Sarkozy hopes talks with Brown will cement Anglo-French alliance to steer EU policy

[CHIMO]

The French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, hopes to cement an Anglo-French axis to generate a new "critical mass" driving EU foreign and security policy when he makes a state visit to Britain next week, officials said yesterday. Sarkozy, who has frosty relations with Germany's chancellor, Angela Merkel, believes France now has more in common with Britain and the US. He is keen to use the two-day visit to hasten an EU realignment before Paris begins its six-month presidency in July.

"He sees the US, the UK and France as the three centres of freedom in the world," one French official said. "There is not the same kind of feeling about Germany ... in Europe now it is France and Britain that can provide the critical mass."

Until Sarkozy's election postwar French policy had been built on the assumption that the Franco-German relationship was at the heart of the European project.

When Sarkozy meets Gordon Brown next Thursday he is expected to provide details of a new French deployment of elite troops to the front lines in Afghanistan, and in return seek British backing for an expanded European role in Nato.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/mar/20/france.eu