When France takes over the 12-month stewardship of the G20 after the Seoul summit, the country's diplomacy will get a boost. President Nicolas Sarkozy hopes a higher profile abroad will lift his popularity at home. Paradoxically, though, this comes at a time when morale among diplomats has sunk — and when Bernard Kouchner, the current foreign minister, looks as if he is on the way out.
The 16,000-strong diplomatic service, named after its offices on the Quai d'Orsay, feels battered. Its squeeze long predates the latest austerity. Over 25 years the foreign service has lost 15 per cent of its staff. In 2011 its operating budget will be trimmed by another five per cent and 700 more jobs will go.
This comes on top of an internal reorganisation under Kouchner. The cuts, argued Alain Juppé and Hubert Védrine, two former foreign ministers, in Le Monde, amount to an "unprecedented weakening" of France's diplomatic structure.
Unresolved conflict
Diplomats everywhere share such frustrations. And the French are still in demand: Pierre Vimont, France's ambassador to the United States, has been made head of the European Union's external-action service.
Yet since 2007 French diplomats have worked under the strain of an unresolved conflict between Kouchner's moral pretensions and Sarkozy's hands-on, hard-nosed style.
A co-founder of Médecins Sans Frontières, a humanitarian-aid agency, and hailing from the left, Kouchner arrived on a wave of popularity and high-mindedness. He told diplomats to spend more time talking to "civil society", not the elite.
He tried to run the Quai as an aid agency. He still gives speeches urging France to "put human rights at the heart of our policies" and calls French embassies "houses of human rights".
Kouchner took the job with his eyes open, and has tried to make his own way over Rwanda, Lebanon and Darfur. Yet reality has been tough for a man who is one of the few surviving left-wingers in the government.
In his first year, Kouchner had to swallow a five-day jaunt to Paris by Libya's Muammar Gaddafi. Human rights were off the agenda during the recent visit by the Chinese premier. Kouchner has admitted he was wrong to ask for a junior minister for human rights, because of the "permanent contradiction between human rights and the foreign policy of a state". Most worryingly, he left such tensions unresolved, never truly pushing his convictions. He considered resigning over France's expulsion of Roma this summer — but did not.
Under the Constitution, diplomatic and military power are in the president's hands, so foreign ministers often struggle to assert their independence. Sarkozy's diplomacy is especially tightly run by a small team in the Elysée, leaving little space for Kouchner.
Rwanda ties
At times he has been sidelined. Kouchner long urged a warming of French ties with Rwanda, but it was Claude Guéant, Sarkozy's chief of staff, who went to Kigali last year to make a fresh start.
Last month a private letter to Sarkozy in which he protested about such "humiliations" was leaked to the press, forcing Kouchner to restate publicly his "loyalty" to the president.
The upshot is a dispirited Quai. "The foreign ministry is an administration that is suffering," said Jean-Christophe Rufin, who quit as ambassador to Senegal this year.
"The Quai has been marginalised. It weighs less and less on important decisions." One former foreign minister says "the Quai is genuinely demoralised, because they are totally out of the game".
If Kouchner leaves his job in the reshuffle expected soon, he will still be one of France's most popular politicians. But with diplomatic spirits so low, his successor will have his (or her) work cut out.
