeed.

While France's standing with its allies might have improved recently, tumult at home over a ban on religious veils threatens to undermine President Nicolas Sarkozy as he prepares for re-election next year, the editorialists at the U.K.'s Independent opine. “There are suspicions that Nicolas Sarkozy might even welcome public clashes with hard-line Muslims over the veil, seeing them as a source of votes. If so, he is playing with fire,” they write. “Very few Muslim women in France wear full veils. But many French Muslims clearly dislike seeing their community singled out, and there is a danger that the new ban will prove counter-productive.” Smaller-scale flare-ups over veils persist in Quebec, such as whether those wearing veils should lift them to vote or board airplanes. Sarkozy's secularism experiment ought to be followed closely by those arguing for such changes in Canada.

And speaking of issues of faith around the world, The Globe and Mail singles out a plank of the Tories' platform for praise, calling their pitch to establish an office of religious freedoms abroad “a good one – both for refugees and for members of religious minorities who do not want to leave their native countries.” They write that setting up such an office that “can nudge and help, but cannot single-handedly change trends abroad” is a great investment for a modest sum of $5 million. How that office would operate if one Canada's closest allies decides to, say, ban certain religious garments from public life remains to be seen.