THE WASHINGTON POST: OUTLOOK SECTION, COMMENTARY AND OPINION - September 4, 1995
"ARE THE FRENCH HEADED FOR A MELTDOWN? A MOTLEY FLOTILLA AND CONSUMER BOYCOTTS COULD GIVE PARIS FITS OVER NUCLEAR TESTING"

Ever since the imperious reign of Charles de Gaulle, French governments have enjoyed a reputation for not giving a damn what the rest of the world thinks. The latest example is President Jacques Chirac's insistence on conducting underground nuclear tests in the South Pacific. On Friday, French commandos forcibly removed two Greenpeace protest vessels from the Mururoa test site, apparently clearing the way for the first of eight tests that Chirac has pledged to conduct between now and next May.

But the battle over French nuclear weapons testing isjust beginning. If Chirac thinks he can win this fight by simply bullying and ignoring his critics -- a scenario in which France clears out the protesters and detonates its warheads, absorbing a few days of bad publicity -- he may be miscalculating badly. Chirac's immediate obstacle is a citizens flotilla of some 30 boats that will stage the aquatic version of a sit-in at the Mururoa atoll.

The flotilla might be dismissed as mere annoyance were it not for the spectacular victory Greenpeace spearheaded earlier this year over Royal Dutch Shell, the world's largest oil company. The Greenpeace-Shell battle attracted little media coverage in the United States, but in Europe it was headline news for weeks. Shell was intent on burying an obsolete oil-storage rig at the bottom of the North Sea. Greenpeace and other environmentalists complained that the rig contained toxic sludge that would pollute the marine underworld. In the end, the petroleum giant was forced to abandon its plan by a furious wave of international protest and consumer boycotts, catalyzed by Greenpeace activists who twice managed to board and occupy the massive Brent Spar rig. The model of resistance used in that battle -- civil disobedience by Greenpeace activists aimed at awakening popular opinion, which in turn gives rise to mass consumer boycotts and official opposition from governments -- is now at work in the South Pacific.

The Brent Spar affair hit the news on May 1, when Greenepace succeeded in landing a group of activists, accompanied by journalists, on the rig. The David and Goliath stand-off generated lots of dramatic media coverage, arousing public opinion and, in Germany, sparking the first boycotts of Shell gasoline stations.

Unmoved by the growing public opposition, Shell began on June 12 to tow the Brent Spar toward its watery grave off the western coast of Scotland. By this time, motorists in Denmark and Holland were also shunning Shell.

Soon public officials of all stripes were rushing to claim spots at the front of hte gathering parade of outrage. An unmistakable sign that the tide had turned came on June 16, when German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, never much of an environmentalist but facing a Green Party that now holds swing votes in parliament, urged British Prime Minister John Major to block Shell's burial plan.

But the boycotts hurt Shell most. In Germany alone, service station income fell 30 percent. Losses estimated in the millions, along with the blackening of the company's name, provoked dissension within the company. Managers of Shell's European divisions demanded that their U.K. counterparts cancel the sinking plan. This Shell U.K. finally did on June 20. From now on. The Economist warned, "Companies that choose to defy their consumers' political demands are placing their businesses in jeopardy."

And not just companies. Now France appears determined to make the same errors of hubris that landed Shell in the "untenable position" lamented in its final statement of surrender. Of course, the French government cannot be hit in the pocketbook the same way that a corporation can but politicians have their own kind of balance sheet to worry about. How high a political price is Chirac willing to pay to live out his Gaulist fantasy?

He has already lost electoral support at home: polls show that more than 60% of the French oppose a return to testing. And he has been condemned in unusually blunt terms by other heads of government, especially in the Pacific region. The tartest comment came from Japanese Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama, who asked Chirac over lunch why, if the nuclear tests were so safe, France did not conduct them in Marseille? France also faces judgement in the World Court, where New Zealand is arguing that the test violate international law.

True, Chirac can shrug off verbal criticism, but his nuclear policy is also costing the French economy real money. Within days of Chirac's announcement in May that France would resume testing, angry consumers and businessmen from Hong Kong to Sydney to Tokyo began spontaneously boycotting French goods. The boycotts increased after France attacked Greenpeace's Rainbow Warrior II ship on July 9, nearly 10 years to the day after France's fatal bombing of the original Rainbow Warrior.

Australia barred a French military supplier from bidding on a $740 million contract for jet fighters, a move that so angered Paris that it recalled its ambassador from Canberra. French wine sales are down one-third in Australia and New Zealand. If such boycotts deepen and spread to Japan, Europe and the United States, the economic injury to France could be substantial, and maybe even intolerable. Thus Chirac has painted himself into the same corner that Royal Dutch Shell did, for nothing is more likely to provoke wider boycotts that to actually detonate a nuclear device.

"There's no way we can physically stop them," concedes Ulrich Jurgens, executive director [sic] of Greenpeace International. But physically stopping the French isn't really the point. The role of Greenpeace is to inspire others to join the fight. The Brent Spar affair may have inaugurated a new era in environmental politics, an era in which direct action is practiced, not only by countercultural monkey-wrenchers but also by bourgeois consumers, all united in a militant multinational mass movement.

At a time when millions feel alienated from formal political structures and victimized by forces seemingly too remote to challenge, this direct action model offers an effective way to put personal beliefs into political practice. Just because people look passive doesn't mean they are apathetic -- a lesson Jacques Chirac may soon learn the hard way.

* Mark Hertsgaard is the author of "On Bended Knee: The Press and the Reagan Presidency" and "A Day in the Life: The Music and Artistry of the Beatles." He is writing a book about the global ecological future.