DOMINIQUE SCHNAPPER
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skillful- to understate it. Mitterrand is very skillful. But their
policies are not very different . French policy tries to keep the
equilibrium between the pro-Arabic position and the pro-Israeli one .
William Phillips:
Could you pursue your answer to Diana Trilling's
question, which was not completely clear to me, and I suspect to
others as well . For example, what are the differences between the
members of the
Commentaire
group?
Diana Trilling:
You don't mean to call the liberal right anything
which we would describe as neoconservative, do you? Because the
word liberal is poison to the neoconservatives.
Dominique Schnapper:
If
the
Commentaire
people were in the United
States , some of them would be on the left of the Republican Party,
and the others would be on the right of the Democratic Party.
Joanna Rose:
Then that is neoconservative, is it not?
Dominique Schnapper:
Okay, if you want to call that neoconservative. I
wouldn't, but that's up to you here.
Harold Kaplan:
The very small number in
Commentaire
who never did
the Marxist bit are
liberaux-which
we should translate as "free
market."
Dominique Schnapper:
I agree.
Harold Kaplan:
Their roots go back to the old French conservatives .
There is a kind of family feeling.
Dominique Schnapper:
One of the great families? among French in–
tellectuals, are the former communists. Some of them are on the left,
some are on the right now, and when you haven't been a communist,
as is my case, you feel outside the family. It is unpleasant, because,
after all, they were wrong. Yet, they feel that you lack that ex–
perience-some of them say it, others think it. They believe that if
you haven't been through the Communist Party you don't really
know about politics .
Harry Kahn:
Was there any strong reaction on the part of the intellec–
tuals to the scuffling of the Greenpeace ship, in New Zealand?
Dominique Schnapper:
That's the difference between America and
France. Most French people, on the right and on the left, thought
that we were correct, except that we failed. Greenpeace was paid for
by the Russians, so we were right to do what we did, but we should
have succeeded. There was no debate on the question. I remember
during that summer I had dinner with one of the most important of–
ficials of the Socialist Party, and we both agreed that what we did
was right, except that the stupid photographer shouldn't have gone
back to the boat and gotten killed.
