The Limits of Macron's Europe

Emmanuel Macron's recent speech on Europe is well worth reading and analyzing.

You'll need to be patient and not be put off too much by the flatness of the style, the approximations to the substance, and the excessive and almost embarrassing familiarity, reminiscent of some of Macron's speeches in Africa. We're getting used to all that.

What is interesting, however, is the parallel Macron draws between the awakening of the European Union and his seven years as the head of the French state. Macron has made “powerful Europe” his hobbyhorse since coming to power in May 2017. He has made it an obsession since 2022, thanks to the Russian-Ukrainian conflict.

To speak of power is to speak of power projection. This raises the question of the European Union's competencies, which would enable it to fulfill the regal functions traditionally associated with power.

De jure, the European Union only has the powers delegated to it by the member states in their treaties. German jurists would say that it does not have the “competence of competence” (Kompetenz-Kompetenz), which remains the prerogative of the States alone.

According to public law specialist Julien Barroche (1): “There are national constitutions, not a European constitution in the formal sense of the term. There are national sovereignties, not European sovereignty. European diplomacy and defense are in their infancy. The Union is not a true strategic player with genuine autonomy on the international stage. Despite efforts to the contrary, which have been reactivated by various recent international crises, the construction of Europe embraces a fundamentally different register of power in the classical sense: a civil, commercial, and normative register, not a military one.”

This is precisely where the problem lies. Macron's speech gives pride of place to defense policy, raising the specter of geopolitical threats to the Old Continent and calling for the latter to be strengthened at the European level.

In reality, it's an economic vision, focused on the defense industry. Let's not forget that, in the Ukrainian conflict, despite all the political declarations to the contrary, the EU member states - i.e. essentially the NATO member states - are not at war with Russia, and the EU even less so, since it does not have the sovereign prerogative to “make war or peace”, which is the sole prerogative of states, either individually or through their participation in military alliances such as NATO.

There is no European army, for the simple reason that there is no European State - at this stage - and therefore no European “Chief of the Armies” or “Commander in Chief”, a function traditionally devolved to Heads of State.

There is, however, an integrated European command within NATO, which has always been headed by a “four-star” American general since the alliance was created. The current holder of the post since July 2022 is General Christopher G. Cavoli. For the past twenty years, the number-two position has always been held by a British general officer. Add to this the fact that some NATO member countries are not members of the European Union, such as Iceland, Albania, and, more significantly, Turkey, and of course Great Britain since 2016, and the gap between the EU and NATO becomes clear.

In his speech, Macron refers to the creation of a “European pillar of NATO”. In reality, this is an even older idea than that of the European Community born of the 1957 Treaty of Rome. It is a desire to recreate the European Defense Community (EDC), “a project to create a European army, with supranational institutions, placed under the supervision of NATO's Commander-in-Chief. In the context of the Cold War, the project, which was outlined in September-October 1950, became a treaty, signed by 6 states on May 27, 1952. Ratified by the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG or West Germany), Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands, the treaty establishing the EDC was rejected by the French National Assembly on August 30 1954 by 319 votes to 264” (source: Wikipedia).

In a statement to the French National Assembly on October 24, 1950, the President of the Council, René Pleven, unveiled the project: “the creation, for the common defense, of a European army attached to the political institutions of a united Europe, placed under the responsibility of a European Minister of Defense, under the control of a European assembly, with a common military budget. The contingents provided by the participating countries would be incorporated into the European army, at the smallest possible unit level”.

Against the backdrop of the start of the Cold War and the war in Korea, the aim was to strengthen the newly created NATO. As the Wikipedia article on the EDC reminds us, “this European army would be integrated into NATO's military structure, without calling into question the pre-eminence of the United States. There was therefore no question of giving Western Europe an independent defense instrument. On the contrary, the European army would depend on the Atlantic command, i.e. the United States”.

The French National Assembly saw in the creation of the EDC a renunciation of an essential prerogative of national sovereignty.

Emmanuel Macron is calling for more resources to strengthen the French defense industry, and to this end, he is suggesting that the European Union double its budget or issue new mutualized loans. It's a question of making states with less developed military industries bear the cost of rearmament imposed by the policy of support for Ukraine and by American pressure, which could intensify if Donald Trump is re-elected to the US presidency in November 2024.

War is never far from the construction of Europe. It has, so to speak, been both its primary inspiration and its final inspiration if the leap to federalism is taken. Let's recall that the ECSC, the Coal and Steel Community, created in 1951 and presented as the matrix of the European Community and, more generally, of the European construction project, had above all the aim of replacing, on a lasting basis, the temporary “International Ruhr Authority” created in 1948 to control steel and coal production in Europe's most industrialized region.

In 2020, Germany's then Finance Minister Olaf Scholz spoke of a “Hamiltonian moment” for Europe - evoking one of the founding fathers and first US Secretary of the Treasury, Alexander Hamilton - on the occasion of the joint €750 billion loan decided to deal with the economic consequences of the pandemic. Emmanuel Macron took care to recall this formula in his speech, in a thinly veiled message to his German counterpart.

After the failure of the 2005 French and Dutch referendums on the European Constitution, the leap to European federalism is unimaginable in the current context or shortly. Macron doesn't even mention the idea in his speech on Europe. Therein lies the real contradiction. There can be no European power without a European state, and therefore without a leap towards federalism.

To put it another way, there can be no “Hamiltonian moment” in Europe without a “Jeffersonian moment”. The limits of Macron's Europe-power are there, and they embrace, so to speak, the limits of European sovereignty, an oxymoron whose unspoken words are far more eloquent than electioneering nonsense.

(1) Julien Barroche, Europe fédérale, Europe des États-nations... Qu'est-ce que l'Union européenne? https://www.vie-publique.fr/parole-dexpert/294159-quest-ce-que-lunion-europeenne-par-julien-barroche