Club Europe
Getting things done while Macron dreams
After misstepping in the immediate aftermath of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Emmanuel Macron has gone a long way to fixing what he broke.
With his 31 May 2023 speech in Bratislava and his 14 March 2024 television interview, the final-term president ended decades-long French equidistance between the West and Russia, loosened Paris’ 60-year bear-hug of Berlin, and began a long overdue courtship of Europe’s east and north1.
Of course, his actions have struggled to keep up with his words but the Bratislava and Paris interventions were both ground-breaking and realistic. In comparison, the speech that I’ll bet was billed in-house as his “synthesis” – Macron’s two-hour oration at the Sorbonne this week – was a derivative return to the unworkable eurovisions of pre-2022 Élysées.
For a start, while Macron fancies himself as Europe’s chin-on-fist Penseur, this was also meant to be a marquee campaign event for the European Parliament elections in June. This was the big moment for his Renaissance movement to provide a European education to Middle France in words it would understand – words like “paradigm” (13 times), “palimpsests” (once was too many) and "European ideas won the Gramscian battle". The 35-point lead for Marine Le Pen’s RN over Renaissance among working-class voters is safe.
Nineties tribute
Putting politics to one side, the proposals for Europe were, if I may slip into French for a moment, un facepalm. To match the urgency conveyed by his “Europe could die” rhetoric, Macron floated ideas that would take years (if ever) to fulfil. Running through it all is yet another pact – this time, “a prosperity pact” – that requires the union’s €190-billion annual budget to double so public money can be channelled into “strategic sectors”. Inevitably, these would be exempted from competition law. This budget expansion will be funded in part by the financial transactions tax (FTT) a coalition of notionally willing EU states has been unable to agree for 11 years.
To justify this rehash of French “European champions” ideas from the 1990s, Macron asserts that the “two biggest international powers have decided to no longer respect the rules of trade” so neither should the EU. Nice line, but is it true? Certainly, since 2017, the Americans have slipped towards protectionism while the Chinese never took the rules seriously. The climate-related subsidies and “Buy American” domestic-content conditions in Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act - together with the illegal Trump-era unilateral trade measures that Biden left in place - are regrettable, sure. And a return to a pre-Trump, rules-governed trading world would be ideal but – as EU officials have revealed with their non-confrontational approach to the Biden team over the past three years – everyone understands the president’s political constraints. Both sides can live with a suboptimal trading relationship as long as it’s temporary and targeted. The notion that the US “no longer respects the rules of trade” is hyperbole to make the case for Macronist industrial policy.
While we’re bathing in 1990s nostalgia, the president pulled another dusty non-paper from François Mitterrand’s and Jacques Chirac's attic: a revised mandate for the European Central Bank. According to the Sorbonne blueprint, instead of focusing solely on keeping inflation at 2%, the ECB should have “a growth objective at least, or even a decarbonisation objective”. This needs a treaty revision, will never happen, and – if it did – would change nothing in practice. But sure, let’s waste everyone’s time.
On the most imperative issue of the moment – the shoring-up of Ukraine (and Moldova) against Russian imperialism and preparation for possible US military disengagement from Europe – Macron re-re-re-proposed increased joint bond issuance (of course) and “European preference” in procurement. The first will eventually happen and the second - being up to national governments - won’t.
The Petr principle
I’d like to think this is all cynical rather than delusional, although even the cynicism itself is delusional: is anyone really going to vote Renaissance over the ECB’s mandate or defence procurement policy?
Delusion would mean that Macron believes that this is the future of Europe. But it’s becoming clearer by the week that the future won’t develop through blue-sky speeches and treaty revisions. It will take the form of “clubs” and coalitions of the willing rather than the performative. In this respect, the model leader is the Czech rather than the French president. After failing to hit a joint shell-production target for desperate Ukrainian artillery units, too many European governments turned fatalistic or fretted about procuring things they couldn’t make in time. While they did nothing, officials working for Czech President Petr Pavel found a million NATO- and Soviet-standard shells available for sale from shy third countries and did a whip-round to fund the purchases. First deliveries to Donbas are expected in June, just three months after the plan was unveiled. Inspired by Pavel and looking for ways to defend Kharkiv and Odesa against Russian bombardment, the outgoing Dutch government offered to broker the acquisition of governments’ warehoused Patriot air-defence missile batteries to pass on to Ukraine.
To sustain the Ukrainian armed forces as the military wing of European liberal democracy – usually expressed through the EU and NATO – required something much nimbler than the EU’s “community method”. As they discover to their shock that these ad hoc coalitions work and meet their targeted aims quickly and efficiently, governments will increasingly resort to them outside defence. This isn’t an alternative to the union and its core structure, the single market, but it’s an essential addition to it. As long as the clubs don’t undermine that market through, for example, suspending competition law for a strategic “champion”, they should be encouraged and pharaonic visions put out of their misery.
Between May 2023 and March 2024, Macron spotted a threat and an opportunity. Europe’s eastern war, the prospect of a second Trump term, the election of Donald Tusk in Poland, and the twin collapse of the Brexit project and Merkel-Scholzism in Germany had changed the terms of trade in Europe. France could cling to its strategic habits and risk being sidelined - together with a chronically hesitant and pacifistic Germany - by a new, militarily powerful, and Anglosphere-aligned coalition of Russia’s border states and a post-Brexit UK. Or, France could accept the inevitable and try to lead it. That can still be done via Macron’s Bratislava and Élysée repositioning but not from this latest exhibition of stolen goods.