French President François Mitterrand and German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, in 1987.

France is a member of the United Nations and serves as one of the permanent members of the UN Security Council with veto rights.[104] It is also a member of the G8, World Trade Organization (WTO),[105] the Secretariat of the Pacific Community (SPC)[106] and the Indian Ocean Commission (COI).[107] It is an associate member of the Association of Caribbean States (ACS)[108] and a leading member of the International Francophone Organisation (OIF) of fifty-one fully or partly French-speaking countries.[109]


French President François Mitterrand and German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, in 1987.


Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy and United States President Barack Obama, before NATO summit, in Strasbourg, on 3 April 2009
France hosts the headquarters of the OECD,[110] UNESCO,[111] Interpol,[112] Alliance Base[113] and the International Bureau for Weights and Measures.[114] France has the second largest network of diplomatic missions in the world, second only to the USA.[115] In 1953, France received a request from the United Nations to pick a coat of arms that would represent it internationally. Thus the French emblem was adopted and is currently used on passports.[116]
Postwar French foreign policy has been largely shaped by membership of the European Union, of which it was a founding member. Since the 1960s, France has developed close ties with reunified Germany to become the most influential driving force of the EU.[117] In the 1960s, France sought to exclude the British from the European unification process,[118] seeking to build its own standing in continental Europe. However since 1904, France has maintained an "Entente cordiale" with the United Kingdom, and there has been a strengthening of links between the countries, especially on a military level.
France is a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), but under President de Gaulle, it excluded itself from the joint military command to protest the special relationship between the United States and Britain and to preserve the independence of French foreign and security policies.[119] France vigorously opposed the 2003 invasion of Iraq,[120][121] straining bilateral relations with the US[122][123] and the UK.[124] However, as a result of Nicolas Sarkozy's (much criticised in France by the leftists and by a part of the right)[125][126] pro-American politics, France rejoined the NATO joint military command on 4 April 2009.
In the early 1990s, the country drew considerable criticism from other nations for its underground nuclear tests in French Polynesia.[127]
France retains strong political and economic influence in its former African colonies (Françafrique)[128] and has supplied economic aid and troops for peace-keeping missions in Côte d'Ivoire and Chad.[129] Recently, after the unilateral declaration of independence of northern Mali by the Tuareg MNLA and the subsequent regional conflict with several Islamist groups including Ansar Dine and MOJWA, France and other African states intervened to help the Malian Army to retake control.
In 2009, France was the second largest (in absolute numbers) donor of development aid in the world, behind the US, and ahead of Germany, Japan and the UK.[130] This represents 0.5% of its GDP, in this regard rating France as tenth largest donor on the list.[131] The organisation managing the French help is the French Development Agency, which finances primarily humanitarian projects in sub-Saharan Africa.[132] The main goals of this help are "developing infrastructure, access to health care and education, the implementation of appropriate economic policies and the consolidation of the rule of law and democracy.

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