However, Michael Rosen, the children's writer and poet, expressed doubt about what he called "government diktat".

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By tradition, though not by explicit constitutional diktat, foreign policy is the French president's preserve.

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The diktat, passed on 4 December, has also now sparked similar rules for civilian officials in Beijing.

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The move comes after a diktat from central government earlier this month that aimed to curb extravagance and tackle corruption.

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"It's not a diktat as such, but we can't just accept the ideas of France and Germany, " he said of the Franco-German pact.

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Tony Travers, a local-government expert at the London School of Economics, thinks that it is possible to build infrastructure without resorting to anti-democratic diktat.

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The alternative to euro-zone diktat is being abandoned to the market.

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While Tony Blair believes that this is best driven through by central diktat and rigid targets, in the teeth of opposition from the public service professionals, our approach will be different.

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He is a maverick in a country whose financial institutions have long operated around hak-yeon, ji-yeon and hyul-yun (school, hometown and kinship ties) and government diktat on who to lend to and how much.

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An early indication of the way in which this bipartisan diktat will be received in official Washington can be seen in the vacuous response of the incoming chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

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