TONY BLAIR and Jacques Chirac are sharpening their lances for another joust. This time they are heading for Singapore to back their countries’ bids to persuade the International Olympic Committee to award them the 2012 Games.

Britain’s team knows that it has to be at its best to beat the bookmakers’ favourite. Yet the Paris bid is not reckoned superior to London’s. It is just that France is a master at using diplomatic campaigns to win big international projects.

On Tuesday champagne corks popped in southern France after the Cadarache nuclear site won a bitter competition with Japan to host a six- nation International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (Iter). The Iter consortium aims to make nuclear fusion technology work economically. If it succeeds, the world could have all the environmental advantages of nuclear power without most of the drawbacks. But that would be a long way off. It may not work and it may never be economic. Meanwhile, France will play the key role in a £20 billion project budgeted to last for at least 30 years.

Britain has consistently been the top European recipient of foreign direct investment over the past decade. It was second only to America last year and won a record of more than 1,000 projects in the latest financial year. The UK has even been the destination of choice for eurozone countries’ business investment abroad. Ease of establishment, ease of hiring and firing and enthusiasm for competition are all part of the British way, helped by the language and a stable growing economy outside the eurozone. Yet France has been no slouch. It claims to have topped Britain and everywhere else except China in 2003, the year when global foreign direct investment fell to its lowest after the bursting of the dot-com bubble. The Iter project illustrates the different French way to attract inward investment.

On the back of this win, Dominique de Villepin, the new Prime Minister, has called for wider EU co-operation on research, starting with two world-class European research institutes to be set up, naturally enough, in France.

By backing nuclear energy more determinedly than any other country, France made itself one of the natural choices for Iter. Britain was once Europe’s leader in this technology. We developed two generations of safe reactors and at Dounreay, in Scotland, built one of the world’s first fast-breeder reactors, designed to eliminate any threat of uranium fuel running out. With nuclear power falling out of fashion and fuel becoming cheap, however, breeder reactors stayed expensive and Britain virtually abandoned nuclear research and development.

France’s long-term commitment to expensive projects has won it Ariane, the focus of Europe’s space and satellite programmes, and Airbus, Europe’s answer to Boeing. Rockets and airliners are both industries in which Britain formerly led Europe but axed key research programmes to save cash.

France Means Business, the country’s latest booklet to promote inward investment, doffs the nation’s cap to Anglo- Saxon entrepreneurial concerns. But the real message is that France is the place you have to be rather than the place you want to be.

Much is made of national champions, implying that if your company commits itself to France, then France will look after you. Euronext is wooing the London Stock Exchange in the guise of a truly pan-European organisation. To the French Government, however, it is synonymous with Paris, making it the eurozone’s financial centre.

Such manipulative chauvinism infuriates others just as the soulless, market-dominated, short-term Anglo-Saxon model alarms and appals the French and others in the EU. UK output has expanded faster and more steadily since the start of the eurozone but France, with its state direction and support, national champions, trade union power and subsidised farmers has outpaced Germany, Italy and the Netherlands.

The European Union is made in France’s image of limited democracy and government by elite. In economic terms, however, there seems no overwhelming bar to allowing the French and Anglo-Saxon models to flourish alongside each other. A new economic report on France argues that it could even reduce its chronic 10 per cent unemployment rate by adopting the back-to-work programmes and tax credits used by Gordon Brown, without cutting welfare protection.

A new Europe designed to accommodate different models would not be so tidy. Some of the more extreme single market rules, such as on public procurement, subsidies, takeovers and non-discrimination would have to be watered down but even that would be better than endless battles for the soul of a homogenous Europe.

Vive la différence.

graham.searjeant@thetimes.co.uk

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