Chirac and Schroeder agree to resume nuclear transports

Shipments of reprocessed nuclear fuel rods from the French La Hague plant would start in "late March or early April", said the Paris office of Prime Minister Lionel Jospin, who also attended the meeting. Transports of German atomic waste to the French plant - which were stopped in 1998 after massive street protests and blockades in Germany - would resume shortly thereafter. Schroeder and Chirac were accompanied by their foreign ministers, Joschka Fischer from Germany and Hubert Vedrine from France.

They met in an effort to clear the air of recent differences and give relations between Paris and Berlin a new sense of direction. It seemed to have worked, as the leaders later vowed to meet informally every six to eight weeks in future. They exchanged views over "what we did right and what we did wrong", Schroeder later said. Chirac said the "the German-French engine is running" smoothly, and Schroeder also spoke of a "historic responsibility of Germany and France" for peace on the continent.

Despite freezing temperatures, village residents and media besieged the rustic Alsation restaurent "Chez Pilippe Schadt", where the leaders were served goose liver and sauerkraut. On Tuesday, Fischer had smoothed the way for the meeting, declaring French-German unity at a speech at Freiburg University on the German side of the border. He said the French-German axis had played the key role in developing the European Union since its beginnings in the 1950s. "European integration can and will be successfully completed only if France and Germany make it their common endeavour," he said.

The tone was in marked contrast to his remarks last year, when he criticized Paris' handling of the E.U. summit in Nice in December. Never an easy relationship, the ties between Paris and Berlin came under strain in Nice over the issue of voting rights allocated to E.U. member-states, just as the 15-member E.U. enters the critical phase of expanding into Central and Eastern Europe. The Paris-Berlin axis played a central role in forging monetary integration and creating the euro, sparking suspicion among other E.U. members such as Britain, which has rejected the euro.