A Happy Marriage of Convenience

The morbid state of Germany's government wasn't on the agenda last week when Chancellor Gerhard Schröder and French President Jacques Chirac held a working dinner at a castle outside Berlin. Yet, perversely, Schröder's problems could help get relations between Paris and Berlin over a difficult hump. France has been nursing the Continent's most important relationship with a sense of wounded pride for the last few years. Not only did reunification make Germany the bigger partner, but the imminent prospect of a big-bang enlargement of the European Union threatened to put the Germans back at the center — and the French more...