PARIS: French officials said Monday that they would use the presidency of the European Union to try to win over discontented voters in Europe by getting "back to basics," like cushioning the impact of soaring food and fuel bills and protecting voters from globalization.

On the eve of the start of its six-month presidency, the officials made it clear that they would seek to reverse the recent no vote by Ireland in a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty to reorganize the EU and would press the Czech Republic to ratify the treaty.

"The European idea is in danger if we don't protect Europeans," President Nicolas Sarkozy said Monday as he promised to oppose the European Commission's position in global trade talks. Speaking on French television, Sarkozy attacked proposals in the trade negotiations that he said would reduce European farm production by one-fifth and cut agricultural exports by 10 percent.

Sarkozy also highlighted the problems caused for exporters by the high euro exchange rate with the dollar and said the European Central Bank should take account of economic growth, as well as its obligation to control inflation.

And in a surprisingly frank admission, Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner said the no vote in Ireland illustrated how the EU had alienated its citizens by conducting politics in a manner they find incomprehensible.

"They understand nothing," Kouchner said. "The institutions interest no one." He argued that, in contrast, voters did appreciate that Europe "was not able to respond to the rise in the price of petrol."

As for the jargon in which business in Brussels is conducted, "no one understands - including me," said Kouchner, adding that it was time to "get back to basics."

The comments Monday to journalists in Paris illustrate how the government there has interpreted the Irish vote as a vindication of efforts it was already promoting to protect Europeans from the impact of globalization.

That effort threatens to crystallize the debate within the EU between France on the one hand and more economically liberal nations like Britain.

France opposes moves, promoted by Britain, to scale back the Common Agricultural Policy, which consumes more than 40 percent of the EU's budget, and Paris plans a review or "health check" of farm spending before the end of the year.

President Nicolas Sarkozy made clear last month his discontent with the way that the EU's trade commissioner, Peter Mandelson, has conducted the Doha Development Round of global trade talks.

Trade ministers are to meet later this month in Geneva, and one senior French official said Monday that Europe had made sacrifices in agricultural policy but had received nothing in return in market access for industrial goods or services.

Kouchner put forward no concrete plans to simplify the way the EU works, but he suggested that French proposals to reduce the value-added tax on fuel could appeal to voters who "see Europe more as a threat than a protection."

Though the European Commission has promised to study the French ideas, along with others including an Italian proposal for a new tax on oil companies, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany is opposed and Britain is skeptical.

In Paris, there is no effort to conceal the fact that preparations for the presidency have been derailed by the Ireland vote. The Lisbon Treaty aims to give the EU a more powerful voice on the global stage, creating a full-time president of the council and a more powerful foreign policy chief. France was to preside over the filling of these posts and the setting up of a new European diplomatic service, but this process has been delayed.

Prime Minister François Fillon of France said he would concentrate on energy issues, climate change, immigration, farm policy and expanding the EU's defense capabilities.

One other senior French official summed up the priorities in English as the "triple F: finance, fuel and food," referring also to measures to stabilize financial markets.

France also hopes to increase European defense capabilities and create a new European military planning structure. Britain, the EU's other main defense power, backs plans to increase capabilities but opposes the establishment of a military headquarters which, it argues, would duplicate NATO's role.

Though Britain has gone ahead with the ratification process for the Lisbon Treaty, the Czech Republic has stopped its drive for parliamentary approval. But the Czechs, who will take over the rotating EU presidency in January 2009, will face problems when they head the bloc's meetings if they do not proceed with Lisbon, said the senior French official.

Prime Minister Brian Cowen of Ireland is to report to colleagues in October on progress, but French officials appear to accept that he may not be able to make a clear proposal by then, though they believe a solution allowing the Irish to ratify will be found.

Clara O'Donnell, research fellow at the Center for European Reform in London, said that, while the Irish vote would overshadow the French presidency to some extent, other areas of work would not be affected.

"Already before the no vote there was a perception that the EU is too pre-occupied with its institutional setup," O'Donnell said. "This has been strengthened, so the French will be keen to push through as many things as possible to show that the EU is relevant."

O'Donnell added that while the French presidency was unlikely to adopt a protectionist and populist tone, there was a greater medium term danger for the EU.

"I think it is unlikely that the next European Commission will be as economically liberal as this one," she said, referring to the next mandate, which is to begin in 2009.

PARIS: When Nicolas Sarkozy brings France back into NATO's unified command next year, he will want to celebrate it as a triumph for Europe's own defense identity.

It's a very French spin on a step that more meaningfully signifies that the alliance, so often buried, is alive and kicking, and that Sarkozy, 42 years after Charles de Gaulle's decision to pull out of NATO's integrated military structure, thinks there's no more profit in France being seen as a reflex antagonist of the United States on issues like Iran, the Middle East, Russia and China.

The world ought to notice. Even if Sarkozy, out of domestic political considerations, must write his own Franco-French account of his country's new wisdom.

On France's motivation, Sarkozy states a plain truth: "Our position, outside the military command, sustains mistrust about the object of our European ambition." To that, he adds a very French judgment: "A France taking its full place in NATO would be an alliance that would be giving a greater place to Europe."

In fact, more than anyone might have thought a few months ago, there are contradictions and problems appearing now that, without fundamentally endangering France's reintegration, could turn the process into a slog.

France is going to be very hard-pressed to explain what that European defense identity - which Sarkozy so much wanted to emphasize as the condition for his embrace of NATO - is or can become while the French hold the European Union's agenda-setting presidency for the next six months.

New facts can only make it increasingly difficult in practical terms to demonstrate growth in European capabilities, expenditure and resolve.

Specifically, Irish voters' rejection of the Lisbon Treaty on EU reorganization disables a measure called "structured permanent cooperation" that would have allowed groups of countries among the 27 members to make advances in terms of their military capacities.

The effect is to remove a vehicle for new hard-power commitments within a Europe long bent on convincing itself soft power was all it needed, and where only two countries (Britain and Turkey) will actually increase their military budgets next year.

This difficulty puts France in a doubly awkward position.

On the one hand, while the United States says it sees eye to eye with the French on developing European defense, the new circumstances can't facilitate the Americans' openly stated expectation "that France will lead an effort" during its presidency to prod Europe into greater investment in greater capabilities.

Instead, some Americans now say they don't have a sense of what a refashioned European Defense and Security Policy could produce in real terms.

At the same time, since France cannot point to a Europe committed by treaty to expanded European military capacities, Sarkozy is likely to have a harder time at home fending off his critics from the left and the anti-American Gaullist right wing who cast the return to NATO not as a plus for Europe but as an exchange of French independence for American domination.

According to Pierre Lellouche, a Gaullist who was involved in writing Sarkozy's campaign platform on defense, "It's indispensable that Sarkozy present the return in parallel with the development of a European defense identity. Without it, there's a potential domestic cold shower here."

The signals coming from Paris have become garbled in every direction.

Although Europe has talked about generalized 2 percent increases in yearly military expenditures, it appears French spending will be below that target.

While the French talk about the necessity of updating Europe's security strategy to deal with new threats around the world, Sarkozy has in fact put off a decision on building a second French aircraft carrier. It was described by Le Monde as "a very political way of softly laying the project in its grave."

France could not have chosen a worse juncture. The old naval truism that one aircraft carrier is no aircraft carrier at all pertains: in the six years since its launch, the nuclear carrier Charles de Gaulle, according to one accounting, has been in activity less than half the time.

With this, France insists it won't participate in NATO's Nuclear Planning Group or have any of its troops under NATO command in time of peace. In Sarkozy's words, "making de Gaulle's principles my own," French atomic arms "will remain strictly national."

As far as European capabilities go, France is talking about the creation of a deployable European force of 60,000, a 10-year-old plan that has never come close to realization.

And more: for home consumption, France plays down into a no-big-deal attitude any sense of a qualitative change in its cooperation with NATO by stressing its current participation in NATO-led actions in the Balkans and Afghanistan. But it argues simultaneously and contradictorily that there should be a separate European headquarters command in Brussels.

Unfortunately, the separate command notion sounds a lot like an attempt by Jacques Chirac and Gerhard Schröder in 2003 to set up an exclusively European planning installation in NATO's margins. Thérèse Delpech, one of the authors of a new French defense white paper, insists this is a misinterpretation of a French desire for a gradual increase in a European planning staff, but for the British the issue remains in play.

The sum of these complications are of sufficient size that one Brussels estimate figures that work on arrangements involving a French return will continue beyond a NATO summit meeting scheduled for April 2009 and into 2010.

Still, nothing presupposes issues that would block France's reintegration. The problem is that the French are experiencing some inconsistency in fitting themselves into the NATO mold.

At this point, the exercise - from France's point of view, a demonstration of team-playing instincts firm enough to justify a claim to European leadership - would profit from more NATO and fewer French concerns.

BRUSSELS: The European Union presidency, which France takes on for six months starting Tuesday, poses a big challenge to "Sarkonomics."

Will President Nicolas Sarkozy try to stamp his brand of state economic oversight, trade protection and promotion of European industrial champions on the 27-nation bloc?

Or will the responsibility of EU leadership help him embrace a free trade agreement, open up France's rigid economy and cut its budget deficit?

Paris has not placed economics in its top four priorities. The priorities right now are: EU agreement on climate change and energy policy, a charter on migration, closer European military cooperation and a modest update of the common agricultural policy.

But rising inflation, sagging consumer confidence, a strong euro and a deteriorating business outlook seem certain to thrust the economy onto the agenda.

Three important issues will put Sarkozy's economic principles to the test: a possible world trade agreement, the response to rising oil and food prices, and the relationship between EU governments and the European Central Bank.

The stalled negotiations at the World Trade Organization come to a crunch in late July, when trade ministers meet in Geneva for what looks like the last chance to forge a deal before the end of the presidency of George W. Bush of the United States.

An agreement could give the world economy a much needed injection of confidence. An acrimonious failure could push it further over the cliff.

The European Commission negotiates on behalf of EU member states in the WTO, but France has tried to handcuff the trade commissioner, Peter Mandelson, to deter him from making any more concessions in agriculture, seen as a vital French interest.

Sarkozy has said Mandelson is partially to blame for the Irish vote on June 12 against a treaty to overhaul the EU, and Sarkozy lambasted Mandelson's handling of the trade talks.

Paris has called a special meeting of EU foreign ministers for the week before the WTO ministerial session opens July 21.

EU trade officials, whose positions bar them from speaking publicly, say they expect the French to be breathing down Mandelson's neck in Geneva. But they say the commissioner still gets to conduct negotiations and can ultimately reach a deal and challenge EU ministers to "take it or leave it."

That would give Sarkozy the choice between rallying European support for an accord that French and Irish farmers might brand a betrayal or lying down in front of the juggernaut of a global trade agreement at the risk of splitting the EU.

Diplomats say the French have been quietly hoping that intransigence by emerging economies like Brazil and India on industrial goods and services, or farm interests in the United States, would prevent the talks from getting that far.

France and the European Commission were asked by EU leaders to propose measures in October to cushion the effect of the rise in oil and food prices on the poorest parts of the population. But most EU partners, led by Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, opposed Sarkozy's idea of capping value-added taxes on fuel and using extra fuel tax revenue to help suffering sectors like fishing, farmers and trucking.

The challenge for Sarkozy will be to stick to proposals that can win a consensus in the EU, like tax breaks on energy-saving appliances or fuel allowances for retirees, rather than to focus on issues like subsidy programs to buy off protesting interest groups.

On economic governance, France has already abandoned its most divisive idea - a first summit meeting of leaders of the 15 nations that share the euro single currency.

Germany and the Netherlands led the resistance, fearing an attempt to pressure the European Central Bank to cut interest rates and lower the euro's exchange rate against the dollar.

"That would be the best way to blow up the French presidency, by starting a hopeless political debate. It would be pointless," a senior representative in Sarkozy's office said on condition of anonymity because this person was not authorized to speak to the media.