Paris.-- At midday on the day France revealed its demand that the U.S. repatriate five supposed spies, I was walking down the Avenue du President Wilson in Paris, which is near the Place des Etats-Unis, where Woodrow Wilson lived during the peace conference following the first World War.
I passed a group of people in conversation, one of whom was wearing an American Legion cap. Then I noticed that a half-dozen wreaths had been placed at the base of the great equestrian statue of George Washington in the center of the Avenue Wilson, and I realized, of course, that the day was February 22 -- Washington's birthday.
The tumultuous intimacy between the U.S. and France -- its "oldest ally" -- has taken another unpleasant turn, the consequence of a commercial competition between the two countries which has greatly intensified since the end of the Cold War. France now is the most important rival to the United States in military-related high-technology exports, as well as in commercial aviation and aerospace.
It is also the inspiration and leader of the European Union's resistance to certain American trade demands. The French last year "won" Europe's GATT negotiations with the U.S. by limiting American access to European audiovisual and agricultural markets.
Economic and industrial espionage by the two countries is nothing new, but until now has usually been handled discreetly. This affair was leaked to the press because of internal French political considerations. There is a presidential campaign going on, and the leading candidate, Prime Minister Edouard Balladur, has suffered a sudden drop in favor in the last few days, in part because of his own and his interior minister's responsibility for an illegal telephone tap, in an affair of alleged political corruption and kickbacks implicating political allies of the two men.
Ordering the five Americans out has certainly wiped Mr. Balladur's scandal off the front pages, and like the affair of the telephone tap it bears -- in the opinion of most hardened witnesses of French politics -- the fingerprints of Charles Pasqua, the interior minister. His rival, Foreign Minister Alain Juppe, has seemed genuinely taken aback by disclosure of the spy affair, and demands an investigation.
The charge made is that the CIA attempted to bribe two high civil servants and a France Telecom official to provide information on France's positions during the last two years' trade talks.
One wonders what the CIA wanted to know that was not to be found in the newspapers. However, spies have to make a living.
The French have done their share of industrial spying in the U.S., as a former head of the country's foreign intelligence agency has admitted. In the 1980s they allegedly infiltrated Boeing, Corning Glass, Texas Instruments, etc., and were caught, eventually making a quiet deal with Washington in which they supposedly promised to stay out of the U.S.
Trade competition has intensified, and last week's episode is reported by the French press to have followed a U.S. attempt to break up a deal made by the French missile manufacturer, Matra, with the Taiwanese government. France has also sold Mirage fighter planes to Taiwan, which had been a closed American market.
This conversion of intelligence services from political to industrial spying is, I suppose, a harmless diversion, or even a constructive one, in the sense of Mark Twain's remark that men are never so innocently employed as in making money. Yet there is also something sordid in it, as there is in the conversion of American presidents into salesmen. I liked George Bush a great deal better before he made himself over as George Babbitt, selling automobiles to Japan. Mr. Clinton the Arkansas populist I like. Mr. Clinton the huckster for American business I do not like.
I know that "it's the economy, stupid," and that the United States has always been a materialistic and commercial society, more openly so than most other countries. But as Scott Fitzgerald once wrote, it has also had "about it still that quality of the idea . . . a willingness of the heart." I think the American people elect presidents to conduct the affairs of state and not to peddle American goods. But I am undoubtedly a romantic.
I like the America that still possessed a quality of idea and ideal. I like it a great deal better than I like the America of George Bush, Bill Clinton, Mickey Kantor and Newt Gingrich. I remember that the CIA, in its origins, laid claim to the example of Nathan Hale, who said to his executioners that he regretted "that I have but one life to lose for my country." Today its members bribe people for commercial secrets.
Walking streets in Paris named after America's great men -- Franklin, Lincoln, Wilson, Roosevelt (as well as Lafayette and Tocqueville) -- I remember another remark of Fitzgerald's, about America's history. He said "I think it is the most beautiful history in the world." I think that history is diminished by what has happened in and since the 1960s, and by what goes on now.
William Pfaff is a syndicated columnist.