The strong French engagement in Libya was generally interpreted by the media as a means to show proactivity after the sleepy inactivity in the rise of the Arab spring, as a regain of European leadership together with the British, and, to a lesser extent, as an intervention against human rights violations of an evil dictator. However, this paper argues that more interestingly, the French Libyan policy during the recent crisis stands for a rapprochement with the North-Atlantic Treaty Organization and a turn-away from the strong French push for European foreign, security and defense policies (CFSP/CSDP) silently initiated under Sarkozy. This was only possible because of changes in the discursive construction of French foreign policy identity that took place in the last years. Accordingly, the Franco-British initiative was less designed to strengthen the European Union's defense policy, but on the contrary gives testimony that France adapted its policy towards both Europe and NATO. The paper therefore tracks how the necessity to intervene in Libya in 2011 was discursively constructed and what this construction tells us about more fundamental adaptations in French strategy. For this purpose, it applies a discourse-analytical framework for foreign policy and tries to link discourse to behaviour.
