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Blair warns chirac over eu rival { April 27 2003 }

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Blair warns Chirac on the future of Europe
By Philip Stephens and Cathy Newman
Published: April 27 2003 22:00 | Last Updated: April 27 2003 22:00

Tony Blair has issued a direct challenge to France's Jacques Chirac over the future of the transatlantic relationship by warning that the French president's vision of Europe as a rival to the US is dangerously destabilising.

In a wide-ranging interview with the Financial Times, the prime minister foreshadows a continuing Anglo-French struggle about Europe's relationship with Washington. Mr Blair seeks to keep alive the prospect of British entry to the euro but he disavows any personal ambition to become president of the European Union.

Though his personal relationship with Mr Chirac has improved since the bitter row over France's veto of a second United Nations resolution, Mr Blair is clear that the strategic divide that opened over Iraq has not been bridged.

Meanwhile a new MORI poll for the FT reveals that 55 per cent of Britons regard France as the UK's least reliable ally, while 73 per cent view the US as the country's most reliable.

The prime minister disassociated himself from those in Washington who have said that France should be "punished" for its opposition to the war with Iraq.

He drew the limits of his own alliance with Washington by rejecting military intervention to halt the development of weapons of mass destruction in countries such as North Korea and Syria.

He was equally determined, though, that Europe has to face up to divisions in the alliance exposed by the US-led invasion.

Spelling out the damage that would be inflicted by Mr Chirac's vision of a "multipolar" world, he said: "I am not really interested in talk about punishing countries, but I think there is an issue that we have to resolve here between America and Europe and within Europe about Europe's attitude towards the transatlantic alliance.

"I don't want Europe setting itself up in opposition to America . . . I think it will be dangerous and destabilising."

France wanted a multipolar world with different centres of power, he said, but "I believe that they will very quickly develop into rival centres of power".

The result would be that "you end up reawakening some of the problems that we had in the cold war with countries playing different centres of power off each other". Rather than seek to gloss over the divide it was better "to have it out in the open".



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