France and Germany\'s Not-So-Golden Anniversary

LONDON â€" The marriage between France and Germany appears to be going through a bad patch. But divorce, it seems, is out of the question.

As leaders of the two states gathered in Berlin on Tuesday to mark 50 years of a friendship treaty that has powered wider European integration, commentators reached for connubial metaphors to describe the present state of the relationship.

“A golden wedding with no romance,” was how the French broadcaster RF1 described the anniversary of the Elysée Treaty concluded on January 22, 1963 between Charles de Gaulle, the French president, and Germany’s Chancellor Konrad Adenaur.

Fifty years on, “the neighboring country is seen more as a partner than as a friend,” according to Pascal Thibaut, its Berlin correspondent.Differences over how to tackle an economic crisis in the euro zone have sharpened since the election last year of François Hollande, France’s Socialist president.

And, just ahead of the celebrations, Germany’s limited support for French intervention in Mali has underlined the lack of a common defense and foreign policy vision between the two partners.

Françoise Fressoz of Le Monde said there was no escaping the fact that there had been a power shift in the relationship that made the French uneasy. “Gnawed by deficits and unemployment, they tend to think of Germany as a hegemonic and egotistical power.”

Europe has undergone seismic changes since the new post-war relationship between the former hereditary enemies was sealed by the friendship treaty.

The Cold War ended, the two halves of Germany were reunited, and the euro was established with their joint backing as an instrument and symbol of closer European integration.

Whatever the political ups and downs of the Franco-German relationship, polls indicate that the people of the two countries have long ago set aside the enmity that once characterized their relationship.

That said, it seems that many clichés persist. A recent Ifop survey found that most Germans first think of Paris, the Eiffel Tower, wine and croissants when they think of France. For the French, it is Angela Merkel, beer, Berlin and cars.

“The anniversary would be a bittersweet moment” for the two partners, according to Joachim Bitterlich, a former adviser to Germany’s Chancellor Helmut Kohl. “Sure, there have been ups and downs,” he wrote in the Financial Times, “but the achievements of the past half-century are real and worth celebrating.”

That could not mask the fact that the relationship appeared to be in deep crisis and that the rifts had never been so wide, Mr. Bitterlich wrote.

Germany’s Der Spiegel agreed: “The anniversary comes at a time when the two countries are drifting apart economically, the relationship is being tested politically as a result of the euro crisis, and assurances of friendship seem hollow at times.”

In an interview with the magazine, Joshka Fischer, a former German foreign minister, acknowledged a note of arrogance in German demands that France should do more to institute economic reforms.

“My advice is to practice modesty and, most of all, to simply step away from this entire arroga! nt discus! sion,” he told Der Spiegel.

However, Mr. Fischer believed “the relationship between France and Germany is currently being portrayed in public as much more tense than it actually is.”

In the words of the narrator in an anniversary documentary by the channel France 5: “They’re no longer a couple, but divorce is impossible.”