In a speech that is sure to be regarded as anti-American, the French Foreign Minister, Mr Hubert Vedrine, yesterday described the United States as a "hyperpower" whose supremacy now extended to every aspect of the world's economy, technology, language and culture.
Addressing the opening day of a conference held by the influential French Institute for International Relations, he said that the West now saw itself as the "victor of history" and the propagator of a democracy that the rest of the world might see as a form of hegemony.
Two basic and related questions summed up the world's problems, Mr Vedrine told the two-day conference, entitled "Entering the 21st Century".
First, "what kind of a balance of power and/or co-operation will be established between the principal poles of the world which embrace democracy and the market economy" (i.e. the US and Europe)? Second, "what will be the relationship between this group and those who accept (democracy and the market) in principle but are far from respecting them in practice, those who contest (democracy and the market) and those who are only partially integrated?"
In other words, how should the West treat the rest of the world?
Since 1992, Mr Vedrine said, the term "superpower" no longer adequately described the US.
"The term has a Cold War connotation, and is too exclusively military, whereas US supremacy today extends to the economy, currency, technology, military areas, lifestyle, language and the products of mass culture that inundate the world, forming thought and fascinating even the enemies of the United States. That is why I use the term "hyperpower", which American media claim is aggressive. . . "
This "hyperpower" must decide not only how to behave towards its enemies, but also its allies and partners, Mr Vedrine said. "In keeping with what America has thought of herself and of the rest of the world for the past two centuries, most important American leaders and analysts do not doubt for a moment that the United States is the `indispensable nation' and that they must, in the interest of mankind, remain dominant."
Former high-ranking US officials such as Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Bzrezinski, or the Harvard professor Samuel Huntington, might question the best way of preserving US leadership and forestalling reactions against "such a heavy hegemony", he added. "But at the end of the day, the Americans have no doubt and the most honest among them don't hesitate to remind everyone that today's world is a direct result of the total failure of Europe to conduct its own affairs during the first half of the 20th century."
France was endeavouring to make Europe a "power", Mr Vedrine said. But even if the EU could reconcile what he called "the contradiction between enlarging and strengthening" the union, "it remains to be seen whether the United States will accept anything more than a partial or momentary partnership with anyone else, and notably with Europe - whether they are capable of going from unilateralism to multilateralism."
Having conquered Nazism and the Soviet Union, the West now saw itself as "the victor of history" and the propagator of universal values of democracy, market economics, individual freedom, fair elections, a free press and respect for human rights, Mr Vedrine said.
Yet throughout the world "men and women who believe in democracy nonetheless have the feeling that the West uses. . . truly universal values to impose its system and its influence."
Those who opposed "Western values" were now divided into "slow learners" and "pariahs". In past times, the latter would have been excommunicated, but today they were ostracised. Too many people, he said, "reason in almost religious terms, as if we could convert tyrants into zealous democrats overnight - like Saint Paul, falling from his horse, overwhelmed by the revelation.
"If the rest of the world is to believe in our values, the unipolar and unilateral (i.e. US-dominated) world must be transformed into a multipolar, multilateral world of which a reformed United Nations would be the guardian."